Specialty by Association?
Not long ago I bumbled a Twitter exchange regarding Smuckers/Folgers and Dunkin Donuts (#anothermiketweetfail). Fortunately, the coffee roaster I was trying to have an exchange with was kind enough to ignore my stuttering tweets and asked me a question: Why is Dunkin Donuts a member of the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA)? He wrote that their coffee is “far from special.”
I replied that I no longer worked or spoke on behalf of SCAA (and I only mentioned that because I wanted it to be clear that anything I had to say would not be in any official capacity or the view of the SCAA) but would be happy to provide an answer over email because the answer was long. The roaster did not take me up on my offer, sensing, no doubt, the verbosity of which I am capable. I decided to answer his question here.
I have been asked this kind of question dozens of times over the years and touched on the topic once in an article titled Righteous Coffee. My response here is not necessarily specific to the most recent inquirer.
Dunkin Donuts is a member of SCAA because they can be a member and why wouldn’t they? SCAA does not and has never policed its membership. In fact, this is dangerous ground for a trade association to tread and it places an organization many steps closer to engaging unintentionally in restraint of trade. It’s not impossible, but would require a lot of legal monitoring of association activity, especially within committees.
Add to this the expense of monitoring the membership to ensure everyone who says they are “specialty” is specialty and we’re looking at a significant bureaucracy. It would be an expensive implementation and what value would it return to members? At best, it would equate to a meaningless “certification” of specialty coffee companies; meaningless, because it would be impossible to truly enforce.
There are other routes, like having people sign a commitment or pledge, but, again, meaningless at the end of the day and what value does the activity return to members? I agree with the philosophy of those who founded the SCAA: They decided they would be coffee clerics rather than coffee cops.
It is true that many companies that may or may not import and/or roast and/or serve coffee that scores 80 plus on an SCAA cupping form join SCAA, and some of them do so only to bask in the collective glory, to be “specialty by association.” But I would be cautious about calling them out within the industry because roasters who live in glass houses should use a de-stoner. If you call them out as part of your formal and informal marketing efforts, that’s another topic. It’s not my style, but if that’s how you roll, that’s how you roll.
Even with the SCAA and other cupping forms in use, specialty cred is often in the eye of the beholder and on the tongue of the customer. For every roaster who points to another roaster and says “not special,” there is someone pointing at him and saying the same thing. I know many roasters who think that flavored coffee could never be considered specialty coffee under any definition, or coffee with chicory, or coffee more than five weeks out of the roaster, or coffee without a born on date, or any coffee at all grown under (pick an altitude) or on (pick a cultivar). On the other hand, I know roasters who insist that their Indonesian coffees are specialty even though they do not score 80 plus on the SCAA cupping form.
Because I did not occupy a competitive position within the coffee industry for many years, I was often given access by companies to information about their coffee, including buying specs and cupping scores, etc. Even though I no longer occupy a wholly neutral position in the industry, I still honor implied and stated confidentiality from those years. But I can tell you this with absolute confidence: many of the companies that we all consider “less than specialty,” or assume to be “far from special” have the same or better, and certainly more consistent, green buying specs than the majority of those who do not hesitate to claim the descriptor of “specialty” coffee roaster.
At the same time, many many many “specialty” coffee roasters regularly compromise their stated standards when it comes to the quality of green coffee they purchase. Sometimes they are simply surviving, sometimes they are being “practical” with their product mix given the highly variable needs of their customer mix, and sometimes, too many times in my opinion, roasters actually believe that a mediocre green coffee becomes a specialty coffee inside their roaster because they are genius with fire.
The SCAA can and does develop and publish standards but they do so as clerics and not as cops. And there is no guarantee that adhering to these standards will make you successful. But adhering to these standards does help define who you are, where you’ll compete, and who your customers are. In my experience, when a company asks SCAA to define the marketplace and its players for them, it is because they are having trouble understanding who they themselves are and where they fit.
