Challenges of Marketing Coffee and Tea

Biography

Loes Snijder-Oeseburg is head of global marketing coffee & tea at FrieslandCampina Professional, working in the headquarters of Amersfoort. Her team are responsible for defining and executing the Professional Beverages marketing strategy to accelerate growth of this segment through building and launching strong and profitable products and product concepts. She graduated from Hanze University of Applied Sciences with a bachelor's degree in Food and business and the University of Wageningen with a master's degree in Sensory Science. Worked for more than 18 years at FrieslandCampina, where, in the last seven years, she worked as a marketeer within the world of coffee and tea. She is a real coffee lover but also loves to indulge herself with Asian-inspired milk teas. She is passionate about understanding market trends, customer needs and consumer behaviour in order to find the best fit between market, application and product.

Developing International Marketing Strategies to Expand the Presence and Sales of Coffee and Tea Products in Global Markets

For us, everything we do starts with understanding the market and our customers.

"Finally, yet importantly, sustainability is a prerequisite. Everything you introduce should be sustainable."

Market understanding of the different countries, what is happening, what is trending and which developments are impacting the market. But also, who is leading and setting the scene for the other countries, like Australia, is key for coffee and Taiwan for tea.

And customer understanding, really deep diving into the gains and pains of our customers, understanding their operation, their business and their challenges. In Europe, we see that the standard for high-quality coffee in the mass market outlets is growing due to the popularity of speciality coffee shops. This push on high-quality coffee and especially cappuccino, in combination with the business model of most HORECA locations (where not always only coffee is served but also food, high peak moments in the morning and high traffic locations), and the shortage of staff is a real challenge.  

Successful Market Entry or Expansion Strategies Implemented for Coffee and Tea in International Markets

 An example of a successful market entry is our Lattiz in the Netherlands and Belgium and the rollout to France and Germany. Our Lattiz is a high-quality milk foam machine that helps baristas make high-quality milk foam cup after cup without any training required. So anyone can do it! This touches upon the key challenge of our customers of serving high-quality cappuccinos within a limited time and with a shortage of staff. Not only has the product defined the success of Lattiz in Europe so far, but also our business model. We are selling our machines and delivering our milk exclusively through partners. Partners can be coffee roasters (where catering venues have deals with the coffee) or machine resellers. Our partners are also happy with Lattiz as a solution, as it also makes the lives of their customers (the catering venues themselves) much easier! It’s a win-win-win solution for us, our partners and the end customers as they benefit from the easiness of our milk foam solution and can add value to their coffee servings.

Challenges in Business That Current Services Are Unable to Solve

One of the challenges is always to keep control over everything. Ideally, you can make sure that the total customer journey is flawless and with only happy touch points.

Lattiz is the brand, and in the view of end customers, there is one company behind the milk foam solution. In reality, there are many parties involved in delivering the right product as well as service. Of course, we take responsibility as we would like to ensure customers are and stay happy. This is to make sure they eventually stay with us and keep using Lattiz as the perfect milk solution. However, it can be challenging to control this customer's happiness and communication through those different parties involved.

Advice to Professionals Working In Other Companies in the Marketing Sector

Always stay close to your target group to understand who is using your product and what their needs are. To give a simple example, we learned that in the business-to-business environment we are operating in, our customers like clear and functional communication. This is different for examples of how you would address consumers.

Also, drinking and coffee habits per country are different, so the challenge is to find the similarities per country to be able to make use of scale but also embrace differences to be relevant.

Finally, yet importantly, sustainability is a prerequisite. Everything you introduce should be sustainable. We are here to make the lives of our operators easier, but we can only do that with sustainable solutions. Sustainability is in our DNA. As part of Royal FrieslandCampina, one of the world’s largest dairy cooperatives, we are uniquely positioned to lead the way in having a positive impact on people and our planet. Therefore, we are very proud that with Lattiz, you reduce your carbon footprint per cappuccino between 19-23 percent compared to other frothing methods.