For 18 months, the coffee industry has remained mostly silent about the ongoing destruction of Gaza. A new fundraiser hopes to raise money—and jolt the industry awake.
For paid subscribers: I’ve written before about Starbucks’ myriad climate issues, but now conservative activist shareholders are trying to weaponise those failings in service of a climate denialist goal.
Some larger companies such as Starbucks and Peet’s are staying open, much to the chagrin of their employees. “It’s a scary thing,” a Peet’s shift leader told the San Francisco Chronicle. “My fellow workers are working because they feel like they don’t have a choice.”
Coffee roasters, for the most part, are still going strong, and for roaster-retailers online sales can help to support their closed cafes. Many are now offering free shipping and other incentives to entice the home-bound to continue ordering coffee.
The Alliance for Coffee Excellence, which hosts the Cup of Excellence green coffee competitions around the world, is trying to figure out how to move forward with its events in light of travel bans and lockdowns. ACE Executive Director Darrin Daniel said in a statement: “We are currently working on contingency plans to ensure that we will properly vet all entries, support all of our in-country partners and assure our membership that we will present coffees for all of the 2020 auctions,”
In the midst of all this chaos and upheaval, there have been some small glimpses of positivity. Similar to last week’s coffee-on-a-shovel, from Thailand comes a story about a cafe serving coffee on a little wheeled cart in an effort to keep to the social distancing rules. Meanwhile, in Calgary an energy company bought $10,000 worth of gift cards to help keep their neighborhood coffee shop on its feet. And a Korean drink known as dalgona coffee has gone viral on social media, and frankly it looks delicious. Consisting of “milk topped with a thick layer of coffee foam that's made by vigorously mixing instant coffee, sugar, and water” according to Vice, it has me wondering how it would taste with oat milk. There’s only one way to find out…
Probe Finds $270 Million Missing After Coffee King’s Suicide - via Yahoo! Finance
Now it’s time to move on from a global pandemic to, well, possible fraud and an untimely death.
Now an investigation into Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd. initiated by its board in reaction to Siddhartha’s death is expected to find at least 20 billion rupees ($270 million) is missing from the company’s accounts.
The reasons for the missing money aren’t known, but some theories include “whether Coffee Day was manipulating its finances to show cash and profit and whether Siddhartha was taking cash out of the listed company to pay off a large investor to whom he had guaranteed a return.”
The company employs tens of thousands of people across India, and has been severely impacted by its founder’s death, with share prices dropping 90% in the months after his body was found by fishermen two days after going missing. Company accounts at the time showed “zero cash in the bank” and severe liquidity issues resulting in difficulties paying staff, according to the report.
It’s a big fall for a company that was supposed to be India’s answer to Starbucks, and that had introduced affordable coffee to the country’s burgeoning middle class.
According to researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, coffee consumption can “offset some of the negative effects of an obesogenic diet by reducing the storage of lipids in fat cells and limiting weight gain and the production of triglycerides.”
How? Well, there’s talk of lipid metabolism and percentages and other terms. I don’t know, look, it doesn’t matter, science says it so it must be true. I’m just going to assume all those fancy words like triglycerides and terms like lower synthesis means I can eat another cookie with my third cup of coffee.
I'm the creator and writer of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry as a barista, roaster, and writer. Ask me about coffeewashing.
