Culture in a Cup
TO Abenet Papy, a cup of coffee is not just a drink, it is an introduction to the culture of her country. “I love coffee and I love my country,” said the 26-year-old entrepreneur from Ethiopia who learned how to make coffee the Ethiopian way from her grandmother when she was nine. “That’s what made me go into the coffee business.” Papy came to China in 2010 as a wide-eyed teenager to study engineering on a Chinese government scholarship. After completing her bachelor’s degree, she is now doing her master’s at the Beijing University of Technology. In the course of her seven-year stay in Beijing, she temped from time to time, working mostly as a salesperson at expos and a demonstrator at cultural events.
“At events like tourism bazars and garden expos, where you promote your country’s culture, I would be asked to demonstrate how to make coffee, since that is part of Ethiopia’s culture,” she said. “Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, which gets its name from Kafa, home of wild Arabica coffee. We have more than 58 flavors in coffee, including most of the fruit flavors tea has. Yet not many people know that. Many in China think coffee came from Latin America, Brazil or Colombia.” While working with a prominent coffee seller in China, she was upset at the way they ran their business. “It was very commercial and utterly profit-oriented,” she said. “I thought it was a disrespect to our culture. In Ethiopia, you don’t drink coffee alone, you always drink it with your neighbors. You also serve desserts and nuts with the coffee and people come and talk about their problems, gossip, share stuff.”
That’s why she started her company, Habesha Coffee, in 2015 in Beijing. Habesha means the people from North Africa. “I started with 35 kg of coffee brought from Ethiopia, with my parents paying for the entire venture,” she said. “It was to test the waters.”
She sold the coffee on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao and Wechat app and at outlets and expos. The response was good enough to continue. She buys the coffee beans from the authorized state outlet in Addis Ababa and then gets it roasted there as well. It adds risk and costs to the venture since the roasted beans need to be consumed within a period of time or lose their freshness. This means she has to airlift her consignments; shipping, though cheaper, would take three weeks at least.
Still, her venture has been satisfactory enough for her to plan opening her coffee shop cum restaurant in Beijing this year as well as sales outlets in a few other major commercial Chinese cities with a sizeable African population like Shanghai and Guangzhou. She is also discussing with an interested Chinese investor if the beans can be roasted in China, which would give her business more leeway.
Along with coffee, she sells Ethiopian ceramic coffee cups and the indispensable Ethiopian coffee pot, handmade from clay. After she finishes her master’s in structural engineering in 2018, Papy plans to both work as an engineer and run her coffee business. “I like both and I want to grow simultaneously,” she said.
She also likes a challenge. “In China, people don’t really drink coffee, they drink tea,” she pointed out. “I want to bring something new to the Chinese tea culture.” Comments to sarkarbjreview@outlook.com