How Do We Know What We Know (in Coffee)?

Technology often fails because so-called "innovators" don't understand the industries they seek to disrupt.

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Photo by HUDSON FEGA on Unsplash

In 2013, I wrote my very first article about coffee.

The piece was about exploring taste in coffee. When we say something tastes sweet, what do we mean? When we describe a coffee as “smooth,” what are we actually trying to describe? As I wrote the story, I kept asking bigger and bigger questions, ultimately zooming out as far as I could go: How do we know what we know?

After that first article, I picked up a few commissioned pieces. I also started writing for myself, and one of those first stories addressed a truism of the era’s coffee industry, an assumption that wasn’t really being questioned: Everything handmade is better.

I saw this view exemplified in the surge of coffee bars offering pour-over as a superior option to batch brew, and its ubiquity made it hard to question. Until, that is, I read about two Los Angeles-based coffee shops—G&B Coffee and Go Get Em Tiger—who were doing something different. They implemented volumetric settings for their espresso, meaning they set a recipe for their espresso and programmed their machine to pull shots based on certain pre-set metrics. G&B co-founders Kyle Glanville and Charles Babinski detailed this decision in an article posted on machine manufacturer La Marzocco’s website: “If you’re a barista on any level, working on a semi-automatic machine where you start the shot and stop the shot manually,” says Kyle, “You just have some shots that you fuck up. And the busier it gets, the more that happens.”

Ultimately, they found that using the volumetric settings on their machine was more consistent than baristas working manually:

That precision means recipes can be executed accurately and consistently, no matter who is on bar. As owners, this repeatability is an enormous benefit: they can be confident that the espresso served while they’re away from their shop is the same as it would be if they were the ones on bar. The other benefit is a bit more of an existential one, as there is a communal identity to the coffee, precisely because the quality of the drinks relies so much on recipes and not on individual baristas. Everyone, in other words, is invested equally in the same outputs and the customer experience.

I thought about G&B—and this larger sentiment about how we know what we know—throughout this week’s podcast conversation with Kristen Hawley, a journalist who writes a newsletter called Expedite about restaurant technology. During our chat, we talked about the potential of technology in the food and coffee sector, but also about the utter failures. Kristen rightly pointed to the attitude that many in the tech world have towards new ideas and innovations, and that the people driving new ideas are often ill-informed about the industries they seek to “disrupt”:

Kristen: …I don’t wanna generalize, but I’m going to—a lot of people that worked in the tech industry at the time felt they knew better. I think that that’s true in some industries, certainly in the technology industry. There was a lot of, “This is better, this is better, this is better.”

You keep pushing forward and innovating and changing and it’s accepted. But where that did not work here was when you had people who enjoyed restaurants and had the resources to really enjoy restaurants, and therefore they believed that they knew better than hospitality professionals who have been doing this their whole life.

And that’s when things started to get a little spicy … because there was a lot of, “You’re doing it wrong and I can fix it. And I’m gonna fix it for you. I’m gonna optimize it. I’m gonna make it better, faster, stronger, whatever. And I’m gonna make money doing it.”

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been exploring the relationship between technology and coffee as the threat of AI continues to loom over every industry, coffee included. And I’ve been trying to put together two ideas that seem incongruous: that technology can be a useful resource and that technology threatens the livelihoods of many workers.

Both of these things can be true, and this moment in my conversation with Kristen reminded me that it’s not the technology itself but the people behind the technology that ultimately decide its fate. There are those who might plan to use new technology judiciously—and those who can’t wait for it to replace human workers.

G&B is an example of the former, and the founders’ choice to automate espresso shots was about questioning norms that had real implications, like: Why do we believe handmade everything is better? Such a move only comes from a deep understanding of the industry you’re working within, and it’s clearly made a mark: Today, more and more coffee shops have turned back to machine-operated brewing devices.

This small instance of automation hasn’t resulted in the sweeping elimination of barista jobs, nor coffee shops that honor and put pour-over at the forefront. (One of my favorite conversations I’ve shared on Boss Barista was with Nigel Price, owner of drip coffee in New York, which is all about centering pour-over brewing.)

Technology in the hands of actors who genuinely want to improve systems—and who understand the systems they want to improve—doesn’t shrink; it creates room for more. More innovation, more improvement, better outcomes. This looks different from the 2010s, when handmade items and pour-over setups became unconscious signifiers of quality, and indications that you weren’t a serious place without them. Now, the definition of quality seems more expansive, and we have more options for people to pursue and drink the coffee they like.

When the technology comes from outside the industry, however, the results feel less meaningful. As Kristen points out in our conversation, the “solutions” posed are often for problems that don’t exist, fueled by actors emboldened by their success in other sectors. A person who is successful in tech might incorrectly assume they can innovate an industry they barely understand, based on a minor inconvenience they experience or witness.

As I write these pieces, I feel like I’m learning in real time. I’ve felt that especially about technology in coffee, trying to parse why a coffee shop chain funded by VC money claiming that automatic machines can improve the customer service experience feels hollow, or why layoffs at a tech-backed coffee company made me so angry. I also want to honor and acknowledge the ways technological innovation has helped the industry.

I think I’ve finally narrowed in on that point of tension and differentiation: It’s about knowledge, and it’s about care. You have to know about the industry you’re trying to improve, but you also have to care about its future and the future of the people whose lives are indelibly part of it. Innovation without care is extractive and exploitative—and ultimately doomed, as we’ve seen with Uber and how broken our current taxi transport system is nearly 10 years after the first rideshare apps were introduced. Innovation can’t just serve potential consumers, but also the people who have to work within the system the tech modifies.

And so that original question comes back again: How do we know what we know? I think it’s a question so-called innovators need to tattoo on their foreheads. Empty assumptions and naked attempts to reap personal fortunes from “disruption” are what have given the industry a bad reputation. I can only hope the failures of tech companies, both big and small, compel us to trust the people within an industry to reflect its strengths and hurdles, and to implement innovations that improve—not disrupt.

Questions About Freelancing?

On Monday, June 19, my editor and I are going to record an episode where we answer questions about writing and freelancing! I’m super excited about this and have already written down a zillion questions to ask, but I’d love for others to submit questions, either for myself or for her. Please comment and ask whatever question is on your mind!