Hi all. A few weeks ago, I stopped posting stories. I also paused all paid subscriptions through Substack and Patreon because I couldn't physically bring myself to write.

Sometimes, I look back at the number of articles and podcasts I used to put out in the eight years Boss Barista has been around, and I wonder where that energy went. I used to publish two stories a week, along with a full podcast. Realistically, that energy has been continually chipped away as life has become more expensive: I'm currently working a full-time job, a part-time job, and freelance work to make everything click.

It's not all survival (I guess) — I'm also getting older (I'm 38), so I'm paying more for things that I would have set aside as unimportant when I was younger, like regular checkups at the doctor and dentist and saving for retirement (last year was the first year I made the maximum contribution to a retirement account).

This year was the first time I had two dental cleanings (and then some: I had to undergo two periodontal deep cleanings that were extremely painful). I also had biopsies done on a growth in my neck (benign), and it just feels like the boundless energy I once had to work all the time and get everything done is being eaten away by simply trying to exist. I know I’m not alone in this feeling.

(Also, I’m vain and this is the first time in my life I’ve gotten more cosmetic things done regularly, like haircuts and manicures. I need to look at my fingers and have something happy to look at.)

As I've mentioned before, Boss Barista essentially breaks even between my editor, processing fees to my website host, and all the tools and subscriptions I use to make the podcast — it doesn’t really account for my time and labor, which was ok in the past. But now, I cannot justify investing the same amount energy here in the way I've done before.

Simply put, I failed to make this sustainable. I just did, and I see other newsletters thrive, sending hundreds of "please pay for this product" emails. These emails both infuriate me because they feel disingenuous (especially when rich people with very popular newsletters ask me for money! How dare they!) but also make me feel sad because I couldn't do what they do. I could not make this work.

I think I'd still like to work on long-term projects, and I have things in the works that are tangentially related to Boss Barista (I'll tell you soon).

But for some reason, I've been thinking a lot about making cakes. I don't think I've had anyone bring a cake to work on my birthday1. For my 31st birthday, I received a soft-boiled egg with a candle on it while working as a food runner at a restaurant in Chicago. However, I have brought a cake for my boss (and arranged a surprise for another on their birthday). I've helped arrange Christmas gifts for bosses who would never dream of reciprocating, and I think now — in my fuzzy memory age — I've decided I'll never bring a cake to a boss ever again.

I think this is on my mind because I've been thinking about my relationship to effort. Effort is lauded as a virtue but rarely acknowledged, and it very seldom comes from the top down — effort seems only to be a measure we consider from those working at the bottom of the employment ladder.

I've seen so many workplaces where the joy and sparkle and praise of workers comes from the workers themselves rather than the leaders who should be witnessing — and certainly and knowingly reap the benefit — of the people around them. I see so many places where workers bring their bosses cake, and it would never occur to the boss to even say thank you for the gift. And they certainly would never bring you a cake on your birthday.

Just a reminder that all paid subscriptions have been paused but if you'd like a deeper refund, please email me at ashleyisacommonname@gmail.com. I promise this isn't the end — it just might be more sporadic. Thank you to everyone that’s stuck around.

Hi friends! I’m collaborating again with Fionn Pooler of The Pourover to produce a piece on coffee buzzwords: the words you see in marketing, on bags, and used by roasters to talk about coffee.

We wanted to create a brief lexicon of words we see used a lot and what that evoked for both of us. Perhaps this is a slightly cynical version of a 2010 lexicon created by New York Times coffee writer Oliver Strand.

In Strand’s glossary, he defined terms like “affogato,” “micro-lot,” and “single origin” — this lexicon was incredibly foundational at the time, particularly for an industry that’s struggled to come up with widely-agreed upon definitions for words we use all the time. Of course, that problem hasn’t gone away: if you ask one roaster what they mean by “direct trade,” they might have a different response than the next roaster.

I also think this is an extension of past work Fionn has done in defining the word “coffeewashing,” or the practice of pretending something is good for the industry but in reality is not. A form of coffeewashing is using terms like “sustainable” and “ethical” in promoting a product or process, but offering no tangible way to measure or define that impact.

As coffee writers (and perhaps more importantly, coffee readers and consumers of information) we see a lot of words thrown around without any sort of clear definition on what the user of the word is trying to say. In this lexicon, we don’t mean to give har definitions to terms, but rather, give our perceptions on where these words appear and what they signal in the industry. Some words are taken at face value without critique; some get used over and over and lose meaning.

The goal here is not to criticize individual companies. What we’re trying to do is encourage you to look more closely at some of the words used by coffee brands—especially those used to convince you to buy their coffee.

We hope that you find this guide helpful and that it’s used as intended: an invitation to be curious and ask “Why is someone marketing their coffee as X, Y, or Z? How can I verify that?”

Sustainability: In my opinion, this is one of the most-used words in coffee because it has no formal definition. What does it mean for a coffee roaster to use the word “sustainable?” What does it mean for a coffee shop? If a coffee shop composts its coffee grounds but serves drinks in paper cups, are they sustainable?

I’d argue it’s impossible to call any product “sustainably sourced” because there’s no threshold, but that doesn’t mean things can’t be done “sustainably.” I like when brands use phrases like “sourced with sustainable practices” or something that implies the idea of sustainability is an action rather than an outcome. For me, I like to see what folks mean when they say something is “sustainable.” As an editor, one of the notes I write to people in their articles is “what do you mean by this” and that’s often the question I have for folks when they use the word sustainability. — Ashley

Community

Another of the industry’s buzzwords du jour, “community” is extremely popular with coffee companies of all sizes. Much like sustainability, community is, on the surface, broadly positive. When done thoughtfully and intentionally, community-building is one of the best things about the coffee industry: Cxffeeblack’s work in Memphis and within its supply chain is a striking example. However, like the other words in this lexicon, “community” is malleable—and ripe for misuse.

The word’s scope is often specific and hyperlocal—“building community through coffee” is a common tagline from neighbourhood cafes. But it can be used more generally, as in the SCA’s goal of “fostering a global coffee community”, or else as a way to link seemingly disparate companies together, such as Nespresso’s Instagram post referring to B Corp as “a community of brands moving forwards with our commitments to have a positive social and environmental impact”. (I’d love to know what the other B Corp-certified coffee companies think of that explicit link between them and Nespresso.)— Fionn

Relationship Coffee: Usually means a roaster has some sort of relationship with a farmer, generally built by purchasing their coffee in years past. David Griswold, founder of Sustainable Harvest, said he coined the term “relationship coffee” in the 90s but wasn’t able to trademark it. When I interviewed him in 2022, he defined relationship coffee as “based around the idea of complete transparency between all the parties involved in the [coffee] supply chain.”

Arguably, this doesn’t happen in every coffee that calls itself a “relationship coffee.” More likely than not, when roasters label coffees with that term, they simply mean, “hey, we’ve bought from this farmer a lot,” which is a good thing (having predictable buyers and clients for coffee is good for forecasting and knowing where your harvest is going). When talking to David, I considered his use of the word relationship and how we think about relationships in our day-to-day lives. Consider what we owe or give people we claim to have relationships with—are we actually giving the same to farmers we claim to have relationships with? — Ashley

The Old School Buzzwords: Small Batch, Artisan, Handmade, etc…: Arguably what defines specialty coffee is any amalgamation of the words above, particularly in the early aughts. For a long time, there was a belief that handmade was always better: a pour over had to be better than coffee from a drip machine, for example, so these words became synonymous and indicators of quality. The industry has shifted significantly: that’s not to say the words above are bad (they’re not) but they’ve become less of one-to-one indicators of tasty coffee, I think. — Ashley

Ethical (especially in regards to coffee sourcing)

Similar to “sustainable”, you’ll often see “ethically sourced” on a bag of coffee, impact report, or About Us webpage. Like many of the terms on this list, it is fairly malleable and hard to define. After all, we all have different ideas of what it means to be ethical. For me, I would hope that “ethically sourced” means that the company paid a fair price for the coffee, and that the farming practices involved were safe and equitable.

This might seem straightforward, but it isn’t always the case. For example Starbucks and Nespresso both claim that their coffee is ethically sourced—both use that exact phrase across their websites. But can a multinational corporation really be ethical? Investigators have uncovered multiple instances of forced and child labour within both companies’ supply chains. What ethical framework does that fall under?

The concept of ethical coffee sourcing. therefore, involves a lot of trust on the consumer’s part. The only way around it is if the company clearly defines its own ethics and commits to true supply chain transparency, but such commitments are still frustratingly rare. — Fionn

Specialty: For a long time, I thought specialty was a designation: coffee often gets scored on a 1-100 scale, and I heard that anything above an 80 was considered specialty, but I’m not sure where that comes from? It might be an antiquated term that originated with the Specialty Coffee Association, which is a global trade organization, but in 2019, the SCA overhauled its definition of specialty: they define specialty as “a coffee that demonstrates excellence in quality and distinction across the entire value chain—from production to preparation and experience.”

The term “specialty coffee” was first used by Erna Knutsen, an early coffee luminary, in 1974. She meant this term as a way to define coffees being bought and sold outside the commodity market, coffees she thought were “special.” I think specialty still refers to coffees bought and sold outside the commodity market, but what makes them special has expanded beyond flavor and quality (another term with lots of baggage; see below). — Ashley

Local: Obviously chains like Starbucks or Dunkin aren't local, but surely that cool cafe down the road is independent, right?

Blue Bottle, Intelligentsia, La Colombe are some of the most famous specialty coffee companies, and still often bill themselves as indie upstarts embedded in their local communities (incidentally, they all also love the word “community”). Despite this local, community focus, they are all owned by much larger companies: Nestlé owns Blue Bottle, La Colombe is a subsidiary of Chobani, and Peet’s/JAB Holdings owns Intelligentsia (and Stumptown).

After the purchases, not much changed on the outside. Those involved would surely prefer that their customers not know of—or at least not think about—the takeovers. A similar thing is taking place with Fairwave Holdings’ acquisition of independent roasters and cafes across the United States—bringing brands like Anodyne, Spyhouse, and most recently Black & White under the umbrella of private equity but keeping an ostensibly local veneer.

The most interesting thing to me about all these acquisitions is how fiercely the workers have fought back: workers at Blue Bottle, Intelligentsia, and La Colombe have all unionized, as have workers at Anodyne. The companies might no longer be local, but the workers sure are. — Fionn

Quality: Is the theme of this lexicon going to be “it’s hard to define this term?” Maybe, but quality is especially hard to define because quality depends on what you’re looking for.

Programs like the Q grader exam, a rigorous test that establishes precise benchmarks for flavor descriptors and how to identify coffee defects, do attempt to codify quality, which is important (we have to establish some sort of baseline between people evaluating coffee). But quality can also be subjective and easily influenced: studies have shown that the color cup you drink out of can influence what you think of the coffee you’re drinking. — Ashley

Stakeholders: One of those business words that has leaked into the coffee world, probably through impact reports, corporate social responsibility documents, or LinkedIn.

The simple definition of a stakeholder is a person who has a vested interest in an organization or company, be it an employee, shareholder, or supplier. In coffee, stakeholders are usually vague groups—see Louis Dreyfus Coffee’s plan to “improve collaboration among coffee supply chain stakeholders”—or corporate partnerships like multi-stakeholder initiatives. Hot take alert, but to me the word’s increased use by organizations like the SCA is another data point in the increasing corporatization of specialty coffee. — Fionn

Passion: What most people think it takes to be a coffee professional. This is a loaded term, and I’d argue that coffee jobs are some of the most emotionally-regulated jobs there are: we make fun of baristas for being snobby or stuck-up (see this article I wrote about the myth of the hipster barista), but then demand an absurd amount of passion from them while paying baristas barely above minimum wage. We seem to hate baristas that take their jobs seriously, but we also demand they be knowledgeable and passionate about their work. — Ashley

Compostable/Recyclable: Ah, that’s the last of the coffee from this bag. Now what? I don’t want to throw it away—I’m a conscientious person, after all—but it’s getting harder and harder to decipher all the various options. Is the bag plastic, and if so, will my local council let me recycle it? If not, is there a supermarket nearby that will take it? And anyway, doesn’t something like 70% of the soft plastic collected by supermarkets for recycling in the U.K. end up being burned?

Or maybe it’s labeled compostable, but then, does that mean I can throw it in my backyard pile or does it need to be sent to a commercial composting facility? Does my council do that? If it is home compostable, does that include the valve and seal? Perhaps it’s made from PLA or biodegradable plastic, but what does that even mean? Those can’t be recycled—and can in fact contaminate a recycling system—but they have to be better than regular plastic, right? Even though it acts just like fossil plastic when dumped in a landfill? Oh god, I’m hyperventilating. Better just throw it out. — Fionn

Transparency: If there’s a buzzword in coffee, it’s transparency. Often, roasters use this word as a way to convey that they’re giving out more information about a coffee than usual, and there’s been recent pushes to be more transparent in order to back up claims like, “we pay more for coffee” or “our coffee is sustainable!”

As my colleague RJ Joseph pointed out in the Red Fox Coffee Journal, transparency without context doesn’t mean much. “Without context on cost of production and other costs throughout the supply chain, the price paid for coffee is just a number. Think of it like rent: if I told you what I pay for my apartment, the number would be meaningless without knowing more about its size, location, and the general cost of space in my region,” Joseph writes. — Ashley

This article was written by Fionn and edited by Ashley. Thanks for reading!

Coffee likes to tout itself as an ethical enterprise. Almost every coffee roaster, from small, indie brands to multinational corporations, relies on marketing itself as a sustainable player in the coffee industry. That is especially true in the specialty market, which often distinguishes itself as “better”—sourcing better coffee, paying better prices, and doing better for the world—than standard, commodity-grade coffee.

Despite coffee often relying on a moral high ground in its marketing and identity, even taking a political stance when necessary, some have pushed back on the idea that coffee is political. It’s not uncommon to hear things like “stick to coffee” or “coffee shouldn’t be political,” when bringing up politically charged points—witness the reaction on Facebook to what is a fairly neutral article I wrote on tariffs.

The reality, however, is that coffee is political, and the industry is often perfectly fine weighing in on such topics—it just depends on the cause.

Climate change, for example, is inherently political and yet is relatively uncontroversial: Many coffee businesses talk about sustainability initiatives they’re taking to combat changing weather patterns.

Then there are the issues on which the industry stays silent: Take coffee’s continued indifference to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza.

