Tamasi Coffee, Inc. (TCI), is an importer and distributor of premium green coffee beans from Latin America, chiefly Colombia and Costa Rica. It distributes green coffee to multiple coffee-roasting companies and dealers and roasted coffees to retail and restaurant outlets throughout the United States. Incorporated under the laws of the state of California and headquartered in San Francisco, TCI desires to enlarge the scope of its distribution by exporting roasted beans, either in bulk or packaged, to Canada in the near term, and, in due course, to expand beyond North America to three countries in eastern Europe: Romania, Hungary, and Poland. This document sets forth the background of TCI, information about the growing Canadian market for coffee, and the strategy for the company's international market entry, with a view toward obtaining debt financing in the amount of $500,000 to fund the process.
TCI has ridden the tidal wave of growth in the specialty-coffee market of recent years. The National Coffee Association's 2004 survey of national coffee consumption reported that some 80% of all adult Americans drink coffee, and of that number, 50% drink it daily. While sales of traditional ground coffees slackened over the course of the 1990s and have continued to be relatively flat since 2000, sales of whole-bean coffees, particularly premium beans, have grown dramatically. According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, specialty coffee accounted for sales of $8.47 billion a year in cafes in the United States alone. Mass merchandisers accounted for $.49 billion in specialty-coffee retail sales, bringing the total specialty-coffee market to $8.96 billion.
Specialty-coffee sales have increased despite periodic problems with supply at the source and despite steady increases in commodity prices. For example, in Colombia in 2000, overproduction fostered a dramatic drop in coffee prices. That was a boon for American importers, but ...