The big coffee companies have discovered specialty coffees. On so-called online marketplaces, they sell coffee from small, independent roasters, for whom transparency, sustainability and good relationships with the producers in the coffee-growing country are important. Tchibo calls them “local heroes”. The coffee company recently launched its “roasted” platform, behind “60beans” is the Jacobs family, behind “Roastmarket” is Melitta.
Tchibo says they want to offer small roasters a platform for more visibility and better logistics. The coffee is offered at the same price as the small roasters. Others say the little ones in these marketplaces could get lost and lose their independence. We spoke to Andreas Felsen from the Quijote roastery and Gina Staschke from Tchibo about the opportunities and dangers of such a platform.
You have to imagine the concept of the coffee marketplaces like this: The coffee company approaches the roasters and offers them to put their coffee on the marketplace. The advantage for the roasters: logistics and marketing are taken out of their hands. Tchibo does not disclose the exact business model. The fact is, Tchibo earns money with the sale. Felsen suspects about 25 to 40 percent of the margins. But who really benefits from this in the end: the small roasting plants or, in the end, the large corporation?
Felsen is very critical of the marketplaces, he describes them as the “Amazon” of the coffee industry and would like to raise awareness among roasters not to blindly participate: “It’s a structural attack on the small roasters. You give too much out of your own hands.”
Gina Staschke from Tchibo sees things differently. For her, the marketplace is an additional surface for the small coffee roasters. “We want the small roasters, who often only operate locally, to be able to benefit from the reach of our platform and want the topic of specialty coffee to be more visible,” says Staschke. “We want to give consumers a one-stop shop where they can get information about any coffee.”
Felsen is certain: “It only makes sense to sell on a marketplace if you don’t have any ambitions of your own to sell your coffee online or to be found on the Internet.” Because if you google a specialty coffee like Five Elephant or Black Delight today, you won’t end up on the roastery’s homepage, but on the Tchibo marketplace.
The coffee group argues that customers may first become aware of a specialty coffee on their marketplace and then later order it on the roastery’s website. Anyone who has ever stored their data on one of the marketplaces such as Zalando or Amazon knows that this is highly unlikely. You order where it is most convenient.
In fact, Google prefers the sites that have high authority. This means that if you are not explicitly looking for a coffee brand, you will most likely end up on the website of the large corporations. The pages of local roasters keep slipping down. So, as a roastery, do you have to appear on a marketplace in order not to lose visibility? “We are in constant contact with the roasters,” says Staschke. “So far nobody has told us that they have suffered any damage, quite the opposite.”
Tchibo assures that they don’t want to “replace the roasting business”. “It should be additive,” says Staschke. “We give the roasters security and give them a commitment to buy quantities. Tchibo is a long-term partner.”
Felsen sees it differently. By offering their coffees on the platforms, roasting companies lose contact with their customers: “All the big platforms talk about partnerships with the small roasting companies. On the Internet, it is an absolute standard for partners to link backlinks. But not a single platform does that , they want to keep all traffic to themselves and completely control the business.”
In the end, the aim of the marketplaces is to be economical and to sell their own coffees or those that are most in demand. Others will then become invisible, coffee roaster Felsen fears: “Roastmarket has established its own brands, which are preferred when searching for coffees. Melitta is thus imitating the character of various small roasting plants.”
Is there a better way? “If a platform like this was set up democratically and collectively, then yes,” says Felsen. “If everyone could get transparent insights into internal coffee searches and algorithms. But that would be an ideal coffee world and it doesn’t exist unless we create it ourselves.”
