What is the difference between a R50 bag of coffee and a R150 bag of coffee?
How much would you pay for a bag of coffee? And if all coffee is essentially the same, then why is there such a huge price variance from brand to brand?
Cape Town has a thriving specialty coffee scene, but there seems to a broad range of opinions surrounding what a bag of coffee should cost. If one can buy a 250g bag for R40.00, what right do coffee roasters have to try flogging beans for more than double that price? Is it all branding and market positioning? Or are there tangible differences between the two ends of the spectrum?
Are you paying peanuts for your coffee?
Why do we all accept that almonds cost more than peanuts?
A kilogram of peanuts will cost you about R65.00. Almonds will cost you four times more than that (roughly R250.00). Brazil nuts will take you past the R300.00 mark. Now one may remark, “My goodness, Mergatrude, almonds really are expensive!”, but the chances are that you won’t be outraged. You will just accept that that’s what almonds cost (and choose to buy them…or not). As consumers we can observe that these nuts look different, therefore we can deduce that they taste different, and so we have no problem digesting the notion that, these different nuts carry different price tags.
Even if we don’t understand the processes or costs that result in different retail prices, the visual cues (colour, shape, or size of the nut) are enough to convince us that these products hold varying levels of value.
Looks the same = tastes the same?
The trouble with coffee beans is that they are almost completely void of these visual cues. They are the same colour and shape. And, within reason, they are same size. But more importantly, most consumers never get to see these beans, either because the coffee has already been ground down, or because the opaque packaging shields them from sight.
One seems justified, therefore, in assuming that the only difference between R150.00 kilogram of coffee and a R350.00 kilogram of coffee is the best or worst marketing efforts of the brands concerned.
More than 5000 cherries need to be picked to result in 1kg of specialty grade coffee.
Looking behind the veil
But to return to the nut analogy, almonds don’t cost more than peanuts because the look prettier. They cost more because they are more expensive to produce, (and admittedly because their taste puts them in higher demand).
Coffee is no different. There are a number of links in the coffee chain where producers can choose to make a delicious-but-expensive coffee, or a cheap-and-medicinal coffee. It makes sense that their prices should vary accordingly. But how can one tell whether the value is there or not, when all visual cues are removed. Here are just a few factors to consider:
We hold very dearly the ability to engage customers in a frank fashion, underscored by the premise that people are more important than coffee.
Seed type:
There are hundreds of cultivated Arabica subspecies, a lot of which have very distinctive tastes. There are some seed types that taste delicious but are very fragile, and produce hardly any fruit. This makes for a super tasty, but also a high-risk investment for any farmer.
And then there are other coffee varieties that are so hardy that you could plant them in a parking lot on Mars and they would thrive, making them a safe bet for farmers at harvest time. Unfortunately these “sure-bet” beans often taste more like the soil they’re planted in than they taste of coffee.
Bags of coffee that claim to be comprised of varieties such as Bourbon, Typica, Geisha, or Pacamaras (the list is much longer, but these are just a few of our favourites) will, more often than not, taste great. But only so long as they meet a few subsequent criteria, such as…
Sackcloth and freshness go together like vegans and bacon
Hand picking:
Ripe cherries produce sweeter seeds because there is more sugar in both the fruit and the seed itself. More sugars in green coffee translate into more sugars and caramels in your cup of coffee. In short, the best quality coffee possible will, by necessity, be made up of all ripe cherries. The trouble is that coffee cherries refuse to ripen all at the same time. At any one time during harvest, a single branch can carry green, unripe berries, red ripe cherries, or even fruit that is blackening, overripe, and starting to decay. So to make sure that you get that best quality possible, these cherries need to be hand selected and picked at the right time, while leaving the unripe cherries on the tree for a few days more. Pickers will return to pick previously unripe cherries that have ripened in the meantime. When you realise that roughly 90 cherries are picked to make you a double espresso, you see how the cost of labour becomes exorbitant. If 90 cherries make 18g of coffee, that means that more than 5000 cherries need to be picked to result in 1kg of specialty grade coffee. Picked by hand. So what is the fair price for a kilogram of hand-picked coffee?
“But why can’t you just use a big kinda combine harvester sort of thing?” the industrialist inside you may want to ask. Hand-picking is so archaic. And the answer is: “Because that would result in all those unripe, ripe, and rotten cherries all being mixed together, processed together, and ending up in your cup. Together.”
I imagine you’d be a little put out if the ladle lady at your office canteen made your fruit salad with this same attention to detail.
Storage and shipping conditions:
Remember those hazy, golden, romantic images of brown hessian sacks brimming with (roasted??) coffee beans? Well, those hessian sacks keep green coffee about as fresh as Donatella Versace.
There are reasons that you don’t wrap picnic lunches in sackcloth. Because sackcloth and freshness go together like vegans and bacon.
Vacuum-packed cartons and grain-pro bags may cost more, but they also preserve the natural flavour-forming compounds that exist in fresh green coffee.
Blending:
Any sushi fan will know that ordering the mixed platter is a rookie error. Because while you may be star-struck by the sheer size of the platter, and the myriad of morsels strewn there-over, closer inspection will reveal an unduly high percentage of stupid cucumber rolls. These be no good for man or beast.
The vast majority of cafe blends are like sneaky sushi platters; they contain boring, often poor quality components, whose sole purpose is to decrease the production costs of said blend.
How do you know if you’re trading fairly when you buy coffee?
If you have a penchant for relativism, then this is the question for you. One man’s “hard bargain” is another man’s “ruthless exploitation”. One man’s “fair profit” is another man’s “daylight robbery”. Supposedly human-rights-minded coffee lovers want to make sure that roasters pay FairTrade prices for their green coffee, but these same coffee lovers also want to make sure that they pay less for their morning cappuccino. The concept of fairness is like a playground seesaw that rises and falls depending on who is sitting where.
Perhaps all we can do is continue to shed light on the process and try to better inform end users about how value is or isn’t created in the coffee supply chain.
If 5000 cherries need to be picked by hand, then sorted (where as much as 30% are discarded during the sorting process), then washed, then dried, then re-sorted, then packed, then rested, then sampled, resorted, repacked, and shipped across the world, then roasted (where between 11% and 15% of the coffee’s mass is lost), then packaged and then delivered to your door… there is a lot of work going on, with risks at many of those nodes of influence. Perhaps the best way to get a grip on “fairness” is to examine these processes more closely, and embark on an exercise in empathy. This sounds ludicrously airy-fairy, but it’s the best answer we have right now.
The question is always being answered
At Rosetta Roastery we hold two qualities very dearly; (1) the appetite to assimilate and verify new information disseminating from the coffee world, and (2) the ability to engage customers in a frank fashion, underscored by the premise that people are more important than coffee.
What we have found through the practice of these qualities, without a single exception, is that the perceived market value of a bag of coffee grows with every conversation surrounding the global state of coffee, the way it is farmed, and the process is takes to produce a readily consumable product. This is true for our own team as much as it is for our engaged customers. In our experience, knowledge has only ever served to bolster the market value of a cup of coffee.
So how much should a bag of coffee cost? Obviously I can’t tell you in any definitive sort of way, but I can guarantee that the deeper you look, the closer you will come to being able to meaningfully answer that question for yourself and align your consumer choices accordingly.
