The Starbucks Explosion, Artisan Roasters, and the American Farmer
This piece is scheduled to run in the Capital PRess in the summer of 2006One of the most explosive areas of the food industry in the past several years has been gourmet coffee. One need not look any farther than the baffling proliferation of Starbuck’s outlets for proof that American consumers are increasingly turning to specialty coffee drinks as their primary vehicle for caffeine ingestion.
In 1986, coffee aficionados would really have to hunt to find an espresso-based beverage outside of a major metropolitan area. In 2006, there are nineteen hundred and sixty-five Starbucks in California, with four outlets in the city of Lodi alone. The ubiquity of Starbucks ensures that the aficionado is never too far from their next white mocha frapuccino, affogato style with one pump of hazzlenut and one pump of toffee nut syrup.
Although one may expect the opposite, the Starbucks explosion has been patently good for many small roasters. One of my favorite coffee purveyors is Peerless coffee of Oakland, Ca. Peerless was founded in 1920, by John Vukasin, a Yugoslavian immigrant with a dream to become the premier supplier of European style coffees in the Bay Area. The company, currently headed by John’s grandson, George Vukashin, Jr. has flourished in the shadow of Starbucks.
“One of the greatest things that Starbucks has done,” Vukasin explains, “is educate consumers about coffee. They have really built the market for the smaller roasters. They are tough competition but we are artisan roasters. We only buy Aribica beans, we don’t use any Robusto beans as filler, and we roast our beans in small batches to enhance the flavor of the beans. Our customers are looking for flavor so we offer more than one hundred and twenty-five different types of coffee including varietals, estate coffees, and flavored coffee beans.”
After watching Peerless’ roasters at work, it struck me that coffee, like wine, olive oil, scotch, and so many other specialty foods, possesses its own world of flavor. Each bean has it own natural dominant flavors and the beans can be blended with other beans to create a blend flavor that is stronger than the sum of its parts. I asked Vukasin how he differentiates his product from commodity coffee. “The quality of our beans and our roasting is our signature,” he replied. “We don’t try to compete with industrial roasted beans. We have also developed our organic and fair trade offerings.”
I asked him to what degree fair trade helps coffee growers. “Interestingly enough,” he stated, “there has been a glut of fair trade coffee recently. Some fair trade growers are actually selling their coffee on the open market when the conventional price is higher than the floor Fair Trade price. This is a classic example of the fact that adjectives like organic and fair trade do little to insulate growers from oversupply issues.”
I asked Vukasin what advice he had for farmers. “Commodity farming in the United States is a dead end right now,” he opined. “To stay competitive, commodity growers will have to get bigger. Otherwise, they should plan on getting smaller and developing their own markets and channels. Adjectives won’t protect them from market problems but relationships can.”
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 11:58 PM
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