Washington, DC, with a workforce of just over 375,000 people, now boasts over 400 coffee shops, which employ over 5,500 locals. The related network of local businesses supporting the shops—coffee wholesalers, coffee importers, equipment producers and distributors, dairy, sweetener, bakery, and flavoring producers and distributors—employs about 12,000 people. Coffee is big business in DC.
Since the first coffee shops opened in New Amsterdam (New York City) in the mid-1660s, coffee consumption and its attendant industry have expanded to every corner of the U.S. Today, over 70% of our citizens drink at least one cup of coffee daily. It would be fair to say that consuming a cup of java constitutes a critical part of the daily routines of the vast majority of us.
In urban areas, consumption is often a social occasion entailing high-end blends, mimicking the historical roots of the industry. In rural areas, it is more commonly a breakfast table staple with a focus on basic grocery store blends. In our country, the northeastern states boast the highest total consumption, while western states lead in the specialty coffee arena.
Yet, with so much consumption, how do we manage to keep those cups filled when in the USA, only California and Hawaii grow the beans commercially? Those states can hardly sustain our market’s thirst for joe.
In fact, less than 1% of the coffee consumed in our nation is homegrown. Of that other 99%, 80% comes from Latin America, with 35% coming from Brazil and 25% coming from Colombia. Central America alone provides twenty times the amount of coffee consumed in the US as our home-grown industry does.
Our DC coffee is mostly a mix of high-end South American products and locally grown beans, with the former far outstripping the latter in total consumption. The DC coffee shop market is ultra-competitive and driven by a taut balancing between satisfying a demand for premium blends (expensive pour-overs) and new venue concepts (often focusing on either a unique hosting experience or on the minute details of crafting proprietary blends), and more basic, affordable “community cup” alternatives.
The DC coffee shop scene itself is a blend of mom-and-pop shops like Small Planes, Ceremony Coffee, and Berrin’s Java in Chevy Chase, national chains like Starbucks and Blue Bottle, and the now-omnipresent citywide chains like Verdant and the up-and-coming Pirata. The two defining characteristics of our local scene are the cutthroat competition among coffee shop owners, which has fueled many recent mergers and acquisitions among our better-known shops, and their increased focus on buying directly from South American suppliers.
The Aymat Weekly will be doing a series on the DC coffee shop industry. Stay tuned.