On my last visit to Canada back in October of `24 during the week leading up to Thanksgiving, I was invited to stay with a friend who had introduced me to SW about a year ago. While in Detroit Michigan on a business trip after flying there from Sweden, I crossed the Canada/US border and stayed with her and her parents on their tobacco farm over the Thanksgiving weekend. 🇸🇪 🇨🇦
First time in my life I've ever witnessed a 'live' turkey chase in someone's backyard! My girl friend in Canada is Scandinavian like myself but Canadian-born and is very athletic, very tall, extremely toned, exceptionally thin and lean... and the funniest part of all is that she can outrun a 25 pound turkey and catch it with her bare hands as a dozen friends and relatives look on! 😳 🦃
While I was in Canada, my girl friend who is also one of my business clients, introduced me to a new female friend of her's who is a Coffee Buyer for Starbucks in the USA, an American business woman who joined us for Thanksgiving weekend who's it is to go to coffee auctions in the USA and bid on coffee beans by the ton or truckload.
Sitting around having some very high quality, non-Starbucks Columbian coffee imported to Canada (with no tariffs!), the three of us talked coffee-talk as we chatted in private about all the men in our lives! Yes, it was a 'hen party' for sure, but any guys who got mentioned in conversation definitely came out the winners in our secret discussion about them in their absence!
What I learned from my new American friend who's a Buyer for Starbucks, is that Starbucks only uses the LOWEST quality of coffee beans money can buy. The reason being, that in those wholesale coffee bean auctions, all coffee buyers want ONLY the very best coffee beans available, which means all the poor beans never get sold and usually get dumped into a compost pile that's as big as your house!
The problem is, if those poor quality beans don't get sold, the coffee bean farmers in South America don't get paid either. If they're allowed to fail in business, the whole coffee industry shuts down.
It's not that coffee plantations consistently produce poor coffee that makes a crop of beans poor, it's that coffee beans are temperamental to grow and any shift in weather or temperature can easily ruin an entire crop.
Who then buys those poor-quality beans for no other reason than to keep the coffee farmers in business, is Starbucks.
Basically what Starbucks pays at a coffee auction for very poor beans is the farmer's gross cost to produce his crop, plus about a 5% profit margin, all of which goes straight back to the farmer with no middle-man in-between to take what little profit there was.
The way that Starbucks then markets those poor quality coffee beans, some of which are still green even after they've been roasted, is to mix flavored cream with each cup of coffee they sell in coffee shops which makes the coffee more palatable to the taste, otherwise you wouldn't be able to drink the stuff if it was served black for sure. But this also requires that you mix at least a half a cup of milk with black coffee if you wanted 'coffee Americano', otherwise the taste is horrible.
Always remember, Starbucks are not coffee aficionados, they are wholesale buyers of coffee beans which otherwise are destined to the compost heap.