This Week in Coffee
A weekly recap of all the news stories about coffee and coffee equipment from the last week. I hope this is useful and, as always, I welcome comments, corrections and feedback.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and I hope you’re all enjoying Snowman’s Land. May your puck always be properly extracted.
Equipment
At £144 this seems extremely ambitious but they’ve managed to sell out. “Uni” by name but not by nature, I think the brand is doing a lot of work here.
Industry
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Middleby acquires Marco, producing water and coffee products for commercial settings
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Starbucks are changing their rewards program, making it less generous
I know you guys love starbees don’t lie. It’s obvious that you secretly crave the union-busting goodness of PS latte but you’ll now need even more imaginary internet points to get that anti-labour caffeine hit. Starbucks rewards points is cyptocurrency for jocks you heard it here first.
Despite Oatly’s attempt to brand themselves as Che Guevara running a mom and pop store, it should be obvious to everyone that they’re actually a very successful 800m USD mega-corp who would put oat milk in the water supply if you let them. No hate, they’re expanding hard and it’s always good to see options.
Misc
You may remember the drama at the last World Barrister Championships after a vegan competitor pulled out when they weren’t allowed to use a milk-alternative for the milk round. You may even remember that Oatly’s corporate marketing department even got involved and cracked out their bag of ‘anti establishment’ messages.
Well, sadly for Oatly they are back in the establishment with these rule changes. Milk drinks can now be prepared with milk alternatives.
As for the other changes, the most significant change is allow fully automatic machines to enter in the awards for best machine. I doubt we’ll see them win but it’s always good to open the competition.