slamboard

I have blogged about McCafe before as if it was an anomaly in the marketplace. Things change fast in the fast food business…

McDonald’s, whose U.S. coffee sales increased 39 percent during the first nine months of 2007, plans to add espresso counters at as many as 14,000 locations.

I had the theory that McDonalds were sticking to areas with little or no Starbucks presence for their cafe add-ons. It turns out that they are now going head to head in many markets. Starbucks has 15,000 locations in 43 countries.

I used to be a professional coffee roaster. I found out during the course of my thousands of coffee tastings that my sense of taste is less keen than a lot of experts. Using my average palate, I have decided that McCafe coffee is just as good as Starbucks. Starbucks does have a wider variety of specialty coffees and coffee drinks. The quality of espresso is somewhat dependent on how well the equipment is maintained and operated.

Source: Bloomberg

Here is a synopsis of what the writers at the CVillain covers…Charlottesville, C-Ville Restaurants, Cafes, Music, Reviews and More. The more includes some pretty interesting stuff, like the people handing out FREE condoms on Halloween. They were pretty positive about that gesture, but I think that far too many of those condoms would have been used as improvised water balloons that night rather than being saved for their proper purpose.

I always get a great vibe from the people of Virginia that I have had the pleasure of dealing with. I may well go there someday

I enjoyed the Cafe roundup. The even handed reviews conclude that the city lacks a truly special coffee house. That is sad, but at least it’s a level playing field. Here is a two dimensional depiction of that level playing field:

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The Fair Trade Coffee Roaster that I became involved with had an amazing mural in its cafe. It came into existence when a Mexican artist who was a part of a coffee producing cooperative in Chiapas made an inquiry about English lessons. JustUs! Coffee is based in a quaint university town and they made the offer of providing the artist with travel and accommodation and arranging his language instruction, etc., in exchange for a commissioned work of art.

Larry’s Beans is a coffee company that recognized the value of the music that was being made by some of the farmers that supplied them with coffee. Larry went down to Nicaragua with some recording equipment and he is now selling CDs back in the US with all the proceeds going back the the Nicaraguan coffee producers.

I checked out their store and the CDs are out of stock, but they have lots of coffee as well as books and t-shirts.

Calabash Music is a fair trade music company. They have lots of free music on the website to help you whet your appetite. One of my favorite genres is soukous.

Oil is the number one commodity in terms of value. People make the argument that a war is being fought largely over the control of this indispensable stuff.

The number two commodity is coffee. Why aren’t wars fought over coffee? I guess it is because possession and control of the land that grows coffee does not provide wealth. In fact, coffee growing regions include some of the poorest places on the planet. In many cases, there may be a small battle of wills when the coffee is taken from the farmers by unscrupulous middlemen. The middlemen are armed with guns, and a little bit of money. The coffee farmer has some beans.

Maybe the economics and the politics of oil would be more like those of coffee if impoverished men, women and children could pick barrels of it out of the jungles and the mountains and carry it out on their backs.

I would guess that every multi-national company has someone, somewhere promoting a boycott of their products. There is an individual on a forum that I frequent advocating the boycott of Google. Not because of their dealings with the totalitarian State of China, but rather in response to the punitive nature of their page ranking system on bloggers.

I have an aunt who is an environmentalist from way back before it was cool. When I was visiting her in Toronto as a child in the mid 80s, she was boycotting EXXON. Boycotting huge companies that have a wide range of products can be a personal hardship. My aunt would drive past Exxon stations when she was close to empty and look around for an alternative. In the small community where I grew up, there is no alternative to Exxon.

Kraft is a great case study for boycotts. This is a huge company with almost countless different brand names. There have been boycotts against them for a wide variety of reasons, from their advertising of cigarettes aimed at children to their sponsorship of the Gay Games. If you are a consumer of processed foods, boycotting Kraft is very complicated. Oh, I should say that I think the AFA call for a Kraft Boycott in response to their sponsorship of the Gay Games is deplorable and ridiculous. A search on this subject reveals that criticism of the boycott and support of the Gay Games totally swamped the call for a boycott. Maybe the AFA should call for a boycott of Google for placing GoodAsYou.org higher in the search than the AGAPE Press. Why does the Christian website name sound gayer than the gay one?

One boycott that I support in principle, but probably fall well short of in practice is against the humongous food company Nestlé. The main thrust of this started in 1977 and the company has abandoned SOME egregious policies and practices in SOME regions and spent much money on defensive rebranding in various sectors of its enterprise in the interim. This is a very big issue and I encourage everyone to read about Nestlé.

The problem with boycotts is that the mass market is not as responsive to complicated messages as it is to simplistic advertising. Lobbying governments to impose restrictions on advertising can have a much larger effect. I read that Brazil has an outright ban on advertising of baby formula. One major issue that people have had with Nestlé is its aggressive marketing of formula to poor people who would be much better off breastfeeding. Brazil and other countries have also imposed labeling restrictions on baby formula.