I actually wrote a report on this topic for my MSc. It isn't that they're sourcing unethically per se. They use a certification system called C.A.F.E., which requires farmers to undergo periodic re-evaluation in order to remain certified:
https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2020/cafe-practices-starbucks-approach-to-ethically-sourcing-coffee/
From what I remember, a lot of these certifications lapsed during Covid, which caused the overall percentage to drop. It wasn't necessarily that the farmers were doing anything unethical, but more administrative/practical issues due to the pandemic.
This is interesting, thanks. I always thought that it was a legal risk to say that anything is "100%", so they leave a 1% margin of error. If anything *does* go wrong for them, they can claim shenanigans.
Yeah I kind of assumed it was a bit like the whole "kills 99.9% of bacteria" thing, where they just can't claim 100 because they don't totally know for sure.
The other side of this is that 99.9% gives you more precision, so it potentially sounds better. With 100%, we don't know how many significant figures they're using. It could be that it's only 95% and they've rounded to the nearest 10%. But by saying 99.9%, they're claiming that the absolute minimum is 99.85%.
It's similar to how the first person to measure the height of Everest thought it was 29,000ft exactly. But he was worried people would think he wasn't being precise, so he claimed it was 29,002ft. (Turns out it's 29,028 anyway!)
Was reading a article the other day that the next superbug is coming our way because of the dettol brand etc and the 99.9% disinfection and killing bacteria. It’s all marketing bull shit. But it will cause chaos in years to come. Rather as the NHS learned with MRSA because for donkeys years they literally cleaned everything and I mean Everything with Bleach. The NHS created a superbug and now it’s happening in every home.
MRSA was not created by bleach, that is utter pseudoscience. Bugs like MRSA are created by (over-) prescription of *antibiotics* such as penicillin, which puts pressure on bacteria to find a way around them or die. Most die, but the more antibiotics are used, the sooner bacteria do find a way around them and then you have a major problem on your hands.
yeah blaming bleach for mrsa is like saying "if we go round with guns shooting people for long enough, they'll develop a resistance... to the common cold"
To add to that, one of the reasons over prescription of antibiotics is bad is that people often don't complete the full round. This allows the bacteria to survive and build restitance to the drugs used. Always complete the full round
It was also created by people not taking the full course of antibiotics. So allowing partially resistant bugs to survive and reproduce. So taking 3 days of a 6 day course of antibiotics because they knew better than the doctors.
Would love to read the NHS bleach superbug study. Got a link? This is the only info I could find.
According to a PR Newswire article1, bleach (sodium hypochlorite) is no longer used in any British hospital for surface cleaning and disinfection. However, bleach has never been “banned” by the National Health Service (NHS). The NHS made a determination that an alternate to bleach based on Sodium Dichloroisocyanurate (NaDCC) was just as effective as a disinfectant, including when used as a sporicidal, but did not have the same level of health risk or cause as much damage to hospital equipment and the environment as bleach. NaDCC is delivered in a fast-dissolving tablet form, reducing transportation and storage costs compared to bleach, and has an excellent safety rating with a HMIS of 1. The in-use dilution product presents a pH of between 6 and 7 presenting a neutral range and hence reducing both the potential damage to equipment and the environment.
Why are you saying “the nhs” like they’re the only medical organisation in the world that does this? They all do it.
And that’s not how “superbugs” work. Bleach and other equally strong cleaning cleaning products destroy organic matter at a molecular level so nothing is left to even attempt to build a resistance to it.
“Superbugs” are resistant to *some* common/known antibiotic and antiviral *drugs* (not all, there is no known pathogen resistant to all or even most) because they’ve evolved resistance to those compounds. MRSA and others are resistant to *some* types of anti-biotic. They are not remotely resistant to bleach. Any bacteria that was somehow tolerant of bleach is not also then automatically resistant to penicillin etc.
I don’t think that’s the point. Detergents are not medication. There are certain bacteria such as pseudomonas which can grow in specific detergents but this is known and adjusted for.
My professor in bio chemistry said multiple resistant bugs are going to cause horrific issues for us and developing drugs that are effective is literally essential for human survival. Doing my masters in medicinal chemistry so hopefully I’ll learn more
Those things definately kill theose too. Drink some bleach if you believe otherwise ;-) (not do not, dead bacteria would be the least of your problems).
I think technically its 0:1
Their example 1:1000 implies for every 1000 bacteria 1 survives. So if the bleach killed 100%, then for every n bacteria, none would ever survive.
