For paid subscribers: Since Elon Musk’s purchase, and especially in the wake of the Grok CSAM deepfake scandal, it has become impossible to defend staying on X. And yet, many coffee brands and organisations are still there.
Denver’s Amethyst Coffee closed in 2022, two years after raising prices to better compensate staff. But that doesn’t mean the project was a failure—in fact, it still offers lessons for the industry today.
For paid subscribers: Since Elon Musk’s purchase, and especially in the wake of the Grok CSAM deepfake scandal, it has become impossible to defend staying on X. And yet, many coffee brands and organisations are still there.
Coffee companies need to market themselves, and in the modern age that is going to involve some kind of social media usage. There are hundreds (more?) options, but most brands stick to the biggest platforms: Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads; TikTok; maybe LinkedIn for those selling business-to-business.
Before 2022, many were also on Twitter. But in 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter (sort of by accident), and has since turned it into his own personal far-right playground. In the aftermath, some coffee companies and individuals stopped using it, often moving to Bluesky (hello) or to Meta’s new Threads platform.
However, many brands and organisations have continued tweeting (or posting, as it’s now called since Musk rebranded the site to X in 2023). They have continued as the platform has worsened, as the people on their have become more outwardly hateful and abusive, and as Musk has woven his generative AI chatbot, Grok, further into the system.
As well as spreading racist and antisemitic hate speech and disinformation, recently Grok has also been creating sexualised edits of real photos, often of minors, as well as other nonconsensual deepfakes. Many of these images violate laws against producing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and yet Musk and xAI, Twitter/X’s parent company, have done little to stem the flood.
Which begs the question: Why are so many in the coffee industry still using this cursed platform?
For paid subscribers: What do Naomi Campbell, Tom Brady, Sydney Sweeney, and Ice-T have in common?
For paid subscribers: Nestlé is exploring a sale of Blue Bottle, and Luckin is reportedly interested. With such different approaches to coffee, however, it’s worth asking the question: why?
For paid subscribers: Coffee is increasingly used to burnish the United Arab Emirates’ international image. Now it is being supercharged by merging with the popularity of the Dubai chocolate trend.
For paid subscribers: Blue Bottle used carbon offsets and a focus on “emissions intensity” to go carbon neutral, but its total emissions increased quite significantly. Should this "achievement" be celebrated?
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