You are Daniel Martínez, 48, general manager of Café Premium de Honduras (CAFEPREM) in Marcala. The board has approved US$2,275,000 to put your brand on shelves abroad and, by Friday 13 March 2026, it wants to know which two markets come first.
The situation
CAFEPREM is a family company founded in 1978: 850 hectares of arabica in the mountains of western Honduras, about 2,100 tonnes of green coffee a year and 95 employees, nearly all in growing and processing. Its coffee has been a finalist three times in an international quality competition. In 2025 it billed US$18.2 million with EBITDA of US$2,275,000: the capital approved equals a full year of that result.
Forty per cent of revenue comes from exporting green coffee to traders in Germany and the United States at about US$6.50 a kilo; sixty per cent from the company's own brand in Honduras and El Salvador. Outside those two countries, nobody buys coffee with the CAFEPREM name on the bag. You are the second generation, have run the company since 2014 and took it from green coffee to a brand, but you have never launched a consumer brand outside Central America.
There are three candidates. The United States, with California and New York as the way in, is the largest specialty-coffee market and the best-paying, but it has more than 120 premium brands and a hard shelf to win. Mexico grows twice as fast and is close by, but it is small and pays half as much per kilo. Germany has a coffee culture and good prices, but it grows slowly, demands strict European certifications and is far from Marcala in every sense.
And there is a rival: Café Supremo de Colombia, with US$45 million of revenue and a private-equity fund behind it, already has a US distributor and has announced a premium Latin American brand very like yours. Your commercial team reckons that if you get there first you can aim for 8–10% of your segment there; if Supremo arrives first, 2–3%. Roberto Castellanos, your international sales director, wants the United States at any cost; Lucía Fúnez, the finance director, prefers Mexico; your German green-coffee buyers are offering their contacts.