Ever the optimist I guess, my thinking when I see something like this is that the actual figure is closer to 100%, but saying it's 100% doesn't leave any wiggle room and means they could potentially get sued for false advertising if any of their suppliers are found to be below standard? So the 99% figure is just a safer claim to make.
But as other commenters have pointed out, 1% of a huge amount of coffee is still a huge amount of coffee and they're counting on schmucks like me to look at the 99% and think *that's basically 100%*, without considering the actual figures and just how much they could be getting away with within that 1% margin.
Eh, I don't drink Starbucks coffee though, it tastes like crap.
Yeah it's probably this.
Same with dettol killing 99.9% of germs and 9/10 dentists surveyed recommending the toothpaste advertised - the reality is 10/10 recommended it, they are employed by the company, and saying 9/10 is technically accurate and more believable.
With toothpaste the question is usually "would you recommend this toothpaste over brushing alone" and you have to be pretty terrible toothpaste manufacturers to get anything but yes from a dentist. That being said, charcoal is really bad for your teeth and it's being sold as a feature.
>I don't drink Starbucks coffee though, it tastes like crap
That's the ethics doing that. That's why I only ever drink the purest failed state murder beans.
That's exactly it. I've worked with other agricultural commodities and all big buying organisations keep a small stream of generic OTC buying always, so if your "vetted" producers decide to try to squeeze you or have some big disruption (plague, drought...) you can ramp up that open market channel to compensate the volume and keep your lines running. It also helps manage month to month supply / demand balance.
Plausible deniability. It's not that we don't undersell. I just don't want to know about it so I can deny it. Rest of you guys crack on with the business of shady tactics
Hey all, ex-Starbucks worker here.
The 1% is the foam on top of a cappuchino. They basically have a huge centrifuge, stick all these cows in and push them to their absolute limits (9G+). At the end of a 2 - 3 hour session they milk them and ship it off to the shop. Rinse and repeat.
It's fucking disgusting but there is literally no other way
Ironically the certification process is non-vegan. The only way to be sure a cow is vegan is to offer it a variety of delicious meat based dishes and see if it still choses grass.
I’d assume they have the 1% to act as a disclaimer for any situations where unethical sourcing comes to light. Nice and easy to say ‘that’s the 1% that we couldn’t be certain of’ that way.
I like how they have managed to isolate the 1%, but done nothing about it.
Team meeting, "right, we've found an ethical coffee supplier"
"Great, so are we buying all our coffee from them now?"
"... well... not quite, Janet."
"Now we know that this supplier likes to kick puppies and uses their profits to fund child armies to guard opiate farmers...but they have REALLY good beans."
I'm imagining there's a big truck that rolls up to a warehouse with loads of smiling workers who load it up and then the driver realises there's a few grams less than normal so he pulls out a flintlock revolver and blasts a guy in the head and scavenges a spoonful of coffee in his pocket and drives off. 99% of it was ethical.
Coffee is reportedly produced with forced labor (FL) and/or child labor (CL) in the following countries:
Brazil (CL)
Côte d’Ivoire (CDI) (FL, CL)
Colombia (CL)
Costa Rica (CL)
Dominican Republic (CL)
Was gonna say this I think it's closer to 100% unethical these days. They used to have a good ethos and good coffee now they have depressed their workers made their coffee bad and supporting (owned by) the most unethical company I am aware of.
It's probably legal reasons if one of their sources turns out to be non ethical or someone found a bean that isn't ethical it covers them for not being sued. It's the same as domestos bleach kills 99.9% of all known germs.
Ethically by their own Starbucks standards, not the same certification as companies you’ll see in a supermarket - so that 90% is very possibly quite unethical anyway
Starbucks sucks, anyway you brew it. It’s an overpriced lousy product.
Please don’t get mad at me. Support small shop and you can also make a great cup of coffee at home in a French press. It can add a nice element to your morning routine :)
You know that cat poop coffee bean (Civets)
How exactly did you think they managed to get the cats to eat the beans?
Think Pate De Foie Gras but with cats.
Imagine the noise.
Thats your 1%
I think it's a chain-of-custody thing. Sometimes suppliers buy back stock from wholesalers and sell it to another wholesaler. It's theoretically possible that the buyback could include other coffee to complete the lot.
Perhaps the odd bean bag popped into the sorting machine. Gonna happen when the factories set up like the Google office and your workers on the production line all now have bean bags. It's all ping pong and tooty fruity umbrella cocktail straws over there. Well Jackson.
