For paid subscribers: A fascinating academic paper delves into the ways Korean Buddhists, after centuries of drinking tea, have started to embrace coffee.
Demand for coffee is growing, and climate change threatens supply—yet consumers don’t want to pay more. In an intensified and unequal industry, however, someone always pays.
Hello, and welcome to the Roundup. Every week, I read all the coffee news and write about the best bits for Fresh Cup Magazine. Then, I summarise those bits for you in this newsletter.
This week: two consolidated coffee giants... consolidate.
Keurig Dr Pepper (a beverage conglomerate formed by the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group) is acquiring JDE Peet's (a coffee conglomerate formed by the merger of Jacob Douwe Egberts and Peet's Coffee) for $18 billion. The resultant company will be split into two, one focusing on coffee and the other on soft drinks, with the coffee arm expected to bring in $16 billion in annual sales and rival Nestlé as the second-largest coffee company in the world. At this rate, I expect those two companies to eventually merge with Starbucks, leaving one enormous coffee behemoth called JDE Keurbustlé or Nesbucks or something.
The coffee industry loves tree-planting to offset carbon emissions or expanding coffee production, but it turns out that protecting existing forests is better than planting new trees on deforested land. A recent study found that removing existing forests released double the carbon that tree planting could capture, even if every farm in the world planted new shade trees.
Verve Coffee Roasters in California added a 5% surcharge to all orders to fund expanding healthcare benefits for full-time employees. However, baristas told Lookout Santa Cruz that not all workers are full-time, and the surcharge misleads customers into thinking that they are subsidising healthcare for employees who might not actually receive benefits. (Verve disputed these claims.)
For more on all these stories, plus research showing that caffeine could impact the effectiveness of antibiotics, check out the full Roundup over at Fresh Cup Magazine:
On Friday, paid subscribers will receive a bonus article looking in more depth at the wild exploits of Munther Bilbeisi, who made millions smuggling coffee into Miami in the 1980s with the help of a bank that Time Magazine called the “largest criminal corporate enterprise in modern history”. If you'd like to read it, you can become a paid subscriber here!
For now, though, it's goodbye from Clem, who is keeping an eye on things from on top of a shelf:
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I'm a coffee writer and creator of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry. Ask me about coffeewashing. It's pronounced Fin (he/him)
Fionn Pooler
Fionn Pooler
