Sunday, October 14, 2012

10th and 11th week

I am combining these two weeks together because i did not have time to write last week. Last week was a very important week for us and i will explain, every year in kampala there is a Manufacturers Trade Show first week of October over 3000 companies from all over africa come here and try to introduce their product to the public, Kenya, Egypt, Sudan, South Africa, Rawanda, Congo, Even Iran was here. It seems Iran and Uganda have very strong relationship as far as trade and manufacturing goes, ill get to that later. We as Nile Coffee had a small booth to sample our coffee to the public, and the reaction i got from the local people and other outsiders was amazing, my original estimate was to serve about 1000 cups of 6 oz coffee to whom ever wanted to try our coffee, with sugar and milk, i was no were nearly prepared for the reaction we received. Here are some final numbers, we ended up sampling over 20,000 cups, using 80 lb's of sugar, and about 25 gallons of milk! it was madness in a good way ( i have pictures and video for those who are skeptical) for 7 days straight we served and sold our coffee from 9 am to 8  pm everyday. The reaction to our coffee was amazing, i mean i already knew our coffee is one of the best in the world but did not expect this kind of outcome, i had Egyptians and Sudanese making me offers left and right, i even had the Iranian Government approach me regarding our coffee.

On Saturday morning i had group of Iranian come by my booth and try my coffee, and purchased about 30 lbs from me, and ofcourse they hassled me for price, then out of no where a gentleman named Reza Savari Chairman of the Iranian-Ugandan Economical Co-operations Office came by and tasted the coffee and asked me where i was from, naturally i always tell people im from the US, but this guy had a strong iranian accent, so i told him my name is Kave and i am iranian but i was born in the US. He asked to speak to me and we went outside, he basically wanted the take Ugandan's coffee raw which means green to Iran and process it there (roast and package) i told him very nicely that i can not do that, our #1 goal here in uganda is to make sure uganda that the ugandan people get their monies worth for their products, which means producing, roasting, and packaging is all done here so they can get paid for it. Europeans have been exploiting this countries resources for decades and it has to stop, 77% of ugandas coffee get exported to europe! they buy a small percentage of very high quality arabica (my coffee) and a very large percentage of very very low grade coffee mix it together, roast it very dark and sell it, what people dont know is when coffee gets roasted very dark it loses alot of its characteristics that make coffee what it is. anyways let me not get too technical about coffee, but there is so much that regular people dont know. So during our conversation with this iranian, 5 Mercedes Benz S500 pull up and the ambassador of Iran steps out of the car and i get introduced to him, let me tell you one thing i hate is when someone shakes your hand like a dead fish, this freaking guy shakes my hand just like that, who the fuck does this guy think he is, i was told later that his salary from the iranian government is $10,000 a month! can you imagine the poor people in iran are starving and struggling to make ends meet and this fucker is getting paid that much money? 10000 is some people yearly salary if you have a good job. any ways i basically told the iranians to go fuck them selves in a nice way. ill put some pictures up so you guys can see what was going on. for now thats all im gonna write, hopefully ill have time next weekend to write more, this week im moving into my new office which is kind of exciting and scary at the same time.






1 comment:

  1. Kave,

    Congrats on your new gig, really interesting and your blog is excellent.

    Just a FYI, your web site www.nile-coffee.org is not working ...

    Good luck and safe trip home.

    John Wildman

    ReplyDelete