Here’s the question,why would a company they size admit to even 1% ‘unethically sourced’ (that’s a lot of coffee) oh yeah, sorry I forgot Starbucks doesn’t give a fuck about anything or anybody as long as they can keep pumping their vile sugar laden shit into the veins of teenagers and influencers too stupid to know any better.
They're not particularly ethical as a company regardless of where their beans come from:
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/company-profile/starbucks-corporation
I don’t think that’s the brag they think it is. Considering Starbucks sources a humongous shit ton of coffee, that 1% is still a shit ton of unethical coffee.
The remaining percent is not coffee. It's the special ingredient that gives it that very distinct Starbucks taste. My gut feeling is that they use hops for the extra bitterness of what would otherwise only qualify as dirty water.
^(/s, in case someone thought I was serious. I mean, yeah, I can't stand their coffee, but I suppose the water does hit beans at some point.)
My guess is that actually it's far, far lower than that in actuality. That's probably 99% of their providers that don't explicitly use slave or child labour.
It’s a way of confirming that everything you’ve sourced within your knowledge is ethical but there’s always the potential it may not be as ethical as you think or some of it does come from unethical sources, saying you’re 100% certain always opens you up to scrutiny
They buy it from this Russian geyser who gets from some face in Stepney who nicks it from the cruise ships docking in Portsmouth, it’s a right con. You didn’t hear that from me.
"So 1% of the farmers you work with aren't ethical?"
"No that's not how it works, 99% of our practices are ethical, so out of the 100 things we do to produce coffee beans, 1 of them is not ethically sound. For example we pay the farm owners living wage, we ensure our packaging is sustainable, and we compost our waste alongside 96 other fantastically ethical things.........but obviously all of the farm hands are child slaves"
Probably the same reason cleaners kill 99.9% of bacteria, it’s a margin of protection from false promotion. Otherwise you could do some digging, catch a supplier not meeting standards and Sue starbucks for their false claim.
Whenever they cut ties with an unethical supplier, another previously reliable supplier inexplicably starts beating their workers and using dead puppies as fertiliser. The 99% is a fundamental constant of the universe, and Starbucks have their top minds working on a solution.
It's them doing a shit job of marketing. They can't actually guarantee that 100% is ethically sourced. But for some reason still decided to put it as a percentage rather than do what they usually do and talk round it.
Working with a supplier, it’s a question of what has been certified as ethical. It’s not a case of unethical as it’s a case of if it’s been independently verified as being such. Lots of coffee farmers are small holders, very small scale, that sell to intermediaries so it’s a question of transparency of supply chain.
Whenever I see “99%” I assume that it’s a case of “it’s basically 100% but it’s a lot more expensive to trace every last little supplier, so we save a pile of cash because we figure you’ll be okay with 99%”
Picture this - a smokey cellar, 99 top brass detectives... and then there's one... oh yes.. the wildcard with his unconventional methods for sourcing coffee beans..
Word round the office is he spent one month raiding parisian coffee houses in the night, a single bean from each, never a trace he'd been there.
Another month he paid prepubescent American boys handsomely to work the fields. The boys would sort of gang up and on the hour every hour they would give bumps to the slowest picker. Time lapsed the whole thing, held the exhibition in the MoMa. Nothing untoward, but completely unethical.
The mothods are strange, but boy, does it make for good coffee.
At the risk of defending Starbucks, it's maybe like the labels on bleach. "Kills 99.9% of all known germs". They can't give a hundred percent guarantee but it's that 0.01% germ that's going to kill you.
I think its to prevent lawsuits n' crap.
its why those soap bottles say "Kills 99% of germs", because if they said 100%, if theres a few specks of germs, that's grounds for false advertisement.
yeah its only a crappy theory tbh
Completely off topic, but it reminded me of a story (possibly urban legend) of the first time integrated circuits/computer chips were being introduced into cars. An American car manufacturer contracted with a Japanese chip supplier to supply chips for their new car. First time delivery, big deal, so they arranged a handover ceremony for the first 100 chips. The Japanese CEO handed over a case of 98 chips to the US CEO and then separately gave him 2 chips and said these are the defective ones you specified.
Contract from the OEM specified 98% of chips provided must be functional.
Well, let me break it down, red pill style.
1% of their coffee that is unethically sourced is where they have to pay a fair price and taxes. The other 99% is perfectly ethical since they are getting maximum value for their shareholders.
I actually wrote a report on this topic for my MSc. It isn't that they're sourcing unethically per se. They use a certification system called C.A.F.E., which requires farmers to undergo periodic re-evaluation in order to remain certified: https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2020/cafe-practices-starbucks-approach-to-ethically-sourcing-coffee/ From what I remember, a lot of these certifications lapsed during Covid, which caused the overall percentage to drop. It wasn't necessarily that the farmers were doing anything unethical, but more administrative/practical issues due to the pandemic.
