Demographics, economy drive coffee consumption

Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Seniors are drinking more coffee away from home while the influential 18-to-24-year-old sector is drinking more of their favorite brew at home, according to the National Coffee Association (NCA).

"Sixty-plus-year-olds are discovering gourmet coffee while at-home consumption of coffee by the 18- to 24-year age group is rising sharply," a spokesman for the NCA said.

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This coffee drinker feeling vindicated

Jacquelyn Mitchard
Tribune Media Services Inc.

Whenever we have to go on a trip, my assistant, Pam, and I time our departure to coincide with the availability of coffee. Indeed, it was partly through our insistence that our local coffee-teria began opening at 6 instead of 7 in the morning.

My kids make sport of my cup of coffee. I drink only one cup, two on a hard day, but that “cuppajoe” makes my day worthwhile. It doesn’t wake me up. It doesn’t transform me from a savage into a lamb. But it sets me up to do what needs to be done. “Mom, you don’t need coffee,” my boys complain when we’re waiting in the drive-thru line and they’re about to be late for school.

Well, yeah, I do. It and skin cream are the vices in this fairly pure life.
Finally, and at long last, medical science has given me facts to throw like confetti in my children’s faces (in a nice way, of course). A November study from the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a journal of the world’s largest scientific society, has shown that coffee (strong coffee, espresso!) boosts enzymes that prevent colon cancer. In fact, the active compound, methylpyridinium, is found almost exclusively in roasted coffee, not in any significant amounts in other foods or beverages.

Let’s hear it for vanilla latte!

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Coffee clash

In Dorchester, MA store, Starbucks faces off with Dunkin' Donuts
By Donovan Slack, Boston Globe Correspondent, 3/5/2004

The fashionable teardrop lamps and eggplant-on-harvest gold paint schemes are the same, as are the tastefully abstract prints on the wall and the caramel macchiatos being served up by barristas in signature green aprons. Yet something is unusual about the latest Starbucks to open in Boston. Its neighbors include a junk company, a row of used-car lots, the Plumbers and Gasfitters Local. This is the industrial heart of Dorchester, Dunkin' Donuts territory.

"Starbucks in a Dunkin' Donuts world," marveled a cashier named Karen at the South Bay Center Target store where the new Starbucks opened this week.

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A Daily Dose of Wisdom from the Rebbe

The Highest
-----------

True happiness is the highest form of self-sacrifice. There, in that state, there is no sense of self -- not even awareness that you are happy. True happiness is somewhare beyond "knowing". Beyond self.

All the more so when you bring joy to others.


A Daily Dose of Wisdom from the Rebbe
-words and condensation by Tzvi Freeman
www.chabad.org

Selling a Home Coffee Maker

By STUART ELLIOTT
New York Times

COFFEE drinkers, get ready for $150 million or more worth of java jive, courtesy of the world's best-known sellers of coffee and coffee makers. The ambitious goals of their advertising and marketing campaigns: persuade millions of consumers who increasingly prefer to leave home for their coffee fixes to stay home - and add another appliance to crowded kitchens.

The appliance in question is a new kind of coffee maker, priced at $60 to $120, which is intended to brew a cup at a time in about a minute, using coffee in prepackaged packets called pods. The machines, with names like Home Café, Senseo and Tassimo, will compete against lower-priced automatic-drip devices as well as more expensive machines, typically imported, that specialize in espresso.

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Coffee industry sees China as next growth market

Reuters
Tokyo, March 4

China, traditionally a tea-drinking culture, will have great potential as a coffee market if growth in domestic consumption stays at 20 per cent, the head of the International Coffee Organisation said on Thursday.

"Traditional markets, Europe, are showing a decline in consumption per capita," ICO executive director Nestor Osorio told Reuters in an interview.

"But there are others like Russia or China that are showing fantastic... growth, like almost 20 per cent (a year)," he said. "If the present rate of growth continues, China will become a very important consumer of coffee."

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The Office Doesn't Run on Coffee Alone

By Rick Sandlas

If your job is to keep an office running smoothly, you know that includes fueling the troops with coffee throughout the day. The trick has been to do so cost-effectively, with all the required amenities, and a minimum of mess and hassle.

