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Finally, a legitimate reason for studying at the coffee shop: A school in China launches a coffee degree. Plus, Lavazza says coffee prices will keep rising, and Australians can chow down on coffee-flavored Doritos.
Arabica futures hit a two-year high in July, and robusta beans remain at record-level prices due to supply shortages. Giuseppe Lavazza, chair of Lavazza Group, told the Financial Times that he expects UK coffee prices to rise another 10% over the next year, on top of the 15% they have already climbed in 2024.
“Coffee prices are not going to go down, [they’re] going to stay very high,” Lavazza said. “The coffee supply chain is dramatically under pressure.”
Lavazza explains that prices will continue to increase for many reasons, from climate change lowering yields to shipping disruptions to the impending EU deforestation regulations known as EUDR. Despite the Lavazza Group raking in over €3 billion in 2023, Giuseppe said the company also incurred hundreds of millions in extra costs related to rising robusta prices and shipping fees.
Lavazza also talked about the potential impact of the EUDR. “In the coffee business, only 20% of the farmers are ready to meet the regulation,” Lavazza said, warning that more companies would look to source from Brazil because it is the only country prepared to comply with the legislation.
Lavazza has been critical of the EUDR despite, as Sprudge notes, his company voluntarily agreeing to the regulation.
Although coffee is a pivotal part of many students’ mornings, coffee as a subject of study is primarily absent from college campuses. There has been the odd standalone course, but universities have taken the topic more seriously over the past few years.
In Switzerland, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences offers a postgraduate certificate in coffee excellence, while in California, UC Davis recently opened a dedicated Coffee Center. Texas A&M just announced a certificate in coffee processing and quality.
China has become the latest country to launch a coffee education program: Yunnan Agricultural University’s College of Tropical Crops will now offer a four-year undergraduate degree in coffee science and engineering.
According to the South China Morning Post, the major will cover a wide range of coffee-related subjects, including “coffee flavor chemistry, processing, quality and safety testing, factory design and environmental protection, world coffee trade, engineering principles, and nutrition and health.”
China is the world’s 13th largest producer of coffee, with the vast majority of its 1.8 million 60kg bags grown in Yunnan province, where the degree is offered.
Liao Xiugui, a coffee farmer in Yunnan, noted the importance of training and education for producers. “Only through the professional intervention of education in colleges and universities and the continuous strengthening of the quality training of new coffee farmers can their planting, management, harvesting, processing [and other aspects improve],” Liao said.
Do you ever get the urge to open a bag of chips while sipping your morning coffee? No, we don’t either, but apparently, Doritos thinks Australians might because they’re releasing an extremely limited run of coffee-flavored chips in the country.
So limited that you can’t actually buy a bag—you have to win it. Doritos Australia is giving curious/brave Aussies the chance to win one of 300 bags of Doritos Coffee chips by commenting on an Instagram post.
Strangely, the social media campaign is designed around the fact that most Australian coffee shops close mid-day. “Each afternoon, people across the country are left disappointed by their favorite coffee shop being closed just as they need an afternoon pick-me-up,” Doritos’ senior brand manager Kat Miller told News.com.au. The new flavor is “the perfect snack to help Aussies beat the 3 pm slump.”
The promotion is a callback to a previous release, when Doritos launched a coriander-flavored chip in 2023, also only available via an Instagram competition. The release was controversial because coriander (or cilantro) is a notoriously divisive flavor, although bags were reportedly soon being sold for hundreds of dollars on Facebook Marketplace.
‘Swiss Coffee Trader Arrested in Guatemala on Tax Charges’ – via Daily Coffee News
‘I-CIP Reaches 13-year High: ICO Report‘ – via Global Coffee Report
‘ILO Leading $10.8 Million Child Labor in Coffee Project‘ – via Daily Coffee News
‘Copenhagen’s New Sustainability Push? Free Coffee for Tourists.‘ – via Washington Post
‘Ethiopia’s Coffee Exports Soar, Generates $1.43 Billion in Revenue‘ – via Business Insider Africa
‘7 Incredible New Coffee Gadgets At World Of Coffee Copenhagen’ – via Sprudge
‘A Citywide Reusable Cup Scheme is Coming to California’ – via Daily Coffee News
Workers at a Peet’s Coffee location in Berkeley have filed a petition to unionize. The seventeen employees are looking to “fight for better control over hours, higher wages, longer breaks, better training, and for worker power, among other demands,” according to a press release. They would be the fourth Peet’s cafe in California’s Bay Area to unionize with the Industrial Workers of the World IU 640 after three other locations in Berkeley and Oakland voted to unionize last year.
After the chain’s flagship location voted to unionize in May, workers at a second Better Buzz cafe in San Diego have followed suit, voting to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 135. “The success at Mira Mesa and Hillcrest is part of a broader movement to improve conditions for all company employees as Better Buzz Coffee continues its rapid expansion across Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada,” the organizers said.
Most people have handled products from Tetra Pak, the paper carton manufacturer whose products have a plastic lining that helps keep beverages like oat milk shelf stable. You’ve probably dealt with your fair share of these cartons if you’ve worked in a cafe in the last decade.
A question that always comes up is what to do with them when they’re empty. Do they go in the trash or the recycling?
The cartons themselves say they’re recyclable, but it all depends on local facilities. In Australia, Tetra Pak is working with coffee shops to return and recycle the cartons into building materials, according to an article in BeanScene Magazine. Tetra Pak wants to create a “circular system” for its cartons, “which are fully recyclable when in the right hands.”
Not everyone has access to the proper facilities. In many places, recycling facilities for Tetra Pak cartons don’t exist. Where they do, separating the plastic (and sometimes aluminum) liner from the cardboard is carbon-intensive. In 2019, Chris Taylor at Mashable looked into Tetra Pak’s recyclability and found the whole process “maddening” because of the different types of cartons and location-dependent instructions.
“Tetra Pak recycling is like dropping an anvil from a 60-story tower block to hit a nail. It’s a thing, and thanks to the efforts of a vast industry trade group, more of us have access to it. But is it the right thing to do?” Taylor concluded. “If you don’t want to swallow a whole bottle of crazy pills trying to figure out whether it’s worth it, best that you just buy less complicated and more locally recycled packaging—like tins and bottles—in the first place.”
There was a time when everyone was talking about the Mediterranean diet, which involves eating lots of fruits and vegetables along with moderate amounts of olive oil, fish, and cheese.
Such a diet can be beneficial, depending on your dietary needs, and Stephen Safe, distinguished professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Texas A&M, sees many similarities between this eating style and coffee. “The Mediterranean diet is, primarily, a plant-based diet, and coffee is a plant-based drink,” Professor Safe told UPI. “If you compare the benefits of coffee to those of the Mediterranean diet, you could hardly tell the difference between them.”
Other experts agree. Marilyn Cornelis, associate professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has researched coffee’s health effects for 20 years. Professor Cornelis led a recent study that found that a diet including coffee reduced the risk for neurological diseases including dementia.
“For many years, coffee has been seen as an unhealthy drink, but, over time, the research really supports more benefits than adverse effects,” Cornelis said. “Given other options in terms of beverages, coffee is probably one of the better ones.”
‘Who Should Be Part Of A Tip Pool?’ by Zac Cadwalader
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