A Demand for Better Coffee
Specialty Coffees in Demand

Today, coffee is the elixir of the work day, the lifesaver of the office drone, the essential tool for worker comfort, if not survival.

“We used to accept whatever coffee was served and never complain about it. We never knew the difference. A good cup of coffee would have been coffee that had been sitting on the burner for four hours and you still drank it,” said Marc Bourret, spokesman for Boyd Coffee Company, which supplies coffee to corporations, restaurants and other organizations.

Now, he said, people actually dump a pot if it’s not fresh.

The fact is that many people in the work place have developed more sophisticated coffee tastes and know the difference between low and high qualities of coffees.

In 1991, The NY Times reported that in each of the past three years the specialty coffee market has grown more than 30%. The market has more than tripled in the past six years. Specialty coffees represented approx. 10% of the $6.5 billion coffee market.

Coffee connoisseurs tout that it is one of the last affordable luxuries. For less than .40˘ a cup one can drink the finest coffees in the world, where it’s hard to think of even a modestly drinkable wine for less than a few dollars a glass.

In the 1940’s, the large roasting companies started cutting their raw material costs to the detriment of coffee flavor. They began adding cheap, caffeine-ladden Robusta beans to premium Arabica, coffee. The peak use of Robusta was in 1961. “That was the year before American coffee consumption began its long-term decline,” points out coffee broker Tim Castle. American palates are keen and over the years people recognized that the coffee they enjoyed “in the old days” just didn’t taste the same. By cutting the quality of their coffee with Robusta beans, the large coffee companies ruined their own market.

Another factor that lowered the quality of coffee was the International Trade Agreement of 1962, which was the first of a series of five-year agreements among the coffee-producing and coffee-consuming countries. The plan was to raise coffee prices in order to improve the income of the producing countries – a sort of foreign aid, to be paid for by coffee drinkers.

The major producing and consuming countries got together in this clubhouse in London, the International Coffee Organization, and agreed on limiting the coffee trade, says Castle. “It was a backward sort of cartel. The consuming countries agreed to allow only coffees with import labels on them; the exporting countries were allowed to issue stamps according to a quote based on historical crop levels and market share. The power in the organization was with the biggest consumers and producers. Brazil got a huge quota. Stamps were issued to exporters by the producing company governments on a totally corrupt basis. There was a lot of bribery and smuggling. It became a total crap-shoot for the small producer – it was pointless to produce a decent crop when he didn’t know whether he could sell it was his own. A country’s initiative was also stifled; there was no motivation to improve.”

Colombia, which was always marketed aggressively in this country, won a special grade for itself under the agreement (and for Kenya, which may have benefited as a former British colony). All coffee was imported either as Colombian (which included Kenya from Africa), Other Milder (essentially Central American coffees), Brazils and Other Arabicas (everything else) or Robustas. “But Colombian coffee," says Castle, “though it’s good coffee for drinking unblended, is not a real specialty coffee. There are only two grades Excelso and Supremo, based exclusively on the size of the bean – all regions and elevations are lumped together."

The specialty coffee market had practically disappeared in the ‘60s when two important companies – Zabar’s in New York and Peet’s in Berkeley – reintroduced the sale of whole-bean coffee. Today specialty coffees are 10% of the coffee market and experts see the figures rising 20% by weight each few years.

 In the end, the International Coffee Organization Agreement failed. Small producer countries with the approval of the anti-protectionist Reagan Administration, refused to join it, and the Agreement fell apart, July 3, 1989.

“It was for the good,” says Castle. Now the smaller producers feel they can stand out if they make a good coffee. They can make more money because they can sell 100% of a crop, rather than whatever the quota was. And the market is more oriented toward specialty coffees today.

Excerpts from: Los Angeles Daily News, April 8, 2002 Los Angeles Times, Sept. 12, 1991