From Passive to Active: Expanding Our Understanding of Specialty Coffee Consumerism | 25, Issue 21
ALEXA ROMANO explores the emergence of specialty coffee culture as an embedded subculture within the broader coffee industry, and how the resulting shift from passive to active consumption asks us to rethink the consumer’s role in value creation and distribution.
One of the things that was so compelling about the specialty coffee industry when I was first starting out in 2005 was just how much everyone seemed to care. It didn’t matter if the topic was the workflow behind a bar or the flow of money and power within coffee’s system: the conversations were always animated and heartfelt. In fact, a perfect example of this is Kim’s recollection (on page 8) of overhearing that the SCA should “abolish the C market”—a call to address the unequal power dynamics in the system—which has recently morphed and expanded into fervent questions of “whose taste matters?”
This is a fair—and important—question, but I also sometimes wonder if this framing leads us down a path of perceived dichotomy that only inflames tensions, rather than addressing them. For better or worse, the underlying systems and structures underpinning our industry are capitalist: a price is just a number unless there’s someone on the other side to agree to pay it. Throughout my career, so many industry efforts have been made to get the people “on the other side” to care just as much as coffee insiders do, while simultaneously finding new and inventive ways to criticize them.
What if, instead, we saw consumers as allies in our work to make coffee better, rather than obstacles? Sure, not everyone wants to know everything about coffee’s complex system at a point of sale (and especially first thing in the morning), but if there’s one thing we’ve learned—and continue to see confirmed—it’s that stories matter when it comes to building a shared sense of value. And, even better, the specialty coffee industry is exceptionally good at leveraging stories in ways that have emotional and financial impact!
Alexa Romano, our next contributor, recently completed her thesis, “Pursuing an ‘Ethical’ Cup of Coffee: The Social Production of Equity in the Globalized Coffee Commodity Chain,” written after completing fieldwork in Costa Rica for her MA in Anthropology. Here, we’ve asked Alexa to lean into her anthropological training to help us understand the history of coffee consumerism and the ways in which it has evolved over time. Along the way, she calls for us to reshape our understanding of “consumers” as demanding, detached actors within the system and instead see them as the co-creators of specialty coffee— and its value—that they are.
To echo Kim at the start of this issue, there is no single strategy we can use to address all the challenges and opportunities of coffee’s complex systems—but perhaps a collaborative “yes, and” approach, leveraged from many different positions within, might begin to finally help us realize the change we’ve been trying to make since the specialty movement first emerged.
Jenn Rugolo
Curatorial Director, SCA
To have choice is to have privilege, and the coffee industry has no shortage of choice.
Even though there is power in choosing, often that power ends there: most consumers of “consumer packaged goods” (CPG) exercise their unfettered choice simply by choosing what they consume; however, the coffee industry enables its drinkers to choose how they consume. In certain (and increasing) instances, consumers go beyond merely sipping their coffee of choice; instead, they actively engage in and contribute to what’s known as a “participatory culture” in anthropology.[1] Where another field of study might focus on the values and changes in the coffee market, anthropology studies the changes in preferences and values that lead to those market changes. In other words, anthropology emphasizes understanding specific groups of people within the broader socioeconomic and cultural contexts of which they are a part. Writing from a single perspective (our own!) naturally excludes others, so now would also be a good time to point out that I am writing this from the perspective of a coffee consumer in the Global North. In fact, although I’ll be using a lot of terminology that already exists in the specialty coffee industry—“consumer,” “producer,” and “prosumer”—I’ll be using them in slightly different ways. When I refer to “us” and “we,” I am referring to the individuals that engage with coffee post-harvest as well as those in consumer society who partake in drinking it (regardless of where or how).
The ways that people are connecting with coffee are expanding and changing, and this is likely because the industry itself has evolved—and is continuing to evolve— over time. Many social relations unfold on a large scale because participation in the global coffee commodity market is significant—more than 3 billion cups are consumed globally every day and approximately 125 million people center their livelihoods on some aspect involving coffee.[2] Coffee is a commodity that is embedded in a socially and economically interactive capitalist market system. In other words, coffee links its drinkers’ (consumers’) lives to the farmers’ (producers’) lives; and often, these links reveal both the economic and power disparities between the two.
The economic implications of being embedded in the capitalist market for coffee producers in the Global South countries are far more volatile than they are for consumers of the Global North countries. Unequal terms of trade, protective tariffs, quality standards, and other barriers have long combined to deny coffee producers participation in lucrative consumer markets.[3] For example, of the total US$200 billion generated by the global coffee industry in 2015, exporting countries only retained US$19.2 billion—less than 10% of the value they generated by growing coffee.[4] (The coffee industry is all too aware of its unequal value distribution, but that’s not what I’ll focus on here: this is just to offer some context before we dig into the history of coffee consumerism.)
