Tales from Bostonia

We spent a few days in Boston last week, and the trip reinforced my belief that Portlanders are very spoiled by the amount of high-quality coffee available to us.

The first thing you notice when you drive around Boston (rather, the first thing I notice) is the presence of Dunkin’ Donuts shops everywhere. There are even more Dunkin’ Donuts than Starbucks. Apparently, Massachusettsans (or their less-polite fellow citizens) like bad coffee. Dunkin’ tried to establish itself in Portland a few years back, but the city’s coffee connoisseurs ignored the company, so it left town.

But Boston is not Portland, and Dunkin’ Donuts has a special place in the hearts of New Englanders. The chain was founded in 1950 in Quincy (pronounced quin-zee), Massachusetts, a few miles south of Boston. From the original shop, the business has grown to approximately 7,000 stores in the US alone (10,000+ around the world). Earlier this year, Dunkin’ announced it wants to double the number of US stores in the next two decades (a sign of the impending apocalypse?). The success of the business is unquestionable. The quality of the coffee, on the other hand…..

Give it a shot

Trying to keep an open mind, I stopped in at a Dunkin’ Donuts one morning and ordered a small coffee. The server asked if I wanted it “regular,” which, in Massachusetts, really means “with milk and sugar.” I said yes.

The coffee, unfortunately, met my expectations. It tasted like lightly-sweetened water. Bleh. It puzzles me that Dunkin’s coffee is so popular, but there is more behind the company’s success than just coffee.

In Boston, drinking DD coffee is almost a badge of honor, a symbol of loyalty toward the place New Englanders call home. People drink Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee, not because it is high quality, but because it communicates something about their values. They identify with Dunkin’s working class, egalitarian American ideals (“America runs on Dunkin’”). In other words, Dunkin’ serves the common coffee drinker.

When I worked for Starbucks in Boston, customers would occasionally come into the store and grumble about the cup sizes, saying something like, “I just want a large. I don’t speak Italian, or whatever that is,” implying that Starbucks’ use of a foreign language was elite West Coast snobbery (I wonder what the customer would think of this post). In the least snarky voice I could summon, I would reply, “That’s okay, we speak English here too.” (Hopefully, they detected some sarcasm, but not too much.)

The marketing/branding lesson in the story is that it takes more than just a quality product to be successful. You have to have something that resonates with your customers’ values.  

Hope for future coffee snobs

Given Dunkin’s history in the Northeast, it would be a challenge to separate New Englanders from their DD coffee, but people are building a better coffee scene in the “Hub of the Universe.”

Thanks to some enterprising Bostonians, it is possible these days to find good coffee with a little effort. One shop providing better beverages is Thinking Cup, a café across from Boston Common that serves Stumptown coffee. The shot of Hair Bender they served me was not quite what you would get from Albina Press (where I’m sitting as I write this), but it was tasty.

Other quality cafés are popping up around the Boston metro area too. Unlike five years ago, when DD or Starbucks was about all you could find (in addition to the Italian coffees in the North End), these days you can find Stumptown, Counter Culture, Intelligentsia and George Howell coffee if you know where to look. That’s a significant improvement, and I expect to see the trend continue in the future. Boston will be hosting the 2013 Specialty Coffee Association of America Event, which means that the pressure will be on for Boston cafés to show off their best stuff. Boston might not be ready to take the title of America’s Best Coffee City from Portland, but it is heading in the right direction.

Mid-May Links

A smattering of news from around the coffee world:

Oregon Public Broadcasting has a nice video about the USBC in Portland. In the article, the producer did forget to mention two other PDX baristas who competed, Laila Ghambari (Stumptown) and Tom Pikaart (Water Avenue), so we’ll make sure they get a mention here. If we're being picky, it's Brett Felchner, not Brett Fletcher (edits!).

Leave it to Philly – From a city that boos Santa Claus and throws batteries at its underachieving NFL team, this might not come as a surprise. A man who apparently did not want to pay for his sandwich threw his coffee at the cashier in a Philadelphia doughnut store.

At least he didn’t steal cash and cigarettes too.

