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Instant Coffee - We knew we would get shot for this, but we really did want to write a serious piece on instant, or 'soluble' coffee.  The concept of soluble/instant coffee as a ‘quality’ beverage is one which has not always been taken seriously.  However, the surprise introduction of Starbucks into the soluble market drew wide attention to the possibilities of an instant coffee sold on a quality basis.   The features of the instant product are indeed widely misunderstood – one argument says that the whole concept of ethically-sourced coffee was driven through the instant market, we have seen one brand of soluble coffee begin to promote source and origin on its packs, and there really are instances of instant coffee having won awards.   Does the concept of ‘quality’ instant coffee holds more potential than has been realised?  This was in Caterer and Hotelkeeper. 

(A story on Starbucks Via is at the foot of the page)

The concept of instant coffee as a ‘quality’ beverage for the catering trade is not always taken seriously. 

The general view of the speciality coffee sector is that instant coffee is fine as a warm comforting beverage, so long as it is not confused with ‘real’ coffee, and that instant does not have a place in a serious catering situation.

However, Starbucks has now shaken the coffee world by introducing a soluble powder, is targeting the catering trade with it, and will sell it on Easyjet flights.  That has been followed by the rest of the instant sector becoming equally bullish about its place in catering.  Nescafe has introduced the ‘Go Large’ campaign, in which caterers are urged to serve instant coffee in bigger mugs for better return, and in the workplace market has devised a contest in which employers can win an entire branded café.  Mellow Bird's is being relaunched, even if with the non-aggressive slogan: 'Born to be mild'.

And other instant brands now say, defiantly, that their product is not a lesser one, but stands up beside the best of roast-and-ground coffee.

This is the key – whether instant coffee can be served as ‘real’ coffee.

Soluble coffee does begin as real coffee. It is roasted, ground, and brewed in a conventional way, before being turned into a powder or granules. 

Powder is formed by spray-drying - hot air, at up to 270C, is blasted into the coffee liquid and turns it into a powder; it can create a good drink, but careless spraying produces a burnt taste. Granules come from a freeze-drying process, with the brewed coffee poured out in a very thin layer, frozen, crushed and dried. This is generally considered to give the best result, but is about one-third more expensive than spray-drying.

Detractors of instant coffee say that processing in ‘industrial quantities’ of two tonnes a time cannot possibly give as good a result as hand-roasted ‘artisan’ coffee at a few kilos a time. Nescafe’s terse response is that its computer-controlled roasting has to be more accurate than even a craft-roaster’s work, as one mistake can waste two tonnes of beans.

Soluble coffee must not be dismissed, say the big brands.

“In a country where the ratio of instant to roast and ground is 80:20 at home and 60:40 in catering, the notion that instant is an inferior product is unfair to the consumer!” protests Shayne Stokes, marketing manager at Nescafe Professional.

“Only one coffee in ten is consumed in a coffee shop - we have 50,000 convenience outlets out there which are now routes for coffee, and the vast majority of that is soluble. The workplace market is the biggest opportunity of all, and a vast amount of that is instant.

“This is still a soluble-coffee market!”

And, runs his Nescafe argument, the quality is good.

“Consistency of taste is what makes us brilliant. No roast-and-ground coffee will give consistent results because every barista prepares it differently – the consumer does not want coffee to taste one way today and different tomorrow.

“And there is no doubt that a number of bean-to-cup offerings are certainly out-performed by ours - put them on a table with ours in a blind taste test, and we win.”

This outright defiance is echoed at Aimia Foods, where marketing controller Martin Armitt says he can replicate the quality of a bean-to-cup machine with instant coffee.

“Don’t tell me this can’t be done, because we are doing it!  Our Pour Moi system was devised to bring ‘coffee shop’ drinks to the vending sector with instant ingredients, and makes people say: ‘I never thought that you could do’.  Professional coffee people might taste a difference, but it is interesting to see that intelligent and well-educated ‘ordinary people’ cannot do so.”

By contrast, argues Armitt, the bean-to-cup option in catering is unreliable.

“How annoying is it that so many bean to cup machines go ‘out of order’ or cannot produce milk-based drinks because the milker has broken down? That the milk is sour or has bits in it?  That the extraction time slips to 12 seconds, not 24, or the milk was burnt?  How about the smell of fermenting un-cared for coffee beans left in the hopper for a week? 

“Compared to this, instant coffee is the Toyota of the coffee world - it might not be flash but it’s very tough and totally reliable, where a Lamborghini is not always practical.

“I used to think that the UK would ultimately stop using instant coffee.  I no longer think that – I think in some ways the world is moving back to instant.”

Support for this comes from Kenco, where communications manager Susan Nash cites research saying that over half of out-of-home coffee drinkers think roast-and-ground coffee smells better than it tastes, which Kenco interprets as a preference for the taste of soluble coffee.