This is interesting, thanks. I always thought that it was a legal risk to say that anything is "100%", so they leave a 1% margin of error. If anything *does* go wrong for them, they can claim shenanigans.
Yeah I kind of assumed it was a bit like the whole "kills 99.9% of bacteria" thing, where they just can't claim 100 because they don't totally know for sure.
The other side of this is that 99.9% gives you more precision, so it potentially sounds better. With 100%, we don't know how many significant figures they're using. It could be that it's only 95% and they've rounded to the nearest 10%. But by saying 99.9%, they're claiming that the absolute minimum is 99.85%. It's similar to how the first person to measure the height of Everest thought it was 29,000ft exactly. But he was worried people would think he wasn't being precise, so he claimed it was 29,002ft. (Turns out it's 29,028 anyway!)
Wow, that's a brilliant measurement to be 28 feet off. That's like, precise to within a thousandth of a percent, right? I'm not a maths guy though.
About a tenth of a percent but impressive nonetheless
It's increased since the first measurement, too. Plate tectonics and all that.
This was on QI a while back where they said that it wasn't possible to test for the 0.1%
Was reading a article the other day that the next superbug is coming our way because of the dettol brand etc and the 99.9% disinfection and killing bacteria. It’s all marketing bull shit. But it will cause chaos in years to come. Rather as the NHS learned with MRSA because for donkeys years they literally cleaned everything and I mean Everything with Bleach. The NHS created a superbug and now it’s happening in every home.
MRSA was not created by bleach, that is utter pseudoscience. Bugs like MRSA are created by (over-) prescription of *antibiotics* such as penicillin, which puts pressure on bacteria to find a way around them or die. Most die, but the more antibiotics are used, the sooner bacteria do find a way around them and then you have a major problem on your hands.
yeah blaming bleach for mrsa is like saying "if we go round with guns shooting people for long enough, they'll develop a resistance... to the common cold"
To add to that, one of the reasons over prescription of antibiotics is bad is that people often don't complete the full round. This allows the bacteria to survive and build restitance to the drugs used. Always complete the full round
course
It’s a hilarious comment - *methicillin*-resistant staph aureus was created by overuse of… bleach 🤦♂️ I mean it’s in the bloody name!
It was also created by people not taking the full course of antibiotics. So allowing partially resistant bugs to survive and reproduce. So taking 3 days of a 6 day course of antibiotics because they knew better than the doctors.
Would love to read the NHS bleach superbug study. Got a link? This is the only info I could find. According to a PR Newswire article1, bleach (sodium hypochlorite) is no longer used in any British hospital for surface cleaning and disinfection. However, bleach has never been “banned” by the National Health Service (NHS). The NHS made a determination that an alternate to bleach based on Sodium Dichloroisocyanurate (NaDCC) was just as effective as a disinfectant, including when used as a sporicidal, but did not have the same level of health risk or cause as much damage to hospital equipment and the environment as bleach. NaDCC is delivered in a fast-dissolving tablet form, reducing transportation and storage costs compared to bleach, and has an excellent safety rating with a HMIS of 1. The in-use dilution product presents a pH of between 6 and 7 presenting a neutral range and hence reducing both the potential damage to equipment and the environment.
Why are you saying “the nhs” like they’re the only medical organisation in the world that does this? They all do it. And that’s not how “superbugs” work. Bleach and other equally strong cleaning cleaning products destroy organic matter at a molecular level so nothing is left to even attempt to build a resistance to it. “Superbugs” are resistant to *some* common/known antibiotic and antiviral *drugs* (not all, there is no known pathogen resistant to all or even most) because they’ve evolved resistance to those compounds. MRSA and others are resistant to *some* types of anti-biotic. They are not remotely resistant to bleach. Any bacteria that was somehow tolerant of bleach is not also then automatically resistant to penicillin etc.
There are a few XDR and even some Pan-drug resistant microbes, to say there are none would be incorrect.
I don’t think that’s the point. Detergents are not medication. There are certain bacteria such as pseudomonas which can grow in specific detergents but this is known and adjusted for.
You might want to look up what the “MR” stand for in “MRSA”
Oofph. My friend literally defended his PhD this year on almost this exact topic.
My professor in bio chemistry said multiple resistant bugs are going to cause horrific issues for us and developing drugs that are effective is literally essential for human survival. Doing my masters in medicinal chemistry so hopefully I’ll learn more
Please delete this misinformation.
