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All by myself.”Ĭonsumption of coffee at home offset the decrease in drinking in bars, restaurants and cafes around the world, from Brazil to Bali. “As a recent example I took a break at 10:30, went downstairs, crossed the street, entered a small local coffee place, had an espresso, went to the bakery, bought bread and came back upstairs. “Many people in Italy do not really drink coffee in social settings,” says Visioli. Unlike aperitivi, coffee doesn’t have to be consumed socially at a bar. “Spending your day working in front of a screen, doing long-forgotten chores, calling your mum, friends, whomever might have increased the need for something rewarding, energising.” It became a kind of self-reward, says Francesco Visioli, who studies active compounds in food at the University of Padua in Italy and co-authored a recent paper on lifestyle lessons from the pandemic. With people confined to working from home and with limited options to leave the house, making coffee was one of few ways to take a break from work. Reis says that some of Daterra’s clients are choosing cheaper beans or delaying orders as they ride out the pandemic.
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“We found ourselves out of work with warehouses full of raw materials,” says Lelli. Ninety percent of Lelli’s beans are sold to coffee shops, restaurants and hotels, which were among the first to close down. With the centre of Italy’s outbreak in the north of the country, Lelli was in the eye of the storm. Leonardo Lelli, a coffee roaster in Bologna, knew immediately that Covid-19 would cause chaos for his business. A daily caffeine boost remained essential but Italians were happier to miss out on their aperitivi, Bracale and Vaccaro say.įor cafes and coffee shops, the picture was less rosy. The method is not perfect, as year-on-year sales might fluctuate for any number of reasons, but compared to single-digit growth for wine and beer, coffee was a product Italians could not go without. Renata Bracale of Italy’s Molise University and Concetta Vaccaro of the Censis socioeconomic research institute in Rome compared Italians’ weekly grocery purchases with the equivalent sales in 2019. As one of the first nations in Europe to impose tight restrictions on leaving the home, consumers had to adapt quickly to get their daily fix.Ĭoffee grocery sales increased by 23% in the first full week of lockdown in Italy. When government support is no longer possible, we may see mass unemployment.” “We do not know how the global economy will settle after this shock. “But with consumption, the uncertainty is greater,” warns Sette. Despite the difficulties finding sufficient migrant labour, even much smaller coffee-producing countries like Ethiopia, which exports about four million bags of coffee per year, have largely been able to continue production as planned. Governments moved to safeguard workers by declaring coffee production an essential economic activity. “The impact of Covid on coffee production is relatively minor,” says José Sette, the executive director of the International Coffee Organization. The farm’s harvest this year is set to be 6,000 tonnes (about 100,000 bags), he says. Fortunately for Reis the skies stayed clear. The race was on to harvest the bumper crop safely with fewer workers before the rains spoiled the beans. With social distancing rules, he had to prepare to have half the number of migrant workers staying on the farm, meaning the harvest would take longer. He is reliant on migrant labourers from the north-east of Brazil, who stay in lodgings on Daterra’s site. Reis had seen the news about business closures in Asia at the start of the year and began to make preparations. Why have some parts of the industry thrived while others struggled to survive? And how did producers and retailers innovate to keep delivering our daily caffeine hit? Watch our film about how coffee kept us going in 2020.
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Some never reopened.ĭespite the incredibly challenging working environment imposed by Covid-19 restrictions, consumers have still been able to get their hands on their favourite drink, thanks largely to the resilience of coffee producers and supply chains. Baristas and coffee shop owners were some of the first to close the doors to their businesses as lockdowns began. In total, 125 million people depend on coffee for their livelihood, from transporting and roasting the beans to selling the final product. This year has not been easy for people in the coffee industry, including 25 million smallholder farmers who are responsible for growing 80% of the world’s coffee. But there are a lot of people you have to thank for your mid-morning coffee break. In what has been a strange year for those people forced to work from home, little daily habits have helped to sustain normality.