Is America the big bad caffeinated wolf of coffee consumption?
It’s completely worldwide. We are a large consumer of coffee, but it’s Norway that has the largest consumption of coffee in the world. Coffee consumption is way up in Europe; it’s replacing tea in the UK. It’s not sold as beans in stores in Europe to the degree that it is here; it’s not made in-home. People still drink a lot of instant. Ugh, instant. No one should have to drink nasty coffee. The irony, in my job, is that when I travel to visit the coffee farmers, I drink the worst coffee on the planet. It’s horrible. In every coffee crop, there’s something like 23 steps from seed to cup, so it’s very labor-intensive. So they go through these processes of sorting the coffee and, by the time they get to the end, they have the dregs. And that’s what they keep for themselves. Other than nasty coffee, what’s it like to visit the farmers? They often live in wooden shacks. They give you the one chair that they have in the house to sit in. And I learn so much from the coffee farmers when I vis
