High harvest: Cafe Punta del Cielo strives to create a name for quality Mexican coffee.

There are few who can begin the day without a cup of coffee no matter the quality of the bean. With Cafe Punta del Cielo, Pablo Gonzalez Cid's goal is to convince Mexican consumers that the day can neither begin nor continue without a good cup of gourmet coffee.

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The business plan occurred to the young entrepreneur five years ago. He realized that, although Mexico is the fifth largest producer of coffee worldwide and home to ideal meteorological and geographic conditions for production of a high-quality grain, its per capita consumption is low. While in Mexico the average person consumes 1.1 lbs of coffee each year, countries like Finland, where not a single shrub of coffee grows, consume 28.7 lbs per year. Gonzalez sees a cultural necessity in Mexico. "The culture of coffee in this country is very low," he notes. "It's incredible that 70 percent of the coffee consumed in Mexico continues to be instant coffee."

The first step he took was to produce a quality coffee choosing the best grains from places like Veracruz and Chiapas. "Our ground coffee is a luxury product but it costs only one dollar more than a standard product," explains Gonzalez. Ground coffee from Cafe Punta del Cielo is less expensive than imported brands not because of lower quality, but because it is not subject to the 70 percent import taxes that plague, for example, Italian coffees.

Next came the development of a fresh and contemporary image. Gonzalez wanted to shift the typical design associated with Mexican coffee, where traditional elements like donkeys and sacks of coffee have reigned. Therefore, he also sought a special name. "Punta del Cielo is a name that invites you to relax, to take your time. At Punta del Cielo we want to transmit the idea that our coffee is a high-quality coffee, pure and clean," he says.

The third ingredient was the distribution chain, a net of cafes with a contemporary look in which metal and crystal dominate. The first cafe was opened only one year ago in the exclusive Polanco neighborhood.

Gonzalez considers coffee a magical drink, as it invites people to stay for hours, drinking one or many cups of coffee, discussing issues from the most trivial gossip to closing important business deals. The social factor is present in Mexico; still, people have yet to learn to distinguish a good coffee from a bad one.

PUSHING FOR INNOVATION

In his battle to introduce the taste for coffee to the Mexican culture, Gonzalez has developed different products that have granted him a certain notoriety. Among his products, he emphasizes his canned cappuccino and espresso, ready-to-drink. Cafe Punta del Cielo won second place at the Alimentaria Mexico 2005 fair with these two products. "Mexico is number one in consumption of sodas, so this idea of a cold coffee ready to drink is one way of augmenting the per capita consumption in an easy way for the Mexican consumer: through a refreshing, soda-like drink," he explains.

The company also patented a container that protects the coffee from any external agent, such as cigarette smoke. With this system, coffee maintains the aroma of a recently toasted grain no matter how many years have gone by.

Today the company is developing five new products. Among them is the very Mexican pot coffee, prepared in a clay pot and sweetened with piloncillo syrup. "We are always interested in being in the vanguard," adds the entrepreneur. "That's why a large part of our time is spent investigating and developing new products."

What's certain is that Mexicans are enjoying Punta del Cielo's recipe. The cafe's sales, which last year reached US$5 million, have grown at an annual rate of 50 percent. The company already has 16 cafes in Mexico City (of which two are franchises) and will open another four, one in the Museum of Popular Art.

After consolidating the chain firmly in the Mexican capital, Gonzalez wants to conquer the rest of the country and even dreams of crossing borders, going as far as Spain and China. Each franchise demands an investment of between US$60,000 and 80,000 dollars, and Gonzalez assures that it takes two to four years to earn it back with a profit margin of around 20 percent.

Of course, to enter European and Asian markets Gonzalez would need deeper pockets. But the entrepreneur wants more than a financial partner: He is searching for an operating partner. That is to say, someone who knows the peculiarities of the local markets in which Cafe Punta del Cielo wants to penetrate.

Gonzalez is always looking for new channels of production for his products. That's why in numerous restaurants, hotel chains such as Posadas, Quinta Real and Mayan Palace, and on Mexicana and Aeromexico flights, Cafe Punta del Cielo coffee is served. And since a few months ago, his products are on the shelves of supermarkets like Wal-Mart, Comercial Mexicana, Gigante, Superama and in the gourmet sections of Liverpool and Palacio de Hierro.

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Though Cafe Punta del Cielo never had massive advertising campaigns, the brand is promoted in magazines, with the book El cafe en Mexico, written by Gonzalez himself, and by sponsoring a car-racing team, led by lvan Ramos, that participated at the Corona Cup. Designating part of the earnings for this type of events, Gonzalez gains brand recognition but above all he hopes to instill the taste for coffee in young, active consumers. The slogan "Stimulate yourself with caffeine" speaks for itself.

With Cafe Punta del Cielo, Gonzalez hopes to launch Mexican coffee to the height of the best. And, although he competes with other brands as strong as the Italian coffee Illy and Starbucks, the concepts are so different that he believes there's room for everyone. "There are people who want to enjoy an Italian coffee, people who want to go with the style at Starbucks and people who want to enjoy what Mexico produces well," he notes.

That said, Gonzalez lacks a regulating organization for Mexican coffee, which is a large obstacle to reaching the height of Colombia or Brazil in the coffee world. To obtain a quality coffee, it's not enough to have a production region like Veracruz; the coffee must be adequately produced and its quality must be supervised. According to the entrepreneur, the Mexican coffee market could benefit from the fact that Mexico is the number one place for organic coffee--coffee that eschews pesticides--which could be a large opportunity for Mexican coffee to definitively reach the international level.