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. …
What’s Behind Rising Coffee Prices?
By Max Nicholas-Fulmer The last time the New York “C” contract reached the levels we’ve witnessed over the last few months was 1997, when futures hit $3.20/pound. The impetus for that move was neither frost nor drought, but the simple fact that in February of that year the “Certified Stocks” of green coffee in bonded …
Going Up and Out: Orbital Thinking at Symposium
By Trish Rothgeb From the moment that SCAA Executive Director Ric Rhinehart asked the 400 plus attendees at SCAA Symposium 2011 to “get orbital,” I knew this annual event of presentations, forums and conversations was not going to be an easy ride. Rhinehart knew we would be hearing about climate change, diminishing coffee quality, market …
The New Market Reality
By Ric Rhinehart At the recent SCAA Symposium, I had an opportunity to present some thoughts on the challenges facing our industry as we come to grips with a new market reality. It occurred to me that there are really three fundamental value propositions for which we are responsible and that our task is to …
The Soul of Coffee
By Peter Giuliano There is an academic discipline that studies the way human beings relate to food and the culture we develop around the ways we eat and drink. It’s called foodways and it documents and analyzes what we do in regards to food and why we do it. Foodways looks at our traditions of …
The (Coffee) World is Flat
By Peter Giuliano Coffea Arabica and Homo Sapiens have a lot in common. Both evolved in Ethiopia, and crossed the Red Sea before fanning out all over the globe. The human race inhabited and spread its culture through every corner of the world, and the diversity and beauty of human expression is a marvel to …
Welcome to your Virtual Community
By Peter Giuliano In 1993, computer scientists at Cambridge University in England decided to attach the feed from a video camera to the brand-new invention called the internet, and in the process created the first webcam. This webcam was trained on a coffee pot in a break room, so the scientists could see how much …