Commodity vs Specialty Coffee
A small nutshell explanation of what constitutes commodity coffee and what exactly is specialty coffee. If we were so bold as to separate a multi billion-dollar industry into two boxes.
Commodity coffee is your highway, restaurant, fast food, supermarket coffee that’s highly affordable and relatively low quality. Tastes pretty much the same wherever you drink it, and rarely, if ever, states where it comes from (origin country, region etc).
Now that’s not to mean that the effort going into the production and harvesting of these green coffees is something to sniff at, but cheaper varietals with higher yields growing at lower altitudes enabling the mechanization of harvesting and processing help push the costs down. These coffees trade convenience and price point for potentially devastating environmental and societal impact. (deforestation, heavy pesticide use, poor remuneration of producers and pickers at origins etc)
Bear in mind these are very general terms I’m speaking in as the real story can be much more complex in a very large industry.
Specialty coffee is your more expensive, fancy coffee that can be fruity, acidic, complex, floral and sometimes wildly different but overall can be categorized as ‘high-end coffee’ Although that scale is a large one too.
The beauty of these types of coffees; is that they often champion ethically and environmentally sound practices at both origin and all along the production line (a long and thrillingly complex line it is). But because these high-end coffees come from varietals that grow at higher altitudes, with lower yields, and are more about quality than volume, that often translates to higher costs. As a general rule quality translates to higher prices.
Both have their pros and cons and there’s a lot more grey in between these two black and white definitions. But like most things the market shapes itself in response to consumer tendencies, as consumer tendencies can at times be shaped by the market. Specialty coffees prodigious popularity in recent times being a great example.
