Aeropress Go Plus ☕️; Brazil Trade Deal 🇧🇷; Deforestation Complexity 🌳: This Week in Coffee
The Big Three
Aeropress Go Plus Launches
Link
Hello everyone. My name is Will … and, I have a problem.
I am addicted to thinking about, buying and using new Aeropress products. This has hurt me, it’s made me look like a corporate wh*re and it’s come between me and my friends. I am seeking help but I know it’s a long road.
Not really (I’m not really seeking help).
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The Aeropress range including the Go and XL counterparts are some of the best coffee device for about 60% of the population. They’re easy to use, easy to clean, make great coffee and look okay in your shelf and last forever.
Aeropress could have sat on that and kept printing money long into the future but it’s really nice to see that they’re interesting those sales back into the business and developing more and more products.
The Areapress Go “Plus” isn’t as much an improvement on the Go - as it is a regular Aeropress with a vacuum canister included. That’s no bad thing but it is operating in a slightly different niche and is for a slightly different person.
The original Go was really targeted at consumers where space and weight where at a premium like hikers and campers. The coffee would be made in situ and drunk immediately. This new ‘Plus’ is focused more on users who will make the coffee at home and then immediately take it to work/play in the canister. No bad thing but a slightly different person.
Brazil and China’s Luckin Coffee Signal $500 Million Trade Deal
Having only just emerged from Bankruptcy in 20222, Luckin is easily the second largest coffee chain in the world by any measure and second only to the indomitable Starbucks.
However, unlike Starbucks, Lukin still has plenty of room to grow. That’s both inside the existing Chinese consumer market but also alongside a growing Chinese consumer middle class.
This new trade deal (can a company do a ‘trade deal’ with a country?) is a continuation of an existing 2022 deal of a similar nature where the company had agreed to buy 45,000 tonnes over three years. This new deal is 150,000 tonnes over two years so a significant increase.
This deal is a win-win for both the Brazilians and Luckin. For Brazil and its export agency this represents a successful negotiation with a powerful new coffee consumer and a fellow BRICs member. For Luckin, this is yet another step towards long-term and stable vertical integration of their supply chain and process.
Deforestation Discussion
There is some quite complex regulation being implemented by the EU which is designed to help reduced deforestation across the world but might also be hitting the poorest coffee farmers hardest.
It’s hard to tell and I’ll be doing more research on the subject to understand it better.
As far as I understand it, the EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) requires that businesses importing products which are ‘the main drivers of deforestation’ (including coffee) need to provide an evidenced statement that the specific item being imported hasn’t contributed to deforestation.
In the case of specialist coffee importers, this is going to be quite difficult because it’s not always easy to work with small growers to provide proper evidence and maybe they are doing some deforestation which wouldn’t look very good…
More to follow.
In other news