I’ve come back to the subject of coffee’s inaction on Gaza several times over the last 18 months, and while some in the industry have spoken up, the general trend is still one of silence and wilful ignorance. Hopefully, that is beginning to change: On April 14th, David Lalonde of Canadian coffee company Rabbit Hole Roasters launched a fundraiser called Coffee People for Palestine, an invitation for everyone in the industry to get involved and pledge support to the people of Gaza.

The goal of the fundraiser is two-fold: first, to raise money to support The Sameer Project, a mutual aid group that works to get emergency supplies to displaced families in Gaza. Secondly—and perhaps more ambitiously—Lalonde hopes to jolt the coffee industry from its collective slumber and put its ethical posturing to the test.

As of this writing, Coffee People for Palestine has raised over $2,500, and runs until May 15th. You can donate directly here.

Collaborating for a Cause

Lalonde launched the fundraiser in collaboration with Chelsea Thoumsin of the Pollinator Project, who designed the fundraiser’s graphics, as well as organizations from coffee and beyond, including Chris McAuley of Getchusomegear and Stay Bloomin; Heart Roasters of Portland, Oregon; Chicago-based Tabeeb Roasters; and the clothing brand The Keffiyeh Source.

It was important, Lalonde says, to partner with others “to show that I’m not the only coffee person who wants to do something and that I’m not just this weird person screaming into the void.”

As well as to raise money, Lalonde’s goal with the fundraiser is to push the coffee industry to do more. “In a nutshell, [the aim] is to wake up the coffee industry,” he says.

The fundraiser supports the Sameer Project, a London-based initiative run by four Palestinians in the diaspora. They work directly with a team on the ground in Gaza to disperse medical supplies, food and water, diapers and baby formula, and direct cash support.

“The Sameer Project always stood out to me because it's a Palestinian-funded and -run organization that has been on the ground in Gaza since the beginning,” Lalonde says. “So donating to them was really important to me because I know that they will do everything with their people in mind.”

Wake Up

Lalonde hopes his directness will motivate those who have been passive to get engaged. He posted about the fundraiser on his Instagram account, urging people to share and spread widely. The post has over a thousand likes and was shared nearly 700 times.

“Everybody who saw the post that I made [on Instagram] has no excuse now not to do something. I know that this fundraiser is not going to be able to stop [the genocide], but the more people talk about it, the more people know where to look and how to take action."

There is precedent for such action. In 2022, the coffee industry came together in support of Ukraine after the country was invaded by Russia. The Specialty Coffee Association “[stood] in solidarity with the Ukrainian coffee community,” donated ticket sales from World of Coffee, one of the industry’s biggest global events, and barred Russia from participating in the 2022 World Coffee Championships. Companies across the world launched fundraisers to support the Ukrainian coffee community.

In contrast, the SCA—and much of the wider industry—has been silent in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. “The discrepancy between the response from the coffee community when it comes to Ukraine and then Palestine is completely staggering,” Lalonde says. “I know the community can come together because I've seen it before. So what's the excuse?”

With several influential coffee influencers having shared Lalonde’s Instagram post about the fundraiser, Tahani Hassan, co-owner of Tabeeb Roasters with her husband Mohammed Awad, hopes the fundraiser will normalize speaking up. However, there is still a long way to go.

“While the response to our fundraiser has been overwhelmingly positive, there remains a broader reluctance within the coffee community to take decisive action,” Hassan says. “It's clear that many people understand what is right, yet a certain hesitancy persists, preventing them from stepping forward. While we’ve seen some encouraging signs, much work remains.”

Desperate Conditions

Lalonde chose to run the fundraiser through May 15th because it is the commemoration day for the Nakba. Also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, the Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing and destruction of the Palestinian homeland beginning in 1948.

“The Nakba is an enterprise of displacement and replacement of people that continues to this very day,” said Riyad Mansour, the United Nations Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine, at an event at the U.N. headquarters in New York City in 2024.

For the past 19 months, the people of Gaza have lived in desperate conditions, with Israeli forces and civilians periodically blocking outside aid from entering the besieged territory.

The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said in March 2024 that the restrictions on humanitarian aid “may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime.” That same month, the U.N. food agency said that “famine is imminent” in northern Gaza, with 70% of the population experiencing “catastrophic hunger.”

Nine out of 10 people in northern Gaza were eating less than a meal per day in December 2023, according to the World Food Programme. Since October 2023, there have been ongoing reports of children suffering from malnutrition, with Gaza’s ministry of health counting at least 60,000 “at risk of serious health complications due to malnutrition” in April 2025. Israel has not allowed any aid to enter the territory since March 2nd.

It’s not just food: in March 2024, CNN reported that Israel “has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria” on what aid could reach Gaza, with healthcare equipment, sleeping bags, cancer medication and maternity kits blocked from entering. Israel has attacked hospitals to the point that, by February 2024, “every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel; only 13 hospitals are even partially functioning,” according to Annie Sparrow and Kenneth Roth in Foreign Policy.

The Sameer Project has been working within these straitened circumstances to deliver aid on the ground. “We started a small group in April. We thought this was going to be like a month or two. We didn’t have the expectation that the world would watch a genocide go on for over a year,” Sameer Project co-founder Hala Sabbah told Amba Guerguerian of The Indypendent in November 2024.

Altogether, the Sameer Project has raised more than $2.68 million to provide thousands of meals, millions of liters of fresh water, as well as firewood, clothes, tents, shoes, and sanitary protection to displaced Gazans around the territory.

‘Dig a Little Deeper’

The group has several ongoing campaigns targeting different parts of Gaza—one focused on the south, another dedicated to the Refaat Alareer displacement camp, and one focused on the north in collaboration with the Translating Falesteen project. The Coffee People for Palestine fundraiser is supporting the latter initiative in the north of the territory.

Anyone based in the United States or Canada who donates to the fundraiser and sends proof to Lalonde will be entered into a raffle to win a book—“A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict” by Ilan Pappe—as well as coffee, Palestinian olive oil, a keffiyeh, and a tatreez, which is a form of Palestinian embroidery.

This raffle, which closes on April 28th, has two goals: to encourage more people to donate and to showcase Palestinian culture. Lalonde hopes that “all the cultural aspects of the raffle could maybe help people dig a little bit deeper into everything Palestinian.”

Additionally, Lalonde launched a mini-fundraiser through his roastery, selling a coffee called Coffee for Palestine, with all profits going to the Sameer Project.

‘True Solidarity Costs Something’

Going forward, Hassan hopes that the fundraiser can inspire more mobilization and advocacy within the coffee industry and beyond. “We want people to feel empowered to use their voices and act with purpose,” she said. “When the coffee industry stands together for something as important as justice, it can spark a ripple effect that inspires others across industries to do the same”.

Lalonde hopes to see more people take concrete action in addition to advocacy. “We have to do more with the privilege that we have,” he says. “I just want the coffee industry to be not so focused on [things like] particle size distribution and start focusing more on wealth redistribution because we can talk all we want—we always talk a good game in the specialty industry—but words are cheap.”

He also agrees with Hassan that the fundraiser’s success can be a template for the industry moving forward. “The author Cole Arthur Riley said, ‘True solidarity costs something,’” Lalonde says. “We need a sustained movement so that it becomes something bigger and more impactful and more powerful. It’s for Palestine right now, but if we can get this momentum going, I think there’s a place to do way more inside and outside the coffee industry. So yeah—this is not over, people.”

On Monday, one of my professors asked me to speak to a class of undergraduates. He didn’t give me any parameters; he just wanted me to talk about my work and how I approach storytelling and reporting.

I gave a short presentation about why I chose journalism and decided to go back to school to get my master’s (you can find that answer below).

During a Q&A afterwards, one of my former students—I worked with them as a teaching assistant last semester—asked me how I take care of my mental health. I didn’t have a great reply. On a scale of 1-10, I’d probably rate my mental health at about a 3—not ideal, but functioning.

That’s not good, I told the students. I then listed some of the things I do in my free time. I cook. I lift weights, mostly to try to help my brain (if my muscles hurt, then I’m thinking about that, and my intrusive thoughts go away—temporarily, at least). I have a dog, and walking him helps. I watch a lot of basketball. I joked that League Pass (the app that allows me to watch basketball games from all 30 teams in the league) is the only thing keeping me functioning.

I told the students that some of that is simply a function of our current world, and it’s hard not to feel depressed. I also told them that I have unhealthy coping mechanisms—lately, I’ve been buying too many little makeup things at Sephora and Ulta when I’m feeling down.

But those answers didn’t feel like enough. A lot of the coping strategies I mentioned felt superficial, so I really had to dig in and remember, “When was the last time I felt happy?”

A few weeks ago, I drove to Milwaukee. Ahead of baseball’s opening day, I covered new food options at American Family Field, where the Brewers play. I have a friend, Colin, who owns a shop in the city, so I decided to work from there. He eventually showed up with a friend of his, and the friend and I started chatting; eventually, we went to a wine store, and another of their friends joined.

I didn’t stay long, but the four of us had one of those sprawling conversations that felt simultaneously intimate and like it could only have happened among a new group of friends. There was something so spontaneous about this group of people sitting and sipping wine (and water—I was driving!) on a random Thursday, completely unplanned, that felt magical. It reminded me of what I like about being a barista—and the sheer freedom I had to experience the world not just through lazy, post-shift drinks, but by constantly meeting new people and getting a peek into their lives.

As I left the wine shop to head back to Madison, I told Colin that I really needed a day like this. He said he could tell.

Reflecting now on that student’s question, I think the best moments I’ve experienced tending to my mental health are when I identify a thing I need and then take action to make it happen. Lately, I’ve been feeling very alone and isolated, which often prompts the “Why isn’t anyone texting/calling/reaching out to me?” spiral I’m sure all of us have felt. To combat that, I try to reach out to someone in the way I need in that moment.

In a way, I did this by visiting my friend’s shop and asking to shadow them throughout the day. I sometimes let myself get into holes where I desperately wish for someone to pull me out—and I realize that it’s me who needs to extend my arm out rather than wait for someone to grab me.

I stewed on this for days, and pondering this question stuck with me so much that when I finally came up with this answer, I texted my professor. I told him my original answer wasn’t good enough and that if I could tell the students anything else, it’d be to take the action you wish someone would take for you.

I wonder how all of you are taking care of your mental health, both from a tangible perspective (“I do this activity”) and from a mindset one (“I reframe things in this way”)? If you’d like to share, please do in the comments!

Just for fun, I thought I’d share some of the other topics I covered and advice I gave to the students. Some of the stuff I said was very unhinged! But I’m always grateful for the chance to talk candidly about what my (work) life looks like, and the students asked really insightful questions I was excited to reflect on. I want to give those questions more space here:

• One of the things that seemed to resonate the most with the students is that I like writing and journalism because it’s work that makes me not hate myself. This got a laugh from the crowd, but I told them I have plenty of college friends and colleagues who do work that I don’t think makes them feel good. In college, we used to joke that everyone graduated and became investment bankers or consultants—not to say that those can’t be good jobs that contribute positively to society, but I do feel grateful that the goal of journalism is to inform and empower the public. I’m grateful that’s a mission I get to pursue, albeit imperfectly.

• I really tried to push the idea that there is no one “dream job,” at least not in the myopic way that we often describe to young people. You can be happy doing a lot of things, and the things you thought would make you happy might not—what does that mean for your dream?

• I told them I like journalism not because I love writing, but because I love what journalism has afforded me: the chance to meet people, to always be learning, and to travel. Journalism has also allowed me to do freelance work and given me an avenue to leave a 9-5 job if I need to.

• Work is just work. It’s okay not to love it. It’s also okay to make concessions and do what you need to do to survive. We all have to exist under capitalism.

Two big stories dominated coffee news this week.

First, tariffs—sort of.

By now, you’ve almost certainly heard the news that the Trump administration has implemented a series of tariffs against U.S. trading partners, implementing a 10% base rate for most countries and adding additional rates to countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Nicaragua.

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you might have noticed that the places listed above all produce coffee. As you can probably guess, these tariffs have people in the coffee world in a tizzy, questioning what they could mean for pricing and how the industry will navigate trade at what is an already-volatile pricing moment.

The tariffs were set to go into effect Wednesday, but were quickly put on a 90-day hiatus due to public outcry, and after markets plummeted. (The stock market rebounded once Trump announced the tariffs would be paused, although it’s important to note that the 10% base rate still stands.)

I plan to report on this evolving issue more soon, so I don’t want to get too deep into the specifics yet, especially as the situation remains fluid and unpredictable. We’ve also published several tariff stories over at Fresh Cup, including a live tariff tracker made by my publisher, Garrett Oden, and a report from my colleague, Fionn Pooler, in which he talked to stakeholders across the coffee supply chain about how tariffs would impact their lives and businesses.

In the meantime, we’ve seen responses from organizations like the National Coffee Association asking the Trump administration to exempt coffee from tariffs, because we don’t produce enough coffee in the United States. (As Fionn’s article points out, we grow less than 1% of all coffee produced.) Still, I can’t help but feel frustrated to see tariffs get so much attention when coffee pricing has already been in crisis for years.

I wanted to mention tariffs because a) They’re a big deal that’s dominating the news cycle, and b) I think they’re sneakily tied into the second story that dominated my social media feed this past week:

Black & White Coffee Roasters was acquired by FairWave, a private equity-backed organization that has bought nearly a dozen coffee businesses since 2020.

I think it’s important to consider why private equity is obsessed with coffee.

This obsession started long ago, with the acquisition of massive, industry-transforming roasteries like Blue Bottle and Stumptown in the mid-2010s, and it has only picked up from there. PE entered the coffee chat around the time specialty coffee was making inroads in consumer habits. In 2015, the Specialty Coffee Association reported that specialty consumption comprised 55% of the U.S. coffee market.

I remember when these stories first came out. On the one hand, I felt proud of our industry. But I also worried it made us vulnerable to actors who would see specialty only as a market from which to extract value.

The argument for private equity in coffee is generally the same as in other industries: More money will allow these businesses to do more with their sourcing, scale up, and improve workers’ lives. However, we’ve seen very little evidence of the latter claim, at least in any long-term way—I don’t know of any baristas who are on the record as saying, “Since we were acquired, my life is way better!” or farmers who are finally being paid more. I would love for any PE firm to provide data or documentation showing how their money has improved things for the people on the ground (though I suspect that, if they had that data, it would already be splashed all over their company profiles).

