Recap #9 | May 14, 2020

Welcome to Recap, a brief overview of recent coffee developments every two weeks from the Specialty Coffee Association. 

If it feels as if news platforms have been writing more about coffee,  you’re not wrong: Google Trends reports that April 2020 had the highest amount of interest in the search term “coffee” since 2004. Some of this could be attributed to the recent social media craze for Dalgona coffee, a fluffy coffee drink made with instant coffee, sugar, and hot water, popularized in South Korea. Bloomberg attributes a massive rise in demand for instant coffee to the trendy drink, citing a 65% growth in instant coffee imports to South Korea in March. But Nestlé reports that sales of instant coffee have increased in most markets as consumers around the world find themselves drinking more coffee at home due to lockdown restrictions. 

As lockdowns begin to ease in Europe and job-retention relief programs are expected to end, coffee shops and roasters face difficult decisions. Although some small and medium businesses have received some form of payroll subsidy from local governments, few have received any support for the rental costs of their closed premises. In Dublin, the historic Bewley’s café, a large multi-floor in operation as a coffee shop and roastery since 1927, will close permanently. Located on the city’s main pedestrianized shopping street, the café’s art deco tile murals and stained glass windows are firmly lodged in the city’s literary heritage, featuring in The Dubliners by James Joyce. The company cited its €1.5 million annual rent as the reason for the closure, which amounts to 30% of its sales. Serving more than 600,000 customers each year, the café’s closure will prompt the loss of over 100 jobs, and calls the future of large café spaces into question. 

Other news outlets have turned their attention to the picking and production of coffee as COVID-19 continues to impact this year’s harvest. BBC News recently drew attention specifically to the situation farmers of specialty coffee now face as they experience a drop in orders after a soaring demand for coffee earlier this year. Online sales of specialty coffee, previously a complementary stream to retail and wholesale for coffee roasters, have grown considerably, but they don’t amount to the volume of demand generated by hospitality businesses. If the demand for specialty coffee continues to fall, some coffee producers will be forced to sell their green coffee at a discount to what they might expect to receive from specialty buyers, pull up their coffee trees, or sell their farms. While demand is expected to return, the interconnected nature of specialty coffee businesses throughout the supply chain means that the impacts of COVID-19 could reduce the availability of specialty coffee from many coffee-producing regions.

In an interesting twist, an unmanned café design announced in January may offer a blueprint for socially-distanced café operations. A collaboration between the design firm Nendo and Maruyama Coffee in Japan, Gacha Gacha Coffee was designed to cut back on café labor and increase service quality by offering customers the ability to make their own coffee. The shop design features coffee-dispensing gacha machines, based on the hand-cranked toy-vending machines found in arcades across Japan. When first announced in January, Nendo imagined that this style of shop would allow staff to focus more on customer service. Customers would select their coffee from a gacha machine, flip a switch to grind it into a dripper, and then watch as brews directly into their cup without ever being touched by a barista. As coffee shops begin to reopen with a renewed focus on contactless customer service, Gatcha Gatcha Coffee’s model offers an interesting--and playful--way to maintain staff and customer safety as well as service. 

If you want to dive deeper into anything you heard today, check out the links in the description of this episode. Recap will be back in two weeks’ time. Thanks for listening. 

Further Reading: 

Listen, RecapSCA StaffCOVID-19