Coffee News Roundup: Week Ending June 10th

This week, the latest International Coffee Agreement involves the private sector for the first time, and Starbucks is closing an Ithaca cafe that recently unionized (the union claims retaliation).

Jun 11, 2022

A hand holds a coffee cup with latte art, resting on a folded newspaper. Via Pixabay.

Hello and welcome to another Coffee News Roundup, in which we summarize the week’s most important/interesting/inane coffee news.

Let’s get to it.

Landmark International Coffee Agreement 2022 Embraces Private-Sector Participation - via Daily Coffee News

It’s been 15 years since the last major update to the International Coffee Agreement, a multilateral commodity agreement between importing and exporting countries, and for the first time in its 60-year history the 2022 iteration will involve the private sector as equal members.

The new Executive Director of the International Coffee Organization (ICO), Vanusia Nogueira, said the new agreement and inclusion of “the world’s biggest retailers, roasters and manufacturers” will offer a “unified front” for tackling the key issues facing the global coffee industry:

“The arrival of the world’s biggest high-street names and manufacturers as well as smallholders means that the whole coffee value chain can now address the biggest challenges facing the global sector in a way that is fair for all.”

It’s not clear just who these private companies are, although it’s not hard to take a guess. World Coffee Portal has a go, saying that “major coffee firms including Nestlé, Starbucks, Lavazza, illycaffè, and Jacobs Douwe Egberts were among signatories to a 2019 ICO declaration, known as the London Declaration, on the economic sustainability of coffee.”

The benefits to this new arrangement, according to Communicafe, are that producers and their representatives will be able to raise concerns with companies directly, and it will allow the ICO to more easily launch development projects and mobilize resources towards areas such as “pest and disease control, climate change adaptation among other mitigating strategies.”

As Daily Coffee News notes, however, the market-driven coffee industry that began in 1989 and is still primarily controlled by private companies, “has been characterized by extreme price volatility, sustained low FOB [Free On Board] prices overall and repeated price shocks to coffee producers over the decades.”

Some more stats from the article: as of 2020, almost half the world’s coffee was exported by just five companies, with 10 companies generating $55 billion in revenue from roasting 35% of the world’s coffee. Producing companies received just 10% of that value, with the actual producers in turn receiving a fraction of that.

I guess we’ll see how it goes now that such companies are involved in the overarching direction of the industry.

Read the full story here.

Starbucks Union Says The Coffee Giant Is Closing A Store To Retaliate - via NPR

A recently unionized Starbucks location in Ithaca, New York, is being closed down by the company with workers being given just one week’s notice of the closure.

Workers United says this is in retaliation for the unionization drive, and a one-day strike in April over unsafe working conditions—specifically, an overflowing grease trap that Starbucks then used as justification when informing workers of the shutdown.

In fact, notification came not from the company itself but from Littler Mendelson, the “union avoidance” firm Starbucks has hired at great expense to hinder the unionization process.

Starbucks denies that the move is motivated by anything other than simple economics and standard business practices. “We open and close stores as a regular part of our operations,” spokesperson Reggie Borges told Bloomberg. Local Ithaca-based 14850 Magazine, however, describes the location being closed as “one of Ithaca’s busiest and most heavily traveled commercial corners.”

Workers United has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in response to the move, accusing Starbucks of violating federal labor law and is seeking an injunction to prevent or reverse the closure.

Read the full story here.

A person sitting on a park bench reads a newspaper. via Wikimedia Commons

More Headlines

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Birds Derive Benefits From Coffee-Growing Landscapes with Forests and Shade Trees

USDA Sees Brazil Coffee Crop, Exports Up in 2022/23

Three Geshas Reach 90+ in 19th Guatemala Cup of Excellence; Auction Coming

The Week In Coffee Unionizing

Workers at Peace Coffee in Minneapolis have voted to unionize, with what was described as a “strong majority” in favour. It also appears to have been a fairly uncontentious election, with owner and CEO Lee Wallace accepting the results and moving to bargain, saying: “We look forward to meeting with the union’s negotiating committee and to getting the process underway.”
A federal judge has ruled that Starbucks doesn’t have to immediately reinstate three employees at a Phoenix location who say they were fired for their union activities, although an NLRB judge will hear the case next week. There are more than 180 open NLRB cases involving unfair labor practices against the company.
Interim CEO Howard Schultz says Starbucks will never engage with Starbucks Workers United, according to a new interview with the New York Times. The billionaire also referred to the union as “a third party” that will “significantly challenge” the customer experience.
A great article in Cambridge Day looks at the various unionization drives that are happening locally and in the wider Massachusetts region, and the different approaches that the companies’ ownership and management has taken in response.
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The Week In Corporate Coffeewashing

The term “responsibly sourced” is thrown around an awful lot in the world of corporate coffee. Especially when it’s big, multinational companies with shareholders and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) concerns. But what it actually means can be nebulous to say the least.

The latest to claim 100% responsibly sourced coffee is Peet’s Coffee, described by Sprudge as “the proto-specialty coffee brand started by Alfred Peet that is a sort of grandfather to the now-mainstream third wave coffee movement” and which is today owned by JAB Holdings via JDE Peet’s.

On Peet’s side is that their claim is backed up by the “sustainability assurance” non-profit Enveritas, which conducts “comprehensive farm audits conducted by regional specialists trained in coffee production” to check for risks such as deforestation and child labor. The surveys took several years and involved visiting 59,000 farms across 24 different regions.

Showing the work is important when making bold (and vague) claims about sustainability and ethical sourcing, and it’s good to see Peet’s is doing that much at least. It’ll probably also become more common, with more companies partnering with non-profits to give an additional sheen of credibility to such claims.

I’m still listing this under “coffeewashing” because in the end it’s still marketing for a multi-billion dollar company, and as Sprudge notes it’s hard to know what “responsibly sourced” really means, even with the backing of a third party auditor.

Is Coffee Good For You?

Drinking coffee on a daily basis, as most of us do, may help lower the risk of acute kidney injury according to a new study.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is when your kidneys just stop working, usually as a complication from another serious illness, and can range from minor loss of kidney function to full blown failure.

Using self-reported data from a 24 year survey of cardiovascular disease risk involving 14,000 participants with a median age of 54, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that those who drank any amount of coffee on a daily basis were 15% less likely to suffer AKI than those who consumed none.

"We already know that drinking coffee on a regular basis has been associated with the prevention of chronic and degenerative diseases including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and liver disease," said study author Dr. Chirag Parikh. "We can now add a possible reduction in AKI risk to the growing list of health benefits for caffeine.”