Is big coffee really the problem?

Specialty coffee is often cast as the more ethical choice based on the premise that paying a little more fixes the equity problem at origin. Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood argues the economics say otherwise, and that some of the coffee industry’s most credible sustainability work is happening at scale

I have been in the coffee industry for 20 years, and for most of that time I have had a nagging feeling about the sustainability terms thrown around it. ‘Ethical’; ‘responsible’; ‘direct trade’ – they sound good, but they do not always add up.

My book, The Business of Specialty Coffee, started as a journalist’s investigation and ended up as something closer to an MBA thesis. Writing it forced me to challenge my own preconceptions about the coffee industry.

One of the most significant was that specialty or boutique coffee is not, by definition, more sustainable than commercial coffee.

“If people cannot make money from something, they will stop doing it”

Premium coffee is coffee with certain taste attributes that the market values. That value does not automatically translate into better outcomes for the people who grow it.

Encouraging consumers to believe that buying slightly more expensive coffee is solving the sustainability problem of coffee – particularly from an economic point of view – is one of the industry’s most persistent mistakes.