"We've had great success in Latin American and it's well overdue for us to open up in Colombia," Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz told Reuters in an interview, adding that he hoped to open at least six stores in the first year. Starbucks' new coffee shops will be run by a joint venture between Mexican restaurant firm Alsea, which operates more than 500 Starbucks stores in Latin America, and Colcafe, a subsidiary of Grupo Nutresa, the fourth-largest Colombian food company. In addition to opening stores, Starbucks said it would partner with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and invest a joint $3 million in a plan to help 25,000 farmers in conflict-hit areas of Colombia increase coffee yields.  NEW YORK Starbucks Coffee Company, which has exported coffee beans from Colombia for more than four decades, plans to open its first café in the Andean country in 2014 and serve only locally-grown coffee. "We want to sell Colombian coffee in Colombia," said Craig Russell, Starbucks' senior vice president of global coffee. Starbucks, which has about 19,200 stores worldwide, has gained 34 percent this year.
– For 42 years, Starbucks has been exporting coffee beans from Colombia; now, it's finally planning to sell the resulting product in the country. Next year, the coffee chain will open its first Colombian store in Bogota, and it intends to have 50 stores in the country—the biggest producer of washed arabica beans on the planet, and Starbucks' No. 1 or No. 2 supplier during the chain's entire history—within five years, Bloomberg reports. "We've had great success in Latin America and it's well overdue for us to open up in Colombia," says CEO Howard Schultz. Starbucks says it won't undercut Juan Valdez, a Colombian chain owned by farmers, and will instead likely have slightly higher prices, Reuters reports. Meanwhile, the company is also working with USAID: Together, the organizations will contribute $3 million to help the country's small-plot coffee farmers. The program hopes to fight "extreme poverty, which is still a reality for almost all of these small-scale coffee growers that have barely (2.5 acres) of land," says the head of the agency. In other Starbucks-is-everywhere news, the Wall Street Journal reports that, beginning today, Whole Foods will stock Starbucks' Evolution Fresh juices and Evolution Harvest snack bars. (Fact that may surprise: Starbucks is far from the No. 1 coffee brand in America.)