Starbucks sued for tip pooling practice

San Diego Daily Transcript

A San Diego County resident employed by Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) is suing the company for requiring front-line coffeemakers, known as baristas in coffee-shop speak, to share tips with supervisors.

Attorney John English, a partner in the Coronado firm Chapko & English, filed the class-action lawsuit last week on behalf of the company's baristas across the state including Jou, pronounced "Joe," Chou.

The lawsuit says employees complained about the policy but were rebuffed.

Starbucks has more than 160 stores in San Diego County, and about 1,500 in California. English estimates several thousand employees have been affected by the tip pooling practice during the class period over the last four years. The company's liability, if the case is successful, is likely in the tens of millions of dollars, English said.

Although individual employees are not likely to receive more than $75,000 if the complaint is successful, English noted that that's not small change for someone who makes coffee for a living.

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Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Introduces Four Varieties of Premium One-Cup Coffee Pods

WATERBURY, Vt.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 14, 2004--Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (NASDAQ: GMCR) today unveiled four varieties of coffee pods at the National Automatic Merchandising Association (NAMA) Expo in Chicago. Green Mountain Coffee's Premium One-Cup Coffee Pods are small round disks of specialty coffee in a filter that have been designed for use in single-cup brewers that have recently been introduced to the consumer market and are currently being launched in the commercial market. This fall, a growing number of Office Coffee Service (OCS) vendors will be expanding the distribution of pods to offices across the country.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is the leader in single-cup specialty coffee offerings. The Company owns 42% of Keurig, Inc., manufacturer of the Keurig(R) Single-Cup Brewer that uses a K-Cup(TM), a single-serve coffee cartridge, to brew one cup of coffee in 30 seconds. Over 25 varieties of Green Mountain coffees, including seasonal limited edition offerings like Autumn Harvest Blend and Pumpkin Spice, as well as six Celestial Seasonings(R) teas are packaged in K-Cups and are available to offices and consumers. To address the growing demand for coffee pods in the OCS channel, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters today introduced a line of coffee pods that brew an exceptional cup of coffee in the workplace. The Company expects to start shipping the Premium One-Cup Coffee Pods (25 per sleeve, 100 per case) within the next two weeks.

All four Green Mountain coffee varieties packaged in pods are Fair Trade Certified, which guarantees the small-scale farmers who grew this coffee with a fair price for their crop. The Fair Trade Certified pod offerings from Green Mountain Coffee include Breakfast Blend, French Roast, House Blend Decaf, and Colombian coffee. Currently the new pods are only available to Green Mountain Coffee OCS distributors and customers.

Robert Stiller, President and CEO of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters said, "We are very happy to offer our customers this additional option of brewing high quality single cups of Green Mountain Coffee in their workplaces. I am confident that with the introduction of our Premium One-Cup Coffee Pods we will continue to expand our leadership in the single-cup specialty coffee category."

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. is a leader in the specialty coffee industry and offers over 100 coffee selections including estate, certified organic, Fair Trade, signature blends, and flavored coffees that it sells under the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters(R) and Newman's Own(R) Organics brands. While the majority of Green Mountain Coffee's revenue is derived from its wholesale operations, the Company also operates a direct mail business and an e-commerce website (www.GreenMountainCoffee.com) from its Waterbury, Vermont headquarters. Each year the Company contributes at least five percent of its pre-tax profits to support socially responsible initiatives. Based on its performance, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has been recognized for the past four years as one of Forbes Magazine's "200 Best Small Companies in America," for the past two years in the top ten on Business Ethics magazine's list of "100 Best Corporate Citizens," and in 2004 as one of the Society of Human Resource Management's "Best Medium Companies to Work for in America."

Mexican farmers protest coffee buying polices at Nestle offices

Associated Press

Dozens of cowboy-hatted farmers protested Monday outside the Mexico City offices of Swiss food giant Nestle, saying current trade policies were hurting Mexican coffee growers.
MEXICO CITY – Dozens of cowboy-hatted farmers protested Monday outside the Mexico City offices of Swiss food giant Nestle, saying current trade policies were hurting Mexican coffee growers.

The farmers threw heaps of unroasted coffee beans on the steps of the company's headquarters, demanding the company pay fair prices for quality coffee beans.

