Is Coffee ... Good?

What does it mean for our coffee to be "moral"? And who's trying to convince you that their beans are better?

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I’m taking a really great class on food politics this semester at journalism school. Recently, we read an article called “Moral Entrepreneurialism for the Hamburger: Strategies for Marketing a Contested Fast Food.” The authors—Natália Otto, Josée Johnston, and Shyon Baumann, all from the University of Toronto—looked at marketing strategies from three fast food chains, and tried to break down how those strategies contend specifically with beef, a food that has been criticized due to its health and environmental impact. Their paper asks: “How do fast-food corporations strategically present the moral worth and aesthetic appeal of burgers in the face of public criticism?”

I was fascinated by the idea of moral entrepreneurialism, which was coined by sociologist Howard Becker in 1963, and which describes people or entities who influence societal values. Moral entrepreneurs use their authority to define what is socially acceptable or beneficial behavior—and also enforce what is outside of those boundaries, and therefore immoral. “Those who try to alter the boundaries of altruism or deviance are ‘moral entrepreneurs,’” writes David E. Pozen for the Wake Forest Law Review, and they can do so from any moral position. (One example is the dairy versus plant milk debate, which features moral entrepreneurs on both sides of the argument—read my piece on Got Milk?’s cringey “Wood Milk” campaign to see this idea in action.)

The authors of the hamburger article applied this framework to fast-food marketing specifically, to understand how certain foods are marketed as “good”—not just in terms of taste, but in terms of the values they supposedly represent.

I wanted to use this lens of moral entrepreneurialism and apply it to the industry I know best. Today, I’m looking at examples of marketing tactics and campaigns that present certain coffees as “good”—regardless of whether those coffees and companies actually represent solutions to the myriad problems the industry faces. 

Ethical Coffee

Moral entrepreneurialism might have been defined decades ago, but in the face of growing consumer concerns about where our food comes from, the framework only feels more relevant today. “Moral entrepreneurship is becoming a more common project among corporations as interest in and awareness of ethical consumption has increased in recent decades,” the paper’s authors write. People want more and more assurance that the companies they engage with are “doing good.”

For the hamburger piece, the authors looked at the marketing campaigns of McDonald’s, A&W, and Wendy’s. Each chain utilized a different tactic to signal to consumers that its product was benign and morally just. McDonald’s used its position as a transnational corporation to reassure consumers that it sources its beef sustainably. A&W used “simplicity” as a way “to position [its] burgers as a sustainable choice that protects virtuous family farmers who act as ecological stewards.” And Wendy’s made a direct tie between “freshness” and goodness—its campaign relied on promoting that its burgers are never frozen. 

“We discuss the proliferation and obfuscation of information, that is, how information is variously presented without restraint or to excess in some instances, or buried, veiled or clouded in other instances,” the authors write. “These modes of information were deployed to convey a sense of response to the burger crisis, but one that did not invite critical engagement from consumers.” I think that last line is especially interesting: These campaigns are thin and deflective, suggestive of a vague moral high ground without actually committing to meaningful action.

After all, what does it mean to present a solution to a problem you’ve actively perpetuated? These chains rely on beef, and so their solutions valorize “good” beef rather than pledging to reduce the number of beef products on their menus, or track emissions of the beef they source. (The authors note that McDonald’s uses phrases like “Not without Canadian beef farmers,” whose wording “symbolically nods to the importance of ‘local’ beef production but does not commit McDonald’s to any particular standard of sustainability to which it could be held accountable.”) 

I was thinking of these dynamics when I saw Robert Downey, Jr.’s news that he was starting a new, “joyful” coffee brand called Happy. In the announcement, Downey’s business partner, Craig Dubitsky, takes a punch at the specialty coffee industry: “We didn’t want to be, we made up this word, ‘baristacrats.’ We didn’t want to be snobby.” (Which is quite something, considering this is a brand backed by a multi-millionaire.) The announcement, published on People.com, says Happy’s “founders strove to create a satisfying experience with specialty-level blends made with beans sourced in a traceable manner.”

Sounds great, albeit wildly snarky. (Now I need to know if Robert Downey, Jr. is nice to baristas—if you’ve ever made him coffee before, please let me know.) But when you go to Happy’s website, there is little information about the brand’s coffee. Its light roast blend uses “100% arabica beans […] responsibly grown and harvested in Central and South America,” which could mean many things, considering more than a dozen countries grow coffee in Central and South America. 

