Hungry Capital by Luigi Russi

Author:Luigi Russi [Russi, Luigi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78099-770-4
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2013-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

New Directions in Retail

If the international coffee market therefore appears to be “controlled by the hedging and speculative strategies of transnational trading corporations on the futures and spot markets,”41 the massification of consumption of the second food regime appears to have given rise to new competitive strategies—on the retail side—in the form of “global sourcing […], product differentiation […] and product innovation.42 These strategies, as observed more generally in Chapter 5, allow agrifood companies to “mine” additional value from an otherwise saturated market. So, the retail sector is still dominated by large roasting companies that source coffee internationally based on price signals. These have also diversified their products through the introduction of—for example—instant coffee (which makes up the vast majority of coffee consumption in some markets, like the UK) or decaf coffee,43 as well as coffee-based soft drinks,44 in an attempt to halt the decline in coffee consumption that had otherwise been taking place since the 1970s.45

The Specialty Coffee Segment and Fair Trade

However, the most interesting new trends seem to have come in the form of specialty coffees and, building on the rise of the latter, sustainable coffee.46 The former simply refers to the valuation of a coffee’s “origin, quality, processing and cultivation methods”47 as a significant contributor to the product’s taste. Specialty coffee has been another way—for large retailers—to tap into a different type of demand.48 The best example of this strategy is perhaps Nestlé’s “Nespresso” business model, which generates consumer fidelity by coupling household coffeemaking technology with a variety of flavours—seeking to accommodate a gourmet clientele—packed in pre-fit capsules that yield a consistent quality coffee for home consumption.49 However, specialty coffee has also fostered the expansion of large coffee “boutique” shops, where the dark drink is only part of the offer, the rest being the availability of a “non-home, nonwork environment that had once been the forum for public life but that had almost disappeared under the postwar regime of highly regimented schedules, commuter life, and television.”50 Retailers like Starbucks and, later, Costa Coffee and Caffé Nero, are the clearest examples of this new trend.

Building on the differentiation introduced by the specialty coffee industry, consumer choice has been claiming attention for reasons beyond just taste, focusing instead on other concerns such as environmental sustainability/biodiversity (as is the case of organic coffee or shade-grown coffee51 ). An exemplary instance of this “wider choice” trend is the Fair Trade movement, based on the philosophy of “shortening” the supply chain, enabling direct contact between consumers and producers.52 In view of this, Fair Trade has enabled concerns for the welfare of coffee growers to trickle down the food chain,53 engendering what has been called the “privatization of foreign policy,”54 i.e. the harnessing of private international trade relations for the pursuit of broadly socio-economic goals. Fair Trade has been promoted through the use of third-party certification, a form of private regulation that is now ubiquitous in the food system more generally, attesting, in particular, to the presence of those product attributes which are considered to be relevant to consumers.

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