PROFILE 49
Price pressure won’t make roaster compromise on quality
Jonathan White: using Robusta in
blends could turn consumers away from drinking coffee
W
hen David White, Jonathan White’s grandfather contem-
plated the type of business he wanted to open back in 1939, coffee was consumed mainly for its stimulating effect. There wasn’t any such thing as ‘gourmet’ coffee. White-Kobrick Coffee Company began
Not many coffee
companies have been in business for more than 70 years, but Long
Island, New York-based White Coffee has, and Jonathan White, the company’s Executive
Vice President, is well- placed to comment on the historically high prices the market is facing and the effects high prices might have
"What you have at the moment is a
combination of factors," Mr White told C&CI at the National Coffee Association (NCA) annual convention in New Orleans. "There are supply concerns, but stocks are also at a very low level. There are also currency concerns; and then there are the speculators." "I think part of the problem is that for a
White Coffee serves restaurants, healthcare organisations, distributors and mass retailers
life that year specialising in supplying cof- fee to businesses, gradually moving into the food service market. At the beginning of the 1970s, the White family decided to dedicate the company to a category they would help create - specialty coffee – and has remained a player in that market ever since. All the time the company’s foodservice business was also expand- ing dramatically. In 1992 Carole White became President
of White Coffee Corporation, and Jonathan and Gregory White, third generation family members, came into the business, which by now was focussed on quality products, innovative products and packaging, aggressive marketing programmes, and a high level of personal commitment.
Focus on quality
Having been around for more than seven decades, White Coffee has been through a good number of peaks and troughs in the market and price spikes like the cur- rent one. However, as Mr White told
C&CI, unlike earlier spikes, which were based on fundamentals – such as the famous frost in Brazil in the 1970s - the current one isn’t. Whatever is going on in the market, said Mr White, speculative interest of a type which hasn’t really been a feature of the market until recently has played a major role driving prices upwards this time around.
"What you have at the moment is a combination of factors," Mr White told C&CI at the National Coffee Association annual convention in New Orleans. "There are
supply concerns, but stocks are also at a very low level. There are also currency concerns; and then there are the speculators"
number of years people in the industry have really lived off the fat of the land. They didn’t want to accept that there were issues that needed to be addressed. As an industry we have allowed a situation to develop in which stocks have been drawn down to histori- cally low levels," Mr White told C&CI.
Coping with
high prices Like most observers of the market, Mr White thinks high prices are here to stay, at least for the time being. So the ques- tion is how do roasters and other players in the market deal with the situation? "Clearly, there’s a lot more Robusta
being used," Mr White said. "The Robusta market hasn’t climbed in the way that it has for no good reason. We have always used some Robusta in our coffee, but we don’t want to compromise on quality. We have seen roasters who have compro- mised their quality in response to the market, and there is only one direction to go once you do that. We need to remem- ber what happened to consumption in the 1960s and 1970s when quality was com- promised."
May 2011 C&CI
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