Changing Consumption Patterns: The Evolution of the Specialty Movement
Coffee was one of the first commodities to go from being a luxury of the elite to being an everyday necessity of the US middle class. In the early 1980s, the US coffee commodity market had fewer than 200 operational roasting and processing companies, with four dominating 75% of the trade.[5] These roasters set themselves apart in the specialty coffee industry by promoting imported “gourmet” coffees from various regions worldwide, supplying them to emerging specialty coffee shops. A small network of these specialty “gourmet” roasters and coffee shops could be found primarily in coastal import cities such as New York and San Francisco;[6] since then, the US has been a prime geography to analyze the growing and fluctuating consumer trends and behaviors shaping the specialty coffee industry.
One of the first common products linked to a global market, coffee eventually spanned across various social classes, from the everyday person brewing Folgers in their home coffee maker to the connoisseur sipping US$6 single origin espressos paired with sparkling water.[7] The 1990s brought what anthropologist William Roseberry coined as “the Latte Revolution,” where variations of new coffee processes, brew methods, and products (and the increasing knowledge of them) yielded more choice, more diversity, and expanded capitalism.[8] This transformation and proliferation in consumption inspired more actors in the coffee industry to design new products, drinks, and experiences tailored to specific socio-economic classes and consumer preferences. Coffee consumption grew exponentially and coffee became one of the most important beverages of a growing consumer society. This growth led to a transformation in the coffee market, and the concept of “specialty” coffee emerged, targeting a more lucrative crowd willing to spend a little bit more for these coffee experiences.[9]
With time, specialty coffee symbolized not only a drink, but an entire movement. Depicted by Emma Felton in Filtered: Coffee, the Café and the 21st Century City, the specialty coffee movement has become a dominant force in the recent wave of cafes blooming and thriving worldwide.[10] In the context of this global phenomenon known as “cafe culture,” specialty coffee stands out for its meticulous approach to sourcing, roasting, and brewing beans: consumers were not merely interested in these cafes for coffee; rather they were drawn to the types of coffee and the ways in which they were presented. As tastes evolved, so did landscapes as these types of cafes became firmly embedded in the fabric of contemporary urban life.[11] This specialty coffee movement, also characterized by a global community of dedicated professionals and enthusiasts, began to thrive through technological platforms like blogs and social media apps.[12] The term “consumer” expanded to include not only coffee drinkers, but also those who labeled themselves as passionate, particular, and dedicated fans seeking out and frequenting roasteries and cafes offering specialty coffee.
Connecting Consumers and “Value”: From Passivity to Participation
The specialty coffee industry became marked by emerging terms like “anaerobic fermentation,” “micro lots,” and “Geisha,” catering to consumers with more disposable income and choices (and expanding the variety of experiences unique to specialty coffee). This expansion contributes to the shaping of consumer taste as well as changes (and increases) to the way we buy and sell coffee in all its forms.[13] Specialty coffee, as it exists today, not only offers a wider range of options to consumers, but also generates and broadens the spaces available for consumers to enjoy coffee-centric experiences while expanding the characteristics representative of the specialty coffee industry.
Our options aren’t the only expansions within the industry: our understanding of “value” in this context is expanding, too. Specialty coffee is most currently defined as “a coffee or coffee experience recognized for its distinctive attributes, and because of these attributes, has significant extra value in the marketplace.”[14] Here, the term “value” becomes the primary focus for investigating the various and evolving ways of consumption. “Values” represent the dimension that seems most ambiguously defined and contested as it applies to various aspects in life—including how one applies value to certain forms of consumption. It seems most people have some idea of what value represents to and for them; however, these value stances are flexible and contextual. In other words, what we value—as well as when we value it, or by how much—is subjective. Specialty coffee consumers value an array of attributes that differ from each other, but that does not mean any value holds more or less importance than another.
The specialty coffee industry is a “subculture” of the larger industry, but it also creates other subcultures— pockets of “informal economies; all neatly circumscribed phenomena, which are thick with meaning.”[15] Specialty coffee—the movement, a social phenomenon—centers on consumers who inherently value coffee. Social phenomena are defined as certain aspects of society influencing and being influenced by the behaviors of individuals.[16] In other words, both the influencer and influencee exist and thrive by perpetuating one another. In the landscape of the specialty coffee industry consumerism, social phenomena play a pivotal role; consumers explore, ideate, create, collaborate, and innovate with and for each other. This shift in coffee consumption to coffee participation generates a new platform that furthermore captures, retains, and increases its participants.