While various paraphernalia has proliferated to satisfy the one of every two adults in the United States that drink coffee daily and the four out of five that drink it at least occasionally, office managers have also been asked to provide the accompanying creamers and sweeteners in costly packets or canisters prone to waste, spills and misuse.

Fortunately, a growing number of office managers are outsourcing their coffee service to more progressive vendors that deliver portion-controlled dispensers. They reduce costs by 10% or more by virtually eliminating waste, break room spills and pilferage.

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Local business owner helps solve coffee crisis one cup at a time

By Barbara Hootman
Black Mountain (NC)News

While pouring an early morning cup of coffee, many coffee drinkers do not realize that small coffee farmers are facing a crisis that could effect the way they start the day.

Amy Vermillion, owner of The Dripolator Coffeehouse in Black Mountain, recently returned from an educational adventure, visiting coffee farmers in the highlands of Nicaragua. Perhaps nowhere in the world has been more affected by the decline of coffee prices than Nicaragua.

"I have a responsibility to know firsthand where my product comes from and to find out about the quality of life of the people who produce it," she said. "I feel like I just had a semester course on international business and coffee trade, and I’m really excited to share what I learned with my staff and customers."

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The Coffee Clash

Many firms see a marketing advantage in selling politically correct beans. Will Starbucks get hurt?

By MARGOT ROOSEVELT/HUATUSCO

In a corner of a dilapidated brick coffee mill, Lindsey Bolger is deep in concentration. Outside the window, the lush cloud forest of Mexico's Veracruz state stretches to a blue-green horizon, and hummingbirds dip into the wild hibiscus. The American, 40, closes her eyes, bending over a row of 12 white cups on a round metal table. Each contains coffee from the new harvest, toasted at 400ºF in a small roaster on the counter. Bolger shakes each cup and sniffs deeply. "I'm looking for defects," she says. "Underripe beans, overripe beans, sour flavors, mold. If even one bean out of 60 is flawed, you can tell."

Bolger is chief buyer for Vermont's Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, the Mexican mill's largest customer. For the 1,900 farmers who belong to the Huatusco cooperative, her opinion can mean food on the table — or not. If her standards are high, it is understandable. She pays twice the market price for 456,000 lbs. of their coffee. Why? Co-op president Josafat Hernandez has a simple explanation: "It allows us to survive." Coffee prices on the world market have fallen by two-thirds in the past five years to below what it costs to grow the beans here. Misery stalks the co-op's 43 hamlets, where as many as half the men have emigrated to Mexico City's slums or the U.S. Along the roads, children as young as 5 pick coffee, baskets strapped to their waists.

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RABBI PLISKIN'S DAILY LIFT

Aish.com

Daily Lift #468 Give Good Advice

When someone comes to ask your advice, your obligation is to give him the same advice you would need to hear if you were in his position. Focus only on the welfare of the person you are talking to, and not on any personal benefit you might derive from giving a particular type of advice. If you are unable to do this, then you should not be giving any advice at all!

The next time someone asks you for advice, view this person as yourself or as your beloved child. What is the absolutely best advice you could give?
(see Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto; Path of the Just, ch. 11)

Demand for Hawaii's Kona coffee perks up

By Christopher Doering

HONOLULU (Reuters) - In a coffee world inundated with frothy cappuccinos and creamy lattes, more java junkies are turning to the rare and expensive Hawaiian coffee known as Kona.

U.S. demand for the bold brew, grown only on a narrow 20 mile stretch of land on the Big Island of Hawaii, has surged since the late 1990s.

Giant coffee retailer Starbucks Corp. will begin carrying the beans in its 4,176 company-owned North American stores in April after a seven-year absence; the Seattle company had been unable in recent years to arrange for sufficient supplies.

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Coffee needs consumption, quality highs to keep prices stable

REUTERS

BANGKOK : Global coffee prices have staged something of a recovery after plunging to historic lows, but to keep them stable or push them higher will require considerable effort, traders said on Friday.

Domestic consumption and quality consistency must be boosted in producing countries to ensure the sustainability of the coffee business, traders said at the Asia International Coffee Conference in Bangkok . Sustainability would require better market access and improved co-ordination of international coffee policy to smooth out price fluctuations, they said.

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