When your number two in the retail coffee business, you have to try harder.  Second among the world’s two leading coffee retailers is Caribou Coffee, a specialty coffee house operator that sells coffee, along with tea, bakery, and other items, at more than 460 stores throughout the United States. John and Kim Puckett initiated caribou Coffee in 1992 in Minnesota. In 1998, Crescent Capital, based in the American state of Atlanta, bought Caribou Coffee and made it a big name in the world of coffee house operators. In September 2005, Caribou was turned into a publicly traded company. Today, it has over 5000 employees working countrywide and the company’s motto is ‘be excellent, not average’.    

 
Caribou Coffee Products
 
Starting as a coffee retailer, the products of Caribou Coffee now include a whole range of gourmet products including (besides coffee beans and blends) cold coffee drinks, blended drinks, tea, and some clothing items like shirts along with accessories like bags. The specialty of Caribou, however, still remains its coffee products. In fact, Caribou also outranked the world’s top ranked coffee retailer (Starbucks Coffee) in national taste tests carried out for the quality of flavor and composition of coffee brands. Caribou also licenses third parties, allowing them to use its brand on food and merchandise items that meet its criteria of quality.     

 
Environmental Amelioration – Caribou’s Role
 
Besides making gourmet coffee production a commercial success, Caribou Coffee has been concerned with producing eco-friendly coffee in order to support the efforts of environmental amelioration. It has become a parent with the Rainforest Alliance and also stands as the first coffee-producing company that voluntarily sponsors the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Producer Support Fund.

 
Investment and Controversy
 
Caribou Coffee has lately been surrounded by much controversy due to the heavy investment of the First Islamic Investment Bank of Bahrain, which is one f its leading stockholders. The controversy especially got heated when Yousaf al-Qaradawi, an Islamic Egyptian scholar, became the bank’s Chairman of the Board in 2002. On account of Qaradawi’s views, he had already been banned from entering the United States. When Qaradawi stepped down the chairmanship later that year, the controversy surrounding Caribou Coffee was slightly cooled down.

 
 Caribou’s Partnerships
 
Caribou Coffee has business partnerships with several well-known companies including Coca-Cola North America, Frontier Airlines, General Mills, Kemps, Life Time Fitness, Mall of America, USA Today, and Wandering Wifi. Other partners of Caribou include Keurig and Rainforest Alliance. The company is especially interested in involving communities that work for social welfare, especially in the categories of breast cancer, children’s literacy, and environment.    

Coffee smells wake up the world every morning and keep people awake at night.  As the German Physician Leonhard Rauwolf said in 1583:

“A beverage as black as ink, useful against numerous illnesses, particularly those of the stomach. Its consumers take it in the morning, quite frankly, in a porcelain cup that is passed around and from which each one drinks a cupful. It is composed of water and the fruit from a bush called bunnu.”

The bush is, of course, the evergreen Coffee bush that was first discovered in Ethiopia when shepherds noticed that their goats were extra frisky after eating the fruit from the Coffee bush.  They are red berries and each berry contains two coffee beans.  So from then on it spread around the world and many countries produce this wake up bean.

The First Thing In The Morning

That morning cup of coffee is used by millions of people around the world to jump start their day.  Grabbing a cup of coffee either at home or at your favorite coffee shop is a morning ritual.  The Coffee may taste a little different in Boston than it does in Bangkok, but the protocol is the same.  Gotta have that first cup or I just can’t function is the mantra of many.

Caffeine

Coffee naturally contains caffeine that wakes them up with the first cup that they drink.  Many of these people are much more alert because they had their cup of this wonderful beverage.  Some people will swear that their coffee gives them energy to fulfill their responsibilities. 

Roasting the Beans

The beans from the plants must be processed before they make up the great drink.  The beans are ripened, harvested and roasted before they are ground for brewing.  The process can be varied to produce different tastes.  The drink served in the most modern shops might be greatly different in taste from that served by nomads far from city centers.  Some people like this beverage without any additions although other people add one or more ingredients to produce their favorite drink.  Some people add milk, whipped cream and sugar.  Others add special flavorings such as hazelnut to make a special kind of drink. 

Coffee has Been Around For Centuries

The first coffee was roasted in Arabia.  From there is spread rapidly around the world and in 1600 it was accepted as a Christian drink by Pope Clement VIII.  Many people at the time wanted the Muslim drink banned.  The Dutch were the first to import coffee on a large scale, and they were among the first to defy the Arab prohibition on the exportation of plants or unroasted seeds when Pieter van den Broeck smuggled seedlings from Aden into Europe in 1616. The Dutch later grew the crop in Java and Ceylon. Through the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular in England as well. It was introduced in France in 1657, and in Austria and Poland after the 1683 Battle of Vienna, when coffee was captured from supplies of the defeated Turks.  When the British cut off tea supplies before the Revolutionary War and then again during the War of 1812, interest in drinking coffee skyrocketed.  They couldn’t avoid coffee smells from then on.