Coffee News Roundup: Week Ending March 22nd

Another week, another smorgasbord of coffee news. What’s been going on?

• For the third year in a row, Brazilian coffee production has steadily increased despite the country’s arabica coffee usually following a biennial production schedule with alternating larger and smaller harvests. However, drought and frost hit the country in 2020 and 2021, breaking the cycle—and there’s a chance this upswing trend will continue.
• The Specialty Coffee Association has released a report exploring the findings from its 2023 survey investigating equitable value distribution in the industry. There’s a lot in there, but basically respondents believe that farmers are not reaping the value of coffee proportionate to the amount of value their work gives coffee.
• And Starbucks is shutting down its NFT rewards program Odyssey before it even left the beta testing phase. Then-CEO Howard Schultz announced Odyssey’s launch in 2022 during an anti-union tour, using NFTs to “excite [workers] about a union-less future with the company,” according to Mashable.

Read the full Roundup over at Fresh Cup Magazine:

Last week, Fresh Cup also revamped and republished my piece about the Red Sea crisis and the coffee industry’s focus on shipping delays rather than the ongoing genocide in Gaza: read Coffee At Sea.

I’ll be back with a new article on Friday, but until then it’s goodbye from Merlin: