A Coffee vs Tea Health Showdown

In the Age of Coffee Automation, What Happens to Baristas?

Coffee companies are going all in on automation. We’re told that it improves efficiency, cuts costs, and yields a better product. But what does it mean for the baristas whose labour these automations displace?

The King of Sweden’s Coffee Experiment

For paid subscribers: Today, Sweden is famous for its love of coffee. But historically that hasn’t always been the case, and one particular ruler’s attempts to prove coffee’s harmful health impacts may have been the world’s first randomised controlled trial.

Starbucks, deforestation, and a tea vs coffee head-to-head—it’s all going on this week.

Starbucks has added to its company-owned “research” farms, acquiring property in Costa Rica and Guatemala in order to “find solutions to increase productivity on farms, support increased profitability for farmers and build climate resilience”.
After a lot of pushback from stakeholders, analysts, many of its own member countries, and the agriculture lobby, the European Commission has proposed a 12-month delay to its impending deforestation legislation. In a statement, the E.C. acknowledged the criticisms, while also pointedly noting that “the state of preparations amongst stakeholders in Europe is also uneven”.
In coffee-as-health news, a new study found that drinking more than four cups of coffee every day could raise your risk of stroke by 37%—while drinking tea lowers the risk. However, the researchers found that anything below the four cup mark “had no association with stroke”, which is good news for the caffeine sensitive among us (🙋‍♂️).

Read more on all these stories over at Fresh Cup Magazine:

CLICK HERE TO READ ☕

I wrote a new feature for Fresh Cup, a profile of a man named Winter who has spent the last 27 years trying to visit every single Starbucks on earth: It’s Impossible to Visit Every Starbucks On Earth—But One Man Is Trying Anyway

While once achievable, the sheer scale and speed of the company’s growth now makes visiting every store an impossible challenge. Starbucking, as Winter refers to it, has taken him to 70 countries, bankrupted him, and turned him into a minor celebrity. I had a long talk with him (while he visited a Starbucks at the same time!) and he’s just a fascinating person:

“A lot of people do believe that real life is having a job, getting married, buying a house, having kids. I see that as fairly arbitrary … When somebody says Starbucking is pointless, I turn around and say, ‘Point to something, anything, that other people are doing that is not pointless.’”

This was such a fun article to research and write, so I hope you check it out!

Until next week, it’s goodbye from Merlin: