Rooted in the value chain

A central aim for Qima Advisory is to connect the people growing coffee with the people, roasting, making and drinking coffee based on shared principles of equity and sustainability. To do this, we embrace a value chain centered approach in assessing and addressing any issue affecting the coffee industry and the people within it.

Qima Advisory was established in response to the absence of value chain thinking in attempts to solving the problems facing today’s specialty coffee community. In its essence, the value chain is a vehicle to communicate and incentivise mutually beneficial collaboration between the participants within it. In a perfectly efficient value chain, all participants are of equal strength, since the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In the same vein, for the chain to grow in strength, all participants must grow equally.

Whilst this definition appears obvious on the surface, it is very rarely adopted in practice. From our experience, most participants in the coffee chain will not look beyond maximising value to themselves, or at best, will consider the participants immediately before or after them in the chain. Whilst understandable due to short term instincts, in the long term this approach does not result in maximising the individual and collective value, thereby rendering a sustainable future for coffee impossible.

A value chain ethos would mean that every participant in the chain should make their day to day decisions based on holistic analyses on how to maximise value to the entire chain. So in the case of a farmer for example, when considering what variety to plant or what farming practices to implement, he should consider the needs and value drivers of pickers, exporters, importers, roasters, cafes and home consumers, as well as their own needs of course. In doing so, the farmer’s decisions would represent a delicate balance between cost of production, agronomic performance and market drivers that would maximise the value delivered to the farmer and the entire chain. The very same ethos applies to any problem facing any participant in the value chain.

At Qima Advisory, we aspire to equip coffee professionals with the knowledge, insights and expertise needed to deliver effective value chain solutions to the problems they face, to deliver more value today and more sustainable coffee tomorrow.