"Nestle got preferential treatment under NAFTA, allowing it to exercise a near monopoly over instant coffee in Mexico," the protest organizers wrote in a leaflet. Nestle officials were not immediately available for comment.

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One Starbucks Star Moves On

The Motley Fool

By Alyce Lomax (TMF Lomax)
October 13, 2004

Come March, is there going to be less glimmer in the Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) galaxy? Well, yes -- the news broke last night. The company's president and CEO, Orin Smith, will retire at that time after having served nearly 15 years, five of which he spent as CEO. Should investors worry?

We all know that any change in management in any publicly traded company can cause some anxiety for investors. Compound this with the fact that top management at Starbucks has a pretty hefty amount of star power. (I hate to think what investors would think of a resignation of Chairman and chief visionary Howard Schultz -- that might cause a little panic in the Street.) Most of us are less acquainted with the designated new CEO, Jim Donald.

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Study looks at caffeine effects in the UK

One of the biggest studies into the effects of caffeine on health is being launched this week.

Around 16,000 men and women in Bristol will be chosen at random to answer questions about their caffeine habits.

The study will look at the drug's effect on a range of areas including sleep patterns.

Scientists at the University of Bristol claim caffeine, which is found mainly in coffee, tea and cola, is the most widely-consumed drug in the world.

But little is known about the amount of caffeine consumed in the UK and the implications for health.

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Coffee brands perk up marketing

By Theresa Howard, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — A pair of venerable coffee brands are being dusted off to take on Starbucks for more of the premium coffee dollar at the supermarket.

On Monday, No. 5 brand Eight O'Clock Coffee, an 145-year-old brand and one of the original whole-roasted bean brands, begins its first TV advertising. And Sara Lee is looking to rejuvenate its No. 7 Chock full o'Nuts Coffee, a 70-year-old brand that originated in New York City, with national advertising. Both are trying to take advantage of the coffee culture sparked by Starbucks in the past decade.

Brand watcher Allen Adamson of image agency Landor says the revived marketing "makes perfect sense." The iconic brands "can reach deep into their authenticity. They have the opportunity to become retro hip or chic. They've just been sleepy or comatose."

Eight O'Clock Coffee says the Starbucks phenomenon has helped perk up the commodity ground bean business, a $2.6 billion market, according to tracking firm Information Resources.

"Starbucks has helped make coffee cool and contemporary again," says David Allen, director of marketing for Eight O'Clock. Cool and contemporary has translated into a premium price at supermarkets, where 13-ounce bags of Starbucks varieties sell for about $8.

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Tech Troubles: Executive settles into the coffee roasting business

By JENNIFER PITTMAN
Sentinel correspondent

SANTA CRUZ, CA — Huge burlap bags of green coffee beans from exotic places are piled on racks in the back of Java Bob’s Coffee Roasting Co., a wholesale distributor owned and operated by high-tech engineer Rich Hansen.

Hansen, the former head of a multimillion-dollar company, can see the stacks from his small office where he tracks a growing number of orders and plots strategy to edge into the local retail market.

Java Bob’s is one of the top roasters in the county behind Santa Cruz Roasting Co. and, for Hansen, it’s a symbol of a new chapter in his entrepreneurial life.

Hansen delivers the beans himself so he can chat with loyal customers throughout the county and get a feel for business. It is a long way from serving as chief executive officer of Silicon Engineering, an $8 million company Hansen co- founded in the early ’90s with four other engineers for a combined investment of $6,320. They eventually sold it to Creative Advanced Technology Center for $24 million.

Hansen says he couldn’t be happier.

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Roast Magazine Offer from The Coffee Project

When you place an order with The Coffee Project, add an issue of Roast Magazine free! while supplies last. As new issues come out, we'll add them to our site. One magazine per order.

It's that simple. You pay only shipping and handling.

