A complex web of pressures, from climate change to tariffs, are pushing up coffee prices. But the industry has a challenge: How to communicate necessary price rises to consumers without scaring them off.
For paid subscribers: deleted scenes from last week's lexicon. Musings on the words "Sustainability", "Specialty", and the old-school buzzwords like "Artisan" and "Gourmet".
Coffee is filled with buzzwords that lack agreed-upon definitions: slightly woolly terms like “Sustainable,” “Ethical,” even “Specialty.” Companies use them constantly to sell more coffee—but what do these words actually mean?
Welcome to the second collaboration between The Pourover and Ashley Rodriguez from Boss Barista.
If you spend any amount of time observing the coffee industry—and especially if you write about it, as we both do—you begin to notice the number of buzzwords thrown around by companies big and small. They’re on bags, websites, advertising copy, and social media posts. There are classics like Artisan and Small-batch, and newer ones like Sustainable, Transparency, or Stakeholders.
We know what these words mean on an individual level—but what are they really saying? Can you trust when a company tells you they are ethical? What does the widespread use of words like Community, or Transparency, or even Specialty mean in the context of a growing, evolving, and increasingly corporatised coffee industry?
The goal here is not to criticise individual companies (well, maybe one or two). What we’re trying to do is encourage you to be more curious about, and look more closely at, some of the words used by coffee brands—especially those used to convince you to buy their coffee.
Sustainability: In my opinion, this is one of the most-used words in coffee because it has no formal definition. What does it mean for a coffee roaster to use the word “sustainable?” What does it mean for a coffee shop? If a coffee shop composts its coffee grounds but serves drinks in paper cups, are they sustainable?
I’d argue it’s impossible to call any product “sustainably sourced” because there’s no threshold, but that doesn’t mean things can’t be done “sustainably.” I like when brands use phrases like “sourced with sustainable practices” or something that implies the idea of sustainability is an action rather than an outcome. For me, I like to see what folks mean when they say something is “sustainable.” As an editor, one of the notes I write to people in their articles is “what do you mean by this” and that’s often the question I have for folks when they use the word sustainability. — Ashley
Community: Another of the industry’s buzzwords du jour, “community” is extremely popular with coffee companies of all sizes. Much like sustainability, community is, on the surface, broadly positive. When done thoughtfully and intentionally, community-building is one of the best things about the coffee industry: Cxffeeblack’s work in Memphisand within its supply chain is a striking example. However, like the other words in this lexicon, “community” is malleable—and ripe for misuse.
The word’s scope is often specific and hyperlocal—“building community through coffee” is a common tagline from neighbourhood cafes. But it can be used more generally, as in the SCA’s goal of “fostering a global coffee community”, or else as a way to link seemingly disparate companies together, such as Nespresso’s Instagram post referring to B Corp as “a community of brands moving forwards with our commitments to have a positive social and environmental impact”. (I’d love to know what the 200 or so other B Corp-certified coffee companies think of that explicit link between them and Nespresso.) — Fionn
Relationship Coffee: Usually means a roaster has some sort of relationship with a farmer, generally built by purchasing their coffee in years past. David Griswold, founder of Sustainable Harvest, said he coined the term “relationship coffee” in the 90s but wasn’t able to trademark it. When I interviewed him in 2022, he defined relationship coffee as “based around the idea of complete transparency between all the parties involved in the [coffee] supply chain.”
Arguably, this doesn’t happen in every coffee that calls itself a “relationship coffee.” More likely than not, when roasters label coffees with that term, they simply mean, “hey, we’ve bought from this farmer a lot,” which is a good thing (having predictable buyers and clients for coffee is good for forecasting and knowing where your harvest is going). When talking to David, I considered his use of the word relationship and how we think about relationships in our day-to-day lives. Consider what we owe or give people we claim to have relationships with—are we actually giving the same to farmers we claim to have relationships with? — Ashley
The Old School Buzzwords: Small Batch, Gourmet, Artisan, Handmade, etc…: Arguably what defines specialty coffee is any amalgamation of the words above, particularly in the early aughts. For a long time, there was a belief that handmade was always better: a pour over had to be better than coffee from a drip machine, for example, so these words became synonymous and indicators of quality. The industry has shifted significantly: that’s not to say the words above are bad (they’re not) but they’ve become less of one-to-one indicators of tasty coffee, I think. — Ashley
Ethical (especially in regards to coffee sourcing): Similar to “sustainable”, you’ll often see “ethically sourced” on a bag of coffee, impact report, or About Us webpage. Like many of the terms on this list, it is fairly malleable and hard to define. After all, we all have different ideas of what it means to be ethical. For me, I would hope that “ethically sourced” means that the company paid a fair price for the coffee, and that the farming practices involved were safe and equitable.
This might seem like a no-brainer, but it isn’t always the case. For example Starbucks and Nespresso both claim that their coffee is ethically sourced—both use that exact phrase across their websites. But can a multinational corporation really be ethical? Investigators have uncovered multiple instances of forced and child labour within both companies’ supply chains. What ethical framework does that fall under?
