There are hundreds, if not thousands of people roasting coffee now. This is fantastic. Some are great at promoting what they do and this is also excellent. If they didn’t they wouldn’t survive. There is a big issue, I have that people use this tag line. It suggests they are doing something that nobody else is. It suggests that people who don’t use this tag are not complying with this and it so wrong. If you saw Square Mile, Has Bean or Monmouth suddenly putting this on their marketing people would wonder what they were doing before! The grown-ups in the coffee business don’t need to, but it riles me almost as much as people who relentlessly tap the side of their portafilters for no apparent reason (that’s for you Marc in an xxx kind of way). Or is it because they feel no one else does this so it must be new and good. You know the answer to this one ….and now, the shocker, one of my all-time unfavourite, pet-hate sayings is:
Ethically Sourced!
Ethically Sourced. Put it on your bumper sticker. Stick it on the back panel of your van and it somehow becomes the norm, or maybe even believable? Self-certification, by lasso, like a cow-person. There is no qualification. What does it say about you or the gullible people that believe it? Duped. It’s as wrong as Nestle selling dried milk to feed to starving babies in Africa. Please stop it…it’s not good and it is misleading to the uninformed. Pay a producer enough or even pay a broker well…but the slogan is ugly and wrong. Maybe it goes hand in hand with “The Invention of lying?” All good fun?
In the next month or so we are able to share block-chain with coffee from Suke Quto. I won’t be putting that on the back of the mini or the old Landrover for that matter. Is this all disturbing because I am aging badly or that things are changing for the, well (not all) better?
Let me know…I am not the angry type unless you use two words randomly without foundation.
Sorry for the rant.
