How Corporations and Executives Captured the Coffee Industry’s Profits

Coffee is big business. The global industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, much of that spent by American consumers whose thirst for coffee shows no sign of slowing down. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people rely on coffee for their livelihoods, from farmers and factory workers

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Disposable Coffee Cups?

The world is drowning in disposable coffee cups. They’re in seemingly every cafe, convenience store, hotel lobby, highway rest stop, and auto repair waiting room. They’re in many of our hands every morning, used for maybe 10 minutes before being discarded. Despite their ubiquity, we’ve been trained

Meme Accounts Are the Coffee Industry's Conscience

For much of modern history, traditional news media played the role of critic and watchdog, the ‘fourth estate’ that served as a key check on power. Journalists at newspapers, and then radio and TV stations, investigated and exposed instances of corporate greed and political malfeasance with the public good in

Could a Private-Equity-Backed 'Collective' Offer a Template for Specialty Coffee’s Future?

Welcome to the third article in an ongoing series investigating private equity and venture capital in the coffee industry. If you missed them, you can catch up on the first and second parts here. This series has involved so much research and dozens of interviews—if you value this kind

Coffee's Tech Dystopia

This is a story about coffee, but only partly. It’s a story about data, and the way technology has become embedded in the industry. It’s also a story about the ways we interact with the coffee shops we frequent, and how those interactions have changed in an ever-more-digitised

‘Actually Pretty Simple’: The Wild World of DIY Coffee Roasters

Coffee roasting is, at its core, a pretty straightforward process: Apply heat to green coffee beans until they turn brown and delicious. But there are numerous ways to go about that process, and every roasting company approaches it differently, and at a different scale. There are multinational companies cranking out

Ballad of the Indian Coffee House

India’s coffee scene is booming. Domestic coffee consumption has grown rapidly in recent years—upwards of 30% since 2018—and that momentum shows no signs of slowing. The sector’s meteoric rise mirrors the country’s overall economic picture; currently, India has the fastest-growing major economy in the world.

The Cost of Competing

For many, elite coffee competitions represent the pinnacle of the industry. But the huge costs to compete prevent those without financial support from participating—and harm the industry as a whole.

Private Equity vs. the Coffee Workers

Big money pours into specialty coffee with one goal: wealth extraction. But as soon as things go wrong, workers are the first to suffer.

The Moral Complexities of Civet Coffee

It’s all Jack Nicholson’s fault. In 2007 he starred with Morgan Freeman in ‘The Bucket List’, a surprise box office hit about two men with terminal cancer who decide to embark on a globetrotting adventure before they kick the bucket. (Fun fact: This movie coined the now-common “bucket

Clooney's Coffeewashing

George Clooney crouches on a sunlight-drenched hillside in Puerto Rico, smiling as he helps a farmer plant coffee seedlings between banana shade trees. “When you hear Nespresso talk about sustainability, it’s about people as well as it is about the coffee bean and the plant”, Clooney says in a

Connecting the Dots: Inside the 2023 Coffee Barometer

The Coffee Barometer doesn’t pull any punches. So many coffee sustainability reports hedge their opinions and water down their criticisms, perhaps afraid to cross the corporations that fund much of the industry’s work to combat the climate crisis. The Barometer—a version of which has been published by