It’s up, it’s down, it’s up, it’s way down. Investors holding Green Mountain Coffee Roasters stock have been on a quite a ride over the last year. The company’s stock price went from below $40 to $115 to back down to about $45 at the end of the year. This year has been more of the same. So far, the first five months of the year have brought changes of +19%, +22%, -28%, +4% and -50%, respectively. With K-Cup patents running out this fall, traders aren’t sure what to do. Then again, judging from the last two weeks, maybe they are.

Do you find it hard to carry your coffee around without spilling it? If so, you should probably slow down and keep your eye on the cup. You will be less likely to match the “sloshing frequency” of the coffee with your gait.

One of Japanese eating champion Takeru Kobayashi’s world records is eating 69 hotdogs in ten minutes, so he probably didn’t find his latest stunt too difficult. Kobayashi drinks 42 cups of coffee in about three minutes in a promotional video for Eight O’Clock Coffee.

Fresh-roasted (really fresh) coffee is coming to Detroit. Roasting Plant, the New York coffee company that roasts, grinds and brews coffee on demand is expanding out of the Big Apple and into the Motor City. I question the assertion that it is the “best coffee in Manhattan” but it would be interesting to see how the whole operation works. link

Tension is growing between people who work/study in cafés and those who go there to drink coffee or meet friends.

Pride comes before a...

Whenever you scoff at something, beware. Pride has a funny way of kicking you in the teeth when you aren’t looking.  A healthy sense of self-righteousness can set you up to feel stupid, as I did last week.

I was doing a little shopping at a local Fred Meyer when I came across a couple products I had not seen before.  On first glance, they seemed ridiculous.

Diet tonic water?

Isn’t that sort of like selling “cholesterol-free” peanut butter?

The second thing that caught my eye was the fat-free half and half.

Yes, that’s fat-free half and half.

Half and half gets its name from being half cream and half milk. If something is half cream, it cannot be fat-free. What did they substitute for the cream? Corn syrup and some other chemical agents (er, ingredients).

Obviously, with fat-free half and half, the food companies are catering to the weight-obsessed crowd. They’re trying to pass something off that substitutes corn syrup for cream as healthier for you (“It’s okay, go for it. It’s fat-free”). I scoffed at the idea of drinking fat-free half and half, and grabbed a carton of the real stuff, right next to it.

Or at least that’s what I thought. The part of the story where pride kicks me in the teeth is that when I got home to unload the groceries, I pulled out the carton, only to find that I had grabbed one of the fat-free ones! I had grabbed the name brand without looking too closely at it, assuming it was the real stuff. Ugh.

Oops.

After mocking the thought of fat-free half and half, I had fallen into its trap (the taste and quality difference was obvious, by the way). I’m not sure whether this was a case of complete absent-mindedness or just a case of “pride cometh before a fall.” Either way, I felt ridiculous. Next time, I’ll be a little less self-righteous and a little more careful about what I pick up off the shelf.

Coffeenomics, social responsibility, and CAN coffee (a review)

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Classical economic theory proposes that the sole purpose of a business is to enrich the shareholders of a company. The profits it generates will eventually circulate into the wider economy and improve the material well-being of everyone in the society (the idea that a “rising tide lifts all boats”). The conclusion of this is that focusing on anything other than profits would hurt the value of the company and therefore society.

The theory is controversial, to say the least. In the short term, its implementation ignores many externalities (pollution, labor market instability, etc.) that are detrimental to society as a whole. Another weakness of the theory is that it relies on the belief that money (and what it buys) is the equivalent of satisfaction (utility). Notwithstanding, it is an idea that many people subscribe themselves to. They believe that profits are the only important thing in business, and any discussion of business’ effects on the environment or the rest of society are dismissed as leftist conspiracies to bring down capitalism.

While there are some leftists who do want to get rid of capitalism, there is a wide middle ground between the two viewpoints. More today than ever before, select business leaders realize that taking care of the environment and the people who work for them are important too. In Portland, for example, many coffee companies have taken up the mentality that they want to treat their employees and coffee growers fairly. Portland Roasting is a leader in this area, but is not the only one building stronger links between the coffee growers and coffee drinkers. If you stop in at Stumptown’s Annex, for example, you can learn about several of the growers  who raise coffee for the company. By raising the profile of the growers, roasters can differentiate the coffees more easily and sell them at higher prices.

