Does Starbucks want its own beans, as well as baristas? The chain, which has owned one Costa Rican coffee farm since 2013, is getting more into the growing business, purchasing farms in Guatemala and Costa Rica and investing in other “coffee belt” regions in Africa and Asia.
Vertical integration, especially into raw materials, has enjoyed bouts of popularity for at least a century. Car titan Henry Ford, an early proponent, even owned sheep farms to supply the wool for car seat covers. The baristas, however, are unlikely to serve up a true revival.
Globalisation and free trade unpicked the fashion to weave together suppliers with producers. Failures have been frequent and dismantling is costly and messy. Bowmar, possibly the biggest calculator maker in the world in the industry’s early 1970s heyday, bought into a plant to make its own integrated circuits as prices for its devices fell — and collapsed a year later. Chemicals group DuPont, partially playing white knight, acquired Conoco for its steady supply of feedstock in 1979 but the two parted ways a couple of decades later.