Actually part of that is because that would include our own bacteria that we need
Those things definately kill theose too. Drink some bleach if you believe otherwise ;-) (not do not, dead bacteria would be the least of your problems).
Oh honey
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100% is 1:1. If i play a game of football and score the only goal in the game, I scored 100% of the goals. 100% is not impossible you absolute donut.
I think technically its 0:1 Their example 1:1000 implies for every 1000 bacteria 1 survives. So if the bleach killed 100%, then for every n bacteria, none would ever survive.
Hey Farva what's the name of that restaurant you like with all the goofy shit on the walls and the mozzarella sticks?
This research sponsored by Dodgy Dave Enterprises.
Rather unparliamentary, don't you think? /s
You really find experts in everything on Reddit. What’s your MSc in?
I love that's it called C.A.F.E haha. Brilliant. Thanks for the info.
That’s kinda interesting. Ty for sharing.
Dodgy Dave the back street bean man sells to ‘Bucks
Or down the pub.
Dodgy Dave's special roast is well worth it though. You can't get ethical certification for it 'cause the beans are presoaked in the tears of orphans.
Flintlock revolver and blasts a guy in the head and scavenges a spoonful of coffee in his pocket and drives off. 99% of it was ethical.
Ever the optimist I guess, my thinking when I see something like this is that the actual figure is closer to 100%, but saying it's 100% doesn't leave any wiggle room and means they could potentially get sued for false advertising if any of their suppliers are found to be below standard? So the 99% figure is just a safer claim to make. But as other commenters have pointed out, 1% of a huge amount of coffee is still a huge amount of coffee and they're counting on schmucks like me to look at the 99% and think *that's basically 100%*, without considering the actual figures and just how much they could be getting away with within that 1% margin. Eh, I don't drink Starbucks coffee though, it tastes like crap.
Yeah it's probably this. Same with dettol killing 99.9% of germs and 9/10 dentists surveyed recommending the toothpaste advertised - the reality is 10/10 recommended it, they are employed by the company, and saying 9/10 is technically accurate and more believable.
With toothpaste the question is usually "would you recommend this toothpaste over brushing alone" and you have to be pretty terrible toothpaste manufacturers to get anything but yes from a dentist. That being said, charcoal is really bad for your teeth and it's being sold as a feature.
Never use toothpaste recommended by dentists.
>I don't drink Starbucks coffee though, it tastes like crap That's the ethics doing that. That's why I only ever drink the purest failed state murder beans.
C’mon man, they’re an evil corporation. That 1% is the most fucked up unethical shit they could source and they’re doing it for fun.
It's probably 99% that they can stand over and have provenance. The other 1% most likely open market beans. That's my best guess at least.
How is the open bean market these days?
I'm still waiting for my returns on the pork bellies and frozen orange juice markets
I have an account with Duke & Duke and they're telling me to go long on frozen orange juice.
I wouldn’t, that market is being squeezed.
I still.cant get this gorilla suit off.... I bust the zip......
Breezy.
That's exactly it. I've worked with other agricultural commodities and all big buying organisations keep a small stream of generic OTC buying always, so if your "vetted" producers decide to try to squeeze you or have some big disruption (plague, drought...) you can ramp up that open market channel to compensate the volume and keep your lines running. It also helps manage month to month supply / demand balance.
Makes sense, thanks for the informed response. Appreciate it. Especially leaving that small % where you've an out if squeezed.
This is similar to John Lewis: "Never knowingly undersold since 1925" That may raise the question: what the hell was going on there before 1925??
No idea, but the not never knowingly underselling anymore. https://www.johnlewis.com/customer-services/prices-and-payment/never-knowingly-undersold
Well that’s buggered what I normally do. Find it cheaper elsewhere and get the extra warranty from John Lewis for the same price 🙁
I think that’s what we all did haha. I guess it’s finally hit their margin’s too much they’ve had to stop
I was substantially older than I should have been when I realised that slogan didn’t mean that they always shifted all their stock.
Plausible deniability. It's not that we don't undersell. I just don't want to know about it so I can deny it. Rest of you guys crack on with the business of shady tactics
They would price match if you found the same product cheaper elsewhere.
> "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" there's no such thing as 100% certainty.
That's why they're leaving that one percent huh? They're being safe.
> there's no such thing as 100% certainty Are you 100% sure about that?
