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?
As the climate crisis intensifies, regenerative agriculture could play a key role in sustaining and strengthening the global coffee industry. That is, if it can escape becoming just another corporate sustainability buzzword.
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.
Last week, I explored the increasing automation push within coffee, paying particular attention to the consequences for baristas. While technological advancements are taking place along the supply chain, it is in cafes that automation is having the most obvious impact.
This is happening at the same time as coffee workers, especially in the United States, are organising and demanding better conditions from their employers. I briefly touched on the connection between unions and automation in last week’s piece, specifically noting how unionising Blank Street baristas referenced the company’s focus on technology as one of their reasons for organising.
But there is another role for automation—and specifically robot baristas—in letting companies respond to the surge of labour organising in coffee. That role is as strikebreaker.
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?
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.
For paid subscribers: What happens when the melodramatic language of social media and political discourse begins to impact how we discuss the coffee industry.
For paid subscribers: It turns out that coffee’s impact on the environment continues after we drink it.
A newsletter about coffee—its culture, politics, and how it connects to the wider world.
