I look at a year like this and I think, are these trends that we have focused on so much? Are they a part of what has got us into this mess that we're in? See, yeah. That's a great question.
I don't know. I would probably tend to argue that they didn't necessarily get us into this mess. I think it's important to ask the question, what and who are they serving? I think it's important to revisit the question, what is their purpose?
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Go to mapofforward.coffee.com or click the link in the show notes for details. Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Map of Forward Friends. I'm your host, Lee Saffar, and this is episode four of our five part series with Nick Brown at the editor of the Daily Coffee News by Rose magazine. In this series, we're talking connecting the dots of the coffee industry.
And in this episode, we're discussing something that I love to hate, but many people love to love. We're talking about the making of trends in coffee. Nick told me about trends in coffee. Well, you know, there's nothing I love more than celebrity bouncer.
Tell me. I should not chew on it. It did surprise me when you said it, though. I'm like, you don't strike me.
It's the kind of guy who sits there and like waits for Kim Kardashian to drop something. I don't know if I should be offended by that. So, yeah, okay, the making of trends in coffee. I think broadly speaking, as with any industry, again, you can just sort of follow the money ones.
I copy it for as much as we sometimes like to talk about it in this way, coffee isn't necessarily fine art or underground reason. It's influenced by money and power. And it is used to move a lot of products. So obviously not just a coffee chip.
Right. Right. There's, let me pick a trend and I want to ask you a question about trends that's emerging right now. And so that's got me quite puzzled, to be honest.
Over the 20 years that I've, 20 past years I've been in coffee, there has been a catchphrase that has annoyed me endlessly and all of a sudden we switched it. People used to say death to decaf forever. And now somehow out of nowhere, decaf is becoming a trend and everybody wants to know about decaf. Which is suspicious to me.
It's very suspicious to me. Do you have any idea why this kind of thing happens or why this particular one happened? I'm not sure I can provide that answer. I mean, certainly there has been a movement in recent years in the coffee industry.
It's for functional beverages or clean, clean labels or what have you and people may view caffeine as this as an undesirable substance or a moment. They just don't get along very well. Certainly, you know, there's also so much health conscious marketing in coffee. Not necessarily related to the cookie.
But you could say here are functional benefits of coffee from some of these compounds that are good to your brain and your heart without the caffeine. So I think you have market participants who are taking advantage of positive academic health role use beyond that. OK, what other trends? Like, I mean, you guys cover some of the trends that happen.
Like, don't you? Yeah, it's sort of like I'm not a big trend hunter type thing as we've already established. But yes, I have a business business publishing is like part of what we do is highlight trends or provide a platform where innovation can occur, that type of thing. You can look at trade or there's another platform or trends to emerge or be highlighted to have a light put on them, as you might see at a barista competition or something like that.
And it is a little more special in coffee. I think because of this light flute or alcohol or sports, like people love coffee, like consumers are really in the coffee and this stronger cultural attachments and social attachments to it and history with many, many people who can see coffee in a day more so than on laundry machine systems, you know, pick an industry coffee is more interesting and more sort of lends itself better. So yeah, like if you're asking me to identify trends, I don't know, I wait for people to do that and then you write about it. Yeah, right.
I mean, obviously there's like, there's a lot of celebrity coffee news right now, which for me personally is sometimes a little hard to stomach. It's quite cringe. But I understand it. People love celebrities.
I get to say how much you love celebrities. No, I agree with you. I don't understand it. To be honest with you, I don't get the whole I don't get the coffee celebrity thing by far.
I don't understand the coffee celebrity thing. And I don't understand the normal celebrity thing. It's the reason I got out of the music industry. I didn't like that feeling of being known and recognised and blah, blah, blah.
It seems to be, and I don't quite understand how somebody can get famous from pouring milk in a cup and drawing a pretty picture on the top of it. That's something that we revere as an industry. And it baffles me to be honest. And I mean, I look at a year like this and I think, are these trends that we have focused on so much, are they a part of what has got us into this mess that we're in?
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know that I would probably tend to argue that they didn't necessarily get us into this mess. But I think it's important to ask the question, what and who are they serving? What is the, I think it's important to revisit the question.
What is the purpose? Because I think if you want to talk about competitions or mention latte art, I think it has historically served the purpose within the coffee industry for sure. And there's also the, what I perceive to be our very genuine community building aspect. There's something a lot to air competition that really does enrich people who are involved, give them deeper connections with other people in the coffee.
Same time, it's for me personally far less interesting or potentially pressing than slave labor at the end of a supply chain. Right. That's a big one to drop, but like, it can be slave like conditions continue to exist or policy making that affects the coffee industry. Those things are a little more appealing to me personally, but I think there's a place for all the trends.
Overall, continue in my mind to be largely a way to sell stuff. Or be distracted. Yeah, or be distracted. Sure.
And but as I mentioned, like coffee is so important to people culturally and socially like that's okay too. Like if coffee can provide positive feelings for people, even a brief reprieve from this wild crazy world that we're living in, then that's wonderful too. In fact, that's one of the great beauties of coffee. Yeah, I agree with that sentiment that coffee should be the reprieve.
It is a wonderful, you know, that idea that my coffee is the only thing that doesn't bitch at me every day. It's such a beautiful thing and an intimate thing. But on the other side of that, we as an industry seem to be getting caught up in these trends that seem and then and getting them. People start in the latte out world and then they get hooked in all the competition.