If you want to learn more about these dynamics, my astute colleague Fionn Pooler wrote a three-part series on private equity in coffee. One thing he pointed out was how much PE seems willing to shed the talented people who made a business what it was. Companies like frozen coffee capsule producer Cometeer and oat milk brand Oatly essentially developed their reputations in the specialty world on the back of some of the industry’s most talented and trusted workers—many of whom were later let go as profits and growth didn’t hit expected targets.

However, Fionn also acknowledged the professionalization that private equity can provide, such as higher wages and schemes like 401(k)s and paid time off, which are benefits that are lacking in most other specialty coffee jobs.

I find private equity’s interest in coffee to be pretty suspect: Why are these firms so invested in an industry that (for better or for worse) prides itself on being, well, special? The rise of specialty coffee happened due to small, independent coffee shops working with small, single-family farms. So much of the appeal of specialty still comes from this premise: You’re getting single-lot coffees in shops and from roasters with a unique point of view. What makes a specialty experience is the confluence of all these factors.

Ultimately, to feign that a capital-driven business like a private equity firm would operate under any other pretense than making money is bizarre. It’s so weird to me how these firms instead lead with claims of benevolence, like they’re fooling anyone. Wouldn’t it be interesting if FairWave instead made a statement like, “Yeah, we’re just here to acquire companies, and people might get fired if our bet to acquire XYZ business doesn’t work out?”

The bottom line: I think people are right to distrust private equity in coffee—and to be upset when those fears are met with little more than dishonest, PR-polished answers.

These two news stories might seem loosely connected, but I think both deal with narrative spinning, and what kind of messaging we’re being given versus the truths we’ve collected and observed with our own senses. Both have revealing things to say about power structures, and about the regular people who are left behind, or whose livelihoods are crushed, in the process—treated as little more than collateral damage as capital marches on.

What were your thoughts about these two coffee stories? Share your thoughts in the comments—and let me know what other topics you’d like me to report on next.

First, a note: We’re continuing to experience sweeping threats to our civil liberties and rights. Everyone in the United States is owed due process—not just citizens. Our government continues to violate the Constitution by denying due process to the people it’s detained/kidnapped over the last few weeks. Stay vigilant.

Recently, I interviewed Kay Cheon—the newly awarded 2025 United States Barista Champion—for Fresh Cup (that piece will be out tomorrow, April 4). One of the ideas we discussed, but which I left on the cutting-room floor, was the role of themes in coffee competitions.

Barista competitions are tight, 15-minute presentations during which a competitor has to serve four espressos, four milk-based drinks, and four signature drinks. Those drinks are primarily built on stage, all while the contestant presents to a panel of four judges. Usually, competitors find it’s easier to structure their routines around a specific theme, making the sensory experiences they deliver to the judges more coherent.

But during our conversation, Kay and I both agreed that the industry now feels “post-theme.” Because information about coffee is much more available and accessible than it used to be, baristas don’t need to worry as much about making the content of their presentations comprehensible. Instead, they can focus on creating authentic experiences that aren’t so hemmed in by theme.

This idea of themes—of operating within clearly defined, narrow parameters—made me think about how we interpret the world around us more generally, and specifically how we interpret our experiences of coffee.

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve pretended to identify the tasting notes written on a bag of beans, for instance, or completely changed my thoughts about a cup of coffee after being given more information about it—like when a roaster friend commented that a coffee I had been enjoying actually tasted stale. In both instances, I trusted the context given to me by others more than the sensory experience I was having myself.

These experiences brought to mind Susan Sontag’s essential essay, “Against Interpretation.” In the short piece, she argues that trying to figure out the “meaning” behind any given piece of art removes sensory pleasure—that “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’”

Instead of liking or experiencing something for the sake of experience, Sontag writes, we are compelled to figure out a “why,” and attempt to ascribe meaning. “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art,” she writes. “It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”

There are certain parallels here with coffee. Lately, I’ve been wondering if trying to quantify the experience of sipping a freshly brewed cup of coffee robs us of that sensory joy. The idea has been percolating in my mind ever since James Hoffmann made a video using multi-sensory experiences to explain how a great cup of coffee makes him feel. At no point did he reference anything about how the coffee was processed, or which varietal he was drinking.

“Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there,” Sontag writes. In other words, we feel unable to simply revel in something beautiful: Instead, we seek to understand why it’s beautiful, and in attempting to pin it down, risk making it lifeless.

(Not) From Seed to Cup

Of course, Sontag’s argument can’t be neatly mapped onto the whole of coffee: There are aspects of coffee’s cultivation and production that should rightly be treated as a science, and data collection, investment in experimentation, and the application of best growing practices, for example, are all areas where we should seek clarity and definitive answers.

Instead, her argument best applies to the experience of coffee as a beverage, and how we find joy in coffee spaces. What do we give up when we try to intellectualize the cup of coffee in front of us? Quite a lot, as Sontag would argue: “In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art,” she says. Interpretation requires us to put a frame around why we like what we like, and to therefore justify it; it narrows the possible scope of our experience.

If the dilution of sensory pleasure is one result of this approach, then another is a stultifying sameness. I’ve written before about “coffee’s age of average,” and anyone who spends time in specialty coffee shops today can clearly see how much the industry defaults to replication. Coffee businesses expand voraciously but without vision, using a singular template of success without really understanding the magic formula that made it work in the first place.

Sontag sees this pattern, too: “Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have,” she writes.

According to Sontag, the solution to these problems isn’t in totally breaking form—reflexively doing so for the sake of subverting interpretation instead signals an industry or movement in crisis. “But programmatic avant-gardism—which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content—is not the only defense against the infestation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run,” she writes.

So, what can we do instead? If working against interpretation is the goal, I think coffee can learn from the natural wine world, and the way that it embraces a wide range of flavors and production methods while operating outside of traditional varietal constraints.

For coffee shops, this might look like business owners spending more time developing a personal mission and vision, and not simply opening a store to make money or because it looks cool. Expansion for the sake of expansion only results in excess, which makes it harder for us to access and experience real sensory enjoyment.

“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience,” Sontag notes. “All the conditions of modern life —its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”

Looking Inward

I know that I’m stretching Sontag’s argument in a direction she wouldn’t have envisioned, but I like seeing what shakes loose in the process. Her warnings about using interpretation as a placeholder for understanding, and creating things that don’t serve people, feel very relevant for the coffee industry. Her arguments also resonate within my own life, and in the work that I do.

I recently told a friend that I’m the opposite of mysterious: I wear all my emotions on my sleeve. As a writer, I always strive for clarity, and I feel preoccupied with how people will read my words. My editor, reading this now, knows how often I attempt to justify my ideas in anticipation of being interpreted incorrectly. Luckily for me, she edits out most of that circular justification work.

It makes me wonder: What would I create if I weren’t so afraid of being misinterpreted? How might I transcend that striving to be clearly understood, which means only working within the confines of scrutability? In my journalistic work, of course, clear communication is important—but I’m interested in how I can also produce work that defies some of these boundaries.

Sontag reminds us that it’s enough to experience pleasure without context. We don’t always need to find some theme or through line to make our ideas legible. We don’t need to understand what makes a certain coffee shop feel magical. We can simply enjoy a cup of coffee without asking why.

This week was my birthday, so I wanted to take a break, but I also wanted to explore a topic I find fascinating: how does coffee flavor evolve over time?

In 2022, I wrote an article for Trade Coffee called "Does Coffee Taste the Same as It Did Five Years Ago?" inspired by a conversation I think I was eavesdropping on. I can't remember who said it, but I distinctly remember dropping in on a talk and hearing someone remark that coffees from Ethiopia don't taste the same as they did five years ago.

At the time, that comment blew my mind. I had only been a barista for a year or two (I think—speaking of birthdays, it's so strange to be at an age where years and timeframes just run into one another. It's hard to pinpoint exactly sometimes when something happened) and to know that I would never experience the flavors this person was speaking to broke my heart.

I also didn't understand how coffee's flavor could change so drastically. At the time, I didn't totally grasp what impacted the taste of coffee. This would have been in the early 2010s, and basic connections, like how processing (is the cherry of the coffee seed fully removed or left to dry on the bean) affected flavor, was still very new to me.

I also had no clue how climate change would impact flavor, nor did I understand just how critical of an issue climate change would be when it comes to coffee. Last week, in his newsletter, my colleague Fionn highlighted a study from the United Nations that shows that climate change has both lowered yields and driven up the commodity price of coffee. Perhaps this isn't surprising to read if you're a regular Boss Barista reader, but seeing such findings codified by such a visible global organization was comforting (more people are catching on to how critical the issue is) and discouraging (perhaps we're far too late).

Anyway, what did you folks think about the idea that coffee changes flavor over time? Have you ever had a coffee that tasted stunning one year and was very different the next? As I read the Trade piece I wrote in 2022, I felt embarrassed I omitted mention of George Howell, arguably the first person to study the evolution of flavor over time by freezing green coffee beans from specific harvests.

Howell treats certain harvests like vintages, and by freezing them, he preserves the flavor and gives roasters and coffee enthusiasts an interesting data point to consider. Did that coffee from Honduras taste different last year? If we know a weather event happened in Kenya last year, can we study two harvests side-by-side and see how that event impacted the final cup? Because coffee pricing is tied to quality, these are essential questions to consider and try to answer.

Thanks for giving me a break and being patient with me. I'd love to hear from you.

This conversation was nearly a year in the making.

Peace Sakulclanuwat has been in the coffee industry for more than a decade. I interviewed her last year, right after she won second place at the U.S. Brewers Cup Championships in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Peace used a blend featuring coffee from Thailand, which is still uncommon in the competition (although a growing number of competitors are using coffees from undersung origins like Vietnam and Myanmar).

Peace is originally from Thailand, and one of her missions is giving Thai coffee a bigger platform. In our conversation, she shares more about Thailand’s coffee-growing and -consuming scene, and we discuss how coffee competitions create demand for and interest in regions that may otherwise get overlooked.

Peace is also an educator for Coffee Project NY (we had founders Chi Sum Ngai and Kaleena Teoh on the podcast before), and she describes how special it is to work with coffee grown where you are from—and how rapidly Thai coffee quality has improved.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Ashley: What was your first memory of coffee? Did you grow up with it at all?

Peace: No. My first memory of coffee is going to Starbucks and getting the Caramel Macchiato. I didn’t even know the difference between a latte and a cappuccino. I just knew I wanted to drink coffee and it tasted good.

But how did I get into coffee? My personal experience in terms of hospitality: My family owned a restaurant back in Thailand. So I grew up helping my parents run the restaurant—serving people, doing all the money, counting, taking orders. I think that is in my blood, right?

But it was never a thing I considered as my professional career, because coming from an Asian-oriented family, my parents wanted me to work in a white-collar job, stable-income job, working in the office. They didn’t foresee me working, running around sweating, cooking or brewing coffee for people.

When we moved here [to New York], my mom owned two restaurants, and before I graduated from my college, she asked me if I could help manage one of the restaurants for her. I did that for about two years, but then the restaurant closed.

My ex-partner at the time—I mention her because she was a person who really pushed me to where I am today, so I want to give her credit for that—she’s like, “Okay, let’s think about what do you want to do in life? What do you enjoy doing the most right now? Don’t think two or three years ahead. Just think about what you want to do right now.”

I said, “We really enjoy going to different cafes, trying different coffees, enjoying the New York lifestyle and socializing with people.” Then she asked, “Do you want to try working in coffee?” That’s how my coffee journey began.

Ashley: How’d you end up at Coffee Project?

Peace: Coffee Project happened when I was working at Starbucks Reserve Roastery. I was full-time there, and I started to feel I’m losing my passion for coffee.

I asked myself, “Okay, how long can I do this for?” And even though the income was good, I was stable, and I had very good benefits, but I needed to find something to light a fire in myself again.

I came across Coffee Project when I saw an Instagram post from the owners that they were looking for a part-time barista. I always wanted to work at a place where they roast their own coffee, they source their own coffee. They also offered a training program and they were about to open their first roastery in Long Island City. So, I sent my application and got hired as a part-time barista at their Brooklyn location.

I started at Coffee Project as a part-time barista, while maintaining my full-time position at Starbucks Reserve Roastery. So I worked seven days straight, but I didn’t feel tired or exhausted at all—making pour-overs, working behind the bar and talking to people again brought me so much joy, and lightened up my fire in coffee again. Eventually, Sum and Kaleena [the owners of Coffee Project] asked me to come on full-time to manage their East Village location, and now I’m an educator and a trainer at the roastery and SCA training lab in the Long Island City location.

Ashley: When did you start exploring coffees from Thailand?

Peace: That started back in 2018. I saw a post on Facebook from one of the coffee farms that I’ve been following in Thailand, in Chiang Rai. They’re an Indigenous group of people who grow coffee in northern Thailand. The owner inherited his coffee farm from his parents, so he took over.

They were looking for volunteers to do this program to come up to the farm and learn about coffee processing—you get to live as a coffee farmer for two or three weeks in Thailand.

Those two, three weeks were probably the best experience in my life that I ever had, and I wish I could go back and do that again. That’s how I started learning to love Thai coffee: First of all, it’s connected with my origin. Second of all, I feel like not everyone gets to use coffee from the country they’re from—and I started thinking about using Thai coffee for competition.

The first year I competed, in 2019, I didn’t have enough time to source Thai coffee for the qualifying competition. When that ended, I thought, “Okay, how can I make myself better as a competitor—and how do I stay true to myself, to my own identity?”

I didn’t qualify for the national competition, but someone gave up their spot, so I got to compete in the U.S. Brewers Cup Championships—and I used a coffee from Thailand. I was proud of my performance. I was able to deliver everything that I wanted to do. I wanted to showcase Thai coffee. I even used Thai music as my background music.

I placed 17th, but now I was like, “I want to continue competing. I can stay true to my own identity, but I need to know how to play the game better.”

Ashley: You continued competing, and in 2024, you won second place in the U.S. Brewers Cup Championship with a coffee blend that was part-Thai, part-Colombian. What did that taste like?

Peace: With the Thai coffee, I remember the first sip: Right off the bat, it tasted like strawberry jam. Super sweet. Very strawberry. I used a CT62 Dripper, the dripper that the Taiwanese Brewers Cup Champion used in 2022 or 2023. I also used a Paragon, which chills the extraction to emphasize aromatic compounds and enhance sweetness. And, this blend happened to be the perfect combination for this brewing method.

Originally, I wanted to use 100% Thai coffee, but it lacked complexity in acidity. It was sweet and had a really nice mouthfeel. Until one of the Coffee Project owner’s friends, Ibrahim from The Espresso Lab in Dubai, sent us a bunch of competition-level coffee they weren’t using.