Meet the “Prosumer”
Capitalism organically exists in our daily actions as a Western consumer society; we exemplify capitalism through our labor, our buying and spending habits, and our choices. We are embedded in capitalism— but if capitalism infiltrates our daily lives, we have a say in how it does so. Specialty coffee, with its pivot from passive consumption to a more participatory culture, changes the relationship between coffee and capitalism, occupying a space that blurs the consumer and producer. (It’s important to note here that I am using these terms in an academic sense, rather than how they are used within the industry, where “producer” and “consumer” have slightly different meanings tied to specific activities in the value chain.) Capitalism intertwines with the phenomenon of specialty coffee consumption where consumers simultaneously become producers—or in other words, “the prosumer.”
While the coffee industry may use the term “prosumer” to describe the intersection of “consumer” and “professional” (i.e., a home machine using commercial-quality components), in academic terms, the “prosumer” is someone who both consumes and produces a product. “Prosumption” is defined as “value creation activities undertaken by the consumer that result in the production of products they eventually consume and that become their consumption experiences.”[17] This means that prosumers engage in a wealth of production activities such as generating new product ideas, defining a brand’s meaning, and staging experiences for other customers.[18] In “prosumption,” consumers are no longer the final link in the production chain, they are at the very heart of both consumption and production processes.[19] Although the coffee industry often relegates its idea of “consumers” to those who purchase coffee in its roasted or brewed state, viewed through the lens of “prosumption,” many in the industry—in one way or another—are consumers: millers purchase coffee cherries, roasters purchase green coffee, coffee shops purchase roasted coffee.
The specialty coffee subculture encapsulates those who not only create coffee-related products, experiences, and spaces, but also those who actively partake in and relish those very same products, experiences, and spaces to which they themselves contributed. For example, a coffee roaster, or even an espresso machine designer, has an idea of what sort of flavor and what types of features the product should have in order to produce the best experience—whether in the form of a balanced cup or an ergonomic bar flow. The roaster and designer know what it is like to have certain positive experiences with coffee, and thus through their trade continue to repeat, innovate, and enjoy those same processes.
In this way, the specialty coffee industry neither exists nor evolves without the prosumers’ active participation. The participatory nature unique to specialty coffee retains its growing audience by empowering its consumers to produce and express their own identities, contribute to their communities, and maintain their unique values. Consumers ultimately continue to remain strong participants of the specialty coffee industry.
Participatory Culture and Value Co-Creation
Participatory culture serves as the key mechanism giving rise to prosumer specialty coffee culture. Media scholar Henry Jenkins states that the essence of participatory culture lies in its communal and relational nature, characterized by low barriers to artistic expression, strong support for creation and sharing, and mentorship forming a vibrant tapestry of shared experiences.[20] Understanding prosumerism as a participatory culture invites us to think more deeply about how cultural materials get produced, evaluated, circulated, and exchanged within a community that has come together around shared coffee passions and interests.
The specialty coffee prosumer culture offers many pathways to participation. In the specialty coffee culture landscape, consumers engage in a participatory culture through the shaping of relations between coffee producers (again, in the form of growers, roasters, designers, cafe owners) and audiences. It sparks events, podcasts, and ventures illustrating a shift from passive consumption to active participation, cocreation, and ideation. This participatory nature results in various configurations, inviting different degrees of consumer participation. Examples include consumer coffee festivals, coffee subscriptions featuring unique roasts, industry trade shows, coffee championships and competitions, professional events for specific roles, podcasts, and online Kickstarters for emerging, innovative coffee products. Such collaborative events demonstrate the shift from a culture of passive consumption to a culture of active participation by transforming personal, and even cultural, values into shared social interactions.[21] In this way, participants co-create value within and because of the specialty coffee industry.
Specialty coffee continues to gain both monetary revenue and passionate followers. In 2004, only 20% of globally traded coffee was specialty, with the remaining 80% supporting commercial supply chains.[22] Despite its smaller proportion of production, specialty coffee claimed 50% of the global coffee value, a testament to its impact.[23] Over the past 20 years, revenue from roasters and retailers has amounted to US$1.94 billion[24]—and the market only continues to grow. Additionally, the industry is experiencing favorable conditions: market growth, paired with a growing global infrastructure (cafes, roasteries, online forums, in-person expos, brew technologies, etc.), are likely to lead to significant economic growth.
