Although Creolé Coffee had a long and rich history in the Louisiana coffee market,
it had only been in recent years that it had started to achieve success on the
regional and national levels. An influx of investment capital from the New Orleans
business community combined with a creative marketing campaign that focused on
the heritage of Creole culture served to launch Creolé Coffee onto the national scene
in the early 1990s. The honeymoon was short-lived, however, as dramatic volatility
in the world coffee market resulted not only in price instabilities, but also created
difficulty in procuring the high-quality product customers had grown to expect from
Creolé.