It's not just look at latte, the competition side of things. And then they find deep fulfillment in that. And I love that they find deep fulfillment in that. But then that becomes the echo chamber.
And that becomes the place that they, the world that they exist in a whole entire coffee experience becomes around that. But that's just one small segment of what's going on. What I wish that we were seeing more of was that people find those parts and they take the really great things that they can take out of them, but not get stuck in there. That they can move on to the other parts of the industry and be able to take what they've learned in the competition world and apply it to finding ways to make other parts of the coffee industry better or learn about those parts of the industry.
Because what we see if we go back to power, what we see is that brands, equipment manufacturers, a whole part of this shadow industry has recognized that people enjoy those parts of the industry. And if I want to talk about my brand, if I want to promote my new brand, if I want to sell more product, I gravitate to those parts of the industry because that's where all the people are. And these trends seem to be a mechanism for whether they're artificially created or not, and I suspect a lot of these trends are artificially created. I wonder if people are aware that they're being, in my opinion, used to jump on an alternative milk craze or to push an agenda around a particular new brew method or somebody isn't recognizing that a particular article is being written or done to push something in a particular way.
I wish we would as an industry ask the question more, why is this happening? Not as many of these trends are happening organically as people would like to think. Yeah. There's a little, there's something in coffee, and sometimes you feel like you're buying a thin, wizzy t-shirt at the hot top of that ball.
But I don't, I don't think anyone would like the idea that they're being used. But I think if we are connecting dots in the coffee industry in this conversation, whether we like it or not, we all, everyone in coffee is part of a large machine that is operating and has been operating for a long time. And to be blissfully unaware of that, it's fine. I know that.
I think you're right. You should maybe talk about it. And it's made a little more, especially when they then get repeated and that the market view language it trends gets repeated over and over and over by different startups who are putting a similar substance in a similar can and trying to provide just a slightly different brand or proposition to consumers and then everything's so diluted. And what a senior student think of it.
So yeah, I think it's still like there's plenty of you. It's incredibly important to have platforms and support for innovation and experimentation in coffee. And I also would never want to criticize the community building aspects of different coffee meetings and market stations. But I agree with you.
Then I was speaking in terms of trends, like you can always just follow the money. Again, generally the one I want. Just quickly. How do you do that?
You just, there's a lot of computer nerding and then talking to people on background whenever you can. Okay. It's like literally following the money. It's like when you say follow the money, it's literally like who owns the company that's pushing or finding the company that's pushing these agendas.
Like I'm quite keen to understand where this caffeine thing came from because when you observe what's going on with this trend, it can't have come out of nowhere. Because it was very subtle but quite well spread. It was happening en masse at a lot of places, but very subtle. And the reason I was paying attention to it is because I had a client come to me in the mastermind group at the time with the idea to have a coffee company that was focused around caffeine.
And we just happened to notice that, oh, James Hoffman's doing a decaf thing, which is quite interesting. Like it got announced after I got told about this idea. And then we started seeing articles popping up everywhere about caffeine and decaf and stuff like that. I'm like, this doesn't, it almost feels like, and I think I said this on a previous episode, it almost feels like somebody sent out a press release to a whole bunch of media organizations and said, you know, caffeine's going to become decaf coffee is going to become the next thing.
I mean, from your perspective, as someone who like is a cross keeping their finger on the pulse of what's going on in coffee, did you notice anything unusual about the emergence of the discussion around decaf or was it just a, did you think it was just a, oh, coffee is a functional beverage and now this is what's happening? Yeah, I mean, I don't know the, I don't know the ins and outs of the mechanics of how that came to life or was marketable. But you see these things pop up all the time. And often there's a, there's a whiff of large corporate influence and often that instinct that sent to be true, plays a place, you know, if you take a little bit, there are most of the people we talk to in our, coffee came up with a policy on them too, like putting their arts and so into their small businesses.
And it results Julie as a reflection of them and their values. And it's like a wonderful, beautiful thing. And we wish them all success in the world. For every one of those that's opening, there's another, there's another business or coffee shop that doesn't seem to have any humans behind it, sort of popped up on a nowhere.
Here's six locations that all vaguely look the same, but all clearly had at least $700,000 put into the bill. Yeah. And so, you know, sometimes you get that with and it, you know, that's what it is. Okay.
Okay. It's just an interesting, it's, it's, it's an interesting thing that emerged that kind of came out of nowhere. And it, it's a conversation that is going to run its course. You can see that that's what's going to happen.
And it's going to be turned into a whole big thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And mainstream media is always looking for a story and consumers love coffee. Again, consumers love coffee. And I think one of it from an outside perspective, this might be not a popular thing to say. I'm on coffee people.
I should probably just shut up right now, but like, no, I don't. Coffee continues to be like a legal drug. Yeah. And while our people are spending large amounts of money to package and sell this drug, if you will, in new and appealing ways to, to consumers.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that whatsoever, but it, from my perspective, it's, it's a fact it's, it's not yet. It's a fact. It is what it is. It is what it is.
Okay. In the next episode, folks, the final one in this series, we're going to talk about what conversations we should be having in coffee. So stay tuned for that. Peace out and peanut butter.
Have an amazing rest of your day.