Marquette students got hands-on with the global supply chain in a unique way during the Supply Chain Management program’s five-day spring break trip to Bogota, Colombia, to visit the area’s coffee growers.
Although the six students who went did get to try some of the world’s best coffee — including products that sell for $900 per kilogram — the real purpose of the trip went far beyond tasting. Instead, local farmers, roasters and entrepreneurs gave students an in-depth look at the coffee supply chain from bean to cup.
Dr. Marko Bastl, director of the Center for Supply Chain Management and the trip’s faculty leader, wanted students to see how the decisions made by companies and government entities in the United States affect people’s lives around the world.

“There is this invisible part of our supply chains where we’re familiar with the product but we don’t fully understand how it intertwines with culture and with politics,” Bastl says. “I wanted students on this trip to open their eyes to that part of their jobs.”
“I got really excited because this trip combines several things that I love,” says senior operations and supply chain management major Stephanie Hernandez. “We got to go to Colombia, which was on my bucket list, and I’m also a coffee drinker who studies supply chain, so this was perfect for me.”
The coffee from a high-end grower in Bogota, Colombia, is quite different from what Marquette students are used to from the Starbucks on campus.
“There’s different ways you’re supposed to taste it,” says Jayra Hernandez, a senior studying criminology and law studies and social welfare and justice. “One method is washing the coffee inside your mouth for five seconds before swallowing it. Another method is called slurping, where the taste changes depending where it hits your tongue — the front is sweet, the sides are sour and the back is bitter. The third method is coffee cupping, where coffee grounds are poured into a cup. Hot water is added, forming a crust on top. Using a spoon, you break the crust while inhaling the aroma. Then, dip the spoon into the coffee and slurp it to aerate it and spread it across your palate.”
Students’ itineraries mirrored the coffee supply chain, starting with a farm where coffee beans are harvested from the fruit. Farmers showed students how the beans were peeled, fermented, dried and prepared for shipping. The group then visited coffee roasteries where the beans were sorted, processed and packed.
Coffee seems like a simple product, but it’s actually incredibly complex from a logistical and culinary point of view.
Dr. Marko Bastl, Director of the Center for Supply Chain Management
Along the way, Marquette students met with faculty from the College of Higher Administration Studies (CESA), a renowned business school in Bogota, to talk about tariffs, interest rates, global demand and other forces that impact what they just saw in the field. The Marquette group also got to interact with CESA students.
“They talked to us about their supply chain class and how that related to what we were doing on this trip,” senior Denny Stiles says. “We had a couple of breaks where we could just hang out with the CESA students, too, and talk to them about normal, everyday things, which was also really cool.”
The trip came amid escalating American tariffs on foreign coffee, which is having profound downstream impacts on the Colombian coffee industry. Students spoke with CEO Boris Wullner of Green Coffee Company, which is Colombia’s largest grower — they face a 25% tariff on coffee imports to the United States. That cost increase pressures their already thin profit margins, keeping local farms from getting sufficient income to continue operations.
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Marquette Business students went to sites in Europe that tourists never get to see, including Ford Motor Company’s secret testing grounds and private rooms in Antwerp’s city hall. The trip is an exploration of how business is done in Europe.
That experience is widely shared among local growers.
“We talked to one grower who had to lay off 30% of his workforce just to adapt to the supply chain disruption that he thinks is coming,” Stiles says.
Locals also talked about their efforts to make coffee growing more environmentally friendly, a topic that meshed well with the supply chain sustainability course many of the students took prior to the trip. Marquette students talked to coffee farmers who are using the peels from coffee beans to make tea instead of simply throwing them away. This greatly reduces the amount of waste the manufacturing process generates.
“Coffee seems like a simple product, but it’s actually incredibly complex from a logistical and culinary point of view; we want our students to engage with that complexity so it might influence the decisions they make when they’re professionals,” Bastl says.
Everything students experienced in Colombia rests upon two central pillars of a Marquette Business education: applied learning and global engagement. Business students in every major take classes that challenge them to put classroom theory into real-life action. Examples include marketing students designing an influencer campaign for a client and sales students calling prospective Marquette undergraduates to answer their questions. That learning is deepened when students go abroad, learning about how business is conducted in different cultures.
After five days in Colombia, the students returned home with their eyes — and their taste buds — opened to a new part of the world.
“I see coffee differently now, knowing the effort and process behind every single cup. It was a beautiful experience,” Jayra Hernandez says.
For more information on our other study abroad programs, go to the Marquette Business website.