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Prices for dried coffee husks are outstripping those for beans
- HillaryBriss 8y agoi've heard that coffee is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in production today. do these coffee husks, or cherries, have significant amounts of pesticide residue?
- nathancahill 8y agoCascara is produced from coffee that isn't sprayed.
- hinkley 8y agoAha. There’s your price premium. There’s a market for pesticide free cherries but not the same market for pesticide free beans. So you divide your crop into two piles and one sells into a channel where your extra labor isn’t a differentiator. Were we quoted the price for organic coffee beans or conventional?
- phlo 8y agoConventional. For comparison, fair trade ranges from $1.40 to $1.90 (organic on the higher end). Direct trade starts at $2 or so at the low end, averages around $3.50 or so and can approach double digits for top-end specialty coffee. Afaik the quality of the cascara is even more sensible to farming and processing conditions that the bean, so I'd expect a large part of the cascara production to come from higher-end farms anyway.
- lostlogin 8y agoWhat are the units those prices are for? The green beans I buy are in the range of $7-14US per Kg.
- phlo 8y agoUSD per lb of green beans in bulk. According to one finva I visited at some point. On some quick research, apparently on the extreme high end, lots can go for as high as $600 per lb. https://dailycoffeenews.com/2017/07/26/record-coffee-earns-601-per-pound-at-best-of-panama-auction/ https://dailycoffeenews.com/2017/07/26/record-coffee-earns-6...
- nathancahill 8y agoIt's just a momentary trend. The vast amount of coffee waste in coffee producing countries is used for fertilizer. The title should be: In a few select farms that produce cascara, it fetches a 480% premium over coffee. Honestly, it's high price and "premium" perception only exist because so few farms are producing it. The tiny premium bottles of cascara you see would be replaced by gallon jugs for $2-3 if more farms started making it.
- peterwwillis 8y agoJust because it's a momentary trend now doesn't mean it's going to stop being a trend. If it proves successful, the farms using it for fertilizer will jump into the market to try to capitalize, which will bring the price down, but still bring in more income than just the coffee beans (and certainly more than feed)
- nathancahill 8y agoMy point is that it's not economically feasible at scale. There are mountains and mountains[0][1][2] of organic coffee pulp, the price would plummet once more farms produce it. The pulp isn't waste either, it's 100% reused as fertilizer. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/0a306pb.jpg https://i.imgur.com/0a306pb.jpg [1]: https://i.imgur.com/Duar7Uu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Duar7Uu.jpg [2]: http://www.elfaroestate.com/img/large/coffeemill16.jpg http://www.elfaroestate.com/img/large/coffeemill16.jpg
- peterwwillis 8y agoWhere's the infeasibility exactly? Currently it's used as fertilizer. As long as they can sell it for higher than the price of new fertilizer, they will be making profit. So really the question is, how much are people willing to pay for it, or how can companies convince people they need to pay more for it? Arabica coffee is currently 2.962 USD per kilogram, and we pay double that for a cup of coffee using about 8 grams. We're paying 125x more for a cuppa than the cost of the beans. So it's certainly possible someone could come up with a way to make some small profit off the pulp. (Incidentally, tea is 0.0288 USD/kg, but obviously it weighs a lot less and we drink a lot less of it)
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago> Thanks to demand from these chains, the coffee husk now often fetches a higher price than the bean itself does. Batlle says she gets $7 for a pound of cascara, while the average price for coffee hovers around $1.20, the lowest in about two years, because of an oversupply of arabica beans. So my takeaway is that it's a factor of being new trendy thing right now, and coffee beans themselves are cheaper than normal from oversupply. I imagine the price and especially the premium ratio will balance out. With that said, I certainly hope the trend of continuing to use the husks continues. Coffee is a wonderful, precious fruit and I'm all for using more of it. Most people don't even realize that coffee "beans" are the seeds of the coffee fruit itself, which is more like a cherry. The vast majority of the fruit is usually discarded and rinsed off the seeds, except on some varietals where some of the pulp is allowed to remain on the seeds before being roasted to give them more of a fruity/citrusy flavor.
- Canadauni 8y agoKeeping the pulp on the seed isn't really a varietal specific thing but just a processing method used before drying. This method is called natural processing and any coffee can be processed this way just lots aren't because washed usually yields a higher grade on the market.
- hinkley 8y agoFarmers are screwed because they produce a commodity, and because there is a couple year lag between supply and demand (you can’t count on a bumper crop the first time you try). The advice I see given out time and again to small farmers is to stay boutique. Try to grow something that not everybody else is. The volumes are low but the prices are higher. However this is always in the context of satisfying a local market. With the exchange rates who knows. And niche produce and vegetables don’t tend to have the shelf life of beans and grains, so you can’t ship them as far.
- sailfast 8y agoThis is precisely why futures markets exist- to hedge this risk for farmers. They’re definitely not screwed here though I agree for more elastic, longer lag products this could be a problem.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- the_cat_kittles 8y agoi remember stumptown selling cascara a full 6 years ago. it was crazy expensive then too. i think this article is framing the thing wrong by overemphasing starbucks
- rconti 8y agoEh, the quote says it all; they're great at taking something and introducing it to the masses. Funny thing is, I've seen cascara drinks advertised by Starbucks but didn't know what it was until now. I think they call it a cascara cold foam something or other so I thought 'cascara' was just a branding term for something to do with the foam or milk; I had no idea it was actually a 'thing'. I don't frequent small coffee merchants in person (drinking Stumptown Cold Brew on tap at work as I type this!) but I've been to enough Storyville/Ladro/Stumptown type places and never seen it either.
