I’m starting to think that Starbucks doesn’t care quite as much for the poor farmers that grow their beans as they try to portay.
Some background: In the late 90s, Starbucks started selling a Fair Trade Certified blend called, creatively enough, “Fair Trade Blend”. Fair Trade certification is essentially an assurance that products with that label meet certain criteria regarding the price marketers pay the producers, ecological friendliness, and care for the producing communities. Great goals, yes?
Anyway, despite heavy promotion and marketing, Starbucks’ Fair Trade Blend never quite took off the way they’d hoped. The reason (in my estimation)? It tasted bad. Really bad. I recall the first time I tried FTB, as a matter of fact. It was some time during my first week as a Starbucks employee. I, along with a couple of my fellow Shift Supervisors had been “cupping” (coffee-snob speak for “tasting”) different coffees during downtimes in order to learn more about the subtleties of the blends. When FTB’s turn came up, I remember feeling a certain excitement to taste it . . . as if the social conscience attached to it somehow meant that it would taste incredible.
Wrong.
Even with my then-limited coffee knowledge, I could quickly tell that this was the worst “real” coffee* I’d ever had in my life. Absolutely no body, and tasted something like sawdust. I distinctly remember the facial reaction of one of my co-workers (who happens to now be a store manager for Starbucks in southern Alabama) . . . he looked up from his cup, puckered his lips, and smacked slowly, as if he was trying to get the taste of some horrible medicine to leave his mouth.
All of this to say . . . Café Estima Blend, Starbucks’ newest Fair Trade Certified brew (complete with Social Responsibility hype and marketing) tastes worse, if that’s possible, than Fair Trade Blend. Why do they insist on giving these poor farmers such a bad name? I’ve had GREAT Fair Trade Certified coffees from other companies, and somehow the world’s largest coffee chain can’t manage to get one right.
(*”Real” coffee excludes such sludge as Folgers, Taster’s Choice, and Maxwell House.)
3 comments ↓
Rae, check out http://cityhippy.blogspot.com/2005/10/feature-starbucks-challenge.html
this is a like-minded fellow that presented a “starbucks challenge.” The basic idea was to simply order the cup of estima, then chronicle it on your blog. I guess there is a concensus that Starbucks commitment to the farmers cannot be too great when you can only order venti size, and have to wait ’4 minutes’ for a french press…
OK — I have to disagree about Estima tasting worse. Nothing — except maybe Nestle’s shit — could taste worse than the “Fair Trade Blend.
That said, may I join your previous commenter in encouraging you to take the Starbucks Challenge?
Joe H: A proper French Press is suppose to take 4 minutes for the coffee grinds to be properly brewed, dumbass. During a busy rush, French Press is the most difficult way to indispose a barista (besides making a frappacino), between measuring, weighing, grinding, pouring, and waiting for the brew to finish. A venti sized cup is so you can enjoy your full money’s worth since you bought the whole serving in the press, anyways. I’m 3 years behind here, but thought your ignorance was worth following up to.
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