Exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the coffee industry in Toronto and beyond
Over cups of coffee, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir often met in Les Deux Magots café in Paris to discuss their ideas of existentialism in the Twentieth Century. Over the years, University of Toronto undergraduates would gather at Caffiends café to sip coffee from reusable mugs, converse with classmates between lectures, and perhaps meet new friends.
But in March, coffeehouses taped off tables and seats typically available for in-person patrons. A 77-year-old man had died of COVID-19 on March 11, the first death from the virus in Canada. Soon after, on March 13, UofT shut down both in-person undergraduate classes as well as facilities—including Victoria College’s student-run café, Caffiends. Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency on March 17, thereby reducing in-person capacity for businesses. Toronto has since prohibited indoor service in cafés from October 10 onward as a second wave of COVID-19 cases sweeps across Canada.
“As the café is closed we had to get a little creative,” wrote Caffiends Co-Managers Emily Dotzlaw and Shannon Vincent. The team has pivoted to serve students by running a pop-up shop, which showcases student-created items such as phone cases, masks, and stickers with designs inspired by Caffiends. All proceeds are being donated to RAVEN Trust, which “uses an Indigenous rights-based framework” to advocate for communities facing issues “From treaty rights to the protection of pristine wilderness from non-sustainable industrial development.”
Lee Knuttila—Director of Coffee at Quietly, a specialty roastery in eastern Ontario—underscored the impact of the pandemic on the coffee industry. “It is a weird, tough time for the industry with shops being closed or with altered service,” he wrote. Measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 upended not just cafés, he reflected, but also roasters and farmers across the supply chain.
Specialty coffee farmers impacted negatively
As a roaster, Knuttila sources green beans, then carefully heats them just right. He sorts, bags, and ships coffee by himself to cafés in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Nova Scotia. “I am a one-person operation, which was sadly supposed to change this year,” wrote Knuttila. COVID-19 has caused him to postpone his hiring plans.
“[Number-wise], I am a little in the weeds,” he noted. “Most shops’ bulk numbers have decreased but retail has increased. Combined with an increasing demand for Quietly, I have been having to shut down the web store to reflect the number of hours I can roast in a week. I am hugely thankful and honestly just waiting for the intense demand and interest to wane.”
However, Quietly’s success is in sharp contrast with larger roasters dependent on wholesale. Pilot Coffee Roasters—a specialty coffee roaster in Toronto with eight cafés—is an example. “Retail closures not only impact our own Toronto cafes, our wholesale partners across Canada are dealing with similar hardships,” said Trevor Walsh, Marketing Manager at Pilot Coffee Roasters.
“In the early stages, all eight of our cafes were closed and wholesale business shrunk by 85 percent. We currently have five cafes reopened and have seen many resilient partners return. We are working together to adapt as a coffee community.”
Walsh added concern for the impact of the COVID-19 across the coffee industry “from crop to cup.” He continued: “We have Direct Trade relationships with coffee producing partners, and we are aware of their own unique challenges at origin, but there are still many unknowns that our industry will face over time.”
Caffiends’ roasters also source beans through Direct Trade. “[A] lot of work goes on behind the scenes to ensure that we are providing products that are ethically derived (and taste great!),” wrote Dotzlaw and Vincent. “We source our espresso beans from Detour Coffee Roasters in Hamilton, and our coffee beans from ChocoSol in Toronto. Both companies focus on Direct Trade, which is when companies work with individual producers rather than a large importer.”
Miguel Fajardo—a specialty coffee farmer in Columbia—is an example of an individual producer heavily impacted by the pandemic, experiencing a 50 percent loss of orders in May. “We’re definitely scared, we don’t know how things will progress,” Fajardo told BBC News. “We will keep producing coffee but where are we going to sell it? That’s the difficult question.”
Some farmers, such as Fajardo, sell beans at prices set in advance. Others enter fair trade agreements where farmers are guaranteed a minimum price for their beans. But many others sell beans at commodity coffee prices, subjecting their livelihoods to wild price swings, with coffee rising from a low of $0.94 USD per pound on June 15 to a high of $1.35 USD a pound on August 31, and then back down to $1.04 USD per pound on October 26.
Corporations such as Maxwell House and Folgers have previously refused to enter fair trade agreements, according to a PBS report. These are the same brands enjoying an uptick in sales due to COVID-19. As New York magazine reported, sales from brands such as Folgers, Cafe Bustelo, and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee have skyrocketed as more people brew at home.
Presciently, Knuttila wrote in April: “Those disproportionally affected [by the pandemic] will likely be the most vulnerable, which in the coffee chain is temporary workers, like pickers, and small-scale farmers whose entire livelihood rests on single harvests.”
When asked why brewers should consider specialty coffee beans as opposed to generic, Knutilla stated that “[Well-roasted] coffee will always present the unique flavours and taste notes of where it is from – the soil, sun, fermentation, processing and so on. Tasting the differences cultivated on the ground by a producer’s approach is amazing.”
“A coffee can universally taste the same (burnt cardboard notes from poorly grown coffee that is old) but it is way more fun to engage in the unique: to see country to country, region to region, farm to farm and harvest to harvest how diverse coffee can taste is incredibly fun.”
How Toronto cafés have adapted
As COVID-19 containment policies led to shutdowns of indoor gatherings, many cafés responded by shuttering locations, furloughing staff, and pivoting to contact-free selling via drive-throughs, curbside pickup, and delivery services. But these adaptations fail to capture all the lost business due to COVID-19 as people leave their households less often.
On the UofT campus, University College’s student-run Diabolos Coffee Bar has shut down for the fall semester. At Victoria College’s Caffiends, the students running the organization have moved to engage the university community online.
Dotzlaw and Vincent wrote: “We like to think of ourselves as a community first, and coffee shop second. To us, Caffiends is a place for good, cheap coffee, but also a place to study, relax, learn, and make friends.”
The student-run café “Will most likely not reopen until September 2021,” Dotzlaw and Vinent continued. Yet Caffiends has resiliently adapted to serve UofT students with public education events on social justice and climate education, along with social events such as movie & game nights.
“We hope to keep the Caffiends spirit going throughout the year despite this so stay tuned!”