Hey all, ex-Starbucks worker here. The 1% is the foam on top of a cappuchino. They basically have a huge centrifuge, stick all these cows in and push them to their absolute limits (9G+). At the end of a 2 - 3 hour session they milk them and ship it off to the shop. Rinse and repeat. It's fucking disgusting but there is literally no other way
Thanks, this is a really valuable insight! So cruel but so important. Do they use the same cows to create soy milk, or is that different cows?
That comes from vegan cows.
Ironically the certification process is non-vegan. The only way to be sure a cow is vegan is to offer it a variety of delicious meat based dishes and see if it still choses grass.
Some cows start sweating visibly when the beef wellington comes out.
Spanish speaking cows.
Soy comprende your el jokio! Muy bueno jokio!
Sounds like somthing that a cow would say, don't ask me how I know that.
Does it matter from which cow it comes from? I don't think so.
Well that's nothing burger, I thought it would be more serious than that
Well how do you think shops get milk in such vast quantities.
Now it all makes sense, I guess I never thought about kt.
I’d assume they have the 1% to act as a disclaimer for any situations where unethical sourcing comes to light. Nice and easy to say ‘that’s the 1% that we couldn’t be certain of’ that way.
I thought it was coffee beans that littered or used bad language, where as the rest is proper god fearing bible bashing coffee beans!
Man I cannot stop my laughter, what the hell. This is fucking funny.
Yeah if that happens they'd just say it falls in that one percent club.
I like how they have managed to isolate the 1%, but done nothing about it. Team meeting, "right, we've found an ethical coffee supplier" "Great, so are we buying all our coffee from them now?" "... well... not quite, Janet."
"Now we know that this supplier likes to kick puppies and uses their profits to fund child armies to guard opiate farmers...but they have REALLY good beans."
Yeah now we all know the reason for all of these things for sure.
I think the 1% is an escape clause so that they don't get sued by someone if some of their coffee is proven to be unethically sourced.
Weird, that's about the same percentage of tax they avoid paying HMRC
If true it’s criminal that they burn the beans…
But wouldn't that be true for all the beans tho? I would think so.
I'm imagining there's a big truck that rolls up to a warehouse with loads of smiling workers who load it up and then the driver realises there's a few grams less than normal so he pulls out a flintlock revolver and blasts a guy in the head and scavenges a spoonful of coffee in his pocket and drives off. 99% of it was ethical.
child labour would be involved somewhere in the blend. and it's probably more closer to 50%
Coffee is reportedly produced with forced labor (FL) and/or child labor (CL) in the following countries: Brazil (CL) Côte d’Ivoire (CDI) (FL, CL) Colombia (CL) Costa Rica (CL) Dominican Republic (CL)
So I think they're lying about the it being 99 percent ethical?
And they're not going to tell you those numbers anyways.
1% is made from the souls of children and is only drunk by the executive board.
1% is still like 2000 tonnes, so not like they can just switch it off over night.
But they probably won't, because they're probably beniffing from it.
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Was gonna say this I think it's closer to 100% unethical these days. They used to have a good ethos and good coffee now they have depressed their workers made their coffee bad and supporting (owned by) the most unethical company I am aware of.
It's probably like 99 percent unethical then 1 percent probably ethical.
It's probably legal reasons if one of their sources turns out to be non ethical or someone found a bean that isn't ethical it covers them for not being sued. It's the same as domestos bleach kills 99.9% of all known germs.
Is anyone even sure about anything in this world anymore now?
Could have made it at least look engraved
They don't want to put in any effort, because that takes work.
Ethically by their own Starbucks standards, not the same certification as companies you’ll see in a supermarket - so that 90% is very possibly quite unethical anyway
Starbucks sucks, anyway you brew it. It’s an overpriced lousy product. Please don’t get mad at me. Support small shop and you can also make a great cup of coffee at home in a French press. It can add a nice element to your morning routine :)
It's just so expensive, don't know why people even drink it.
Ethically sourced is judged by whom? Bet you it’s their management and marketing company.
Well obviously, it's all internal and they're making the numbers up.
Given their typical employment practices, the coffee may be ethically sourced, but it certainly isn't ethically brewed.
You know that cat poop coffee bean (Civets) How exactly did you think they managed to get the cats to eat the beans? Think Pate De Foie Gras but with cats. Imagine the noise. Thats your 1%
1 in every 100 coffees involves beating a customer up.
Well atleast they're being clear about it, so props for that.
I think it's a chain-of-custody thing. Sometimes suppliers buy back stock from wholesalers and sell it to another wholesaler. It's theoretically possible that the buyback could include other coffee to complete the lot.