The concept of ethical coffee sourcing. therefore, involves a lot of trust on the consumer’s part. The only way around it is if the company clearly defines its own ethics and commits to true supply chain transparency, but such commitments are still frustratingly rare. — Fionn
Specialty: For a long time, I thought specialty was a designation: coffee often gets scored on a 1-100 scale, and I heard that anything above an 80 was considered specialty, but I’m not sure where that comes from? It might be an antiquated term that originated with the Specialty Coffee Association, which is a global trade organization, but in 2019, the SCA overhauled its definition of specialty: they define specialty as “a coffee that demonstrates excellence in quality and distinction across the entire value chain—from production to preparation and experience.”
The term “specialty coffee” was first used by Erna Knutsen, an early coffee luminary, in 1974. She meant this term as a way to define coffees being bought and sold outside the commodity market, coffees she thought were “special.” I think specialty still refers to coffees bought and sold outside the commodity market, but what makes them special has expanded beyond flavor and quality (another term with lots of baggage; see below). — Ashley
Local: Obviously chains like Starbucks or Dunkin aren't local, but surely that cool cafe down the road is independent, right?
After the purchases, not much changed on the outside. Those involved would surely prefer that their customers not know of—or at least not think about—the takeovers. A similar thing is happening with Fairwave Holdings’ acquisition of independent roasters and cafes across the United States—bringing brands like Anodyne, Spyhouse, and most recently Black & White under the umbrella of private equity but keeping an ostensibly local veneer.
The most interesting thing to me about all these acquisitions is the reaction from inside: workers at Blue Bottle, Intelligentsia, and La Colombe have all unionized in recent years, as have those at Anodyne. The companies might no longer be local, but the workers sure are. — Fionn
Quality: Is the theme of this lexicon “it’s hard to define this term?” Maybe, but quality is especially hard to define because quality depends on what you’re looking for. Programs like the Q grader exam, a rigorous test that establishes precise benchmarks for flavor descriptors and how to identify coffee defects, do attempt to codify quality, which is important (we have to establish some sort of baseline between people evaluating coffee). But quality can also be subjective and easily influenced: studies have shown that the color cup you drink out of can influence what you think of the coffee you’re drinking. — Ashley
Stakeholders: One of those business words that has leaked into the coffee world, probably through impact reports, corporate social responsibility documents, or Linkedin. The simple definition of a stakeholder is a person who has a vested interest in an organisation or company, be it an employee, shareholder, or supplier. In coffee, stakeholders are usually vague groups—see Louis Dreyfus Company’s plan to “improve collaboration among coffee supply chain stakeholders”—or corporate partnerships like multi-stakeholder initiatives. Hot take alert, but to me the word’s increased use by companies and organisations like the SCA is another data point in the increasing corporatisation of specialty coffee. — Fionn
Passion: What most people think it takes to be a coffee professional. This is a loaded term, and I’d argue that coffee jobs are some of the most emotionally-regulated jobs there are: we make fun of baristas for being snobby or stuck-up (see this article I wrote about the myth of the hipster barista), but then demand an absurd amount of passion from them while paying baristas barely above minimum wage. We seem to hate baristas that take their jobs seriously, but we also demand they be knowledgeable and passionate about their work. — Ashley
Compostable/Recyclable: Ah, that’s the last of the coffee from this bag. Now what? I don’t want to throw it away—I’m a conscientious person, after all—but it’s getting harder and harder to decipher all the various options. Is the bag plastic, and if so, will my local council let me recycle it? If not, is there a supermarket nearby that will take it? And anyway, doesn’t something like 70% of the soft plastic collected by supermarkets for recycling in the U.K. end up being burned?
Or maybe it’s labelled compostable, but then, can I just throw it in my backyard pile or does it need to be sent to a commercial composting facility? Does my council do that? If it is home compostable, does that include the valve and seal? Perhaps it’s made from PLA or biodegradable plastic, but what does that even mean? Those can’t be recycled—and may in fact contaminate a recycling system—but they have to be better than regular plastic, right? Even though it acts just like fossil plastic when dumped in a landfill? Oh god, I’m hyperventilating. Better just throw it out. — Fionn
Transparency: If there’s a buzzword in coffee, it’s transparency. Often, roasters use this word as a way to convey that they’re giving out more information about a coffee than usual, and there’s been recent pushes to be more transparent in order to back up claims like, “we pay more for coffee” or “our coffee is sustainable!”
As my colleague RJ Joseph pointed out in the Red Fox Coffee Journal, transparency without context doesn’t mean much. “Without context on cost of production and other costs throughout the supply chain, the price paid for coffee is just a number. Think of it like rent: if I told you what I pay for my apartment, the number would be meaningless without knowing more about its size, location, and the general cost of space in my region,” Joseph writes. — Ashley
I'm the creator and writer of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry as a barista, roaster, and writer. Ask me about coffeewashing.
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