According to Derek
Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, ten years ago Americans drank enough
soda every year to fill a small aquarium: fifty-three gallons of the stuff per
person. That's half a liter of Diet Coke on an average day. Compare that to our other favorite
liquid-caffeine companion. For every cup of coffee we consumed in 2003, we
drank two cups of soft drink. For $1 we spent on coffee, we spent $4 on soda.
Now look where we are: Soda is in a free fall, with domestic
revenue down 40%. Coffee culture is
ascendant, up 50% in ten years. In
another decade, the United States could easily spend more on coffee than soda
-- something utterly unthinkable at the turn of the century.
Four factors are behind this remarkable caffeinated
convergence:
(1) The health thing. This
hardly requires summary. Soda ain't
cigarettes, but sugary soft drinks have faced a similar cultural and political
backlash in the last decade. As
obsessively healthy attitudes have osmosed from yoga yuppies to the general
population, local governments have turned on soda, pressing school bans and
cup-volume limits. Fading consumer
sentiment has had twin impacts: pushing soda drinkers to switch to cheaper brands
and encouraging soda companies to shift toward diet drinks, smaller bottles,
and alternative drinks.
(2) The water and
energy-drink craze.
Americans drink about 180 gallons of liquid every
year. That number is practically carved
in stone. It's zero-sum. When a soda drinker decides she wants to
drink iced tea with lunch from now on, she's won't order a Diet Coke and an iced tea. She'll just switch. When we drink more of one kind of beverage -- bottled
water sales are up 50 percent in the last decade; sports and energy drink sales
are up 100 percent --
those gains have been soda's pains. The
rise of energy drinks is especially important because energy drinks directly
replace soft drinks among customers who buy Diet Coke and its ilk for an
afternoon pick-up. Americans still drink
more soda than any other "category" of drink, like milk or
juice. But the gap is fading quickly.
(3) Ascendant coffee culture. Coffee
consumption in the U.S. is basically flat, after two decades when Starbucks and
other national coffee shops sprouted like a steroidal ragweed along urban and
suburban sidewalks. But young consumers
haven't yet had their fix, and as this demographic trades up for more expensive
coffee when the economy recovers, the overall industry should continue
buzzing. Just as studies showing the ill
effects of sugary drinks have hurt soda, studies showing that we can basically drink
as much coffee as we want, permit young people to go back for
refills. Consumption has increased the
most for consumers between 18 and 24, and younger consumers are more likely to
drink coffee on a daily basis today than five years ago and the most likely to
drink espresso drinks.
(4) Rising
coffee prices. Coffee's growth isn't just a matter of trading up to more
expensive lattes, it's also a case of paying more each year for the same cup.
"Much of the revenue growth in the past five years was stimulated by a
14.1% annualized increase in the world price of coffee," which were mostly
passed on to customers.
The Kona Cowboy Coffee Company can satisfy your soft
drink replacements with our four brands of gourmet coffees. You’ll get a real start on having a great cup
of joe with PANIOLA 100% Kona Cowboy Coffee, grown on Hawaiian volcanoes and
roasted in the Rocky Mountains … the one with no bitter aftertaste and no acidity. CAFÉ PINON de Nuevo Mexico is the Southwest’s
favorite with pinion nuts and a perfect way to improve your coffee happiness
during the day. And our MOKA-JAVA is a
medium dark roasted blend of Indonesian and Ethiopian coffees that will make
you positively positive! We also make
COWBOY ACTION COFFEE, the Official Coffee of the Single Action Shooting
Society!
You
know you’re a coffee fiend when you're the employee of the month at the local
coffeehouse and you don't even work there!
So
enjoy your coffee, make it Kona, and remember, Kona is the home of the Hawaiian
cowboy…and we had cowboys in Kona before there were cowboys in Texas!
