Coffee’s “Age of Average”

As we veer towards sameness, how can we reclaim variety in coffee—and protect the industry’s longevity in the process?

Photo by Matthew Moloney on Unsplash

Recently, I was watching an episode of “Rick Steves’ Europe,” a public television travel show aimed at U.S.-based tourists. In the episode, set in Copenhagen, Steves points out the colorful buildings that line its canals, and which immediately distinguish the Danish capital from other cities. Nearly all of Steves’ episodes highlight what makes each city he visits special, and as I watched it, I thought, “Wow, this place is so beautiful. We will never live in cities with such distinct architecture.”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about homogeneity. If, like me, you live in a place with a lot of new construction, you’ve likely noticed the flattening effect: Everything looks the same. And it doesn’t end at housing. If you zoom out further, you’ll find repetition in other areas, from book covers to brand logos. And I’m sure anyone who’s visited coffee shops has noticed the same warm lights, wood accents, and chalkboard menus appear over and over again.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece debunking the idea that “innovation” is inherently good, that we get better and more efficient tools and products by letting market actors compete. The promise of capitalism is that competition in the free market begets innovation and newness—but all this sameness sure seems like another rebuttal to that false promise. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t an issue that ends at aesthetics. In coffee, sticking to the same script isn’t just unimaginative—for producers and the industry at large, it comes with serious potential consequences.

Take No Risks

In 2023, strategy director Alex Murrell published a piece called “The age of average,” which unpacks this contemporary phenomenon. “In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains,” he says, including cars, movie posters, interiors—even faces. As evidence, he pulls dozens of images from various sources to show that so-called market competitors seem to produce virtually the same items, branded the same way, time and time again.

Unsurprisingly, one of the examples Murrell cites is coffee shops, a theme that others have also picked up on. In her New York Magazine story “The Unbearable Sameness of Cities,” Oriana Schwindt writes: “I was in a non-chain coffee shop in Columbia, South Carolina ... I remembered seeing the same lights in coffee shops in Bend and Portland in Oregon, and innumerable others I had frequented while living in New York and the Chicago area.”

And in a now-seminal 2016 article for The Verge, Kyle Chayka names this phenomenon “AirSpace”: a sterile, Silicon Valley-derived aesthetic that has spread all over the world. “The new cafe resembles all the other coffee shops Foursquare suggests, whether in Odessa, Beijing, Los Angeles, or Seoul: the same raw wood tables, exposed brick, and hanging Edison bulbs.”

The authors above make different arguments for why we’ve slipped into sameness. Schwindt notes that, especially as we’re more mobile than we used to be, we want to bring experiences and comforts from one city to another. For Chayka, it’s all down to the internet: We see the same things, and so our desires mirror one another’s.

But Murrell’s argument feels the most compelling to me, because it highlights the influence of people in power to shape trends and opinions, and challenges popular notions of what we think growth and enterprise are meant to do. He posits that brands are unwilling to take risks, which explains why things look increasingly similar. “The kind of TLDR reasons for why everything looks the same, it’s [a] combination of risk aversion, focus groups, and testing things like movie posters to see what resonates,” TikTok user @shwinnabego said in a video explaining the piece. 

In other words: Instead of fueling risk, success hampers it.

The Same Cup of Coffee

This argument applies to the coffee industry in obvious ways, like the coffee shop example every article on the subject (ironically) cites. But it also goes deeper than that.

It all reminds me of a 2019 talk by Dr. Janina Grabs on overcoming the single-exit fallacy. Picture a movie theater: If there’s only one exit that people can rush to in an emergency, that’s clearly insufficient. Likewise, trying to achieve the same aim as others using the same mechanisms is detrimental. It’s also avoidable. In life, we do not have just one exit; we have multiple options.  

Focusing on another area in coffee, one example of the single-exit fallacy I see repeated among roasters is the insistence on sourcing “quality” coffees. It may sound commonsense, but it can be a big problem for a lot of reasons.

First, the system in which we source and sell coffee—which is based on colonial trade routes and power dynamics that have been in place for centuries, and which are designed to benefit countries in the Global North—places undue risk on farmers. As roasters and others on the consuming end of coffee enforce ever-tighter quality controls and become even more risk-averse, that risk doesn’t go away—it just transfers to someone else.

Second, climate change is already making coffee growing more volatile and unpredictable. I recently edited a piece for Fresh Cup by Bhavi Patel about the impact of drought on coffee farms, and it’s dire: “Coffee, a plant that relies heavily on seasonal patterns and predictive weather, is heavily impacted by climate change but has been notably hard hit by drought over the last few years. Droughts pose a massive problem for coffee producers and could drastically reduce yields, especially in places where water is scarce and not set up for irrigation.”  

Third, taste is subjective, and coffee-buying decisions are likewise made using subjective evaluative methods that we only pretend are objective. A recent Instagram post from Standart highlights findings from Fabiana Carvalho, who observed that the color of a bag of coffee influences our perception of its taste. For example, people who drank coffee from a pink bag picked up on flavors of berries and fruit, while folks who drank from a brown bag said they tasted cocoa and brown sugar.

Not only does this experiment demonstrate that we experience flavor in highly variable ways, but it also has quality and price implications: Carvalho’s findings showed that people “were willing to pay more for the ‘fruity’ coffee from the pink bag.”

Sourcing “quality” coffee, then, is clearly more complicated than the often-repeated phrase suggests, and the adoption of that ideal comes with its own set of consequences for people and planet. It also just feels, well—boring. 

I can envision another set of consequences. If roasters demand the coffees they buy all be processed in a certain way, could we lose the identity of coffees from specific regions? As they’re met with less and less variety, do consumers’ windows of preference risk getting smaller? Is this march towards sameness eclipsing the range of coffee experiences available to us? 

Sameness is not just a coffee problem, but in coffee, where all this sameness is really detrimental to the industry, true innovation is especially worth pursuing it. Ideally, the result isn’t just more varied and interesting coffee flavors and experiences for consumers, but also a more robust industry that’s better able to confront looming threats and challenges—and rectify the systems that have steered us towards sameness in the first place.