Starbucks to take on Juan Valdez in Colombia But now Juan Valdez has a serious competitor: Starbucks, which has 19,000 outlets in more than 60 countries. The Seattle chain, which in city after city has prompted cafes to close or remake themselves to survive, recently said that it plans to open 50 stores in Colombia in the next few years. Last week, Starbucks began scouting prime locales in Bogota for its first stores, set to open in mid-2014. The chain has more than 650 outlets in Latin America. Juan Valdez, which is run by an 86-year-old federation that markets the coffee of 500,000 growers, is putting on the best possible face on the impending challenge. Its executives hope Starbucks will boost local consumption. And smaller chains say the move will open up a market dominated by Juan Valdez. "Starbucks created this concept, this business model," said Hernán Méndez, president of Procafecol S.A., created in 2002 by the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation as the parent company of Juan Valdez Café. Its entry will be a challenge that will make us better. Right now, we're working on becoming much better than we are. Juan Valdez and Starbucks have a history. When Starbucks went public in 1992, Colombian coffee investors rejected an invitation to invest in the growing company, said Luis Samper, a federation spokesman. When Starbucks sales slumped in 2008, then-federation head Gabriel Silva urged coffee-growing nations to buy the chain, telling El Tiempo newspaper that such a purchase would "reinforce our fight to defend the origins of coffee." "With $200 million to $300 million, the coffee world could control Starbucks," Silva said. Now, the two companies will be competing over a coffee frontier whose peculiarities might seem unusual to outsiders, if potentially lucrative. Colombia, with a population of about 46 million, is far bigger than some of the other countries where Starbucks operates. And it's an increasingly influential country, where a rising middle class can afford a $3 specialty cappuccino. But chains continue to face an uphill battle. Colombians have only recently begun to enjoy the high-end, high-quality coffee brewed by baristas in New York or Rome. Colombians consume far less coffee than other top coffee-growing nations, such as Brazil. And the coffee they drink is often weak and blended with low-grade beans from Peru and Ecuador. Méndez said one of Procafecol's biggest problems was getting Colombians interested in, and willing to pay for, Juan Valdez's high-end brew.