Coffee is increasingly at risk from the climate crisis, and corporate-driven incremental change won’t save it. The theory of degrowth offers hope for a better world and a fairer coffee industry.
For paid subscribers: Coffee is increasingly used to burnish the United Arab Emirates’ international image. Now it is being supercharged by merging with the popularity of the Dubai chocolate trend.
The Specialty Coffee Association of Panama isn’t a fan of co-fermentation, a processing method that adds things like fruit or spices to coffee cherries to assist the fermentation process and, hopefully, enhance flavour. The SCAP disqualified four coffees and put out a statement accusing farmers of “cheating” in this year’s Best of Panama green coffee competition.
Even though everything else is expensive, Americans are still drinking coffee—and visiting cafes. Foot traffic analysis shows that several coffee chains have seen an uptick in visitors in 2024 (although Starbucks wasn’t one of them) as they expand across the US.
Workers at Washington, DC-based Compass Coffee are voting in a union election soon. Quite coincidentally, the company hired over a hundred new baristas to work at unionizing locations, and many of them just happen to be friends of the CEO. Nothing to see here, just an Uber lobbyist and a bunch of food industry executives taking on second jobs to make rent, probably.
Read the rest of the Roundup, including some coffee-and-DNA research, over at Fresh Cup Magazine:
I’ll be back on Friday with a new article, but until then it’s goodbye from Merlin, who’s been interrupted enjoying the bowl of milk our local chippie puts out for her:
I'm a coffee writer and creator of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry. Ask me about coffeewashing. It's pronounced Fin (he/him)
