“Coffee is a natural product. It’s hard for consumers to connect the dots between that shiny packet on a supermarket shelf with a growing tree laden with cherries in a luscious mountainous farm in Brazil.
Roz Cattell
It’s a seasonal, delicious beverage which is widely drunk and traded, embedded into our lives as our go-to pick me up during the day. This social ceremony is hundreds of years old. Consumers may not know the connection between that ancient ritualistic roasting on the sandy plains in Ethiopia over hot coals to their crisp, clean-lined, minimalist, achingly hip café in Auckland.
You only have to walk to your local farmers market, toting your reusable, refillable bags, to know that prices can fluctuate. Freshness comes seasonally, and your tomatoes in winter are widely known to taste insipid and expensive. So why aren’t consumers the same with coffee? Why has the price remained stubbornly stable in cafes while wages, shipping, harvesting, processing, packaging, equipment, ad infinitum have risen threefold in the last three years?
Over the past year, the media have been very quick to print the price of a $7 flat white. Yet the people who complain about the cost of the cup of coffee are the ones who are paid more than anyone else in the chain.
There’s value in that cup.
It’s not just coffee.
It’s the advances in growing and processing the beans at the farm level.
It’s creating a livelihood for people that have farmed for generations brimming with opportunities in new cultivars and disease-resistant plants.
It’s processing this coffee sustainably, packing with sustainable options and sending it halfway around the world to be greeted with care by one of our 250 coffee roasters in New Zealand.
It’s roasting by skilled professionals on equipment that is state of the art to tease out the taste of the terroir.
It’s the packaging and dispatch, the courier, the machinery needed to grind and extract your cup, the rent, the power, the additional products, the trainer, and the barista who are all skilfully focused on getting the best product into your cup. Even that ceramic cup costs money.
We must ask consumers to go on a journey back to where that bean came from so every Kiwi can appreciate the cost and story of that cup.
Because every cup has a story."
By Roz Cattell, President, NZ Speciality Coffee Association
