Point of View
We are downright envious of all of you who get to travel these days. We get a contact high listening to the detailed step-by-step stories we extract from friends and business colleagues flying here and there around the US, popping in on a crowds-free Venice or snapping pictures on a deserted Acropolis. But we secretly hate your guts! Those of us in beautiful Thailand are stuck here due to lingering Covid-19 restrictions. We’re not ones to miss many major coffee or tea exhibitions, but leaving Thailand these days means subjecting oneself – upon return here – to a mandatory 14-day, prisoner-in-a-hotel quarantine, and that’s a non-starter as far as travel goes. (And, we have to admit, there are many worse places to be “stuck” than Thailand.)
We’ll hear all about all about New Orleans from STiR’s staff in the US who attended our booth at the recent lower-key, delayed SCA exhibition in the hurricane-struck city. And we’ll also get to hear about how wonderful Italy is this time of year from STiR staff attending our booth at upcoming HOST exhibition in Milan at the end of October. (Just in: Thailand just reduced the return, in-hotel quarantine to mere seven days …. hmmmm …. tempting … checking the airfare to Italy now.)
In the “just when you thought it couldn’t get worse” department…. In Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, the so-called “black frost” threatens to curtail coffee supplies to crisis levels not seen in many years. And now it seems that coffee production in the world’s second largest producer – Vietnam – is also not performing well. Production there isn’t expected to be down down, but it will be lower than expected. So come on Colombia – save the day? Nope. Just reported in the recently emailed STIR Newsletter (visit https://stir-tea-coffee.com/tea-coffee-news), that production will also be down there due to the effects of La Nina. So any hopes of the second and third largest coffee producers coming to the rescue of Brazil’s shortfall seem dashed as coffee prices soar in the New York arabica coffee futures trade.
OK let’s talk about something nice…
REVENGE shopping? Count us in. Goes like this: there’s lots of pent-up demand for vacations, furniture, toys, dining out, cosmetic surgery, etc., etc.– all curtailed by the pandemic era – and globally, consumers sit upon trillions of $€£ in savings accounts saved up during Covid-19. Some reports say this holiday season sales will be GANGBUSTERS as we emerge from the Covid-19 era – hopefully – and people will be spending WITH A VENGENCE making up for lost time. That bodes well for coffee and tea also along with all other products and services.
And how about the upbeat news from National Coffee Assn of America’s (NCA) and its annual National Coffee Data Trends (NCDT) showing the US out-of-home coffee drinking rebounds to pre-pandemic levels?
There’s no shortage of business and trade info on coffee and tea origins and farmers and production/crop levels and on the other end the consumer and retail experience of coffee and tea drinkers and enthusiasts. In this issue, for example, see the story on Vietnam already mentioned above, or the story on “Coffee Subscriptions: Here to Stay” or the story on the “Robotification of Boba Tea”. And while STiR reports on those segments alot, readers look toward STiR’s unique and exclusive, issue-by-issue reporting on industry and manufacturing concerns, and technology, and developments. STiR is the only magazine where you will read many features in each issue like, “Category is: “Sorting Equipment” or “Coffee and Tea Packaging: Suppliers Innovating Toward Sustainability”, and “Packaging and Packing: Enhancing the Positives of Tea”. And you can count on us continuing those reports.
Very importantly, we are happy to present to readers in this issue the Q&A with leading coffee company Neumann Kaffee Gruppe and executives David M. Neumann and Pablo Garcia C. answering questions about the pandemic, climate change, poverty in the coffee regions, and the Brazil “situation”.