The Seven Most Common Mistakes Coffee Companies Make When Going Global and How To Avoid Them
by Mona Pearl In the not too distant future, businesses will be placed into one of two categories: those that skillfully entered into the global marketplace and those that sheepishly exited out of business. A wait-and-see mindset is nothing short of organizational suicide. However, a reactionary, ill-conceived global expansion is no improvement. That, too, spells disaster. …
Developing a Development Approach for Coffee
by Andrew Sargent, Michael Opitz, and Jan von Enden Nearly a decade after the coffee crisis of 2000/2001 and the subsequent introduction of several industry efforts to address its causes, consequences, and related issues, poverty and environmental degradation continue to be widespread among the 20 million smallholders for whom coffee farming is an important livelihood strategy. …
Coffee Quality and Sustainability: The Issues Challenging and Changing Our World
By Shauna Alexander Mohr In the mid-1990s, before most industries were tackling sustainability, specialty coffee companies came together with NGOs and research institutions to address issues such as shade-grown coffee, organics and Fair Trade. 1996 marked the First Sustainable Coffee Congress at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. Four years later, Paul Hawken, in his keynote …
The Value of A Good Story, Or: How to Turn Poop into Gold
By Lily Kubota Story | stawr-ee, stohr-ee | noun 1. a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale. It is hard for me to imagine the marketing plan that incorporates images of an animal’s fecal matter into promotional efforts. As unappealing of …
Home Coffee Roasting: A Bump on the Butt of Specialty Coffee
by Thompson Owen A guy goes into a coffee roasting shop and asks if he can buy some green coffee to roast at home. The owner says, “Sure, and I will give you a 10 percent discount off our roasted coffee price.” The guy says, “Gee, since I will have 20 percent weight loss, that means I …
A Realistic Look at the Numbers Game
by Tracy Ging Stocks take another dive as new employment figures are released, analysts warn of further declines, and as I write this, the coffee market has just experienced 18 straight sessions of higher highs. Understandably, there is a palpable edginess in the coffee industry now—an unease that is centered mostly on the question: What …
There and Back Again: A Coffee Decade Comes Full-Circle
By Nick Cho This past decade has been busy for our specialty coffee industry. While reminiscing about the past is a bit arbitrary, there’s a growing sense that we’re entering into a new period within the industry necessitating a status-check. Such changes are evident in the way that many consumers perceive and engage coffee. Likewise, …
Bolder Business: The Competitive Capital of Doing Good
By Tracy Ging By 2013, we may need two planets to sustain our demand for resources on Earth. At the risk of being repetitive: climate change is real. The level of urgency is rising to the point where it is not only unacceptable, but also increasingly unwise for businesses to ignore the issue. Businesses are being …
Creating Coffee Community: Three Outlooks for the Future
By Shanna Germain Walk into Case Study Coffee in Portland, OR, on any given Saturday and you might see this sight: a dozen people gathered at individual tables, fingers ticking across their laptop keys. The silence is deafening. And then, simultaneously everyone stops typing, does a joyous fist pump into the air, closes their laptop …
Positive Vibrations: Bright Spots In Coffee
By Peter Giuliano There has been lots of scary news lately in the coffee world: environmental changes, economic instability, a volatile coffee market. It’s easy to focus on what’s wrong in the coffee world. But there’s a lot right too. Good things are happening all over the place, and I am filled with hope and …
Hedging Future Coffee Prices, Speculators and Technology Blend-in
By Marvin G. Perez No matter how you brew it, higher coffee prices are here to stay. How high and for how long will depend on several factors, ranging from dollar fluctuations to growers’ ability to improve output and possible regulation on speculators’ participation in commodity markets. Careful What You Wish For Over the last …
Quality: What is it and how do we deliver it?
Reflections on the year’s SCAA Symposium By Kevin Knox At this year’s SCAA Symposium one presenter asked whether quality alone was enough to equal sustainability. Another suggested jettisoning the carefully crafted SCAA and Cup of Excellence cupping forms in favor of a more “objective” form that simply measured intensity of flavor, acidity, aroma and body. …