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THE MORAL COMPASS OF COFFEE

In the trade, we are lucky enough to get snippets of information that are not publicised outside our little world, because It’s just”NOT good for business” to talk about coffee extinction and a future with less coffee because “WE” didn’t want to pay the real price now.

When someone gets on their soapbox and starts ranting, it is an ugly thing, usually. We are living in apathetic times where people are prepared to whinge on Facebook, but not get off the old sofa and make a difference. That’s probably how the US got Trump and we fell into Brexit-ville.

So, if you are still reading I am writing this from a hugely privileged perspective. We have suppliers and growers, who are happy with what we pay them and we LOVE what they grow for us. They can afford to run their farms and make P R O F I T . In our little microbubble, we care about everyone we work with and genuinely want them to have a future, and are equally important to each other, in the chain. Did you read the thing I wrote about coffee socialism by day? So a little quote for you…

A report for the BCA, produced with the Centre for Economics and Business Research, called The UK coffee market and its impact on the economy, showed that the coffee industry’s total output to the UK economy was £17.7bn in 2017, creating approximately 210,325 UK jobs

Project fear is no longer about let’s pay the cost of production and try a gold star on. Project coffee fear is actually about Jobs and money in the UK and the EU. It’s has spun the clock backward 100 years and is all about self-protectionism at the expense of coffee farmers and producers. B I G ” H O W E V E R !” This is where things get interesting. It is a surprise that everyone in the chain grosses more per kilo than a coffee farmer at every step in the chain (apart from shipping)? Have you tried to run a real business in this era before answering this one, please? With coffee, still being cheaper than diesel how should we go about rewarding the champions of the chain? Answers on a postcard please, to James Gourmet Towers.