So he sent us a lot of samples; they were all Gesha coffees. When we had the coffee on the table, we were like, “Oh, this is how it feels when you have so many good options on the table, but you don’t know what to pick!” I was so overwhelmed, and I had my Thai coffee on the table. I was trying to decide if I should blend the Thai coffee with any of these Geshas or not.

It turned out that this Colombian Maragogype from La Negrita they sent was the perfect blend for my Thai coffee; they complemented each other in a balanced way. The majority of the blend is Colombia Maragogype: I’m using 12 grams of the Colombia Maragogype and then 3 grams of the Thai Java.

These are the notes I gave to the judges for this blend: The aroma is floral like coffee blossom, cherry, nectarine, and purple grape. And then for the flavor, it tastes like nectarine, golden raisin, Rainier cherry, rum, and strawberry. The sweetness is sugar sweetness, like cane sugar, and fruity sweetness, like ripe Asian pear and strawberry jam.

Ashley: Why do you think we don’t see as much Thai coffee in the specialty industry?

Peace: I think the majority of coffee produced in Thailand is pretty much consumed domestically. So the farmers mainly focus on their production, and then selling it to the coffee shops inside Thailand.

The quality is still a work in progress, but it’s improving. Nowadays, almost every coffee shop in Thailand serves Thai coffee on their menu. Coffee competitions have had a significant impact on the industry worldwide, and now some Thai coffee competitors are using Thai beans on international stages. Thai producers are also focusing on improving coffee processing by introducing new technologies and innovations to elevate their products. Additionally, many experts from outside the country have been coming in to educate farmers and help improve quality.

The producer of my Thai Java coffee was actually the first coffee producer in Thailand to grow the Gesha variety.

Ashley: It seems like quality has gone up pretty significantly in a short period of time?

Peace: Yeah. Very short period of time. I would say maybe four to five years ago. I think a lot of that has to do with competition. When a Thai competitor goes to compete on the world stage, some of them choose Thai coffee to compete with.

When I got second place in 2024, the farm I sourced my coffee from reached out to me and asked, “Do you mind if we share your video and share your recipe?”

It’s really rewarding to see people in Thailand recognize and appreciate the work I’m putting in. It feels great to showcase their work on behalf of them.

Ashley: Are you going to compete again?

Peace: I think so—I think so. I was debating after they announced the winners. I looked over at everyone, and I’m like, “I don’t know if I should go again because this year is probably the most exhausting year. I don’t know if I can do this again.”

But everybody said to me, “You’re this close. You need to just cross the finish line.”

I think I’m gonna go again, and I’m still going to use Thai coffee, but we’ll see if I have to blend it or not. I would prefer not to if I can find a very good one. I have to stay true to myself.

Ashley: What did it mean to you to be able to use Thai coffee on the competition stage?

Peace: Well, first of all, I think it represents myself. I got the chance to see coffee grow with the coffee farmer back home, and see all the work that they do. I want to showcase their work and push Thai coffee to be recognized wider in the coffee industry.

I think Asian coffee in general never gets to have that fame or recognition compared to other growing regions in the world. I want to be that small part to make it possible.

I think competition is a great way to grab attention. When you win—or even when you place well—people become curious about the coffee that a competitor uses. After I took second place, for example, even though I didn’t win, people still approached me asking, “What coffee did you use?”

To me, I feel like this is my mission, because I now have the opportunity to share and educate people more about how good Thai coffee can be. I strongly believe that, in the future, it will continue to grow and gain recognition.

First, a quick note: It looks like we now live in a country where you can be arrested for expressing your points of view. That is not democracy, nor is it freedom of speech. Mahmoud Khalil should be free, and his arrest should make plain to us all what this government is willing to do to dissenters. Contact your representatives and let them know how you feel about this threat to democracy.

In 2023, I interviewed unionizing workers at Madison Sourdough, a bakery near me, for a local publication ( we also had a separate conversation on the Boss Barista podcast). Spencer Schlenker, one of the company’s bakers, said something during the interview that has stuck with me ever since:

“Some people might say you don’t need a union if your workplace is good. But even if the contract we signed just kept things the way they are, there’s value in that.”

Schlenker’s comment reveals something crucial in how we think—or don’t think—about unions. I’m still surprised by how many people question why a group of workers would form a union, as if only outright abuse or mistreatment could justify doing so. This hunt for a smoking gun, or disbelief that a union could exist for any other reason, feels frustrating, like a time-wasting distraction.

And we don’t have time to waste. Amidst the active threat of weakening labor laws, we need to lead with the idea that unions are simply allowed to exist. They do not need a specific justification, and aren’t only meant to respond to work conditions we view as undesirable.

Employees have the baseline right to form unions, full stop. It’s time to stop asking why—and to start recognizing their inherent value.

Sign the Contract

When you break it down to its simplest form, a union is a contract. It’s a set of guidelines brokered by employees and employers to dictate how their workplace will operate.

Of course, that’s a very broad understanding, and like any contract, things can get complicated. But per Schlenker’s point, a contract doesn’t have to be anything more than saying, “Let’s define the current work landscape—and commit to that for X number of years until we sign a new contract.”

This framing is all the more pertinent because, from my experience, contracts are rare in low-wage or hourly jobs. Usually, you’re hired quickly and onboarded with a verbal agreement or a handshake. Meanwhile, 49 out of 50 states in the U.S. give companies the right to terminate your employment “at will,” meaning they do not need to provide cause (discriminatory practices is one exception).

In contrast, think about how many so-called “rich-people jobs” require contracts. Actors sign contracts when they agree to work on a movie, whether or not it’s ever released; athletes sign contracts to play for teams and get paid even if they get hurt.1 In coffee, just look at Brian Niccol, the current CEO of Starbucks, who signed a contract when he took on the position late last year; I encourage you to check it out for yourself.

Besides the gross amount of money Niccol is promised (including $75 million in equity, called a Replacement Grant, to replace the equity he lost by forfeiting shares from his previous employer, Chipotle), the contract plainly lays out all the monetary conditions of his job, including his salary and what happens if he’s terminated.

I’m not arguing against the use of such contracts. But they’re arguably more essential for waged workers. Waged workers are significantly more endangered by losing their jobs or changing workplace conditions than millionaires are by losing money. And shift workers face even more dangerous instability. They might work 40 hours one week and 20 the next; we’ve seen Starbucks target unionizing workers with just this tactic, reducing their hours without notice.

We seem all too comfortable telling low-wage workers they need none of the protections that the rich utilize to protect their money.Why is it so difficult to offer hourly workers the same guardrails around their employment? And in the absence of those protections, why is it so hard to believe that unions can be an essential way to codify terms of employment?

Logistically Unsound

On his former Apple television show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” pundit Jon Stewart pointed out that the American government offers a lot of protections to corporations that are inaccessible to everyday working people.

“When corporations fail, you pay for it. But when they succeed, it’s theirs,” he says. “They socialize their losses and privatize their gains [...] Government intervention for corporations is the free market, but government intervention for workers is socialism.”

Stewart is certainly not the first person to point out this discrepancy, but it only further demonstrates that we’re very comfortable giving rich people and moneyed interests as many safety nets as possible, all while bristling when regular people ask for the same. We’re not even comfortable with the idea that regular people need protections when they have a “good workplace” (a subjective and hard-to-define target in itself).

This tension came up during former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s testimony in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in 2023 (I revisited the hearing in a recent piece pondering whether Starbucks is doomed). Schultz kept emphasizing how good he believed workers had it at Starbucks. In his mind, unions were clearly only for “bad companies.”

It might be that Starbucks offers workers more perks than other comparable employers, but we’ve recently seen those so-called benefits be taken away as punishment:

In 2022, workers at a unionizing store in Oklahoma City say management implied that trans healthcare benefits would be taken away from unionized stores. Starbucks also implied that unionized stores would lose protection for workers who live in the U.S. under DACA, and issued threats that unionized workers could not transfer stores (an important perk for many, especially college students). After one store in Indiana unionized, a worker tweeted that all their safety mats were thrown in the trash.

It’s clear that we need to move past this binary narrative when we talk about workplaces and unions. And yet, I see it come up again and again when people write and talk about collective bargaining, even among commenters who are generally supportive of union efforts

I don’t believe suddenly having a contract is a silver bullet that will solve all workplace problems. After all, we’ve seen rich people manipulate the legal system in myriad ways, including “waiting out” waged opponents who can’t afford to sit back for years as court cases slowly progress.

But I do think we have to reappraise what we think unions are for—and to do that, we need to consider why certain systems are in place. Why do the rich benefit from policies that are vehemently fought against for working-class people? Why does Brian Niccol get a contract for his job, but many coffee workers aren’t afforded the same?

And why do we think unions need to justify their existence amidst these baseline conditions?

I’ve used wine as a point of comparison for coffee for almost my entire career.

Back when I worked as a barista, I reached for it all the time. Whenever customers looked at a bag of beans and inquired about the tasting notes—“Is this coffee actually hazelnut- or lavender-flavored?”—I’d tell them the notes were like a wine label: suggestions of flavors they might taste in the drink rather than a literal list of added flavorings.

Mostly, I used wine as a way to justify specialty coffee’s price point—and existence. When customers balked at the price of a cup of coffee, I’d exclaim, “Well, you’d pay double that for a glass of wine at a bar!” Usually, that got a nod of acknowledgment, but still, most people bristled.

There are a lot of reasons why comparing wine to coffee makes sense. Wine grapes and coffee beans are both agricultural products that are typically harvested just once per year, meaning they are at the mercy of climate events and changing weather patterns. Both come from fruit (coffee beans are actually the seeds of a cherry-like berry). And both are regularly portrayed in popular culture as gate-kept and snobby domains.

I’m thinking of April Ludgate’s fake entry into a wine-tasting competition in the sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” or when comedian Nate Bargatze detailed his difficulty ordering iced coffee during a recent special. He joked that his wife had to write out her coffee order, which he showed to the barista because he “can’t pronounce” some of the words.

But there are also a lot of reasons why the metaphor falls flat. Wine arrives to consumers as a finished product, unlike coffee beans. There’s much more scholarship and documentation of wine throughout history (which reveals something about how we view and value wine, a product of the so-called “Global North,” versus coffee, a colonial commodity extracted from countries in the “Global South”). And let’s face it: Wine has alcohol, so there’s a different value proposition for consumers versus coffee.

(As a side note, it seems like we’re generally disposed to correlate alcoholic content with value. I’m thinking back to a podcast episode I produced with my former colleague, Bryan Roth, about the connection between ABV percentages and price. One of the guests interviewed rightly pointed out that lagers are technically more complex to brew than IPAs; still, because IPAs generally have higher ABVs, customers are content with paying a higher price than they would for lagers.))

Throughout my career, I’ve seen coffee professionals—myself included—use wine’s standing and marginal similarities to coffee as a way to bolster the latter’s value, and encourage mainstream acceptance of higher prices.

Recently, I began to wonder, “What would that actually look like? What would coffee cost if it were priced like wine?”

I started doing some math. I had to make a lot of assumptions and guesses, but even using estimates that favored wine, I found that if we compare wine to coffee, gram to gram, a bag of coffee would need to be four times more expensive than it currently is to be worth the same as a bottle of wine.

Here’s how I came up with that number:

A bottle of wine is 750 milliliters, a volumetric measurement. First, I needed to convert milliliters to grams, a weight measurement. Wine is slightly less dense than water because of its alcohol content, so a 750mL bottle of wine is roughly 758g of liquid (again, this is a rough estimate and changes based on alcohol content).

I wanted to know how much a gram of wine would cost, which meant deciding on an average bottle cost. Again, this varies, so I tried to work within rough categories: If a bottle of wine costs $15, what would I expect a bag of beans of analogous quality to cost? I decided to compare a $15 bottle to a $20 bag of beans.

I divided $15 by 758 and got 0.01978. I rounded that up to 0.02. A gram of wine costs about two cents.

Coffee was a little trickier. I started with $20 for a 12oz bag, but then I needed to figure out how many grams of brewed coffee that bag would yield. Using a 1:16 ratio of coffee beans to water, I figured I could brew 13 12oz cups of coffee per bag. (12 ounces is roughly 340 grams, so you’d need about 22 grams of coffee to brew each cup. I rounded up to 25 to account for waste; 340 grams divided by 25 gets you 13.6.)

Next, I multiplied 13.6 by 340 and got 4,624—that’s the total amount of liquid coffee you can get from a 12oz bag of beans. I divided $20 by 4,624 and got the per gram value: 0.00432, or less than half a cent per gram.

If I applied the value of wine (two cents a gram) to coffee, that $20 bag would cost around $90.

Clearly, I made many assumptions when doing these calculations. I also tended to skew the numbers so that the gap between the value of wine and coffee was smaller, not bigger. My math problem also doesn’t take into account how coffee and wine are served—I only looked at prices from a retail, take-home perspective—nor the fact that serving and producing wine requires overhead and licensing that coffee doesn’t.

We in the coffee industry often reach towards wine as a way to justify specialty practices and prices. But does it serve coffee to tether it to a beverage that exists in a wildly different cultural (and financial) context? If there is anything that this small thought experiment proves, it is that coffee is a beverage that needs its own lexicon—and deserves a value system that doesn’t rely on faulty comparison.

I once joked to someone that if former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz had recognized the first stores to unionize in 2021, he would have won a Nobel Peace Prize.

I don’t actually know if that’s true, nor do I think he’d deserve it if it did happen. But I do wonder where Starbucks would be now if Schultz had responded differently to the unionization groundswell that began in Buffalo more than three years ago. If he had, Starbucks might have a clearer idea about what kind of company it is today, and how to position itself in an increasingly competitive coffee landscape.

Because I’m starting to think that Starbucks is fucked.

Starbucks’ brutal repression of its union movement—it has received hundreds of citations from the National Labor Relations Board, and has thus far failed to come to a deal with any of its more than 500 unionized locations—has resulted in several years of bruising publicity. In the process, the chain has alienated scores of customers who might have otherwise connected with its supposedly progressive ideals.

Likewise, many of new CEO Brian Niccol’s initiatives have seemingly failed to win back large shares of its customer base. Niccol launched a campaign in September 2024 to bring the brand “back to Starbucks.” While some of his initiatives make sense—like getting rid of overly complex menu options, and eliminating drink deals that overwork baristas—some of his ideas have fallen flat or faced pushback, like getting baristas to write shoppers’ names on their cups with Sharpies or banning non-customers from using the bathroom.

Although the chain claims that the campaign is being positively received, recently filed Q1 sales indicate that both “global comparable store sales” and “North America and U.S. comparable store sales” have declined by 4%. Meanwhile, MSN reported that Niccol “is set to earn $10 million in bonuses for just six months on the job.”

Most recently, Starbucks seems to have made itself a new enemy. Following a lawsuit filed last week by Andrew Bailey, the attorney general of Missouri, the chain now appears to be in the crosshairs of Trump-supporting Republicans.

I think back to that union moment in 2021 because, in hindsight, it seems like a pivotal turning point for the company. Right now, Starbucks is combatting union workers while earning the ire of conservative legislators and witnessing declining sales. The brand exists in a liminal state, one where it’s simultaneously fighting entities across the political spectrum, seemingly without any clear vision of what it stands for and values.

Companies without a clear vision of what they want to do fail. I’m starting to wonder if this moment marks the beginning of the brand’s inevitable—and irreversible—decline.

#1 (AND ONLY) ENEMY

For decades, Starbucks’ only real enemy was specialty coffee shops. The worst thing you could say about the megachain was that it was a corporate brand that roasted its beans to hell and likely shortchanged farmers for their coffee.

This is not to diminish the latter argument, because it’s important, so let’s give it some context: Starbucks isn’t transparent about what it pays for coffee. Three years ago, I wrote about the paradox of coffee pricing, and the most recent reporting I could find about Starbucks’ prices came from a 2019 Sprudge article written by Zac Cadwalader:

“[Starbucks’] average yearly prices for 2012, 2013, and 2014 [were] $2.56, $1.92, and $1.72, respectively. For context, the average yearly C-market prices for 2011 (when many of the Starbucks contracts would have been signed) through 2014 are $2.53, $1.75, and $1.26.”

Basically, Starbucks’ prices seem to hover just above the C-market, literally a few cents above the lowest amount it can pay. However, I’d argue this wasn’t much of a customer concern, nor should it be: If it was this hard for me, a coffee expert and journalist, to find this information, then we can’t reasonably expect most consumers to do the same.

Rather, I point this out to demonstrate that for years, Starbucks had no one to worry about except specialty shops. Even then, I think the distinction most customers made between the chain and independent shops was down to size (corporate versus small) and coffee quality.

Even when specialty seemed to be the only enemy, Starbucks noticed. Over the years, it has attempted to co-opt many specialty drinks and practices, like offering lighter roasts (Blonde Roast came out in 2017) and debuting drinks like the flat white in 2015 and the cortado just a few weeks ago.

While many of these launches missed the mark—the brand’s version of the cortado is so ridiculous that I asked one of the writers at Fresh Cup to delve deeper into it—it was hard to categorically hate on Starbucks. And that’s because of the perks and benefits it offered workers, many of which remain uncommon in small, specialty coffee businesses.

Starbucks offers healthcare coverage to employees working 20 or more hours a week, a significant perk in an industry that’s used part-time workers as a reason not to invest more in healthcare for baristas. Starbucks also provides gender-affirming care for transgender employees as part of its coverage. When I’d talk to people who worked at Starbucks about the company, their responses were generally, “The coffee is eh, but my healthcare and benefits are great.” I’d hear workers say they could make careers in coffee because of these policies.

A COFFEE BRAND WE USED TO KNOW

At least those were the kinds of sentiments I used to hear—but that was before Starbucks started weaponizing its most progressive policies against union workers.

In 2022, workers at a unionizing store in Oklahoma City say management implied that trans healthcare benefits would be taken away from unionized stores. Starbucks also implied that unionized stores would lose protection for workers who live in the U.S. under DACA, and issued threats that unionized workers could not transfer stores (an important perk for many, especially college students). After one store in Indiana unionized, a worker tweeted that all their safety mats were thrown in the trash.

All of this falls under a larger umbrella of alleged union-busting tactics. More than 500 stores have unionized since 2021, and not a single one has been able to work with the company to reach a first contract. In December, Starbucks Workers United launched a multi-store nationwide strike over disagreements about wage increases—or the lack thereof—that the company proposed during negotiations. Two weeks ago, both parties agreed to bring in a mediator to push negotiations forward.

Given Starbucks’ treatment of its workers, it’s worth questioning where the brand’s supposedly progressive policies came from in the first place. How much does Starbucks believe in their merit, when they’re immediately weaponized to punish workers who rally together?

I thought this quote from Mila Wade, a barista at a Starbucks in Indiana, provided a good summary of what’s happening. In talking about Starbucks’ healthcare plan, she told Vice: “...it definitely feels like they are using [their healthcare benefits] to continue to market their allegedly progressive image and have this captive workforce of highly-exploited, very poor trans people.”

This tension between progressivism and control came to a head during Schultz’s testimony in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in 2023. Schultz was called in to talk about alleged anti-union activity at Starbucks, and it seemed like he took even the idea of a union at Starbucks as a personal affront.

During the hearing, Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota noted that Schultz seemed “personally offended or insulted that anyone would question you or your company. It seems as if you feel that only bad companies should be unionized.”

But perhaps the most telling moment came when he was questioned by Sen. Mitt Romney, who pointed out how ironic it was that he and fellow Republican senators were essentially defending Schultz during the hearing. Schultz—a guy who’d considered running for president in 2020, but was nervous he’d siphon off votes from the Democrats and contribute to a Trump win—was now being fawned over by the right wing.

LOSING VALUE

But that was two years ago. Now, any goodwill that Republicans had for Starbucks seems to have vanished.

On February 11, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state against Starbucks, alleging that the megachain engaged in “systemic racial, sexual, and sexual orientation discrimination.” The lawsuit comes in the wake of the current administration’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

The lawsuit claims that “since 2020, Starbuck’s workface [sic] has become more female and less white,” and because of that, customers have to “pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services.”

The AG offers no evidence for the latter claim; he cites employment demographic information for the former. In 2020, Starbucks’ employment numbers show that 47% of workers identified as Black, Indigenous, or people of color; in 2024, the percentage dipped to 46.5%.

Despite the fact that the percentage of Starbucks’ non-white employees has slightly decreased, Bailey asserts that the company makes hiring decisions based on “non-merit considerations,” which “will skew the hiring pool towards people who are less qualified to perform their work.”

Obviously, this is a bunch of nonsense. The AG’s arguments make no sense, and appear driven by ideological extremism and flawed anecdotal evidence. (I could see this guy saying something dumb like, “There are only women working at my local Starbucks, so that means they’re sexist!”) His argument also fails to consider that service jobs tend to skew less white and employ more women—not because of discriminatory practices against white people, but long-standing discriminatory practices against Black people and women.

But given how quickly other brands like Target have dropped their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, I wonder how seriously we should take Bailey’s threat—or whether this will prompt Starbucks to abandon its own progressive policies.

If Starbucks does so, will employees stick around? The company is already experiencing customer complaints due to understaffing and long wait times, so what would an even further diminished workforce mean? Arguably, if Starbucks capitulates to conservative demands, we could see a departure of the labor force that made its success and rapid expansion possible.

NO VISION

I’m not advocating for Starbucks to fall in line with our two-party political system. Years ago, I wrote about how Starbucks acts like it’s too big to fail, and I wonder sometimes if that’s actually true. Right now, the biggest challenge facing Starbucks isn’t down to one financial quarter, one negotiation, or one lawsuit—it’s figuring out what the company stands for at all.

Without clarity on its vision and intent, Starbucks continues to shed allies and fight battles on multiple fronts. With the company’s profits in free fall, Niccol and the entire Starbucks corporate team are making reactive decisions based on what they think will immediately make money rather than longer-term strategies rooted in clearly stated values.

From what I’ve observed, these kinds of companies—without a vision, without a mission—are the ones that fail. I can only say that I wish for that not to be the case for the sake of Starbucks’ workforce.

Niccol’s gimmicky campaigns have all been rooted in the idea of getting “back to Starbucks,” imbued with a nostalgia for the era that made the brand one of the largest retail coffee chains in the world. But perhaps what made Starbucks successful all along was its investment in people—and no amount of naive yearning for an idealized past will course-correct a company that can’t recognize that.

That was something I’d never heard of an importer doing before.

“Limit # of sources in order to increase purchase commitments, consolidate shipments, [and] gain better understanding of place and people,” the slide read.

Coffee is plagued by incorrect assumptions about what customers want, which shape how roasters engage with farmers. In a piece I wrote in 2023, I referenced an interview that previous Boss Barista podcast guest Namisha Parthasarathy conducted with Tim Wendelboe, a former World Barista Champion. He talked about how consumers don’t entirely dictate coffee taste preferences. Rather, as retailers and roasters, we have a lot of agency over what our customers demand.

Reading Kevin’s slideshow raised questions about how we tie sourcing practices to customer demand. Furthermore, it made me question how much effort we put into making sourcing beneficial to farmers. So I contacted him to chat about why he only sources from two countries, what it means to make longstanding commitments to coffee producers, and how he tries to remove the burden of the ongoing coffee price crisis from consumers.

Below is a transcribed interview with Kevin, which I did back when I was still recording podcast episodes for Boss Barista. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ashley:  Kevin, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

Kevin: Sure. Hi, my name is Kevin Joanisse and I am the owner and sole operator of Lulo Coffee, which is a micro roastery based outside of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. And I specialize in working with specialty coffees from Colombia and Costa Rica.

Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Kevin: Um, not particularly, to be honest. I don’t have many memories of trying coffee at a young age. My parents drank Folgers or whatever—it was definitely something routine, not given a second thought.

I worked a little more closely with coffee in the hospitality industry and bars and restaurants. But even there, I wasn’t so close to coffee. It was more of a means to an end.

Ashley: At what point did you have a moment with coffee that made you think, “Oh, this is something I want to work with?”

Kevin: That moment happened to me in 2016 in Antigua, Guatemala. I was having an espresso from a roastery/cafe—if I can remember, I think it’s Java Coffee or something like that. I had been traveling in Latin America on and off for many years at that point. And that was the first time that I had a delicious espresso in a coffee-producing country.

And it just really opened my eyes to what coffee could be.

After that trip to Guatemala—I had been working in Western Canada in resorts in the Rockies, and the slow season was coming up over winter (during those days, I’d travel in the winter and work in the summer)—I started finding and messaging coffee producers on Instagram, asking, “Hey, do you mind if I come and learn about what you do?”

I was greeted with unanimous responses of positivity, but one farm in particular stood out to me. I was drawn to Huila in Colombia, and that’s how I met the producer behind Finca Alcatraz—his name is Wilfredo Ule Vargas.

I went down and just visited him on his farm for a few days. He’s meticulous—he showed me how important humidity is on the drying bed and problems that might occur if it’s too hot and so much more. I then worked for Selva Coffee, a green coffee company based out of Tarrazu, Costa Rica. It was there that I really got a sense of how the specialty coffee trade works, and I went back for a second season in 2020.

It was then that I fell off a cliff on their farm and ended up breaking my hip quite badly. It was this whole whirlwind of being rushed to a hospital for surgery, and I actually ended up on a medevac back to Canada a few days later. During my recovery in Canada was when I knew I needed to start a roastery in Ottawa.

Ashley: That’s a wild story.

Kevin: It rocked my world. I had been used to working in these remote areas of Canada, climbing mountains on my days off. For a little while there, I felt really lost. I had no idea when I would be able to walk again.

So I had no idea what my life was going to be, but I had all these coffee seeds planted, if you will, and I knew who I wanted to work with. I had already met them. So the first thing I did was try to figure out how to get these coffees up to Canada.

Ashley: One of the things that you mentioned is that you kind of started your roastery with the idea in mind that you already knew who you wanted to work with—that seems like a unique approach.

Kevin: Yeah. I saw how many opportunities there were to dilute or change the supply chain without everyone’s consent. I saw that the most stable way to consistently work with the people that you wanna work with is by actually commercializing their product to the end consumer.

Ashley: Say more about that.

Kevin: What I’ve noticed is there’s a general call in the specialty industry for people to pay more for coffee and for coffee to be valued properly, right? And I just kind of never really saw that as the problem of the final consumer.

It’s actually not the final consumer that has a problem with the price, but it could be one of the potentially many actors within that supply chain that would then present a problem with that transaction.

I think that I can say now, four years in, that I was right because I basically committed myself to working with certain people, having a high level of traceability and absolutely dedicating myself to the quality of the roast of these coffees. People have been enjoying them ever since.

Ashley: I’m imagining this process is working to eliminate as much of the middle parts as possible, right?

Kevin: Exactly. Let me also explain how I was roasting at that time. I started with a 1kg electric roaster. I actually started in my parents’ garage, still in recovery, still with my crutches.

And so when you’re roasting with the one-kilo coffee roaster, it just doesn’t warrant these types of purchases that are on a pallet—I was buying, like, 30 kilos of coffee at a time.

At the start I was actually shipping coffees via DHL and sending farmers money via PayPal. Now everything has changed to where I’m at today, but that’s definitely how I got started. And it was kind of putting a lot of faith in the value proposition that people actually want direct-trade coffee.

Ashley: Direct trade is one of those concepts, too, that has no formal definition. Can you talk a little bit about what that meant for you?

Kevin: For me, direct trade, I mean it as literally as possible. Although the company has grown, the direct nature still hasn’t changed. I’m going to each farm and talking to each producer and agreeing on a price together for their coffees and then facilitating as directly as possible.

Some of that is because we started with a shoestring operation, but as we’ve grown, other actors have become involved, but only in ways that are necessary. We’re trying not to hand off too much responsibility to anyone else.

Ashley: So it seems like you were able to basically say, “This is how I want this relationship to work, and I will find the actors that will make that possible,” versus, “This is the system, this is how it’s always been.”

Kevin: That’s exactly it.

Ashley: One of the things that you mentioned right when we started this episode is that you import coffees from two countries: Colombia and Costa Rica.

That probably seems, at first glance, to be very limited, but I wonder for you, what does it mean to know exactly what your menu is going to have?

Kevin: That ties into how I’m trying to define something like slow-sourced coffee: If you take the time to slow down and work closely with any farm—a small farm, a large one—you’ll always find more there than what you thought at first glance.

I find that by showing up consistently and having a really solid feedback loop with farmers—I’m letting them know how their coffees are tasting when they arrive—that more begins to open up.

For example, each farm that I’m working with has been growing new varieties. Working with the same farms for years has resulted in a depth of coffees, of different processes, varieties, flavors—it’s almost too much to keep up with. The variance in flavor between farms is absolutely immense. Within that, from variety to variety or even lot to lot.

I don’t need to look elsewhere for coffee, but wait for it. It’s a very different sourcing model than roasters who travel looking for coffee. I’ve built my menu around the coffees that these producers already work with.

Ashley: We were talking about restaurants and I’m thinking—for example, let’s say a restaurant that works with a farm and the farmer says to them, “Hey, we’re going to have cranberries in October.”

The chef at the restaurant starts to think about that. They’re like, “Okay, we’re going to put cranberries on our menu because the farmer we work with is going to have cranberries.”

It seems like you’re thinking about what’s actually coming in the future and making that a sustainable back-and-forth relationship versus just simply opening a catalog and saying, “I’m going to buy these coffees to fit this menu that I’ve created over here that has kind of nothing to do with what’s actually being grown.”

Kevin: Keeping on the subject of restaurants: I don’t think of it like I’m the chef and I’m going to outsource certain products from other farms. It’s rather the producers that I’m working with are the chefs, and I’m a server bringing the food to the table.

Ashley: One of the loose themes of Boss Barista is the impact of travel in specialty coffee. We all know roasters who go to a farm, come back, and talk about this “direct relationship” they now have. But I’ve also seen a lot of roasters say that travel is unnecessary to build relationships and most sourcing trips are basically photo ops.

But you’ve gone the opposite route where you’re like, “I am deeply invested in travel and spend months on end at coffee farms.” I was wondering if you could talk about the role of travel at Lulo.

Kevin: I would say right off the bat that I totally agree with you as well. And I’ve definitely got a first-hand glimpse of this—I’ve seen it happen.

I think it’s part and parcel with the commodification of tourism. Now, you can get an Uber to your hostel where everyone speaks English and you may never interact with someone who is actually from the country you’re visiting.

But traveling with a deeper intention of trying to understand, spend time, and learn from the people of any place is something else entirely. I think there are so many reasons to have a meaningful physical presence with those that you work with, particularly those in a much different economic position than you are and with a lot more to risk.

It goes a long way to show up, to spend time, and to listen.

Ashley: I keep thinking about what you said earlier about how the problem of pricing is not for the end consumer to absorb. Not to say that we shouldn’t raise the price of coffee, but we see the same things in environmentalism and greenwashing—the idea of requiring individual responses to problems made and maintained by corporations and other actors.

So thinking more about what the collective stakeholders in an industry can do to improve the coffee supply stream is really interesting—one of the ways that you’ve mentioned doing some of this work is that you consolidate shipments; another thing you’ve talked about is comprehensive purchasing. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about those things. Why do they matter?

Kevin: Shipment consolidation matters purely from a logistics standpoint, and just trying to lower costs. But the comprehensive purchasing is reflected in my menu categories.

I categorize coffees into pillars, the coffees that you can lean on, and peaks, the ones that really take you there. It’s through these two categories that we’re kind of able to address certain issues in the industry.

Pillars are there to address the volume problem. Basically what we’ve done is set relatively fixed prices for certain coffees from a certain farm.

1Pillar coffees represent the largest portion of the crop (usually varieties like castillo, caturra, cenicafe 1), and the most common/stable processes. Often washed or semi-washed.

We maintain a steady price, put less importance on cup score, and keep the focus on long-term consistency at a price (US$9.70/kg at farmgate) that works well for everyone. The price is always an ongoing conversation, and it will certainly evolve in the future.

By consistently putting commitment over cup score, we have at least a small buffer between ourselves and the C [market]. Of course, quality standards at every step are still vital. Everyone involved wants to bring their best to the table. It’s just that in the case of the pillars, we aren’t letting too much nuance get in the way.

What that enables me to do is every year buy more coffee from them—so far, that’s been successful. It really translates well to wholesale partners who are also looking for consistency and higher volumes of certain coffees.

The peak coffees are much more open and recognize a wider range of flavor notes, and a wider range of pricing.

The peaks are the microlots. Light roasts, focusing all that is bright and fun. More often than not, the category focuses on adventurous, natural processing—although crisp washed lots can certainly be found.

It’s also where we make room for as much nuance as possible. Cup score is more of a factor, and we try to push the boundary with the price, which varies from US$13/kg to about US$50/kg at farmgate. The idea is to be able to maximize value with less volume.

Volumes are much smaller here, accounting for about 20% of total yearly purchases.

Ashley: You have four different coffees from Finca Alcatraz—it seems like they exemplify the idea that building variety for your coffee offerings doesn’t necessarily mean sourcing 20 coffees from all over the world, but instead investing in the relationships you currently have and making that more sustainable and using that as a growth model.

Kevin: I’m glad that you mentioned Finca Alcatraz because it’s a perfect example of both the slow-sourced, patient way of doing things and how the range and peaks matter.

For the past few years, we’ve been getting tastes of Don Wilfredo’s Pink Bourbon—4kg one year, 8kg the next. I’m able to do something with these coffees because I’m roasting on these little tiny machines, but for most people, that’s not a workable amount of coffee.

Last year, I went down to the farm to learn that this harvest of Pink Bourbon was massive and cupping fantastically. He processed three separate day lots of this Pink Bourbon: one fully washed, one washed with a two-day anaerobic fermentation, and one fully natural coffee with no added fermentation.

They’re all cupping off the charts, but between the three, the natural is standing out. So we were able to buy it all and assign a slightly different price for each one, to capture the most value for everyone involved.

Last year, when I wrote a piece commemorating Boss Barista’s seventh anniversary, the mood was light and jovial. I paid homage to my favorite basketball podcast, Six Trophies, and wrote a post in the style of the show. It covered the year’s silly coffee trends, like robot baristas, and mocked former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who had a freakout about being called a billionaire in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

It’s now been just over eight years since Boss Barista began, on February 1, 2017. Marking an anniversary like this one generally feels like an invitation to celebrate and reflect on how this project has grown and changed. But this year, celebrating feels fucked-up. Instead, I’m preoccupied by questions that I don’t have the answers to.

Questions like: What does the threat of Trump’s tariffs mean for the future of coffee?

Or, what will happen to the burgeoning labor movement within the coffee and service sector? (As I’m writing this, the current administration is attempting to slash worker protections for federal employees, while multiple members of the National Labor Relations Board have been fired.)

Or, how will stripping away climate protections impact coffee’s future, given that it is a crop that has already been highly impacted by unpredictable weather patterns?

What about coffee service workers, many of whom identify as members of marginalized groups? How will they be impacted? What about guns and public spaces? What happens if someone gets injured at work? What happens if they’re harassed? Discriminated against?

Protections that attempt to curb these behaviors are currently being stripped away. Oligarchs are moving to seize power while democracy is being dismantled in real time. We are witnessing multiple overlapping attempts to make people powerless.

COFFEE AND POWER

I often describe Boss Barista as a newsletter about a thing you drink every day—coffee—and all the issues surrounding it. In Boss Barista’s early years, as I recently reflected, that mainly meant coffee and feminism.

As time has passed, the scope of these articles has expanded to more broadly question systems of power, and how they shape our relationship to coffee.

Power touches every facet of our lives: It’s the reason so many bosses and managers fight against their employees when they unionize, even though they profess to “care” about their workers. It’s the reason why big companies like Nestlé buy up smaller coffee brands. It’s the reason why trade organizations and multinational companies do little to address the problem of coffee farmers’ depressed wages, no matter how often the issue is raised.

Power is the point; the point is to hold onto power. And while this dynamic is deeply ingrained in coffee—a product that relies on colonial structures and the extraction of value from Black and Brown people in the Global South—it also impacts nearly every facet of our lives.

So yes, this is a newsletter about coffee. But it’s also not.

If I have one directive to share today, it’s to fight the consolidation of power in any form you see it. Question why a system operates the way it does; push back on people who are interested in keeping salaries opaque; ask your anti-union friend what they mean when they call a union a “third party.” Take stock of your capabilities and take a risk if you can—power grabs rely on our unwillingness to challenge them. While pushing back is not always viable, I hope you at least feel encouraged to look for spaces of resistance.

A Numbers Update

As I write this (it’s 8:43 CST on February 3, 2025), Boss Barista has 3,874 subscribers and 81 paid subscribers. Around this time last year, I had about 800 fewer readers but 20 more paid subscribers. Shrug. My open rate (around 40%) has stayed relatively stable, and most articles get about ~2,500 views. You can see that breakdown here:

I also wanted to include this line graph that charts subscribers over time. I officially started this newsletter in 2019 (Boss Barista existed solely as a podcast for its first two years), and I thought it’d be interesting to break down some of the key inflection points:

The first big bump in subscribers happened in February 2021. I went from ~400 to 600 subscribers after I wrote a piece telling folks that they should absolutely not open a coffee shop. Don’t! This piece is still one of my favorites to revisit, because the number of people who casually float the idea of opening a coffee shop like it’s buying a cardigan is confounding—this is not some hobby business. You will fail if you treat it as such.

The second happened in August 2021, when Alicia Kennedy shouted out Boss Barista on her newsletter roundup. It’s incredibly humbling when other food writers recognize your work.

Another happened in April 2022, when I wrote what I think is one of my best pieces, about how pizza parties became synonymous with bad bosses. In the future, I’d like to explore how food is weaponized, and how things like meme culture contribute to this association, in an academic context.

A fourth happened in October 2022, when I wrote about the elusive “fourth wave of coffee.” Spoiler alert: It hasn’t happened. My colleague James Hoffmann retweeted a link to this piece, which brought in new readers. Today, it’s still among Boss Barista’s most-read stories.

After that, the line remained pretty steady until January 2025, when I noticed a significant uptick. (I’ve gained, like, 300 subscribers in three weeks; I usually see only one or two new signups per day.) Some of these may be bots, but I also think it’s because my colleague and past podcast guest Morgan Eckroth has put Boss Barista on their recommended list. I also saw a good response to my latest piece on olive oil disruptor brands’ use of fear-based marketing language.

It’s cool to see Boss Barista grow! I have been shying away from asking readers to convert to paid subscriptions recently, partly because my ongoing masters degree has impacted my schedule and partly because asking people to support my work makes me nauseous. Maybe someone can talk me into getting over myself; maybe the number of subscribers means I can think about a very carefully considered sponsorship?

Until then, thank you so much for reading, and please leave a comment below to say hi.

Last night, I watched a Reel from America’s Test Kitchen that featured a group of the organization’s testers trying different olive oils.

If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ve likely noticed a lot of newcomers to the olive oil industry; they’ve popped up across social media. They’re also in specialty stores that carry other seemingly artisanal goods (New York Magazine’s Grub Street wrote about these so-called “shoppy shops”; that article inspired me to write a piece about how consumers could possibly be expected to discern which products are “good” or “bad”).

The premise of the ATK test was pretty targeted. “For an ancient ingredient, olive oil has never been so trendy,” says Lisa McManus, the executive editor of ATK and the video’s narrator. She and the ATK team are curious whether any new olive oil disruptors can stand up to established brands. In the video, McManus does something that I think is interesting: She hones in on the marketing tactics of these newcomers. “Newer brands pop up on social media with cute names like ‘Awake’ and ‘Drizzle,’” she says. “The dark side is that newcomers often work the angle that there’s something you can’t trust about traditional olive oil.”

She’s not wrong. Graza—among the most prominent brands in the newcomer olive oil space—says this on its About page: “Most olive oil in the U.S. is blended from old, low quality oils. But across the ocean, people are using fresh, never-blended olive oil by the gallon. Graza is that olive oil. We’re made from 100% Picual olives from Jaen, Spain, the region where over half the world’s olive oil is produced.”

This positioning is incredibly interesting to me because it’s a common tactic—we see fear used all the time to influence our consumer habits or to instill distrust in the institutions around us. As my editor pointed out, this “all feels like part of the same broad ecosystem of predatory misinformation—sowing consumer distrust in the familiar and promising them something better in return.”

And it’s also common in coffee. A few weeks ago, I wrote about my concerns following the USDA’s recent decision to allow coffee to be labeled “healthy,” and how that might influence brands’ attempts to market and differentiate themselves. I worry with this mandate, people will take things further, and companies will use health to try to claim there’s something inherently untrustworthy about the coffee you’re drinking.

To some extent, this is good—we should be challenging the narratives we’re given about the things put in front of us! And if something seems fishy, we should investigate! It should be a head-scratcher that coffee farmers barely break even, and yet, many of the stories we see in the news are about coffee being too expensive. It should raise eyebrows when a coffee roaster can’t articulate what’s in their blend (I’d argue there’s nothing so necessarily proprietary about a coffee blend that’s worth keeping it a secret, but I’m not a roaster).

We should get in the habit of challenging power and questioning prevailing narratives. But what happens when those tactics are co-opted as marketing tools rather than used as genuine calls for accountability?

Making Nothing Out of Nothing

I could probably write a whole piece about the premise of “making something out of nothing”—look around and you’ll see policymakers using this tactic to scare people into believing false views of the world. I was a teaching assistant this semester, and one of the topics we discussed was Mean World Syndrome, or the idea that the world is scarier and more violent than it actually is. Views on crime are often particularly skewed between assumption (in the U.S., crime is up) and reality (crime has been going down since the 1970s).

Unsurprisingly, many of the arguments we see play out in public policy and belief systems also influence how we choose what we consume. Graza has been around since 2022, and on its website, it positions itself as better than most olive oils. Along with the claim mentioned above, the brand’s About page also features a graphic that says Graza never “blend[s] old oils down to drive costs” or “say[s] [its olives] are from Italy when they are actually from 5 different places.”

In the ATK Reel, McManus says that various marketing claims aside, the proof of olive oil’s quality lies in its taste. There’s a shot in the video where you can see testers using an evaluative tool that looks much like a coffee tasting wheel; McManus’ narration also notes that they don’t know which olive oils they’re tasting. Ultimately, the ATK team finds that few olive oil disruptor brands stand up to celebrated, longstanding favorites.

The argument that many newer olive oil entrants are making relies on questioning the quality of predecessors. While the ATK blind tasting is just one test, it does at least challenge that tenuous argument. If these disruptor brands don’t taste as good as other olive oils, and taste is a measure of quality, what does that say about their own products and how they’re made? McManus guesses that many new entrants are mixing high-quality and lower-grade oils, although notes that she can’t definitively prove that.

Like olive oil, coffee is a highly contentious industry that is constantly fighting misconceptions and working to justify its costs and processes. Those of us in the industry try repeatedly to communicate how valuable it is—that coffee should be more expensive, that being a barista is a skilled profession. Amidst this ongoing justification work, it’s easy to see why some brands rely on making simplistic or fear-based arguments for the sake of differentiation.

I don’t think these dynamics are quite as obvious in coffee as what we see with the olive oil examples above. Coffee companies aren’t yet pitting themselves against one another in the same way, or claiming that one group of brands relies on a falsehood that another set is working to dispel. But we do regularly see objective-sounding claims like “X is the best roaster,” “Y sources the best beans,” or “Z is the best brewing method”—claims that feel impossible to prove, and also just don’t really feel like arguments. There’s no way one singular roaster is best; no way one singular coffee farm is growing the best beans; no way one singular brewing method reigns supreme.

One example that does come to mind is the idea that single-origin coffees are better than blends—that’s even a claim I’m sure I’ve made at some point, and we see brands do it all the time. But nothing inherent to a single-origin coffee makes it better. Historically, the gripe was that roasters used blends to get rid of older or less valuable coffee beans, but that’s not an innate characteristic of blending itself.

I loved the ATK Reel because it used marketing messaging as a jumping-off point to analyze olive oil quality. It made me think how easy it is, as a consumer, to believe claims about certain products’ superiority—and how even using true statements (maybe it is true that most olive oils are wonky blends) can hide more than we think.

It’s all the more important to be conscious of how these claims operate—especially as they co-opt language we’ve historically used to question power and received narratives.

a) rest, and
b) giving something extra to paying subscribers.

So this week, I’m thrilled to share my interview with NBA superstar and BIGFACE Coffee founder Jimmy Butler.

It felt appropriate to release this interview the week after my colleague, Fionn Pooler, published a story about celebrity coffee brands. Fionn specifically cites Jimmy as someone who engages meaningfully with coffee and coffee culture (unlike many of the other celebrities he mentions). Plus, given that I am a rabid basketball fan, it was an honor and a privilege to spend some time with Jimmy.

For me, this interview was an exercise in combining two interests (coffee and basketball) and trying to find parallels between Jimmy’s approach to the game and his perspective on coffee—and we did find lots of similarities. It was also interesting to interview someone who has been covered extensively in the media. I put my best “Sean Evans from ‘Hot Ones’” hat on (Jimmy has previously appeared on “Hot Ones,” a show known for its really in-depth and specific questions) and tried to ask questions he hadn’t heard before.

This interview first appeared in the Winter 2023 edition of Standart, and photos were taken by Edwin Jean.

Jimmy Butler needs no introduction to sports fans, but to everyone else, he is one of the best basketball players in the world—a bona fide NBA superstar whose grit and win-at-all-costs mentality have helped to make the Miami Heat one of the most fearsome teams in the league. During the 2020 season, in which teams competed inside a quarantined hotel complex nicknamed “the bubble,” Jimmy discovered a passion for specialty coffee, making headlines by charging his teammates $20 for a cup of top-class joe. Off the back of this experience, he founded BIGFACE to bring some of the world’s best and rarest coffees to customers, along with a bold line of related merch. Standart caught up with Jimmy to talk courage, competition, and coffee.

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Please give to the folks in LA if you can: here’s a coffee-specific resource list from Sprudge and a general list from Anne Helen Peterson.

At the end of 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) updated its criteria for the use of “healthy” on food and drink labels. Following this rule change, foods that the FDA once classed as healthy, like protein bars and cereal, were no longer eligible for that label.New foods and drinks were also added to the healthy column, including salmon, eggs—and coffee.

As the agency wrote on December 27, “all water, tea, and coffee with less than 5 calories per RACC [Reference Amount Customarily Consumed, or how much most people consume of an item] and per labeled serving automatically qualify for the ‘healthy’ claim.”

Coffee’s health merits have been subject to debate for decades. Thousands of studies have attempted to come up with a definitive ruling on its benefits or harms—so many that in the newsletter I edit, Coffee News Club (written by friend of this newsletter, The Pourover’s Fionn Pooler), there’s a recurring section dedicated to new studies that make coffee health claims.

While I believe the findings (and try to understand the limitations) of each of these studies, it strikes me that the FDA’s rule change reflects just how much coffee seems to yearn for definition—and how that’s made our understanding of the language used to describe coffee really weird.

Health is only one such fraught example. Brands put a lot of weight on the idea of drinking “morally good” coffee and throw around words like “ethical” and “direct-trade”: words with no governing body, like the FDA, to regulate their use, and which are employed in a way that makes them almost impossible to define. Many coffee brands also resort to other dubious health-related claims, using fearmongering tactics to market “mold-free” coffee or diet fads to promote “bulletproof coffee.”

In short, coffee is already rife with ambiguous and arguably exploitative language meant to influence your drinking habits one way or another. With this new rule change for coffee labeling, will we end up with hundreds of bags of coffee emblazoned with the word “healthy?” Will coffee suddenly be hawked as some sort of health food? And what does it mean for coffee to enter the “good for you” food chat?

What Is Health? What Is Ethical?

In the United States, the word “healthy” is federally regulated. Brands must meet specific nutritional standards before using it in their branding and packaging. And it’s been a while since those requirements have changed: The FDA last set standards around the word in 1994, aiming to highlight “nutrient-dense foods that are encouraged by the Dietary Guidelines – vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fat-free and low-fat dairy, lean game meat, seafood, eggs, beans, peas, lentils, nuts, and seeds – with no added ingredients except for water,” according to a recent press release.

In providing its new definition, the FDA discussed its previous parameters for defining “healthy” food, many of which were focused on fat content. This new update, the FDA wrote, reflects that “dietary guidance have evolved since 1994.”

This all makes sense—our understanding of nutrition, and scientific understanding more generally, is always evolving. I’m not here to debate the merits of the FDA’s updated guidance, or to reflect on its context within our broader society. Indeed, what’s healthy or not is different for different people, and myopic definitions of health are often used to harm people who exist outside of Western beauty standards. Our society fails to prioritize mental health, monetizes healthcare, and regularly denies peoples’ claims for necessary care, all while creating artificial food deserts that prevent low-income people from accessing nutritious foods.

Instead, I’m interested in how these definitions come to be—and if there’s any stake beyond the so-called pursuit of more accurate terminology. A 2023 report from the nonprofit U.S. Right To Know found that “nine of the 20 experts on the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee have had conflicts of interest in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical or weight loss industries in the last five years,” Alice Callahan reported for the New York Times.

The term “healthy,” according to the FDA, was revised in order “to more closely align with nutrition science underpinning the Dietary Guidelines, 2020-2025.” It stands to reason that changes to the definition of “healthy,” and the Dietary Guidelines more generally, could be influenced by those who have a monetary stake in some part of the food industry.

As it continues, the New York Times piece gets pretty specific about the people involved with crafting the new guidelines, and admits that finding objective experts with the knowledge necessary to serve on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is difficult. As Callahan writes, “Federal funding for nutrition research is limited ... and many researchers accept industry grants for research studies so they can keep their jobs in academia.”

But even if the people appointed to the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee work to keep their recommendations objective (the New York Times piece includes interviews with several sources who think the board did a pretty good job putting nutritional science first), their recommendations are simply that: recommendations given to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Both agencies can freely choose to ignore or omit the guidance. For example, the 2015 Dietary Guidelines “omitted the committee’s advice on limiting the consumption of red and processed meats after intense lobbying by the meat industry,” Callahan writes.

I can’t say for sure whether there was outside influence on the FDA’s reclassification of “healthy,” but I do know the updated definition was welcomed by the coffee industry. Daily Coffee News reported that the rule change was cheered by the National Coffee Association, one of coffee’s largest trade organizations. (Check out the NCA’s Board of Directors: It’s primarily composed of people from very big coffee organizations.)

In a press release, NCA President William “Bill” Murray said: “As Americans enjoy the holiday season, FDA’s definition of coffee as healthy is all the more reason to celebrate the country’s favorite beverage. Decades of robust, independent scientific evidence show that coffee drinkers live longer, healthier, happier lives, and [the] FDA is absolutely right that including coffee in the definition of ‘healthy’ can help consumers choose beverages that help maintain healthy diets.”

I share all of this context to demonstrate how what we imagine as scientific and objective can be heavily influenced by money and power. Many of the words we use to classify the worth and value of what we consume carry less weight than we might realize.

Still, the word “healthy”—at least within the food-labeling world—is heavily monitored. Even with the influence of lobbyists and moneyed interests, there are hundreds of eyes on this definition. What happens when the words we use to describe or value a product have no such actors trying to protect (or shape) their meaning?

Meaning Without Context

Perhaps my biggest pet peeve as a writer and editor is when someone pitches me a story about an “ethical” coffee shop that uses “fair trade” beans. I often push back when people use these words, because they’re not evidence in themselves but rather conclusions that may or may not have been drawn from real evidence. How do they know the coffee is sourced ethically? What makes this a fair trade shop? Where did this information come from?

Seemingly every industry has a “better for you” segment, which proffers supposedly better versions of that thing you like. But coffee also has a “morally better” segment wrapped up in the ethical intricacies and historical exploitation that are latent in the industry’s structure. By serving as both a consumer good and something we imbibe, coffee opens itself up to myriad attempts to moralize its consumption—resulting in claims that often don’t mean much of anything.

Many of the words I see used by coffee brands, like “ethical” or “direct-trade” or “relationship coffee” (a term I’ve written about in the past), don’t have any intrinsic meaning or official parameters, and can be used freely. Even terms like “Fair Trade” are difficult to pin down: While companies must go through certification processes to label coffee as “Fair Trade” (Fair Trade USA™ is a different certification from Fairtrade International, which adds to the confusion, there remains ambiguity in lowercase “fair trade.”

For example, there’s a spot in Madison, where I live, called Fair Trade Coffee House. It doesn’t seem to be affiliated with any of the certification bodies above.1

But because such terms can be used freely means they are used freely, and trying to figure out the truth underlying “ethical” or “fair” claims becomes more and more difficult. Transparency is one antidote to this problem: If you’re claiming something is better, having some level of openness about how you came to that conclusion helps. But it’s not a cure-all: Transparency without context doesn’t mean much.

Writing this piece feels like trying to predict the future. I don’t know yet what the impacts of coffee’s new “healthy” label will be. But I’m already picturing marketing campaigns from powerful, multinational coffee companies centered on coffee as a health tool. I can imagine such campaigns making consumers feel better about their consumption habits, all while the brands continue to avoid making meaningful changes in their supply streams to improve farmers’ livelihoods or lessen the impact of climate change.

As part of the announcement, the FDA also said it was working on a symbol brands can use if their products fall under the “healthy” parameters, so I wonder if coffee’s new health halo will simply mean more brands using this symbol. Maybe this definition will lead to brands attempting to create a competitive edge by saying their coffee is better for you than others’.

Whatever happens, we must continue to question how these definitions are made—and all the ways such terminology can be vague, undefinable, and used without scrutiny.

Immediately after the 2024 presidential election, I wrote about the problem of power and how I saw it influence both political parties. Specifically, I thought a lot about the Democratic Party’s problem with power: “a party concerned much more with preserving old, neoliberal structures of power and funding a genocide than listening to constituents’ needs, a party that then turns right around and believes itself entitled to people’s votes unquestioningly,” I wrote.

Or, as I later quipped to a friend, the party didn’t need to further shift to the “center” to attract “moderates.” What it needed was to get weird.

Of course, it is not weird to ask leaders to stop sending money to fund a genocide, or to actually follow through on legislation that would positively impact people’s lives (student loan relief, for example). And I also meant weird differently than how the word was used by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz when describing Republicans.

Instead, by “weird” I meant throwing away the playbook—discarding old structures meant to preserve control and taking action that would actually reflect the needs and wants of the party’s constituents.

I’m just a coffee writer, not a politician—but I think the advice above would also be fruitful for many members of our industry. Every year, I make a recommendation for Boss Barista readers. In 2022, I said start a union; in 2023, I asked you to get closer to your coffee; and in 2024, I encouraged all of us to stop expanding.

This year, I want coffee to get weird.

Furthermore, I want you to look around your favorite shops and brands—or pan out to consider industry conventions and frameworks for buying and selling coffee—and ask, “What would it mean for coffee to get weird?”

Same Old, Same Old

Last July, I wrote about coffee’s “age of average.” So many brands do the same things: They look the same, source the same kinds of coffees, and borrow from the same script, repeating words like “intentional” and “innovation” without actually doing anything different than what we’ve seen before.

BOSS BARISTA

Coffee’s “Age of Average”

Recently, I was watching an episode of “Rick Steves’ Europe,” a public television travel show aimed at U.S.-based tourists. In the episode, set in Copenhagen, Steves points out the colorful buildings that line its canals, and which immediately distinguish the Danish capital from other cities. Nearly all of Steves’ epi…

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2 years ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · Ashley Rodriguez

This happens in capitalism. Instead of promoting novelty, capitalism trains us to believe that new ideas are risky (and they are in this economic framework, to an extent). As a result, individuals and companies tend to copy what they’ve seen work for others.

Brands eventually cannibalize one another in their efforts to target the same consumers and market standing, because nothing differentiates them from the rest of the pack. It’s wild that this pattern has only seemed to accelerate over time, and it’s one of the reasons I think the idea that market competition is a threat to businesses is overblown. (If your customers cannot differentiate between what you offer vs. what other companies provide, then either you need to communicate your values better or your business doesn’t need to be in operation.) We blame competition instead of identifying what makes us stand out, or seeking out sectors of the market that aren’t being served.

I’m not saying that opening a business isn’t hard or risky, and I don’t mean to limit my focus to small business owners. Coffee as a whole is an incredibly risk-averse industry, by which I mean that buyers, roasters, and other companies in consuming countries tend to shift risk to growers and producers through contracts and mechanisms like the C-market. Instead, I’m looking to the part of the industry I have the most access to (retail stores) and wondering if we can extrapolate this idea of weirdness across the entire industry.

Could we place more value on doing things that might feel strange or odd instead of reinventing the same thing repeatedly, like opening the same kind of coffee shop or reimaging the same type of tools? By now, we collectively have enough brewers, kettles, and grinders. I’d like to see folks launch crowdfunding campaigns for innovative tools that could positively impact people, not for a grinder with one or two more bells and whistles than previous models.

This weirdness could extend to the trenchant problems of coffee growing and sourcing. Many roasters use the same catchphrases, like “ethical sourcing” and “paying more for coffee,” even though we know that these frameworks haven’t solved the issues plaguing farmers. (We only seem to panic about coffee prices when they affect consumers—just look at how the recent spike in arabica prices has garnered hundreds of “why is your coffee going up in price?” articles over the last few months.)

What would it look like to get weird in this context?

Small Scale, Big Ideas

Being weird with coffee doesn’t mean throwing out all conventions, nor does it necessarily mean taking big swings. (That said, I’d encourage trade organizations like the Specialty Coffee Association to use more of its resources to push the industry forward rather than increasing its CEO’s compensation nearly 80% from 2022 to 2023.)

I think being weird can be as small as offering something unique that speaks to your own passion. For example, there’s a coffee shop here in Madison that I love going to because I know I’ll get signature drinks I can’t find anywhere else (the coffee is also great).

Being weird can also mean basing your sourcing model on the small and sustainable. In a few weeks, I’ll be publishing a written interview with Kevin Joanisse of Lulo Coffee1, who sources coffee primarily from Colombia and Costa Rica. We discussed how that approach allows him to invest deeply with producers, versus offering myriad coffees from all over the world to meet some invented idea of “consumer demand.”

I also need to think more about what being weird means for Boss Barista. I’ve been focusing so much on how this platform can be more sustainable (i.e., not contribute to my already overflowing workload and mental fatigue) that I haven’t thought about what would push the boundaries here. Usually, those ideas come from reading, and I hope to invest more time in books and articles in 2025—and translate what I’ve learned into articles here.

A few years ago, Ruth Reichl—a food writer and former editor of the now-defunct “Gourmet” magazine—gave a talk to a group of grant recipients that I was part of. She spoke about how she’d try various experiments within the confines of food writing, like pretending she was an alien visiting a restaurant for the first time and writing a review from that perspective. I no longer recall exactly why she did this, or if the experiments went anywhere. But I imagine the tactic was designed to shake something loose, and to imagine something wholly new within the beats and repetitions of everyday life.

Fun things come to those who are willing to experiment, and real change can, too. So in 2025, I urge you to get weird—and to make your coffee weird, too.

In last week’s post on what feminism means to me, I talked about my Gender and Women’s Studies class. That class has been one of the most impactful parts of my journalism master’s program and has inspired several Boss Barista posts.

I also mentioned that one of our assignments in that class was writing a manifesto., Boss Barista itself started because of a manifesto—I watched my former co-host, Jasper, give a manifesto about women and workers in coffee, and it inspired me so much it led to this entire platform—and so that assignment felt particularly apt.

For that reason, I wanted to share it with you today. Fair warning: This is long, but if you’ve been digging my recent work that has relied on past authors’ insights and theories—we were required to cite 10 sources when writing this—I think you’ll particularly enjoy this.

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A few weeks ago, I did an interview with someone who asked me why Boss Barista had shifted focus. Initially, the podcast (the newsletter didn’t debut until 2019) focused on “coffee and feminism.” At the time, I had a very shallow understanding of that mission—I think I just equated it with interviewing women. In a way, that made sense: Boss Barista started based on an observation that coffee media was (and still is) very white and very male.

While I don’t think I’ve strayed from feminist ideals, I do think I’m exploring them differently than I did in the beginning, focusing more on the lived experiences of people and addressing systems of power that impact coffee workers.

But this semester, I took a class on feminist ideology, which covered the work of feminist writers from the 19th century to today. If you read last week’s story about wages for hospitality work, you’ll be familiar with some of the ideas we discussed in class. (Please do read this story if you haven’t already: I got so many texts from friends saying it was one of my best articles yet, which was a lovely compliment.)

BOSS BARISTA

Wages for Hospitality Work

The final project for my Gender and Women’s Studies course is writing a manifesto. (Funnily enough, a manifesto is how Boss Barista started: I saw Jasper, my former co-host, read a feminist coffee manifesto at an event in 2016 and knew I needed to meet them…

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2 years ago · 13 likes · Ashley Rodriguez

I also recently used a feminist lens to delve deeper into the “waves” metaphor with which coffee defines its historical movements, a framework that likely has more to teach us than we realize:

BOSS BARISTA

Did Coffee Borrow More From Feminism Than Just the “Wave” Analogy?

By now, the idea of coffee’s “waves”—first, second, third—has become common parlance. If I say “third-wave coffee,” most consumers, even those who operate far outside of the industry, probably know what I’m talking about. I bet they could even point to a local specialty shop, or the latte in their hand, as an example…

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2 years ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Ashley Rodriguez

Right now, it’s finals week, and I’m gearing up to graduate from my master’s program, so I won’t be doing another deep dive into theory like last week. But that comment about shifting away from feminism has really stuck with me. It certainly wasn’t meant maliciously—it was actually very kind and insightful. (The person mentioned being an early Boss Barista fan, and having watched the evolution of the platform over the last seven years.) But it did make me reflect, and question: What does feminism mean to me?

Turns out, that was the same question my Gender and Women’s Studies professor posed early in the semester. We were asked to define feminism, and describe what we thought impeded feminism today. Now, one of our final assignments is revisiting that prompt and incorporating what we’ve since read and learned in class. To do so, my professor, Dr. Kate, sent us back our original feminist position statements, and I thought I’d share mine with you:

I wrote this off the cuff and it isn’t as nuanced as I would have liked (I know I’m missing a lot of people harmed by systems of patriarchy and white supremacy), but I think this captures a lot of the themes I talk about here, and how I view feminism—and its hurdles—today.

And so, I wanted to ask readers: How do you define feminism? Where do you see the struggle for greater implementation and acceptance of feminist ideals? Please drop your thoughts in the comments section below.

Until then, thanks for reading—and there will be more coming your way soon!

The final project for my Gender and Women’s Studies course is writing a manifesto. (Funnily enough, a manifesto is how Boss Barista started: I saw Jasper, my former co-host, read a feminist coffee manifesto at an event in 2016 and knew I needed to meet them.)

My manifesto is a quasi-literature review, including analyzing feminist and scholar Silvia Federici’s 1974 short book, “Wages Against Housework.” Her landmark work calls for women to be paid for their domestic labor.

She opens the piece with these lines:

“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.

Every miscarriage is a work accident.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions … but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.

More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.

Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.”

Federici argues that because domestic labor is unpaid, it has become socialized as a “natural trait” for women—that they perform domestic labor not explicitly because of patriarchal structures but because “they like it” and are naturally “better at it.” Furthermore, because domestic labor has become coded as a way to show and perform love, women perform it as a demonstration of care for their families—and those who don’t, therefore, must not love their families enough.

I’ve thought a lot about what we’re asked to do for the sake of “love.” I’ve also wondered if these dynamics exist in coffee—and I believe they do. I’d argue we can draw parallels between Federici’s work and how we view the performance of hospitality in the service sector.

Federici’s breakdown of how domestic labor has become weaponized against women mimics how we view the labor of hospitality in service work. We view it as something that cannot be taught, a natural trait and assumed responsibility in most low-wage jobs. Hospitality is given without extra compensation because people “love their work.” And that opens the door for exploitation.

No Love Lost

Right after the opening lines above, Federici makes clear that her argument is not just interested in getting wages for housework, but in examining why domestic labor has been devalued and made invisible in the first place—despite the fact that our society runs on unpaid work performed in the home. “To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society,” she writes.

Federici argues that housework is not only something that typically falls on women (Federici’s argument relies on the assumption that women do most, if not all, of the domestic labor in homes, and she speaks about gender as a binary, not because she’s making a binary argument, but rather speaking about societal trends and attitudes) to perform, but that it has become internalized as a task that women are naturally better at—and that’s not by accident. “Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognised as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged,” she writes.

In other words, for our current form of capitalism to work, domestic labor needs to be performed for free—but the people performing it must not question or challenge the conditions under which they perform this labor. The easiest way to do that is to craft societal expectations that the people whose labor is to be exploited—women, in this case—are innately better at tasks like cleaning the house, preparing food, doing laundry, and child-rearing.

Not only are women socialized into performing this work for free because they’re “better at it,” but such domestic labor has become a warped representation of love. “Men are able to accept our services and take pleasure in them because they presume that housework is easy for us, that we enjoy it because we do it for their love,” she writes. “Only when men see our work as work—our love as work—and most important our determination to refuse both, will they change their attitude towards us.”

Housework and Service Work

Federici’s argument doesn’t exactly map onto service work because those workers are given a wage. She acknowledges that all workers, under capitalism, are exploited to some extent, but trading your labor for wages is at least engaging in some sort of exchange, however unequal. “To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt concerning its meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are allowed to live,” she writes.

However, service workers are some of the lowest-paid people in our ecosystem, and their labor is both mocked as simplistic and unskilled yet vital to a functioning society, much like housework. We could not function without the people who stock our shelves, run our gas stations, or bus our tables. And yet we feel comfortable not only making these jobs as financially precarious as possible—most service workers don’t have benefits or stable salaries, and depend on the whims of a manager to schedule their shifts—but routinely downplaying their value.

We see this crop up in the U.S.’s cyclical debates about raising the minimum wage. Federally, the U.S. minimum wage is $7.25, which hasn’t changed since 2009 despite the cost of living increasing 150% since then. (If the minimum wage changed to meet inflation, it’d be $10.84 today.) Even back in 2009, the minimum wage wasn’t much to celebrate. That year, the living wage in Madison, Wisconsin, where I live, was $11.21 an hour (defined by the city of Madison as the wage you need to make 110% of the poverty line). And that was before Madison became one of the fastest-growing cities in the state.

Many states and municipalities have since raised their minimum wage above the federal limit. Still, routine arguments against raising the minimum wage are predicated on devaluing the work performed by the people most likely to receive it. For some, there’s nothing more insulting than a “kid paid to flip burgers” making a living wage.

Federici argues that, despite the inherent exploitation of waged work in capitalism, wages help draw a line. “But exploited as you might be, you are not that work,” she writes. “Today you are a postman, tomorrow a cabdriver. All that matters is how much of that work you have to do and how much of that money you can get.”

And yet, there are aspects of service work that can’t be shrugged off so easily. While service workers get paid, there’s often more expected of their labor, specifically the bestowing of hospitality. Despite receiving some of the lowest wages in society, service workers are frequently asked to perform extra labor. Just last year, I wrote about the old idiom, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean,” and the idea of employers trying to own the time of low-wage workers rather than their labor.

But it goes further than that. Workers are often expected to show just how much they fucking love their jobs by smiling, being courteous, and cultivating customer experiences. The grind of service work is fetishized (a notable recent example is the FX show “The Bear,” which delves into the often-unseen dynamics behind running a restaurant) as a labor of love. That performance of love is seen as a justification for low wages in turn. It’s an expectation that’s essentially built into service work, without there being any tangible compensation in the form of higher wages.

Let’s be clear: I’m not advocating to throw away hospitality and strip service work to its bare bones—that’s certainly not what Federici is arguing for, either, when she speaks of how housework is undervalued. She does not imagine a world where the labor of domestic work is made as simple as possible, because that denies how important it is. Hospitality is equally important—but the answer to its persistent undervaluing isn’t as simple as just paying people more.

‘A Natural at Hospitality’

Federici’s argument doesn’t end at demanding wages for housework. Instead, she lays bare how the broader dynamics of housework function in our society—giving it a wage is just a mechanism for rendering it visible. “To demand wages for housework is to make it visible that our minds, bodies and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function, in a specific function, and then have been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted as women in this society,” she writes.

One of the reasons I wrote this piece is because I had a conversation with someone years ago about whether or not hospitality could be taught. I argued that it could, like any other skill. My colleague disagreed, claiming that some people have more of a knack for hospitality than others.

The true answer is probably somewhere in the middle. I’m sure some people take to service and hospitality work in a way that suggests they’re naturally better suited to it, and I’m sure others would never consider service work. Federici also believes that people would divide themselves along these lines, but she instead urges those harmed by patriarchy to think of themselves as housewives, no matter if they perform domestic labor or not. “We might not serve one man, but we are all in a servant relation with respect to the whole male world,” she writes.

I’d still argue that hospitality can be taught. Assuming it’s an innate skill feels akin to the argument that women are by nature better at domestic labor. Not only is hospitality an act we demand beyond the normal confines of service work, but we also admonish people who don’t perform it to our satisfaction. “If you don’t like it, it is your problem, your failure, your guilt, your abnormality,” writes Federici of housewives who don’t like housework.

Furthermore, it isn’t about creating a divide between people who love hospitality and service work and those who don’t; it’s more about appropriately valuing the people who perform low-wage work. To be blunt, that’s more of us than we might care to reckon with.

You’ve probably seen the argument that, at any given moment, most people are closer to financial insecurity than they ever will be to becoming a billionaire. Federici talks about the groups of women who imagine themselves “beyond” housework, liberated from traditional patriarchal standards for one reason or another. But she also argues that our struggle is tied together, and that those who don’t perform housework but still live under the thumb of patriarchy have much more reason to align themselves with housewives than with the cis men who extract their labor. The same could be said for workers who trade their labor for wages.

Assuming you’re “beyond” the struggle of service workers is false, therefore—and assuming that hospitality is something innate allows us to place less—or no—value on it. It’s why we can get so indignant about paying service workers a fair wage, while simultaneously demanding—and even holding part of their wages ransom, in the form of tips—that they perform hospitality to our standard.

So yes, workers should be paid a premium for being friendly and providing hospitality, just as they would be if they acquired any other skill that makes them better at their jobs. But, as Federici writes, it’s not about reducing the skill to a wage. Assuming a simple equation of “hospitality = higher wages” misses the point, and flattens this issue into a straightforward one about financial leverage. “It is the demand by which our nature ends and our struggle begins because just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us,” as Federici says.

For Federici, a demand for wages for housework would be to make housework visible and give women agency. It also attempts to dismantle the systems under which capitalism works: If there’s no free labor in the home, how does society keep going? What would we have to reshuffle and take apart to make this work?

“Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it attacks capital and forces it to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class,” she notes. She also argues that housework already produces capital: It’s what fuels our economy and makes paid labor possible for others. We just seem to expect that labor for free from housewives.

The pitfalls of service work and the expectation of hospitality don’t quite follow the same beats, and Federici directly argues that wages for housework cannot be equated to other wage struggles. However, she has much to teach us about how labor gets socialized and removed from public consumption while still fueling every moment of our lives. It’s hard to ignore the parallels between how we, in the same breath, devalue certain kinds of work while deeming it essential and necessary.

So yes, let’s think about how to pay people who perform service work more. But let’s also examine how other kinds of work, beyond domestic labor, are removed from the social gaze—and what this obfuscation actually serves in the long term.