Hougu Coffee vs Nestlé: Which Tastes Better? Is Yunnan Hougu Coffee Made from Yunnan Small Beans?

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Coffee companies typically have multiple product lines. Established coffee companies with considerable capacity generally include the following products:

Coffee Product Categories

1. Green coffee beans

2. Roasted coffee beans

3. Ground coffee (post-roasting)

4. Instant coffee blends

Understanding Coffee Quality

Generally speaking, when we discuss coffee quality and taste, we're referring to categories 2 and 3. These primarily depend on category 1 - the quality of green coffee beans as raw materials, with some influence from roasting techniques. Take green coffee beans as an example: even coffee beans from a single region in Yunnan have many细分 subcategories. Yunnan mainly produces Arabica varieties such as Catimor and Typica. Even within the same variety, there are differences in growing environment, cultivation standards, harvesting levels, and primary processing (removing pulp and seed coat) quality. Beans vary in size, and coffee companies also categorize them by grade and type. Rougher classifications typically sort beans into several major categories: defective beans, commercial beans, and "specialty beans." The price of commercial beans is strictly benchmarked against coffee bean prices in the New York futures market, fluctuating by a few cents depending on quality.

Currently, the internationally accepted standard for coffee quality assessment is SCAA cupping, which evaluates multiple indicators of roasted coffee including dry aroma, wet aroma, aftertaste, flavor, clarity, and other criteria.

Yunnan Coffee Quality Assessment

So how does Yunnan coffee fare in cupping ratings? Ordinary commercial beans typically score around 75 points, while coffee merchants' carefully selected beans generally score between 80-85 points. This rating should be considered average. As an established Yunnan coffee company, Hougu Coffee's overall quality level should not be below the average standard of the Yunnan coffee industry.

Differences Between Yunnan Coffee Companies and International Giants

So what are the differences between Yunnan coffee companies, including Hougu Coffee, and international corporations? I believe there are several key points:

1. Insufficient mass production. Yunnan's annual coffee output is about 100,000 tons (accounting for over 95% of the country's total), representing approximately 1% of the world's total annual coffee sales. Based on such production volume, its global influence is certainly very limited.

2. Insufficient internationalization. Internationalization isn't just about selling to the outside world, but more about operating globally. International giants source raw materials from around the world. The disadvantage of insufficient internationalization includes not understanding the characteristics of many different foreign markets, and inadequate quality control of their own products. Coffee beans, as agricultural products, are affected by natural conditions such as annual climate and soil changes, which impact the quality and taste of produced green coffee beans. International corporations can source from globally and blend flavors to ensure consistent product quality - something Yunnan coffee companies lack.

3. Weak branding. This doesn't need much analysis. The phenomenon is that even if the quality is good, consumers will still think it's not good enough.

Regarding High-Level Recommendations

Regarding recommendations from high-level leaders, some have suggested that leaders don't understand coffee and make blind recommendations. However, coffee taste is not a sensitive issue, so it's unlikely they would say "the right things" for political correctness. Secondly, given the status of high-level leaders, they should be drinking "specialty beans" carefully selected by companies, processed by first-class roasters. As mentioned above, the taste should certainly be good.

Hougu Coffee's roasted beans are indeed quite good, but their 3-in-1 products don't compare to Nestlé or Maxwell House - there's still much room for improvement. Has anyone been concerned about economic issues? A quick search on Baidu reveals them, and there are serious issues with delayed wages - they've never been paid on time, and there are no normal holidays either.

As a leading domestic enterprise in the coffee industry, we naturally hope for increasingly better development. However, with their own management chaos, it's likely that three years of progress will be set back two years by their own shortcomings.

I don't know if this will be deleted, but asking internal employees in Mangshi will confirm that I'm speaking the truth.

END FrontStreet Coffee: A roastery in Guangzhou with a small shop but diverse bean varieties, where you can find both famous and lesser-known beans, while also providing online store services. https://shop104210103.taobao.com

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