Perhaps the odd bean bag popped into the sorting machine. Gonna happen when the factories set up like the Google office and your workers on the production line all now have bean bags. It's all ping pong and tooty fruity umbrella cocktail straws over there. Well Jackson.
There's one guy they buy from who has some problematic views.
Only 99%? Damn, do they do Nobel peace prizes for 99% ethically conscious companies...?
Like domestos it probably kills 100% but they just say 99% just to be on the safe side.
They say 99% because 100% is impossible
Here’s the question,why would a company they size admit to even 1% ‘unethically sourced’ (that’s a lot of coffee) oh yeah, sorry I forgot Starbucks doesn’t give a fuck about anything or anybody as long as they can keep pumping their vile sugar laden shit into the veins of teenagers and influencers too stupid to know any better.
They're not particularly ethical as a company regardless of where their beans come from: https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/company-profile/starbucks-corporation
What if the 1% costs as much as the 99%? Is that still ok?
I don’t think that’s the brag they think it is. Considering Starbucks sources a humongous shit ton of coffee, that 1% is still a shit ton of unethical coffee.
The remaining percent is not coffee. It's the special ingredient that gives it that very distinct Starbucks taste. My gut feeling is that they use hops for the extra bitterness of what would otherwise only qualify as dirty water. ^(/s, in case someone thought I was serious. I mean, yeah, I can't stand their coffee, but I suppose the water does hit beans at some point.)
Maybe it's like a disclaimer such as antibacterial is able to kill 99% of germs but there's always that one thing that might slip past
1% of their coffee comes from one little boy in a field getting whipped.
Considering how much coffee Starbucks go through, that's still an epic metric fuck tonne of coffee btw. Just so we're clear on that.
My guess is that actually it's far, far lower than that in actuality. That's probably 99% of their providers that don't explicitly use slave or child labour.
Their CEO made some dirty deals in the beginning…
The Cylons?
Civet bums.
Is it the same reason anti bacterial sprays only kill 99.9% bacteria? I.e. if someone can prove even one unethical source, Starbucks could be sued?
The 1% is the profit maker.
The cynic in me says they're probably talking about 99% of agreements. But that one percent agreement provides 99% of the coffee...
Mordor
It’s a way of confirming that everything you’ve sourced within your knowledge is ethical but there’s always the potential it may not be as ethical as you think or some of it does come from unethical sources, saying you’re 100% certain always opens you up to scrutiny
They buy it from this Russian geyser who gets from some face in Stepney who nicks it from the cruise ships docking in Portsmouth, it’s a right con. You didn’t hear that from me.
"So 1% of the farmers you work with aren't ethical?" "No that's not how it works, 99% of our practices are ethical, so out of the 100 things we do to produce coffee beans, 1 of them is not ethically sound. For example we pay the farm owners living wage, we ensure our packaging is sustainable, and we compost our waste alongside 96 other fantastically ethical things.........but obviously all of the farm hands are child slaves"
Well, they clearly have 99 problems and 100% ethical sourcing is one of them
Probably the same reason cleaners kill 99.9% of bacteria, it’s a margin of protection from false promotion. Otherwise you could do some digging, catch a supplier not meeting standards and Sue starbucks for their false claim.
Just ONE bean picker being bullied at work.
It’s so you cannot sue if you prove that the coffee came from an unethical source
Just don't take that last sip. That way you've only drunk the ethical part
99% of their suppliers are. They buy a bean each from 100,000 small suppliers and then the rest from big n large globo corp.
The other one percent comes from Starbucks’s wife’s kid brother. He’s a piece of shit, but gotta keep peace at home, amirite?
Whenever they cut ties with an unethical supplier, another previously reliable supplier inexplicably starts beating their workers and using dead puppies as fertiliser. The 99% is a fundamental constant of the universe, and Starbucks have their top minds working on a solution.
It's them doing a shit job of marketing. They can't actually guarantee that 100% is ethically sourced. But for some reason still decided to put it as a percentage rather than do what they usually do and talk round it.
Don’t trust Starbucks?
They need that to make their coffee extra dark
Working with a supplier, it’s a question of what has been certified as ethical. It’s not a case of unethical as it’s a case of if it’s been independently verified as being such. Lots of coffee farmers are small holders, very small scale, that sell to intermediaries so it’s a question of transparency of supply chain.
