Construção do mercado de cafés especiais e o papel dos concursos de qualidade: o caso do cup of excellence Brasil

Abstract

In the context of the specialty coffee market, several actions are carried out in order to disseminate the production of quality coffees, to strengthen the relationship between producers and their buyers and to enable coffee growers the opportunity to access new technological resources for their production. Among these events, quality competitions have stood out for bringing different benefits to the market based on the practices carried out by different actors. Among these competitions, the Cup of Excellence (COE) program stands out in the coffee scene, for promoting a quality competition held by nationally and internationally renowned judges, and also for producing at the end of the competitions a prestigious virtual auction, which offers buyers from all over the world the opportunity to purchase the best batches of specialty coffees from the countries that host the event. In the case of Brazil, the history of the COE program completed 20 years in 2019, and provided important changes in the market throughout this time. In this context, the present work has the general objective of understanding how the COE coffee quality competition performed the process of building the specialty coffee market in Brazil. For this, the theoretical approach of Constructivist Market Studies (CMS) was adopted, which has been gaining body in the scientific environment and bringing several findings from empirical works in different contexts. This analysis perspective presents itself as a possible alternative to seek to understand the constructive dynamics of the market from a historical analysis perspective. To carry out this research, an interpretive perspective was adopted and qualitative research techniques were used to collect data such as direct and non-participant observation, document analysis and in-depth interviews. In the results, initially, a historical reconstruction was carried out in order to identify moments that the quality competitions, especially the COE, transformed the specialty coffee market in Brazil. From the recognition of these important events, practices and market arrangements were identified and, subsequently, interpreted under the focus of the CMS. Subsequently, COE's contributions to the specialty coffee market in Brazil were highlighted. Among them, we highlight the technical legacy of the COE that performed the market from different market practices, whether in the design of a proof form, which would become a normative model for several quality competitions; and by the protocols and rules of the competition that brought transparency and integrity, values sought in the competition's philosophy and passed on to other players in this market. Finally, the limitations of the research and possible themes for future studies were presented.