Millennials driving up the cost of coffee

Posted on: 2016-11-03 2:52 PM

These days, it seems like Millennials are the favorite scapegoat for just about everything wrong with the world, from vacations to trees to the traditional 9-to-5 workday. Now, a new report is picking on the beleaguered generation for exacerbating an oncoming dearth of coffee as they increasingly demand their cups of coffee.
 
According to a variety of sources, the bulk of the world’s java-lovers are young people between the ages of 19 to 34. While older generations may be drifting away from the brew, so many more young people are more than making up for any resulting drop in coffee drinkers.
 
These days, Millennials born after 1995 typically start drinking coffee around the beginning of high school, while those born closer to 1982 typically began drinking it closer to graduation. The amount of coffee they drink has surged over the last few years, Daisy Meager writes for Munchies. But while this might sound like good news for coffee growers, the combination of spiking demand and a combination of problems in the fields could spell trouble for coffee-lovers everywhere.
 
Over the last few years, a perfect storm of a devastating fungus, unseasonably and increasingly warm and dry weather, as well as higher prices for fertilizer have hit coffee farmers and their crops hard. Most of the world’s coffee-growing regions can be found around the equator, but as global temperatures have risen, that sweet spot has shrunk, according to a recent report by The Climate Institute in Australia. If things keep going this way, climate experts warn that more than half of the world’s coffee growers could be out of luck and out of business by 2050, Wyatt Marshall reports for Munchies.
 
“The demand for coffee has been trending well above expectations and causing a significant tightening of coffee markets.”
 
While generally a good thing, the increase in retail pricing isn’t being passed down to the growers in any meaningful way as the distributors seem to be pocketing the lion's share of the increase.  Coffee buyers looking to keep costs under control will need to start negotiating with the farms directly to ensure that there is sufficient money in the hands of the growers to expand and keep up with the demand.