In 2020, which was of course a difficult year for coffee at the bar, a growing interest was seen in specialty and quality varieties: many end consumers went in search (both off and online) of a premium product to enjoy at home, and now they will expect similar high standards when they go back to the bar, something that will prompt the sector to up its game. Many professionals have been working to raise standards in an effort to stimulate a return to away-from-home coffee drinking among consumers when the time comes. “Premium coffee as an accessible luxury item has the potential to generate growth in the long term,” says Andreea Postolache, head of marketing Italy at ‎Julius Meinl Italia. “Consumers want to make up for the fact that there are so few opportunities to relax and socialise now by treating themselves to some high-quality coffee. Bars and other Ho.Re.Ca establishments that offer a high-level experience will attract new customers and encourage regulars to return, and that will have a positive impact in the long term.”

In the meantime companies have gone on innovating, as Iacopo Bargoni, CEO at Le Piantagioni del Caffè explains. “In 2020 we completed our product and image restyling process. We realised, though, that the world of coffee was becoming self-referential. Our aim was to make quality coffee easier to understand, improve the culture of drinking good coffee in Italy and offer an excellent experience to as many coffee lovers as possible. So we created: a range of plantation coffee blends, for daily consumption by anyone looking for a coffee that they can understand and has a little extra something; a coffee range from a single plantation, created to immerse people in the land where the coffee plant grows; and a third range that would be our way of going beyond the status quo bring a specialty coffee onto the market, in a way that would not be boringly self-referential, but something that would be considered cool, pop and convivial. The basic purpose of the operation was to get people who usually drink industrially-made coffee to go into a bar and experience something much better.”

Julius Meinl has focused on preparing its partners for the reopening of establishments, developing Coffee-To-Go products, such as biodegradable takeaway cups, investing in training, with free online courses given by brand ambassador Jacopo Indelicato, together with messages on social media providing useful tips on things like how to look after coffee-making machines and measures to ensure the health and safety of staff.

The real challenge for the future, though, remains sustainability. “A subject that will take on more and more importance, in terms of both environmental impact and the economic sustainability of the supply chain,” Bargoni says. “Over time we have equipped ourselves with technologies to reduce the impact our work has on the environment and we have started using recyclable materials to package our coffee, researching and trying out new materials that preserve the quality of the product. We chose to reduce to a minimum the production of single-portion products, which we consider to be unsustainable, including capsules that can be recycled or composted, because of the impact the many materials used in their production have. Today we only produce a small number of pods made of paper and we have abandoned the capsules sector, in contrast with the market as a whole. In addition, we are increasingly attentive to the economic sustainability of the supply chain and to paying those who produce green coffee a fair wage. We believe that quality is an implementation tool: in pursuing it, producers are prompted to train their workers and perfect the work they do, adopt technologies and take on highly qualified human resources. That way they raise the quality of their product, which in turn gives them access to markets and rewards them in a more than proportional way.”

“We want to take some small but significant steps to make the world a better place for ourselves and for generations to come,” says Christina Meinl, managing director of Julius Meinl. “We aim to act in places where we can have the most direct impact, starting with our coffee roasting installations, and where we can have the greatest influence on the supply chain. For example, we re-use the green coffee husks that come out of the roasting process, pressing them into pellets that are used to produce thermal energy. Or we use the waste heat generated by the roasting machinery to heat or cool our offices, and that gives an annual saving of 1,050 tonnes of CO2 a year. We are also looking into a number of practices that can be introduced in the so-called ‘coffee belt’: the coffee-growing regions from which we buy our beans, building on the achievements of the Colombian Heritage Project.”