The Manuscript Cafe, Studying Coffee Consumption, and Is Specialty Coffee Outpacing Consumption?

• Coffee, with a Side of Deadline Hectoring

  By Ann Tashi Slater for The New Yorker

  “Since 2019, [Takuya] Kawai has tried out several other themes in the space—a coffee-and-cigarettes café, a video-editing café, a café to sort receipts—but they haven’t taken off, partly because of covid. ‘The Manuscript Café is my fourth time at bat,’ he said, miming a slow-motion swing. The inspiration for this iteration came not just from the Miyazawa [book, The Restaurant of Many Orders] but also from Tokyo’s Hilltop Hotel, where such writers as Yukio Mishima and the Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata were once confined by their editors, to make them finish their projects.”

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• Is specialty coffee growing faster than global coffee consumption?

  By Zoe Stanley for Perfect Daily Grind

  “‘In terms of numbers, the growth rate of the specialty coffee market is faster than the growth of commodity-grade coffee,’ Daniel [Velásquez Restrepo, Director of Operations at Amativo Colombia,] says. ‘However, in terms of market share, this faster level of growth isn’t comparable to the large volumes of commodity-grade coffee exports, which represent around 90% of Colombia’s exports, for instance.’ According to Euromonitor, the total value of global retail sales of coffee was US $180 billion in 2019, and sales are predicted to grow by another US $12.5 billion by 2023.”

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• The Secret to Studying Coffee Consumption? It’s in the Bathroom

  By Zac Cadwalader for Sprudge

  “Self-reporting has been the best tool available for comparing coffee consumption habits to its health impact. Until now. Researchers from Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich (LSB) have identified three metabolites that could serve as specific biomarkers for coffee consumption in an individual. Published recently in the journal Food Chemistry, researchers set out to find if coffee consumption resulted in any measurable metabolites, substances created when the body breaks down food, drinks, drugs, etc.”

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