- Alextigtig 8y agoWhat's funny about how SB is going about this is as another flavor syrup to add to lattés. That way, the flavor is about as masked as any hazlenut cream they dump into a frappuchino. It's too bad, because cafes that sell exclusively cascara-based drinks can actually churn out some really decent stuff, but SB's "cascara foam" is more like a fancy way to brand some flavored sugar. IMO, where the debate really gets interesting is how cascara might shift the balance of direct trade relationships: because so many farmers rely heavily on cooperatives to purchase high-volume dry milling equipment, farmers almost always act cooperatively with their coop. However, because cascara is something that individual farmers can make without expensive machinery, it might start to fracture the thousands of coffee coops that make up lots of the source-level industry.
- pnathan 8y agoYeah, I thought the same - "look another branding exercise, I'll pass".
- FullyFunctional 8y agoDoes anyone other than Starbucks sell it? I'd like to try it but am skeptical of Yet Another fad. OT: "low-fat cappuccino whose foam and syrup have been spiked with an extract made from a blend of sugar and ground-up dried coffee husk" -- low-fat + loads of sugar is an oxymoron. The sugar industry is killing us all.
- ryanx435 8y agoFat is fat, sugar is a carb. They are different macro nutrients, so I don't know why you think low fat and high sugar is an oxymoron.
- tudelo 8y agoIt's true but probably misleading to the people who the advertisement line is directed to. Of course, that's definitely the intention. It seems odd that anyone would want to have a low-fat diet voluntarily.
- icebraining 8y agoLots of diets are odd. Plus it's just a coffee beverage, not soylent; it's not supposed to be your whole diet. Personally, I prefer the taste of low-fat milk.
- perl4ever 8y agoI prefer skim milk in coffee because fat doesn't mix well. I also don't like sugar in my coffee, but that's an independent matter.
- lightbyte 8y agoI think the idea is that people generally say "low fat" to mean healthy (even though that's not true). The "+ sugar" just makes it doubly more unhealthy. The drink itself is the oxymoron.
- ryanx435 8y ago
- billysielu 8y agoWell that's one way of saying farmers don't get paid much for coffee beans.
- evan-arm 8y agoIf you want to try cascara straight up yourself as a tea, Sweet Maria's[0] sells it: https://www.sweetmarias.com/colombia-finca-la-vega-cascara-tea.html https://www.sweetmarias.com/colombia-finca-la-vega-cascara-t... Shipping might be a little high if you're buying just that, but they do will-call pickup in Oakland too. It's good - it has a light fruit flavor, and has a bit of coffee tastes without being bitter. 0: Sweet Maria's is a great shop and resource for green coffee and roasting. If you drink even a moderate amount of coffee, roasting your own is pretty easy and pays for itself in a few months. If it sounds up your alley, skip the air popper and get a real roaster, though.
- bfuller 8y agoOff topic but I went to a coffee farm in Antigua and it was EXTREMELY interesting. I recommend it for all coffee lovers.
- whitepoplar 8y agowhat was most surprising about your visit?
- wesleytodd 8y agoA few years ago a friend of mine started importing this stuff. He got a sample of a syrup made, and then started selling it. It was a slow start because he was just one guy and had other interests, but then I remember when he told me that Starbucks was starting to make a seasonal cascara drink. Seeing this just reminded me how often it is that opportunities for little startup's are missed because the founder was unable to commit fully at the time. Plug for him, here is where he was selling it: http://www.inspiredcoffee.com/ http://www.inspiredcoffee.com/
- wesleytodd 8y agoAnd if you live in Michigan, his syrup is used in this Bloom kombucha sold at Meijer.
- joshe 8y agoChocolate husk tea is also a tasty switch up. You can have it hot without milk or sugar and it won't be bitter. It has a nice flavor and a little of the theobromine kick. One example: http://tisano.com/ http://tisano.com/
- perl4ever 8y agoI experimented once with trying to brew a drink by running hot water through ground cacao beans. It produced a red liquid that looked kind of like tea, and had a very pronounced unsweetened chocolate flavor. The main difficulty was that cacao beans have much more fat (I guess) in them than coffee beans, so tend to clog up your filter.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- phyzome 8y agoThis seems similar to how slaughterhouses make more money off the rendered fat and other "byproducts" than the meat.
- cwkoss 8y agoI thought this was going to be referring to coffee grounds: they make a great compostable or soil amendment, and somewhat acidic so can be used to balance soil pH for crops like blueberries. Soil amendments tend to be pretty cheap, by weight, though...
- null000 8y agoIf you're measuring both on a per-pound level, kinda makes sense. One coffee bean produces a lot more bean than husk.
- Bokanovsky 8y agoI first heard about cascara last year and wanted to try some. However I live in the UK and it was withdrawn from sale due to some confusion around "Novel Foods". The EU defines this as “food that has not been consumed to a significant degree by humans in the EU prior to 1997”. There was for a while a bit of confusion with independent coffee shops if they could sell it and make drinks with etc. - https://unitedbaristas.com/blog/insights/2017/03/the-cascara-raids/ https://unitedbaristas.com/blog/insights/2017/03/the-cascara... I think it's been resolved, but I can't find much online about it.
- tsomctl 8y agoAs a side note, coffee chaff makes excellent mulch. It gets wet and then forms a thick mat that keeps the water i.