Café Bom Dia

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Café Bom Dia (Portuguese: "coffee good morning") is the largest Brazilian coffee exporter, one of a few that sell directly in the U.S. instead of through other companies. Its leading brand is Marques de Paiva, which is also the name of the family that has owned the company and its predecessors in the coffee business since 1895.

Café Bom Dia is one of a handful of fair trade certified coffee marketers. Fair trade marketers see that coffee growers get a price for their beans which actually reflects the value of the beans to the company, rather than paying them the lowest possible price with an eye to making bigger profits themselves. It has also pioneered environmentally friendly coffee growing techniques which enable beans to be harvested without adverse effects on the land, and has carried this environmentalism up the chain through all stages of its production of the beans for the market. At the market level, its coffee sells for about half the average cost of coffee. Wal-Mart, as part of its sustainability initiatives, has begun carrying Café Bom Dia's Marques de Paiva organic coffee through its Sam's Club outlets. As of 2006, Café Bom Dia had $20,000,000 in U.S. sales annually.

Despite this, Café Bom Dia's coffee "beat out several popular national brands in a consumer blind taste test", coming in a close second to Starbucks coffee, which costs two to three times as much per pound.

The company "traces its roots to a small coffee company founded in 1895 in southern Brazil by the Marques de Paiva family." The Marques de Paiva family started Café Bom Dia in 1978 as a venture in which they could branch out from growing and selling raw coffee beans, and begin roasting their own beans and selling coffee to the end consumer. The company is headquartered in Marques de Paiva ancestral lands near Varginha, Brazil, where "its coffee plantations now extend for more than 800,000 acres" (3,200 km²) including land owned by a co-op seventeen coffee-growing families. The company "produces about 6,350 tons of coffee per year, including 800 tons of organic coffee." Now it has "farms and production facilities in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and North American headquarters in Coral Gables, Florida."

Cafe Bom Dia was written about in a New York Times article titled "Fair Trade in Bloom," that focused on Sam's Club decision to convert its ground coffee to be Fair Trade Certified.

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