The coffees are Rainforest Alliance-certified, but it should be noted that this is an agricultural certification and does not guarantee farmers any sort of minimum price or premium for their coffees. Happy’s beans are also Raíz Sustainability® certified, which appears to be an internal sustainability verification program through Westrock Coffee, although there’s little readily available information about it.

Those certifications might add up to something—but I want to call attention to how easily a brand can position itself as “good,” and then provide tenuous evidence of such a claim. Happy says its coffees are traceable, but how? How are its coffees “specialty-level?”

Of course, Happy isn’t alone in using hard-to-pin-down words like “traceable” and “sustainable” to market its products as “better.” In a previous piece on Boss Barista, I wrote about the difficulty consumers have in recognizing “good” products, and about corporate “smallwashing,” when large, often-venture-capital-backed brands adopt the aesthetics and language of small businesses. These brands might not market themselves with any explicit false claims, but they do harness a small, local, and handcrafted aesthetic to appeal to consumers who equate those values with moral goodness. It’s not an outright lie, but it sure feels misleading.

Coffee consumption, too, is steeped in moral language and assumptions. Your Starbucks coffee is bougie; you apologize for liking diner coffee; you look for words like “Fair Trade” or “Sustainably Sourced” when you purchase beans; pumpkin spice lattes are only for “basic” women. (These judgments also speak to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s research on how taste is used to uphold class boundaries, which further complicates our understanding of “goodness.”)

Moralizing coffee can be a good thing, when the actions of moral entrepreneurs reflect the beliefs of a society as a whole, and when they align with real efforts to improve conditions for farmers, or pursue lasting sustainability endeavors. But in the case of Happy—and so many other brands—we can’t know that through what’s offered on its website. I’d argue that Happy is replicating the fast-food chains’ techniques: responding to consumer concerns by positing its product as a solution, even though it’s unclear, or dubious, that it is.  

Rebranding Coffee

Who are the moral entrepreneurs working to position coffee as “good”? In many cases, it’s the actors who have the most to gain from that image—and by gain, I mean cold, hard cash.

The Coffee Barometer, a third-party assessment tool produced biennially, looked at the top 11 coffee companies globally, and created an index of their sustainability commitments called the Coffee Brew Index. “Our Coffee Brew Index reveals that although most companies have overarching strategies and engage in coffee sustainability activities, they often lack comprehensive, measurable and time-bound goals. This deficiency in effective strategies and reporting hinder coffee companies’ ability to address sector challenges, thereby impeding social and environmental progress within supply chains. Moreover, transparency and engagement gaps persist, hampering meaningful discussions on advancing these objectives.”

These leading brands all seem to know sustainability is key to selling coffee—they all have some sort of sustainability scheme—but the real-life application of those schemes varies widely. These sustainability “action plans” are no surprise, according to the authors of the hamburger paper. “We speculate that the ways in which corporations selling these foods will engage in moral entrepreneurship will correspond to the nature of the critiques being made (e.g. labour justice concerns vs. environmental concerns), as well as to the qualities of the foods (e.g. meat vs. plant).”

I’m not saying coffee brands shouldn’t have sustainability plans, but it’s clear that few of them provide measurable commitments or invite critical engagement from consumers. After all, doing so might mean sacrificing profit. Moral entrepreneurial strategies seem to target that tension, as the paper’s authors suggest: “We argue that moral entrepreneurialism in the context of the fast-food industry works to counter and reconcile the inherent contradictions of global capitalism – of which transnational burger chains are a powerful cultural symbol – as consumers and civil society become increasingly concerned with its ecological impacts.”

The “moral” of the story? We should absolutely be trying to make coffee better, but we also shouldn’t accept a corporation’s blanket approach to “better.”

I do find hope in people like Bob Moore, the founder of Bob’s Red Mill. He passed away last week, but in 2010, he gave the company to his workers instead of selling; the business was 100% worker-owned by 2020. I don’t want to heap blanket praise here—I have only a cursory understanding of this business, and have never spoken to workers—but I do think this example shows the possibility of making choices that aren’t driven solely by profit.

Ultimately, it’s not bad to want to do better—to aim for sustainability targets, to benefit the workers who make a business run. But when the companies around us start championing causes that they previously found no value in, we should look past the buzzwords and assurances and start asking deeper questions.