The Coffee Wars Get Recaffeinated

Just when you thought the world was divided between the opposing forces of Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, new ventures have perked things up again in the coffee category. With the purpose of depositioning the blue mermaid.

This year, for example, a man named Pete Licata was named best barista in the country at this year’s United States Barista Championship in Houston. Licata is not a Starbucks barista, but hails from the Honolulu Coffee Co. group in Hawaii. Licata then went on to international competition in Bogota, Colombia where he placed second (numero uno barista on the planet is an El Salvadorian named Alejandro Mendez).

Today Starbucks finds itself being challenged and repositioned on every front.  And the notion that’s brewing is that there’s more to coffee today than just the mermaid.

America’s (and the world’s) coffee palate has changed, evolved, and the new coffee culture finds itself sitting in cafes discussing the arcane attributes of Kenyan Peaberry, Brazilian Serra Negra, and Grand Cru. Restaurant menus respond to the new coffee connoisseurship by describing coffees the way others describe wines. Example: “…medium-bodied, smooth, with hints of cacao”. Some menus even mention coffee growers like Chuck Boerner in Kona. Artisan coffeeshops like Blue Bottle, Brooklyn Roasting Company, Dunn Brothers in Minneapolis, and Ninth Street Espresso in Chelsea Market present thicker, chewier lattes and more robust morning roast, focused on what they claim Starbucks started but did not finish.

Ed Schultz, founder of Honolulu Coffee Co. (where barista Pete Licata brews his best), puts it this way. “A company with 13,000 stores [like Starbucks] cannot see themselves as a boutique brand. There are people who want a pure coffee experience, rather than being in [Starbucks’] ‘third place’.” Rather than spewing out cups of grande egg nog lattes from super automatic espresso machines, Schultz and others pay attention to the coffee, from seed to cup.

“There’s a quite large percentage of people who are quite happy with going to Starbucks and don’t want what we do at all,” says Blue Bottle Coffee’s James Freeman. “Shops like ours are a little less customer focused. We only have six drinks, we don’t have sizes or flavors. We have less people, less stuff, smaller drinks.”

While Starbucks has captured the comfy social experience of the European café, others are championing the taste experience. While this may have been what Starbucks had going in its early days, it is where people like Honolulu’s Ed Schultz suggest they are failing today. “You cannot be that big and pretend to put out artisan coffee,” says Schultz. “Inside European cafes, you find one person creating the coffee, using a very manual method.”

“We have more manual preparation,” agrees Blue Bottle’s Freeman. “Fewer push button operations. Fewer words. We spend more time making each drink.”

It seems that as Starbucks educated us on what coffee could taste like, they also created coffee aspirations. Just as we traded up from bottles of Mateus and Liebfraumilch to Napa Valley wines years ago, so, too, we aspire to better things in coffee today.

And while this depositioning might relegate Starbucks solely to the experience level, the company is having pressures on that front, too.