Coffee News Roundup: Week Ending March 18th

A diner mug rests on a newspaper atop a wooden table.

Hello and welcome to another Starbucks-heavy Coffee News Roundup.

Let’s see what they’ve been up to this week, plus all the other news.

Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson to Retire as Howard Schultz Returns - via Daily Coffee News

Howard Schultz—he of the mooted 2020 presidential campaign that was mocked and pilloried into oblivion—is returning to Starbucks as interim CEO after the announcement that Kevin Johnson will retire next month.

It’s a move that has definitely been planned since last year and has nothing to do with the ongoing unionization issues at the coffee behemoth, honest. “It’s been deliberate,” Mellody Hobson, the Starbucks chair, told the Wall Street Journal. “This is not hasty in any way.”

Schultz, meanwhile, is returning for a third time to the company whose massive worldwide growth he oversaw during his first tenure, and will be paid $1 for his services.

What this will mean for the union push remains to be seen, although Schultz has expressed anti-union views in the past and was one of a number of company bigwigs who was wheeled out to address/intimidate workers during the initial (eventually successful) unionization drive in Buffalo.

Organizers have been reacting to the move, with More Perfect Union calling him “virulently anti-union” and others referring to his $1 severance as a “mockery” from a “position of privilege”.

Read the full story here.

Coffee Very Popular, Says National Coffee Association - via Sprudge

Incredible, world-shaking, stop-the-presses announcement here. It turns out that people like coffee. A lot.

According to the National Coffee Association’s Spring 2022 National Data Trends report, 66% of the (US) population drinks coffee every day, up 14% from this time last year. According to the NCA, that’s a two-decade high. As the COVID-19 pandemic is supposedly on the wane (even though it’s anything but waning across much of the world), coffee consumption in cafes has risen 8% as well.

“Given decades of independent scientific evidence that coffee drinkers live longer than people who never drink coffee,” NCA President and CEO William “Bill” Murray commented, “it’s fitting to see America’s top beverage emerge from COVID-19 more popular than ever at home, on the go, in the office, and in coffee shops around the country.”

Read the full story here.

Nestlé, Lavazza, Starbucks Withdraw From Russia - via Global Coffee Report

As coffee traders rush to divert and redirect shipments in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the big coffee companies are finally pulling out of Russia as sanctions take hold. Global Coffee Report, er, reports of hours-long queues at Nespresso’s Moscow store as Russians scramble to purchase the remaining, limited in-country supply.

Read the full story here.

Meanwhile, this excellent piece in Sprudge looks at the ways in which Ukraine’s specialty coffee industry is helping to fuel the resistance, with “a series of vignettes on coffee life inside Ukraine, and how the invasion has impacted the work of coffee businesses throughout the country.” It’s well worth a read.

The Internet’s New Favorite Coffee Drink Is Orange Juice & Espresso - via Sprudge

I will be the first to admit that orange juice and espresso sounds rather gross, and I was reluctant to try it. But then I tried it and, well, it’s pretty tasty. Refreshing, bright, and sweet, with strong espresso tonic vibes—a lovely summery drink, basically. I say try it, if you get the chance.

There’s also a pretty funny follow-up article about how orange juice + espresso has been a thing for ages, and how dare young people rediscover it (people love to get mad about things that don’t matter).

Read the full story here.

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

More Headlines

The Glasgow Coffee Festival Returns In Person This May

Here Are the Winners of the 2021 World Aeropress Championship

Uganda Coffee Exports Plunge 20% in February as Drought Cuts Yields

New Coffee Pod Fight Brews With Nespresso Lawsuit Against Peet's

Despite Conflict in Europe, Coffee Prices Continue to Increase: ICO Report

Vietnamese Coffee Growers Protest Loss of Land Rights in Central Highlands

Genetics Research Boosts Response to Disease Plaguing Hawaii’s Coffee Crop

The Week In Coffee Unionizing

New Starbucks locations are constantly joining the nationwide drive, with announcements this week from Louisville and Queens, New York, among others. The total, according to More Perfect Union, currently stands at 150 cafes.

The company is also facing a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board that it allegedly retaliated against two organizers at the recently-unionized Arizona location, the first formal complaint Starbucks has faced during its anti-union campaign. According to the Washington Post, “the NLRB typically issues formal complaints after it investigates accusations brought against employers and finds merit in them.”

Union organizers received another boost this week, as an investor group which holds over $1 billion in Starbucks stock urged the company to adopt “a global policy of neutrality for all current and future attempts of its workers to organize.” The group also wants Starbucks to reach “fair and timely” collective bargains with those who vote to unionize.

The Week In Corporate Coffeewashing

Okay, so this Roundup has a lot of Starbucks in it, probably because of the shareholder meeting that took place this week. Thankfully, they’ve given me a story for almost every section of the Roundup, so it’s hard to complain.

Case in point: lots of headlines about how the company “unveils new plans to eliminate single-use cups” and is “going away from paper cups”. Which definitely makes it sound like there’s an end-date for those billion upon billion paper-plastic cups that are cluttering landfills and filling the oceans.

However, dig a little deeper and here’s what the announcement actually announced: per Nation’s Restaurant News, “Starbucks is hoping guests will adopt a culture that moves away from disposable cups entirely by 2025.” NRN’s story, like most of the others, uses lots of phrases like “move toward” and “more-sustainable” and “less waste”. Meanwhile, the word “eliminate” doesn’t even appear in the official Starbucks statement.

According to that statement, the actual goal by 2025 is “to create a cultural movement towards reusables by giving customers easy access to a personal or Starbucks provided reusable to-go cup for every visit.”

It’s classic greenwashing—a big announcement that sounds good (and gets plenty of positive press coverage) but in reality does little but put the onus on the consumer to change their behaviours.