a cup of coffee for the coffee addict
Ok, so recently I decided to cave into (or RE-cave) my coffee addiction. It started in high school when I started using my mom’s prized coffee maker for sleepless all-nighters spent doing calc homework and studying for the SAT’s. I didn’t spend a dime on Starbuck’s frappuchinos unlike the school newspaper nerds or my favorite student council president. But my favorite coffee back then was Starbuck’s ground coffee, and I never looked back since.
Coffee was the reason I was able to survive back then. Coffee pumping through my veins, I was involved in a ton of activities, academic and non-academic. Before I broke my legs, I was involved in dance, track, basketball, tennis, and for a brief moment in space and time, swimming. I started swimming in eighth grade, the worst swimmer in my class, but after one hot summer of being tutored in swimming by my classmate, I magically became a mermaid. I made swim team and dived like a dolphin, crushing on said classmate who was varsity swim team captain who helped me become the swimmer that I was and still am today.
We swam in the same lane and haven’t looked back since.
But anyway back to coffee. I hadn’t used a coffee maker in years, because I used to have a coffee addiction that caused serious withdrawal. Also, my mom threw mine out. I got a new one a month ago and finally got some ground coffee. Specifically Starbucks’ Cafe Verona coffee, which has dark chocolate and caramelized sugar notes.
The best coffee I ever had. Excluding that time my freshman summer when I got an espresso machine on an impulse buy. I have fond memories of that espresso machine. I wonder where it is now and what it’s doing.
It’s 5:12 am and I just drank a cup of coffee. It’s fueling me to write this post. I wanted to write a post about coffee for the longest time, but I wasn’t sure what I would write about. I even asked ChatGPT to write a blog post on coffee, and it spit back a long anecdote of the origins of coffee. Did you know that coffee first originated in Ethiopia when a goat herder by the name of Kaldi realized that his goats were more energetic after eating coffee beans? Coffee was born, and the evolution of energy became the age of industrializaton.
The coffee industry is saturated. I spent a summer working at Starbucks (approximately a month in May), and it was high-stress, high-energy. The cafe bustled with customers, I worked the register with increasingly mounting anxiety as customer after customer ordered their cup of coffee, I tried and failed to make frappucinos. As a side note, I’m not a fan of frappucinos. Just not a fan. Too sugary and not enough coffee and too much whipped cream.
My last drink at a Starbucks was a white chocolate nutty cold brew. It was good. But not as good as the cup of coffee I just had which I can still savor in my mouth, as the dark roast permeates through my tongue and up the roof of my mouth. Taste buds are as efficient as ever.
I’m not an MBA student, by any means, but I do have a thing for business. And I want to talk business, right, about, now.
Here are some statistics about coffee.
The global coffee market was valued at $102 billion in 2020 and will increase in valuation to $155 billion by 2026.
Brazil is the largest coffee producer, producing 37% of the world’s coffee, followed by Vietnam, Columbia, and Indonesia.
There are about 37,000 Starbucks coffee stores around the world.
The coffee industry supports 1.6 million jobs.
In 2023, Starbucks reports an annual revenue of $36 billion.
And here are some ground-breaking coffee records
The largest cup of coffee was made in Puerto Rico in 2017 and contained 18,012 liters of coffee.
The fastest time taken to drink a cup of coffee was 3.66 seconds.
The fastest time to make 12 (why 12?) cappuccinos was 3 minutes and 39 seconds.
My personal record for coffee? 5 cups in a day. I could have won an Olympic gold medal that day.
Keep calm and drink coffee.
