Coffee News Roundup: Week Ending February 4th

A white coffee cup with latte art and spoon sits atop a newspaper. Via Pixabay.

This week’s Coffee News Roundup is brought to you, very slowly, by a hotspotted internet connection due to broadband issues. Assuming I don’t run out of data, let’s see what’s been going on.

Starbucks To Raise Prices, Blaming Inflation. It's The Third Price Hike Since October - via CBS News

Starbucks announced its quarterly earnings this week, with revenue reaching $8.05 billion (up 19%) and fiscal first-quarter net income of $815.9 million.

Meanwhile, CEO Kevin Johnson saw his salary increase nearly 40% in 2021.

Coincidentally, the coffee behemoth is planning more price rises this year, citing “inflationary pressures”. Like many publicly-traded corporations, Starbucks is choosing to pass on rising costs to customers, rather than see them eat into profits.

“Corporations blaming their price hikes on inflation have come under scrutiny from some consumer advocates,” the article notes, “who point out that the profits of many businesses are growing far beyond the rise in prices.”

Read the full story here.

ICO Launches World Coffee Statistics Database - via Global Coffee Report

The International Coffee Organization (ICO) is launching a new tool, the World Coffee Statistics Database (WCSD), with the goal of “provid[ing] a one-stop shop for all coffee-related statistics.”

The ICO says that the tool “will revolutionise the way in which coffee data are delivered and used, giving analysts and users of ICO’s coffee statistical a simple control and access to its data set.”

Covering over 190 countries and 50 years of data, the WCSD will also allow customization and disaggregation of reports.

Although the launch date is said to be January 31, the tool doesn’t yet appear to be available on the ICO’s website (cost is also not mentioned).

Read the full story here.

Forecasting Brazil’s Coffee Crop Gets Harder With Coming Floods - via Bloomberg

Turns out the people whose job it is to forecast Brazil’s coffee crop—that thing which accounts for more than 45% of the world’s coffee output and basically determines the C market price—are having to guesstimate their way to a number for the next year.

Usually, analysts and forecasters physically travel to farms to inspect the coffee trees. This year, however, “many prognosticators who would normally get a first-hand look, smell, taste and feel of the beans are relying on second-hand numbers, or extrapolating weather and past trends.”

This year’s crop is especially important because it represents the larger of Brazil’s two-year harvest cycle—last year’s disappointing harvest is much of the reason why the C price has skyrocketed over the past twelve months.

While previously the issues had been drought, frost, and a worldwide pandemic, now farmers (and analysts) have potential floods to contend with. And these difficulties mean the numbers for the 2022 harvest have been all over the place—Volcafe, for example, cut their forecast from 53 million bags to 37.5 million in a recent report.

As one importer notes, “Forecasting Brazil’s 2022 crop has become an exercise in futility.”

Read the full story here

Starbucks Union Push Spreads To 54 Stores In 19 States - via NPR

This story is already out of date, as Wikipedia lists 56 stores that have filed for elections, and More Perfect Union’s map of locations has 61 stores either filed or announced.

Of course, as NPR points out, that’s 61 out of 9,000 across the United States. However, the speed and passion with which the union campaign has spread has had a big impact: “As the union push spreads, labor experts say it will be harder for Starbucks to fight each one individually. They also say the high profile of Starbucks helps raise union awareness among regular Americans at a time when union membership has matched historic lows.”

By the time you read this, there’s every chance another store will have announced its intent to unionize.

UPDATE: I was right! Since I began writing this roundup, four more stores in Michigan (three in Ann Arbor!) have announced their unionization push.

Read the full story here.

Bored Breakfast Club Partners With Yes Plz Coffee - via Blockchain Reporter

This was always going to happen. Cryptocurrencies have already infiltrated the world of sports, and celebrity movie stars are hawking NFTs on late night talk shows. Coffee was never going to escape.

So, here’s a sentence: Yes Plz, a coffee subscription service based in Los Angeles, has partnered with something called the Bored Breakfast Club, “an innovative NFT project focused on building a digital community of coffee enthusiasts”, to launch “the world’s first blockchain-based coffee membership”.

“Each NFT is a one-of-a-kind digital collectable that acts as a membership token,” according to the story, “enabling Yes Plz to send you free shipments of freshly roasted coffee on a regular basis.”

There’s also talk of “additional techniques for generating royalties from options such as unique goods and eCommerce sales.”

It’s certainly one way of running a coffee subscription service. But here’s where I’ll also link to some articles about the environmental impact of NFTs and the blockchain technologies they rely on.

Read the full story here.

More Headlines

Indonesia Cup of Excellence Coffees Average Nearly $30 Per Pound at Auction

Australia Fly in Coffee Expert To Power Them to Beijing Gold

Coffee Prices Climb, Pushed Up by Bad Weather and Supply-Chain Woes (paywalled)

Costa Rican Coffee Exports Jump More Than 75% Year-on-Year in January

Coffee Harvest Progresses in Nicaragua Amidst Pandemic

Long shot of Colombian coffee farms with mountains in the distance.

The Week In Coffee Unionizing

A great article in Huffington Post looks at how Starbucks is going about fighting the unionization process, including the hiring of a notorious “union avoidance” law firm to try to stall the filings with the National Labor Relations Board.

At least 30 lawyers from the firm Littler Mendelson have represented Starbucks in cases before the NLRB, arguing over and over for the single store counts to be replaced with region-wide elections. Estimates put these lawyers fees at costing Starbucks hundreds of thousands of dollars. And for what?

It’s a stalling tactic, essentially. “Slowing down a union campaign through NLRB proceedings gives an employer more time to ramp up their anti-union campaign on the ground,” the article notes. “Delaying a vote, by weeks or even days, would allow a company to hold more captive-audience meetings and send more text messages to workers.”

Meanwhile, workers at The Coffee Tree Roasters in Pittsburgh have begun the voting process in their bid to form a union. Employees have previously accused the chain of union-busting, hiring anti-union consultants and, they allege, firing an employee in retaliation for organizing.

Is Coffee Good For You?

New research has found that drinking coffee could “significantly reduce the risk of endometrial cancer”, a type of cancer that begins in the uterine lining before spreading to other organs.

The meta-analysis of 24 observational studies covered 700,000 subjects and 9,833 cases of endometrial cancer over four decades, and also found that caffeinated coffee showed better protection than decaf.

The researchers were typically hedgey in their pronouncements: “The results of this meta-analysis demonstrate that high coffee consumption might lower the risk of endometrial cancer,” they wrote. “The results may suggest an actual protective link between coffee consumption and anti-endometrial cancer effects.”