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speaking of coffee

I was recently interviewed by FoodGPS about many coffee topics, ranging from west coast coffee scenes to the legitimacy of barista competitions and my thoughts on coffee common.

There are a few things I said that I’ll expand on when I have more time (or if you buy me a beer), but here is a fun quote:

More vital than us pushing our message on audiences right now is really listening to customers and understanding what ideas about coffee they’re still holding on to and how they perceive what’s going on in our industry. You can see a lot of backlash against the kind of hoity toity expertise-driven positioning and differentiation that’s happening at the vanguard of the industry. I don’t think it has a lot of buy-in. The general foodie-centric consumer perceives wine or beer or cocktail culture with a much higher degree of acceptance than what’s going on in coffee culture. It’s still feels pretentious — and I think we have a lot of pretensions — and I feel a lot of those pretensions are defensible and worth defending and I embrace them, but I think we’ve done a poor job of communicating the legitimacy of them to consumers.

Mostly I’m just proud of myself for not saying anything too inflammatory.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 10th, 2011 at 10:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “speaking of coffee”

  1. Brian Clemens Says:
    March 10th, 2011 at 1:20 pm

    Tony,

    You sir….are a good man! Off to read the entire interview. AND next time I’m in L.A. we need a few beers and then you’ll get talking and using words like “wankerism”. Keep it real!

    BC

  2. drew Says:
    March 29th, 2011 at 6:01 am

    I agree 100%. What the leaders of coffee culture have to get over is the fact that they have the final answer. We’ve entered a renaissance period with coffee and instead of coming from a high place, they need to understand that they are really in the trenches with the consumer. We’re all learning, as we come out of the dark (roast) ages. The population of consumers who demand exceptional coffee is growing rapidly and some are leaders themselves. Look at the work going on at home-barista or coffeegeek. They’re doing the research and asking the unpopular questions, all for the love of great coffee.