Starblacks and Weasels
Mar 31st, 2007 by Eats Wombats
Starbuck’s search for some authentic Latin American coffee-related stuff to sell as it launches a new caramel flavored drink, dulce de leche, is recounted in yesterday’s Business Week. Typical Costa Rican mugs were brown, dull, and wouldn’t sell. An artisan making bright handpainted mugs was found and she was paid a flat fee for her designs. Each mug will have a tag with her name and a likeness and, on the bottom, “Made in China.” Posters of a grandmother making traditional dulce de leche on gas stove will be sold in stores; the grandmother is a Seattle model.
The dulce de leche that Starbucks will sell is something concocted in Starbuck’s labs, taste tested on employees, and then rolled out globally. That what is deployed is not authentic is sad but unavoidable, but the loss of local authenticity that follows this globalization is sadder still.
Dublin had magnificent coffee shops once. Now they are gone (or maybe not entirely). Starbucks was hardly to blame. Nor is it Nestlé’s fault that the Philippines fell off the “coffee belt,” stopped exporting coffee and now imports instant coffee. I have no objection to Starbucks opening up in places where you couldn’t get a decent cup of brewed coffee to save your life, e.g., Manila, but when this is at the expense of traditional retail diversity I want to shop elsewhere, to buy Max Havelaar coffee, and maybe anything but Starbucks.
I spent last Easter in Starbucks-free, coffee-loving Vietnam. Alongside the sidewalk stalls there’s a local Starbucks knockoff. It’s called Starblacks and it has a green and black logo like you-know-who. Most of Vietnam’s exported coffee is already sold to Starbucks and I suspect it will likely want to buy Starblacks some day, if allowed to do so. However, since Vietnamese taste in coffee is very different it will have to adapt the menu. The sickly dulce-de-leche will be out. Instead, weasel coffee could be big.
The world’s newest and most expensive deluxe coffee is Alamid Coffee from the Philippines. It’s unique flavour derives from the passage of the coffee cherries through wild civets. (Whoever first discovered this must have been pretty desperate to stay out of Starbucks.) I tried a ($10) cup of it in Manila airport when en route to Ho Chi Minh City. The flavour was robust, but not worth a multiple of the cost of a cup of Starbucks coffee. I was amused to find on arrival in HCMC that the street vendors had their tins of coffee neatly labeled Arabica, Robusta, Mocha, etc. and Weasel. It was being knocked off before it had even reached Manila.
The Alamid is also marketed as Kopi Luwak at hundreds $/kg. I imagine the collecting was too onerous and that the civets have been caged.
It was my impression that Vietnam was mostly exporting Robusta coffee which is more bitter than Arabica. Robusta does produce much more crema than Arabica beans, even when stale, therefore visually gives the impression of being freshly roasted. That does fit in with their business model which uses two roasting plants for N. America plus exports. According to Consumer Reports the freshest coffee they could buy in Starbuck’s stores was two weeks old - that is well along the path of stale.