The Price of Coffee

I’ve read that a lot of people are upset about the recent 12% price hikes on Folgers, Yuban and Maxwell House coffees. I was feeling sympathetic until I read that the new average price for these major brands is only $2.57 for a 13 ounce can.

Holy Roast! I had no idea coffee was so cheap! No wonder people settle for those mediocre mass-produced vacuum-packed tin cans of brown dust instead of quality coffee.

Coffee was perhaps my first habitual premium purchase. I’ve been buying whole bean coffee and grinding it myself since I first started living on my own thirty years ago.

Funny thing is, it never was necessarily a better-tasting cup of coffee I was after, though I think I generally get it (the few times I’ve tasted these national brands of coffee, they struck me as lacking depth, watery with a faint aftertaste of cardboard). I’ve never been overly fussy about what water or coffeemaker I use, and I’ve certainly managed to brew some pretty shitty pots of coffee over the years even with fresh-ground premium beans (just ask Mrs. DebtorsPrison).

Rather, it’s the connection to the essence and history of coffee that has driven me to pay usually between six and fifteen dollars per pound for coffee, even during the leanest financial periods of my life. I love knowing that this particular pound of beans I’m drinking on any given day comes from Kenya, Peru, Columbia, or Sumatra…and very often from a very geographically specific collective of farmers within that country. Sometimes I feel that sense of connection so strongly that just pouring out the last dregs of a cup into the sink brings a sense of regret, aghast at how casually I can discard the product of millennia of horticulture and the careful labors of the proud people working some organic shade-grown finca in Costa Rica.

At first it may seem silly that I pay premium prices for coffee as much for the intangible vibe as for the superior taste. However, when you take a look at the websites of the major coffee brands, you see that they too market themselves on lifestyle rather than taste. At least I get genuine good feelings and flavor. Canned coffee drinkers get phony ad agency touchy-feeliness and a lousy cup.

Maxwell House promises to “brighten up your morning or energize gatherings with family and friends. Folgers claims to be “the best part of wakin’ up”. Yeah, and don’t droppin’ your ‘g’ when you’re talkin’ go makin’ ya feel all warm and fuzzy? Yuban goes haiku in describing how a cup of their brew will enhance your existence: “It's the moment before the sun rises...A sweet melody tickling your ear. It's a stroke of brilliance from an artist's brush...The clarity of a breathtaking view. It's the essence of serenity, the essence of perfection. It's Yuban, the essence of coffee.” None of these websites seem to talk very much about how the stuff actually tastes.

I also like knowing that by seeking out the Fair Trade label, my coffee-buying habits help ensure that at least some coffee growers throughout the world make a living wage, and, even better, earn a premium for using organic and ecologically sustainable growing techniques. Growers for the mass-produced coffees are trapped in a cycle of poverty and debt, laboring in what have been called “sweatshops of the field.” It’s nice to know my morning coffee has in some tiny way contributed to global economic justice, helping coffee growers in the Third World to escape their own debtors prison.

In my travels over the years, I’ve visited many of the impoverished countries that grow the world’s finest coffee. Sad to say, it’s damn hard to find a good cup in any of them. The good beans are reserved almost exclusively for export to the wealthy nations. Instead of serving an exemplary cup of their own world class coffee, your average restaurant in these countries give you one of the world’s worst: a cup of boiled water and a jar of Nescafe.

Nescafe, a division of Swiss multinational Nestle, has an ad campaign, “Open Up,” shot in countries around the world “to celebrate the role that coffee plays in people’s lives. Just think what greater role it might play if they didn’t pay poverty prices to growers and then turn around and foist their loathsome bastardization of coffee on the countries which produce the world’s finest beans.