Starbucks, deforestation, and a tea vs coffee head-to-head—it’s all going on this week.
Starbucks has added to its company-owned “research” farms, acquiring property in Costa Rica and Guatemala in order to “find solutions to increase productivity on farms, support increased profitability for farmers and build climate resilience”.
After a lot of pushback from stakeholders, analysts, many of its own member countries, and the agriculture lobby, the European Commission has proposed a 12-month delay to its impending deforestation legislation. In a statement, the E.C. acknowledged the criticisms, while also pointedly noting that “the state of preparations amongst stakeholders in Europe is also uneven”.
In coffee-as-health news, a new study found that drinking more than four cups of coffee every day could raise your risk of stroke by 37%—while drinking tea lowers the risk. However, the researchers found that anything below the four cup mark “had no association with stroke”, which is good news for the caffeine sensitive among us (🙋♂️).
While once achievable, the sheer scale and speed of the company’s growth now makes visiting every store an impossible challenge. Starbucking, as Winter refers to it, has taken him to 70 countries, bankrupted him, and turned him into a minor celebrity. I had a long talk with him (while he visited a Starbucks at the same time!) and he’s just a fascinating person:
“A lot of people do believe that real life is having a job, getting married, buying a house, having kids. I see that as fairly arbitrary … When somebody says Starbucking is pointless, I turn around and say, ‘Point to something, anything, that other people are doing that is not pointless.’”
