Mike 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 propon

Mike 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