However, monetary value truly underlies a different set of values. Consumers are willing to spend only when they care about something (it is surplus money that is spent, after all). Monetary spending reflects something deeper: emotional connection. In the specialty coffee industry, demand is not a compulsive desire of human need. Demand emerges as a function of social practices and thoughtful choice; it materializes from each individual’s values of the different attributes in coffee, expanding the spectrum of meaningful elements within specialty coffee consumerism.
Consumerism, which historically was derived from preference and taste, has evolved. Without a doubt, consumers are now centered as the actors (not the variables), whose perspective (not just desire) impacts the creation and direction of value.[25] How participants engage in consumption expresses not only socio-economic statuses, but also what people care about and value. Specialty coffee consumers wield autonomous control over their choices, reflecting their habits, beliefs, and circumstances. To participate and to co-create is to display a form of self-making where personal values and morals guide individual choices.
Additionally, like any product, coffee’s value accrues during innovation, branding, and marketing phases.[26] This foundation of value generation and distribution involves a collective knowledge of specific quality attributes, value chain governance, transaction costs, consistency, reliability, and product knowledge narratives. The value of something is never an inherent property of a product: it is a judgment made by a person about the product.[27] With a focus on both the intrinsic and extrinsic values of coffee, specialty coffee yields more value creation: its culture contains the ability to increase a coffee’s total value. It gives rise to a new economy of consumerism granting its participants roles as stakeholders, sponsors, investors, writers, cafe goers, drinkers, designers, roasters—all contributors towards value within communities.[28] The concept of value cocreation, as articulated by marketing professors Fuat Firat and Alladi Venkatesh, highlights the diminishing boundaries between producers and consumers, spurred by social and technological changes, similar to the concept of the “prosumer.”[29] Specialty coffee consumerism, as a transformative phenomenon, not only reshapes the market but also leverages it by redistributing value, extending beyond monetary considerations to encompass individual and collective significance.
By reframing consumerism as more than individual preference and desire and moving into a space of “co-creation” or “prosumerism,” the specialty coffee industry offers all of its actors a way to participate in “meaning-making” experiences. By offering many avenues to value something in coffee (or a specific coffee), we are meaningfully engaging with one another, actively participating in networked coffee communities, enabling our own creative transformations, and imagining the ways we connect with coffee producers and other fellow consumers.[30]
Redefining Value Across the Supply Chain
To have choice is to have privilege, but it has been demonstrated that to have choice is to also have power. Consumers exercise choice in a world of structured and interconnected relationships, and part of what those relationships structure—or shape—is both the specialty coffee market industry and the processes of consumerism itself.[31] Specialty coffee consumers have the ability to actively attend to the historical processes that shape their consumer positions and consider to what extent their individual and large-scale consumer behaviors are influencing the specialty coffee industry.
Without doubt, we are increasingly aware of the importance consumers play in determining value— but it’s important to note that coffee does not have an absolute value based only on supply and demand. Instead, consumer demand for innovation, creativity, and community is what endows coffee with value. Each role constituting the specialty coffee industry distributes value through every action. The coffee producer who experiments with a new bio innovation processing method, the roaster who sources from that producer, the branding company who labels their packaging with recognition of that producer, the espresso machine manufacturer who designs a manual pre-infusion feature, the Japanese coffee shop who curates an intimate four-seat coffee bar Omakase tasting experience, the coffee drinker who attends that experience, the baristas who “throw it down” in latte art competitions, and so on, all demonstrate how each action contributes to the creation, passion, and innovation rippling across the entire coffee chain.
Consumerism is not merely enacted passion for a quality beverage; it’s a force reshaping the entire coffee industry. The co-evolution of consumerism alongside the specialty coffee industry suggests the potential to redefine and redistribute value within the industry by creating a collaborative ecosystem. Consequently, the active role of consumers has become a prerequisite for the ongoing value co-creation process, and this dynamic engagement extends to coffee producers, brands, and drinkers, all of whom actively collaborate to co-create value for themselves, their communities, and the broader industry.[32]
Value distribution throughout the coffee supply chain is a collective task, and participatory consumer culture offers many pathways for value creation. Paired with efforts from policy, certification programs, producer workshops, and trainings, and an ever-growing specialty coffee market, the continued evolution of the specialty coffee industry has potential to strengthen collaborations and relations across and between consumers’ and producers’ spheres.
As Vaughn Tan wrote in Issue 19, “specialty coffee has a diverse and constantly changing set of narratives of what quality means [and what and who creates value] in coffee.”[33] In other words, consumerism creates value by inspiring other forms of newness that have not yet been imagined. It continues to transform the industry, actively shaping and increasing value across the entire coffee supply chain. As coffee participants—drinkers, producers, and everyone in between—become active contributors through collaboration within and with other industry efforts, specialty coffee consumption catalyzes positive change. Through this collaboration, paired with the coffee market’s immense potential growth, the specialty coffee industry has laid a foundation for a more equitable, innovative, and valueoriented future for coffee producers and consumers to co-create together. ◇
ALEXA ROMANO recently completed a Master of Arts in Anthropology at Stanford University after presenting her thesis, “Pursuing an ‘Ethical’ Cup of Coffee: The Social Production of Equity in the Globalized Coffee Commodity Chain,” which explored relational ethics between Costa Rican coffee production and US Bay Area coffee consumption.
References
[1] Henry Jenkins, “The Future of Fandom,” Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield, 2007): 357–364.
[2] International Coffee Organization, Coffee Development Report 2019 (London: 2019).
[3] Daniel Jaffee, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014).
[4] Giovannucci Samper and Marques Vieira, “The Powerful Role of Intangibles in the Coffee Value Chain,” Economic Research Working Paper No. 39 (WIPO, 2017).
[5] William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 (1996): 762–775.
[6] Roseberry (1996): 762–775.
[7] Douglas Goodman and Mirelle Cohen, “Anonymous Inequality in Global Consumer Culture,” Consumer Culture: A Reference Handbook 5 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2004): 109–118.
[8] Roseberry (1996): 762–775.
[9] Roseberry (1996): 762–775.
[10] Emma Felton, Filtered: Coffee, the Café and the 21st-Century City (London: Routledge, 2018).
[11] Felton, 2018.
[12] Felton, 2018.
[13] Roseberry (1996): 762–775.
[14] Specialty Coffee Association, “Towards a Definition of Specialty Coffee: Building an Understanding Based on Attributes,” 2021.
[15] Roseberry (1996): 762–775.
[16] John F. Markey, “A Redefinition of Social Phenomena: Giving a Basis for Comparative Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 31, no. 6 (1926): 733–743, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2765504.
[17] Chunyan Xie, Richard Bagozzi, and Sigurd Villads Troye, “Trying to Prosume: Toward a Theory of Consumers as Co-Creators of Value,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 36, no. 1 (2008): 109–122.
[18] George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’,” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 1 (2010): 13–36.
[19] Bernard Cova, Stefana Pace, and Per Skalen, “Brand Volunteering: Value Co-Creation with Unpaid Consumers,” Marketing Theory 15, no. 4 (2015): 465–485.
[20] Henry Jenkins, “Fandom, Negotiation, and participatory Culture,” A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (2018): 11–26P.
[21] Jenkins (2007): 357–364.
[22] Samper et al. (2017).
[23] Vera Espindola Rafael, “A Business Case to Increase Specialty Coffee Consumption in Producing Countries,” IDB Lab, Specialty Coffee Association (2020).
[24] Ruben Ruerd, “Why Do Coffee Farmers Stay Poor?” Journal of Fair Trade 4, no. 2 (2023): 11–30, DOI: 10.13169/jfairtrade.4.2.0002.
[25] Espindola Rafael (2020).
[26] Luis Fernando Samper, “Value Creation and Value Distribution: The Role of Intangibles in Coffee,” Lecture at 2023 Green Coffee Summit, December 5, 2023.
[27] Georg Simmel, Tom Bottomore, and David Frisby, “The Philosophy of Money,” trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York, Routledge: 1978).
[28] Patryk Galuszka, “New Economy of Fandom,” Fan Identities and Practices in Context (Routledge, 2017): 157–175.
[29] A. Fuat Firat and Alladi Venkatesh, “Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption,”
Journal of Consumer Research 22, no. 3 (1995): 239–627, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489612.
[30] Jenkins (2018): 11–26P.
[31] Roseberry (1996): 762–775.
[32] Siwarit Pongsakornrungsilp and Jonathan E. Schroeder, “Understanding Value Co-Creation in a Co-Consuming Brand Community,” Marketing Theory 11, no. 3 (2011): 303–324.
[33] Vaughn Tan, “Managing Uncertainty: The Value of Intermediaries,” 25, Issue 19 (SCA: 2023).
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 21. This issue of 25 is made possible with the contributions of specialty coffee businesses who support the activities of the Specialty Coffee Association through its underwriting and sponsorship programs. Learn more about our underwriters here.