can’t stop thinking about how the success of specialty coffee is completely in spite of how bad at operating every roaster is, and here are some of those thoughts in a thread!

1. i’m always flabbergasted at the disconnect between what most customers enjoy drinking and what coffee bars and cafes insist on serving.

2. there’s absolutely zero training for better paid full time positions, so the people who learn the most about coffee (baristas, etc.) are never prepared to take on, say, a sales role.

2., cont. This means that promoted baristas either struggle to do the right job, or outside hires with sales experience and zero coffee experience dominate those jobs. Bad on both fronts!

3. Most jobs in specialty coffee are unsustainable, and since there’s no centralized education, we’re retraining entirely generations of coffee pros every 5 years.

3., cont. This leads to really bad practices just recycling themselves over and over! There’s rarely progress because there’s a demand for highly trained professionals to work at every level, but there’s no sustainable wage system to support that demand.

4. There’s not a great understanding of what the competition of specialty coffee is: is it major chains that work at the edges of specialty? Is it commercial grade coffee sold at commodity and packaged for grocery shelves? Is it the local diner down the street?

4., cont. There’s no united front in creating sustained demand for higher quality coffee at better prices for farmers and too much competition between companies that do exactly the same thing if you take one step back.

5. There’s no sustainable financial model for companies that grow. It’s pretty clear that you can get to be a certain size, but the cost of running a business that big requires cash injections from massive investors.

5. cont., The success stories in specialty coffee are all failure stories: Stumptown, La Colombe, Intelligentsia, all required major buyouts to be operational. That’s a failing business model for the END of the value chain, which is where the most profit is available to reap.

6. None of this is entirely unique to coffee, but other specialty industries seem to have a bit more stability, and it feels like coffee tries to model itself after those businesses instead of mapping out its own operational path.

6. cont., Coffee can’t be beer, wine, spirits, cheese, etc., because coffee isn’t a finished product. It requires preparation. Coffee is an ingredient, and should be marketed as an ingredient.

6. cont., Coffee also doesn’t have the margins needed to be profitable the way other ingredients are at a restaurant/cafe. Most people can brew coffee just as good as they can at home, but people go to restaurants because it’s something they can’t do themselves.

7. All of these conditions lead to a lot of infighting and a lot of strife. An underpaid barista sees someone making better wages and lashes out. An undertrained sales worker sees someone making a better sale and lashes out. A roaster sees another getting better praise, etc.

It’s just become such a messy house of cards, and these conditions just create the perfect opportunity for everyone at the bottom to constantly poke at it.

There are people trying to do good! A small pastry shop that’s figured out how to offer health insurance to all part-time employees. A small collection of shops moving to salary scale. Specific, concrete examples of helping people.

But until there’s the ability to stop the churn and burn mentality towards entry-level jobs from bigger companies, and until there are specific, thoughtful, sustainable business models for those bigger companies, specialty coffee is just going to be ripe for acquisition.

And then specialty coffee will just be a money making pet project for international bad actor conglomerates. Like, say Nestle, who as recent as 2016 admitted to slavery in Thailand. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01/nestle-slavery-thailand-fighting-child-labour-lawsuit-ivory-coast