September/October Features Include:

Worth Its Weight
Panama coffee fetches record price at auction

Craft of Cupping
The art and science of the silver spoon

Cupping Form
Evaluation Form

Vocabulary
Glossary

Details of Discovery
Creating the Cup of Excellence

Trade Secret
Keeping your roast under wraps

From Carafe to Cup
What specialty coffee can learn from wine

Ruling the Roast
The struggle with sample roasting

The Coffee Project

Dave Barry: Mr. Language Person lowers the boom

Dave Barry ©2004, The Miami Herald

MIAMI Join us now for another rendition of "Ask Mr. Language Person," the only grammar column mentioned by name in the Bible, as well as the official grammar column of the American Association of English Teachers in the Staff Lounge Counting the Days Until Retirement. We begin with a disturbing escalation in the trend of coffee retailers giving stupid names to cup sizes. As you know, this trend began several years ago when Starbucks decided to call its cup sizes "Tall" (meaning "not tall," or "small"), "Grande" (meaning "medium") and "Venti" (meaning, for all we know, "weasel snot"). Unfortunately, we consumers, like moron sheep, started actually USING these names. Why? If Starbucks decided to call its toilets "AquaSwooshies," would we go along with THAT? Yes! Baaa!

But it's getting worse. Recently, at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and Death March, Mr. Language Person noticed that a Starbuck's competitor, Seattle's Best Coffee (which also uses "Tall" for small and "Grande" for medium) is calling its large size - get ready - "Grande Supremo." Yes. And as Mr. Language Person watched in horror, many customers - seemingly intelligent, briefcase-toting adults - actually used this term, as in, "I'll take a 'Grande Supremo.'"

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Emory chemists develop bacteria that may help decaffeinate coffee

[Health India]: Washington, Oct 9 (ANI) : Emory University chemists have suceeded in harnessing the ability of bacteria to make new molecules, which could eventually lead to the creation of naturally decaffeinated coffee plants and produe theophylline , a producte used in treating asthma.

Emory chemist Justin Gallivan and graduate student Shawn Desai, studied coupled the life of a bacterium to the presence of theophylline, a compound that is used to treat asthma, and is produced by the breakdown of caffeine in both coffee and tea plants.

"We know that there is an enzyme that breaks caffeine down into theophylline, but we don't know much about it.What we do know is that it works very slowly. Ideally, we would like to speed it up a bit so that we could create coffee plants that are low in caffeine. That's where the bacteria come in. They now need the breakdown product of the enzyme (theophylline) for survival, but they can't do much with caffeine," Gallivan, an assistant professor of chemistry, said.

Gallivan said that their idea is to supply the bacteria with caffeine, and give each bacterium a piece of DNA from coffee plants that may encode the enzyme to would allow the bacterium to convert the caffeine to the theophylline,which it also needs to survive.

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Big Investors Needed to Boost Organic Coffee

The Monitor (Kampala)
Dorothy Nakaweesi
Entebbe

Organic coffee production in Uganda needs urgent empowerment from big investors to be able to create sustainability, a leading coffee importer has said.

"Uganda's organic coffee is regarded as the best in the US market in terms of quality. If big companies come in, the industry will take off," Mr Shallom Berkman, the Manager of Urth Caffe, a leading importer of exclusively organic coffees and fine teas in US, said on Wednesday.

He was speaking at a three-day Third International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movement (IFOAM) organic coffee conference at the Imperial Botannical Beach Hotel Entebbe. He said his company is willing to invest in the organic coffee industry in Uganda.

He said the coffee revolution is the main challenge where all farmers have to go back to organic production. "I am impressed with so far what I have seen in Uganda, we are ready to invest in this and it will create a revolution," said Berkman. He said the market for organic coffee in the US is worth $12 million. Out of about 350,000 bags of coffee imported annually, 140,000 are purely organic and Africa contributes just three percent.

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Making beans about something

Shauna Farnell
Vail Daily (CO)

AVON - A caffeine high is the least of Mindy Feldman's priorities. But she definitely wants to spread a buzz about what she believes to be the best coffee in the world ... and accomplish a couple of other things at the same time.

With her fund-raiser this weekend, Feldman said she will not only spread the buzz about Costa Rican coffee in the Vail Valley, but in so doing, she will provide financial assistance to her Third World coffee connection and raise money for a close friend of hers who is undergoing chemotherapy for a brain tumor.

Feldman, who owns the Radio Shack in Avon, moved to Costa Rica with her family three years ago. The intention was to immerse her children in the Spanish language and jump-start them into speaking it fluently.

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