Starbucks vs Local Cafe Doesn’t Always End How You Might Think

• While a tiny number of gigantic coffee brands dominate the industry, the percentage of "sustainable" coffee they buy does seem to be increasing. That's according to the Global Coffee Platform, which reported that 75% of green coffee purchases from 11 of the largest coffee roasters met some kind of sustainability standard. (The GCP accepted 26 different programs this year, the majority of which were private in-house certifications like Nespresso AAA.)
• The general consensus is that having a Starbucks or other large coffee chain nearby heralds the death of local cafes. However, the reality is often quite different. Take the Groovy Goose, a small, indie coffee shop near San Francisco that is thriving while the Starbucks location up the road struggles.
• The Starbucks Workers United strike expanded again, spreading to nearly 4,000 baristas at over 180 stores in 130 cities. This walkout has been going for a month now, the longest strike in Starbucks' history. Plus, solidarity protests took place in 10 countries around the world, and, separately, workers at a franchised Starbucks in Glasgow went on strike.

For more on all these stories, plus news of the passing of Bill Kennedy, a longtime coffee educator and CEO of San Franciscan Roaster Co., check out the full Roundup over at Fresh Cup Magazine:

Coffee News Club: Week of December 15

Is a Starbucks down the street a death knell? Not always. Plus, multinational roasters are buying more sustainable coffee than ever before—here’s the scoop for the week of Dec. 15.

Fresh CupFionn Pooler

I didn't have room for it in the Roundup, but the social enterprise green coffee trader Raw Material is running a Kickstarter to fund its regeneration project in Timor-Leste. The money raised will go towards repurposing solar panels to run processing equipment, improving plastic recycling infrastructure to build equipment like fermentation tanks, and renewing and replacing the country's aging coffee trees. Not long left to get involved!

On Friday, paid subscribers received a companion piece to my latest long read on the moral cost of Dubai's coffee boom. This bonus article looks at the soft power effects of the Dubai chocolate trend and how it connects to coffee:

Dubai’s Chocolate-Based Propaganda Push

For paid subscribers: Coffee is increasingly used to burnish the United Arab Emirates’ international image. Now it is being supercharged by merging with the popularity of the Dubai chocolate trend.

The PouroverFionn Pooler

I'll be back on Friday with another new article, but until then it's goodbye from my friend Angela's cat Clem, who is helping (?) with tree setup: