How is COVID-19 Impacting Coffee? (and how you can help!)
Well we’re living through some pretty uncertain times, aren’t we? I wonder if life has always been this uncertain and the walls that we build up to keep ourselves safe have simply been obscuring how fragile life really is.
The global pandemic of the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus has disrupted our daily lives, changed our collective pace, and put many lives at risk. If you’re reading this article you’re likely doing alright (albeit lonely), but the truth is there are many people whose lives are being catastrophically impacted today and in the days to come.
The coffee industry is not immune to this impact either. Locally your cafés are closing, your roasters are slowing production, and some of your favourite baristas are without pay. Globally the market is teetering as buyers change their purchasing habits, ports stop importing and exporting, and producers harvest their crops with bated breath.
“This is massive for us in a negative way” laments Emily McIntyre, co-founder of Catalyst Trade. She shared a little bit of her personal experience with me today. “Just today I put a halt to an air freight shipment of an experimental process coffee that was intended for the competition circuit because Ethiopian Air couldn’t guarantee delivery to Portland and wanted to route it to DC.”
That’s just a small impact, she says.
“We are seeing massive disruption in our business model on every front. Though Ethiopia currently hasn’t shut down, we expect it will before long as well as the reviving ports in the USA.”
The impact of this economic crisis won’t just be felt at origin though, it will surely travel the value chain to wherever you live and drink. Emily calls this a trickledown effect.
“It’s intense: our customers are closing for who knows how long, so we suddenly have potential unsold inventory, which means we have to back off on buying, which means of course that our partners in origin have a problem too. It’s a universal issue we are trying to handle with grace and communication to preserve relationships and plan for next year.”
That may feel pretty heavy, and you may feel ill equipped to affect any sort of global change. But just like the negative impacts can trickle down to you from origin, your intentional decisions can trickle up to the very farms that grow your coffee.
Here’s a list of ways that you can affect positive change during this time on a local and global level!
How You Can Help
Buy Local
Yesterday your local café might have still been open, but today it’s likely not. That means you can’t quite walk in like you normally do to support them in that way but you can still buy a gift card, buy their beans online, or even get curbside service in some cases like Rooftop Coffee Roasters is doing!
Order Online
Online coffee subscriptions make drinking better coffee at home so much easier, and that’s never been more apparent than now. Whether you can’t get coffee locally because your shops are closed or because you literally can’t leave your house, there’s a multitude of ways to get coffee shipped directly to your door. But this isn’t just about you. “For most coffee shops and roasters, web orders is their only avenue of revenue” says David Shaub of Passenger coffee. Here are some subscriptions and roasters that are offering savings on shipping!
Crema.co - save $10 off your first order and an additional $1 off every bag
Trade Coffee - save 30% off your first order + free shipping
Not Even Coffee - 25% off using code TAKECARE
Brandywine Coffee Roasters - 15% off all web orders
Monogram Coffee - free Canadian shipping on orders of 2+ bags
Lüna Coffee - free Canadian shipping on orders of 3+ bags
Almanac Coffee - free shipping using code FREESHIPPING
Drop Coffee - free shipping worldwide using code COFFEE@HOME
Lil Wolf Coffee - free shipping using code SOCIALDISTANCING
Onyx Coffee - free domestic shipping using code COMMUNITY
Rooftop Coffee - free North American shipping of 2+ bags
Lima Coffee - 20% off all coffee online
Bird Rock Coffee - 100% of all Barista Blend proceeds go to staff
Mallgrab Coffee - 25% off and free shipping on orders over $35
Koppi Coffee - free international shipping on orders of 4+ bags
Olympia Coffee - free shipping storewide
RGLR Coffee - free home delivery in the downtown Toronto area
Brass Horn Coffee - free shipping on merch
Pilot Coffee Roasters - 10% off coffee and brewing gear
(this list is ever growing - let me know if I missed something!)
Tip A Barista
Go Fund Bean (@gofundbean on Instagram) is a clever initiative setup to facilitate virtual tip jars for baristas and cafés. Tip links have been generated and compiled for cafés all over the world that you can simply click on and donate to! Some of us are surely saving a few more pennies by being at home, we can spare them for people in the industry who are struggling financially.
Caffeinate The Caretakers
Andytown Coffee Roasters (@andytownsf on Instagram) has setup a program that allows you to purchase a coffee or a pastry for a healthcare professional. My wife is a primary healthcare provider, and I can tell you that the need is real. These folks are standing on the frontlines for the rest of us, so let’s have their backs.
Come Together
The folks at Fellow Products have put together a great resource for cafés and roasters to post their information and how you can help them specifically (kind of like this post!). This is a collaborative community project, so don’t hesitate to reach out to them if you have something to add!
Emily from Catalyst finished her thoughts in saying that “it seems like we all have to embrace the idea that the world is changing irrevocably. How? That remains to be seen.” We each have a lot of responsibility to assume for how the world looks on the other side of this. One of the most practical ways we can all help each other is to put the needs of our neighbours ahead of our own. That looks like social distancing, obsessive hand washing, and lots of phone calls. Call your elderly friends, Facetime your cousins, and let’s keep each other assured that we’re not alone.
Did I miss something? Leave me a comment or send me a DM on Instagram if there’s anything I should add to this article.
