Editor’s letter: Andrew Tuck on the booming business of coffee
Our editor in chief introduces our June edition and looks at how espressos, long blacks and flat whites have become big business, as we explore the coffee industry across the globe.
The world can be divided into just two types of people: coffee devotees and tea drinkers. I am a proud member of the coffee tribe and, frankly, harbour a distrust of anyone who outs themselves as a lover of the teapot and all the stewed, tannin-laced evil that can spurt from its spout.
Coffee is about speed, energy, focus. It’s about having a stand-up espresso in a Milanese café, surrounded by people in good suits, or sitting outside a Sydney café enjoying another flat white with ready-for-fun friends. Coffee is also about well-designed cafés, clean aesthetics. And tea? Well, tea is all about becoming a permanent resident of Sleepy Town. It’s a world of slipper-wearers who say things like, “What I need is a nice cup of tea and to put my feet up.” Yes, bubble-tea bars and matcha cafés have proliferated but these are drinks that obscure their tea element using fruity flavours or Day-Glo green colouring. Really, if you need to get anything done, make sure that you find a coffee drinker.
And it seems that much of the world agrees with me. Certainly, the money people do. The coffee shop has become one the hottest investment sectors for venture capitalists, alcohol businesses trying to diversify and community-building fashion brands (you may have also noticed a media company close to my heart that likes to take care of its coffee-drinking readers).
And you can see why. A good coffee shop has universal appeal and has cut through in wealthy markets such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where socialising often takes place over a coffee, not with booze. The audience is young, design-aware and ambitious. So if you can create a cool brand, it’s possible to grow a healthy business. And it’s this latest iteration of the coffee trade that we pore over in this issue. We’ll meet the biggest players (China’s Luckin Coffee now has 30,000 outlets) and guide you to 25 of our favourite cafés around the globe.
This magazine also contains two further surveys. The first is our annual examination of the world of art and collecting, in which we meet seven players with deep insights into very varied sectors of the market, from rare posters and antiquities to contemporary art. Collectors are motivated by many things: obsession, passion, money. Perhaps the most fascinating part of our report is the unpacking of the cravings that drive people to fill their homes with objects and art.
US gallerist Easy Otabor, for example, tells Monocle that he has always collected. First it was training shoes. Now, with the art that he buys, he asks himself, “Are these [works] by good people? Would I enjoy having dinner or working with them?” Meanwhile, Pertti Männistö has gathered one of the world’s largest Alvar Aalto furniture collections. Over the past 30 years he has put together an array of pieces so large and of such significance that only a tiny portion of them will fit in his house, with the rest now in storage. Yet he continues searching for rare prototypes.
Then there’s the Class of 2026 Expo, masterminded by our editor, Josh Fehnert. He’s worked with Monocle’s writers and correspondents to spotlight 16 rising talents in everything from photography to architecture and cartography. Why? At a time when many media organisations focus on the negatives – what divides us – we wanted to put the spotlight on people forging ahead, tackling issues and delivering change, with hope and ambition. It’s a very uplifting conclusion to this issue. And I imagine that there’s a lot of coffee drinkers among them.
If you would like to drop me a note, please feel free to send thoughts and ideas to at@monocle.com.
