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> The rapidly expanding niche accounts for 15 to 20 percent of coffee consumed in the United States, according to the Specialty Coffee Association. One in ever
by pdog 9y ago
> The rapidly expanding niche accounts for 15 to 20 percent of coffee consumed in the United States, according to the Specialty Coffee Association.
One in every five or six cups of coffee is Blue Bottle or "third-wave specialty" coffee? This simply can't be true considering the scale of Starbucks, McDonald's, and Dunkin' Donuts, let alone brewing at home and coffee consumed at diners and non-specialty restaurants.
I'm surprised the Times would cite the SCAA so uncritically.
- subnaught 9y agoI think it's pretty clear that the article intends "rapidly expanding niche" to refer to all of "third-wave specialty coffee," not just Blue Bottle.
- sergers 9y agoThat is still hard to fathom 20% of coffee sales
- spaceflunky 9y agoI agree with this. Think of the mid to low-tier restaurants and the coffee the serve. Unless I'm in some big city, most of time I'm just getting whatever bulk coffee they happened to buy from some wholesaler. They arent serving me $18/lb coffee from some boutique farm in Nicaragua.
- biggc 9y agoMaybe by dollar amount spent?
- david-cako 9y agoHard to believe. Specialty coffee costs the same as whatever shit you can buy at Starbucks.
- cwilson 9y agoThis is very surprising, as last time I did research on this subject I remember seeing that Starbucks alone owned 40%+ of the "single cup" coffee market share. The runner up was the McDonalds/Duncan "lower end" group of coffee sales. Specialty coffee was great for the margins, but the market-share was not even close to the numbers being reported in this article.
- jedberg 9y agoMaybe the mean by total dollars spent. Which given the high prices at least passed the snug test. Maybe.
- tedmiston 9y agoIf they measure "coffee consumed in the United States" by dollars than it could mean each cup of craft coffee counts for ~4x cups of McDonald's coffee.
- mikenyc 9y agoMike from craftcoffee.com here. I love 3rd wave style coffee but that statement from the article is very misleading. This is a common trick that 3rd wave proponents pull all the time. They conflate "3rd wave" and "specialty", as Oliver did here, and then pretend that "specialty coffee" metrics are referring to only 3rd wave coffee. In actual fact, 3rd wave != specialty coffee. In reality, 3rd wave coffee is just a tiny fraction of specialty coffee. Specialty coffee includes Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Peet's, and many others like that. All those companies sell "specialty grade" coffee, which is a technical term that more or less means the beans score above a certain level when evaluated for defects. So when people quote the size or growth of specialty coffee, that's the pool of companies they are actually talking about. And in fact, depending on the source it's often unclear if those numbers include things like frapuccinos. There's very little data on the niche because it's so small that it doesn't make the top 25 or 30 sources of revenue or consumption in industry reports, but 3rd wave coffee certainly accounts for less than 1% of coffee consumed in the US. Blue Bottle has 25 cafes, Starbucks has 24,000.[1] Starbucks is worth $80B today. In aggregate, Blue Bottle + Stumptown + Intelligentsia + [any other locals you can think of] are likely worth less than $1B. So yeah, 3rd wave coffee is delicious and fun, but unfortunately it simply does not account for that level of consumption. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks