Overexpansion could cost your company. Juan Valdez learned that the hard way

Wider reach doesn't guarantee stronger returns. One coffee brand cut to five markets and posted the highest EBITDA in its history

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Camila Escobar joined Procafecol as CEO in 2018 to find a company with a strong home base and a scattered global presence. Juan Valdez, the Colombian coffee brand that Procafecol is tasked with commercializing, had expanded into nearly 40 markets, from Aruba to Australia. The footprint looked impressive. The results weren't. More than 80% of revenue still came from Colombia.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning. With locations shuttered and revenue shrinking, Escobar's team ran the numbers on every market. A target list of 10 countries shrank to five: Brazil, Mexico, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. The goal was to increase international sales from 20% to 40% of total revenue. Four years later, the company is outperforming its targets in each market, logging double-digit growth, and recorded its highest EBITDA in history in 2025.

The lesson isn't that Juan Valdez found the right five markets. It's that the discipline of choosing five forced a quality of execution that 40 never could.

The risks of spreading too thin

That discipline runs against how most companies think about global growth. The instinct is to enter every accessible market, treat breadth as a hedge, and figure out the details later. The problem is that........

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