SIFE - RumbaRoast Coffee Project
As a project to fulfill the entrepreneurship requirement of the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) team’s yearly objectives, Belmont students JonEric Pettersson, Renee Reyle, Victoria Aleksina, Janice Dotti and Lauren Winfield developed every aspect of the fair trade coffee, from working with the farmer to marketing and labeling the new brand, RumbaRoast. The students created the coffee to fund entrepreneurial and financial literacy programs, to teach Hispanic adults how to develop and sustain new businesses and to financially support the fair trade coffee growers of Central America.
Our mission is to connect people with people one cup at a time across the table and around the globe,” JonEric Pettersson, a Belmont student involved with the RumbaRoast Coffee project, said. “Buying RumbaRoast fairly traded and organic coffee is caring for the families of farmers in Latin America, the support of local business and the highest quality in coffee we can share. The ultimate goal of RumbaRoast Coffee is to create a social and entrepreneurial means for the community to invest in itself and those we are connected to around the world.”The students adopted a three-phase approach in implementing their business plan for RumbaRoast coffee:
- Belmont SIFE will launch and manage the new venture.
- Belmont SIFE will develop a strategic plan for capturing commercial accounts and use the business as a platform to teach local Hispanic entrepreneurs.
- Belmont SIFE will choose two – four entrepreneurs from the Hispanic community to take full control of the business, while continuously providing business-consulting services.
To date, the SIFE team has developed the coffee blend, bag labels and a marketing campaign and has sold over 200 pounds of coffee. RumbaRoast is estimated to gross $50,000 in the first year of operation. Belmont SIFE will allocate 80 percent of the profits made off of the fair trade coffee to the development of projects within the local Hispanic community and 20 percent back into the SIFE program.
One of the biggest developments in recent years in the coffee industry has been the rise of fair trade coffee. “Fair trade” refers to a rising political and economic movement that is designed to create an equitable and fair partnership between coffee buying and coffee producers in major coffee growing regions. Fair trade coffee is designed to assist poor coffee farmers that often produce high quality gourmet coffee in organic conditions.