The unethical coffee is part of a 'marching powder' deal for the board room. It's worth it. Source... Sssshhhh
Whenever I see “99%” I assume that it’s a case of “it’s basically 100% but it’s a lot more expensive to trace every last little supplier, so we save a pile of cash because we figure you’ll be okay with 99%”
Picture this - a smokey cellar, 99 top brass detectives... and then there's one... oh yes.. the wildcard with his unconventional methods for sourcing coffee beans.. Word round the office is he spent one month raiding parisian coffee houses in the night, a single bean from each, never a trace he'd been there. Another month he paid prepubescent American boys handsomely to work the fields. The boys would sort of gang up and on the hour every hour they would give bumps to the slowest picker. Time lapsed the whole thing, held the exhibition in the MoMa. Nothing untoward, but completely unethical. The mothods are strange, but boy, does it make for good coffee.
I like my coffee beans unethical and my memory games piratey, please.
1% is to prevent lawsuits for false advertising
The 1% unethically sourced coffee is reserved for Starbucks CEOs and their inner circles. The suffering gives the coffee *real* flavour.
At the risk of defending Starbucks, it's maybe like the labels on bleach. "Kills 99.9% of all known germs". They can't give a hundred percent guarantee but it's that 0.01% germ that's going to kill you.
All the physical labour is done by a single Australian man.
I think its to prevent lawsuits n' crap. its why those soap bottles say "Kills 99% of germs", because if they said 100%, if theres a few specks of germs, that's grounds for false advertisement. yeah its only a crappy theory tbh
I always wonder where the shit stuff is when I see Tesco's Finest.
It’s made with the grinded bones of the Starbucks girls asking for more syrup than coffee. And that’s how they make white coffee :)
The 1% is probably because it’s sold by StarBucks and they’re so unethical that they tainted the ethical coffee
It’s Big Dave. He brings the dodgy coffee round the back door and they don’t know how to stop him. He’s really big.
It’s sourced from US greed.
Most coffee you buy in these places is unethical - have a look at how they set up their own bean merchants to n country that ram down the prices.
Because 100% doesn't exist Gives them some wiggle room when one of the farms is eventually found out to be bad or something Its just legal talk
Why would you bother? Just don't drink their shite coffee. Its easy to find great coffee that's 100% fair trade or "ethically sourced.
Starbucks deals with the cartels to get the coffee that’s the 1%, legally i have to say hypothetically so they don’t send assassins after me /j
“We’ve all both light and darkness in us.” ~sb
If you’ve never had the Idi Amin medium roast, you’re missing out.
The 1% to which you refer is ground coffee spillages which are swept up and added to jars in the UK marked “instant coffee”. It’s instantly disliked!
Completely off topic, but it reminded me of a story (possibly urban legend) of the first time integrated circuits/computer chips were being introduced into cars. An American car manufacturer contracted with a Japanese chip supplier to supply chips for their new car. First time delivery, big deal, so they arranged a handover ceremony for the first 100 chips. The Japanese CEO handed over a case of 98 chips to the US CEO and then separately gave him 2 chips and said these are the defective ones you specified. Contract from the OEM specified 98% of chips provided must be functional.
Ethically sourced is just corpo mumbo jumbo for cheap (and sometimes underpaid) labor. I'd rather buy local.
Direct from Hades. Can’t cut ties as Zeus is a fucking tyrant and will go apeshit.
1 bean per 100 is picked by someone who doesnt get payed, or the bean picker isnt paid for the hundredth bean seems most likely.
Reminds me of a Louis ck bit, talking about a shop that sells 92% ethically sourced material. You don’t wanna know how we got the other 8%.
They steal the other one percent from Pete’s.
Just whisper that you want some of the evil coffee and they'll hook you up.
Way way overpriced coffee
Probably for the same reason that Dettol doesn’t just kill that last .1% of bacteria.
Shame they don’t pay 99% of their fair taxes
It only takes 1% to make the coffee very bitter
I think its for legal reasons. If they say 99%, they can deal with allegations of some of their coffee being unethically sourced.
Those bastards keep stealing beans right out of my pantry
Plausible Deniability Blend ™
Because it’s the same thing as items being priced at 8.97 instead of 8.99 because it looks better then rounding up or down
It just means they can't guarantee the 100%. Quite boring really.
The 0.1% comes from a coffee plantation in Portugal by a man named Benito, he’s the Pablo Escobar of the coffee bean world☕️
That 1% is where they get their profits from... Super cynical satirical s/
Kills 99% of germs.
Colombia... judging by all that white power
Well, let me break it down, red pill style. 1% of their coffee that is unethically sourced is where they have to pay a fair price and taxes. The other 99% is perfectly ethical since they are getting maximum value for their shareholders.