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Coffee Trends: R’n’R and R Café R'n'R and R Café |
| Written by Brian Martell | |
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The Western world is thinking green. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. As far as trends go, this one has been able to hold on to and even gain a bit of momentum over the course of the last decade. The blue box programs are ubiquitous, people are composting, and the drive to find “eco-friendly” products has become a passion more than a pursuit. So what have we done in the coffee business to keep pace with the green wave? Well, for starters, the ingenious folks who buy coffee have found a whole host of alternate uses for coffee, both fresh ground and spent grinds. The following are some of the things people are doing with coffee, other than drinking it: Ant control – Apparently, ants hate coffee. If you have an ant problem, then a bit of loose ground coffee on the anthill does the trick and keeps the critters from coming back Cat control – If you have an issue with cats using your garden as their own personal privy, then a mixture of coffee grounds and orange peel seem to have a repulsive effect on feline noses.  Compost
– Want your plants to look like the ones in the movies? Add a bit of
spent coffee grounds to the soil and watch the wonders work. The spent
grounds are also good for controlling plant munching bugs, so much so
that some backyard farmers will mix spent coffee grounds with vegetable
seeds to prevent infestation and promote healthy growth.Dust Compound – Spent coffee grinds are a perfect solution to keeping down the dust level when sweeping out the garage or basement. Spread it on the floor as you would a sweeping compound and then sweep up without the dust clouds. Odour suppressant – A trucking company not too far from our roasting plant put in a strange request for bulk ground coffee. When I asked what he uses it for, he replied that one of his customers has a particularly smelly product that leaves his trailers more odiferous than he would prefer or for that matter, the next customer. To help absorb and remove the offending smell, he spreads ground coffee throughout the trailer on a Friday afternoon and then sweeps it up Monday morning. The end result is a trailer with the sweet smell of coffee (what a way for the trucker to get going in the morning). Coffee “Cleansing” – Not to put too indelicate a point on this one, but some people are using coffee as an enema. This is definitely something that is on the fringe and I suspect will stay there, not really making it to the prime time mainstream any time soon, but apparently there is a following for this practice. In the OCS business, a particularly sticky point has been what to do not with the spent grinds of coffee, but with the packaging that has been left over. Coffee packaging has to be tough to maintain freshness and consequently the construction of the bags does not lend very well to recycling. These empty bags are always destined for landfills and will take as much as 1,000 years to decompose. To put this in perspective, if Leif Erikson had an OCS in L’Anse aux Meadow, only now would his Viking Coffee bags be returning to the soil. Using new technology that has only recently become available, Heritage Coffee’s bags will be produced using bio-degradable film which will fully revert back to the soil in four years. This amazing packaging will have all the properties necessary to keep coffee fresh, but unlike the houseguest from Hades, it will know when it is time to go. This new packaging will also have great potential in retail applications as well as foodservice where certain chains are looking to make sure their statement of earth friendliness is followed by concrete applications on the operational side. As single-cup brew coffee packs (cartridge-style coffees, pods, etc.) become more and more popular, the question of waste packaging will be more pointed. Being able to proactively say to your customers that your coffee packaging is eco-friendly may just be the easiest part of your sales process. Questions or comments? E-mail Brian at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
