Hey China, Don’t Drink the “Healthy Coffee USA Inc.” Kool-Aid

While conducting some initial Coffee and Tea research online, I stumbled upon an interesting looking Reuters article touting the popularity of a new company out of the United States that goes by the name of Healthy Coffee USA Inc. The article states that:

With over 35,000 attendees, including over 3,000 Chinese government procurement officials, Healthy Coffee was one of the most sought out and popular displays in the show. Chinese consumers are developing a taste for high quality coffees and beverages and their fixation on the health issue was particularly interesting. The added feature of affordably owning their own mobile retail stores were also of great interest as many attendees wanted to sign up for the business on the spot!

I thought to myself, “Wow, this is a great lead, combining upcoming trends of health and wellness with traditional Chinese ingredients into coffee sounds like it might have success in China.”

So, heading over to Healthy Coffee’s website, I began to dig a little further. Immediately the concept of “direct selling” was indicated many times on the website. The opportunity to be a “founder” and make boat loads of money in emerging markets was also lauded.

However, I hadn’t yet questioned the legitimacy of this company because of the rational that Healthy Coffee is seeking to capitalize on the three mega-billion dollar markets of Coffee, Wellness, and Energy drinks. From our initial research in the Chinese coffee and tea market, this seems to represent an appropriate gap. And the combination of traditional Chinese ingredients including Lingzhi Mushrooms, and Ginseng would appeal greatly to those inside and outside of China who are attracted to these types of elements.

Even their product packaging and designs look like something that one would find in most supermarkets, or convenience stores without much thought.

However, I was still skeptical of this company. My thoughts were further verified by a simple Google search of Healthy Coffee founder, Rick Aguiluz. This led me to a BBS by the name of Scam.com and a specific post detailing the shady operations of all of those involved.

According to the allegations in the post, CEO and Founder Rick Aguiliz is guilty of this:

Ricky ran a nice pump and dump scam to raise money to buy his coffee beans. He pumped the health benefits of the coffee, while slowly dumping his portion of 4,000,000,000 shares on the market (that’s not a typo). Of course, there was no product. The beans “were tied up in customs” according to his story. So after running the stock down to .0001 cents a share earlier this year, Ricky did a 10,000 to 1 reverse merger.

Hmmm. This obviously raises a lot of serious legal and ethical questions regarding this “coffee” business. But what’s even scarier is that this “company” is actually attending import fairs in China, selling both their product and the opportunity to be sales representatives. Healthy Coffee even offers photographic evidence on their website from an import fair in Shenyang:

I’m not a lawyer. I’ve never taken a business ethics class. But this is shady. From a few other trends we’ve been tracking including the recent upsurge in fake wine’s, and the success of actual direct selling companies such as Amway and Avon, let’s hope that this company does not fool anyone in China with a plausible product and sales scheme.