Whereas Portland is the leader in producing more sustainable coffee, the city’s coffee companies do not hold a monopoly on trying to make the world a better place. Smaller roasters in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Kansas City, Durham and other cities across the country are building a movement that is benefiting coffee drinkers and coffee farmers.

CAN Coffee

One participant in this movement is an organization known as the Community Agroecology Network (CAN), based in Santa Cruz, California. In 2001, CAN was founded by Dr. Stephen Gliessman, a researcher in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, and Robbie Jaffie, also a lecturer in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. CAN comprises a network of coffee cooperatives that includes communities in four coffee-producing countries—Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua—as well as resources from UC Santa Cruz. The coffee is grown and processed outside the US by the cooperatives then sent to the United States. Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company roasts the coffee once it arrives and CAN sells it under the AgroEco label.

CAN recently sent me a bag of AgroEco coffee for review [note: CAN sent the coffee at no charge, but none of the links are affiliate links]. The coffee arrived at my house in a vacuum-packed bag. It was labeled as a single-origin, light roast from a coffee cooperative in Nicaragua called Union de Cooperativas Augusto Cesar Sandino (also called UCA San Ramón, or UCASR). I looked for a roast date on the package, but could not find one. When I asked Daniel Fuentes, CAN’s Marketing Coordinator, about this, he told me the company roasts in small batches and goes through its inventory in less than two weeks, so when the coffee arrives in the customer’s mailbox, it will have been between one and three weeks since being roasted. CAN will grind the coffee if a customer chooses (but if you care about freshness, why would you do that?).

Fresh out of the French press, the coffee had a sweet aroma, but the sweetness did not dominate the coffee. I picked up hints of unsweetened baker’s cocoa and rose petals in the medium-bodied brew.

The thing that stood out the most to me about CAN’s coffee was its unique label. Most coffee labels trumpet the coffee’s unique flavors, or highlight its story, but the AgroEco label was primarily used to give the facts about the coffee’s sustainability. If you look at it in the picture, you can see what makes the label unique. CAN is very transparent about where the coffee came from, the demographics of the coffee farmers in the cooperative, and the prices that farmers received for the coffee. The cooperative received $3.42/lb for the coffee, significantly higher than the Fair Trade price or the market price for coffee.

How can the farmers be paid a higher price for the coffee and the roaster still make money? One of the ways CAN does this is by cutting out middlemen between the growers and the roaster. Coffee typically passes through several hands before it reaches the consumer, each of which take a cut of the purchase price. In this case, the coffee goes from the coffee cooperative through an importer directly to the roaster, who then sells the roasted coffee to consumers. The more direct supply chain lowers overhead costs, making the coffee more profitable for both producer and roaster.

Though not certified as organic, the coffee from UCASR is grown without pesticides or herbicides. The costs involved with obtaining certification can be too high for some farmers, and the return on the investment does not always pay off. One of CAN’s goals is to help promote farmers who produce their coffee without chemicals, whether or not they obtain the official organic certification.

The coffee from UCA San Ramón is also shade-grown, so instead of clear-cutting forests to grow only coffee, the coffee is grown beneath other trees. Mango, citrus and cacao trees are grown in and around the coffee, providing additional food and income for cooperative members. Thus, the shade-grown coffee helps diversify the farmers’ production risk and increases their food security. Raising coffee this way also provides more habitat for wildlife, especially migratory birds.

CAN shortens the supply chain to provide more benefits to growers

Overall, the quality of the AgroEco coffee was somewhere between Ristretto (perhaps Portland’s best) and Starbucks coffee. If social and environmental issues factor heavily in your coffee-purchasing decisions, AgroEco coffee would be worth checking out. Given the company’s transparency, you can feel confident you are supporting coffee growers and their communities. In a country where the collective spending decisions of consumers shape the direction of both economic and political decisions, choosing which products to carries much responsibility. The choices are yours, make them wisely.

For more information about CAN, visit http://www.canunite.org.