The coffee scene in Dubai is thriving, and the city is set to welcome the Specialty Coffee Association’s World of Coffee event next month. But underneath the glitzy facade and marketing buzz lies a moral quagmire.
The co-founder of the chain Biggby Coffee talks about building a successful company with hundreds of franchised locations, only to switch to a new way of doing business—one that prioritises more than just growth and profit.
For paid subscribers: Troubled coffee companies now have a new way to escape their problems: invest in cryptocurrencies and pray that the line keeps going up.
Let’s say you run a struggling coffee company. Sales are sluggish, revenue is down, and your share price has tanked since you went public a couple of years ago. What’s the solution? Traditionally, you would look for outside investment and streamline operations (that is, take on venture capital funding and lay off workers).
But we live in the 21st century, a glorious new era of opportunity, promise, and cryptocurrencies. Now, embattled brands can “launch a bitcoin strategy”, raising funds to purchase crypto assets which will then, hopefully, continue to appreciate. Doing so will “unlock the value of the company”, as one executive recently told Nikou Asgari in the Financial Times.
This is the route that Vanadi Coffee took. The small Spanish coffee chain faltered after going public in 2023, losing millions and closing multiple locations. But in June this year, the company announced that it was going all-in on crypto, raising money to buy over a billion dollars of bitcoin.
It’s a very risky move, considering that bitcoin represents an unstable, highly volatile investment. But coffee is increasingly embracing crypto—Compass Coffee has been leaning into it heavily in recent years—and costs continue to rise alongside tariffs and other challenges. If Vanadi’s gamble pays off, other floundering companies may see the appeal of a crypto pivot.
The co-founder of the chain Biggby Coffee talks about building a successful company with hundreds of franchised locations, only to switch to a new way of doing business—one that prioritises more than just growth and profit.
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?
Companies are turning to automation as a tool to fight back against industrial action. In coffee, that role could well be played by robot baristas—in fact, it sort of already has.
For paid subscribers: Today, Sweden is famous for its love of coffee. But historically that hasn’t always been the case, and one particular ruler’s attempts to prove coffee’s harmful health impacts may have been the world’s first randomised controlled trial.
A newsletter about coffee—its culture, politics, and how it connects to the wider world.