At Douwe Egberts, brand manager Olivier Kutz agrees that instant coffee need not be a bland-tasting beverage.

“In research you read that instant coffee is just ‘functional’, but this is wrong – many people actually like instant coffee because it is milder in taste, but clean, with good ‘body’.  We hate instant coffee that’s ‘thin’, so we produce a good coffee taste, of which you can drink more per day.

“A good-quality instant is always preferable to a badly-made cappuccino made from stale beans in a dirty machine by someone who doesn’t care!”

Quite right, says Louise Whitaker, trade marketing manager at Cafedirect. “Premium instant coffees deserve a prominent place in catering, because there is an awful lot of low-quality roast and ground about.

“Last May we launched Classic Instant Quality Improved, as the result of ongoing improvements, and we are now developing a new single-origin instant coffee. We believe the features of origin can come through in instant, we have seen this confirmed in consumer taste tests, and a Cafedirect grower from the Dominican Republic tells us of a zonification project being carried out there to understand the flavour differentiations better.”

At Aimia, Martin Armitt is working on a similar project to broaden the spectrum of freeze-dried instant flavour varieties.

Critics say that this is pointless, because subtleties of single-origin flavour do not come through in a soluble product - however, the world-renowned coffee guru Kenneth Davids says that he can definitely observe a 100-per-cent freeze-dried Colombian as a ‘far superior’ beverage to any other instant coffee.

At Douwe Egberts, Oliver Kutz warns that claim of origin might be unreliable when associated with poor instant coffee – but agrees that in a carefully-processed one, taste features can be quite clear.

Starbucks’ UK managing director Darcy Willson-Rymer says that his new Via powdered instant coffee uses exactly the same beans that produce the filter coffee in his stores – one variety is Colombian, and as instant produces a taste ‘of some acidity and a nutty complexity’.

If the soluble brands now believe so strongly in their taste qualities, their target market becomes interesting. 

Certainly, all of them want to upgrade the hotel bedroom sector. “Too few hotels treat bedroom coffee with any priority,” is the Nescafe view; Armitt at Aimia says that we still have too many sorry-looking paper sachets there, and Kutz at Douwe Egberts says the sector is crying out for new product development. The need for a clear quality instant solution in bedrooms is obvious, says Nash at Kenco.

And this is where the new name may come storming in. Starbucks has said, categorically, that it is going to transform the instant coffee sector, that its new Via will open up new markets…  and, when pressed, Starbucks acknowledged that Via was seen as a competitive option for the hotel and B&B bedroom market.

And Starbucks went even further. When it was put to Darcy Willson-Rymer that thousands of pubs and roadside cafes who currently serve tin-and-spoon coffee could now put a Starbucks logo up, he agreed this was indeed a quite conceivable prospect.

The new drive for instant coffee throughout the catering sector may, therefore, be led by the name that led the world’s ‘real coffee’ revolution.

*

From coffee house, Jan 2009:

Starbucks has confirmed the launch of a new product already hinted at in the American press – it is moving into soluble coffee, which will be sold for the first time in Starbucks London stores on March 25^th.    Speaking to Coffee House magazine, Starbucks UK managing director, Darcy Willson-Rymer, and Anthony Carroll, Starbucks manager of green coffee quality, said that the product uses a new manufacturing method, and is intended to replicate the taste of the ‘brewed’ (or ‘filter’) coffee sold in Starbucks cafes.

The product is a powdered soluble coffee packed in 2.3gm sachets, and sold in flip-top boxes of a dozen sachets.  In the UK, the product is to retail at £1.20 for three sachets, or £3.95 for a box of twelve.

Although the product is intended for retail sale, Starbucks acknowledges that it has seen the vast potential for making its branded soluble coffee available through thousands of ‘tin-and-spoon’ catering outlets, and also through instant coffee vending machines – however, it is understood that catering packs do not yet exist.

The product is called Via, a name which is partly a nod to the person who originally devised the idea, the late Don Valencia.  The product is said to have long been a pet project of Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, although some doubt does surround the history – the Via packaging says that the process took 35 years to develop, but it is barely 30 years since Howard Schultz joined the company, and the three original founders were filter-coffee enthusiasts.

According to Darcy Willson-Rymer, the story probably starts in the late 1980s.

“The story goes that a customer, Don Valencia, went into Starbucks and took some brewed coffee home, where he dried it so that he could take it camping. He went back with what he’d done and got the store manager to taste it – the manager called Howard Schultz and said ‘you’ll never guess what this customer’s done…’  Eventually Howard Schultz hired Don Valencia.”

The manufacturing method now being used is partly the accepted method of making instant/soluble coffee, with an added twist. Starbucks has acknowledged that it is working with a known maker of soluble coffee, and also that its method is the spray-drying one, which allows for a powdered result. 

“The process is that we take Starbucks brewed (filter) coffee, concentrate it and dry it,” Anthony Carroll told Coffee House. “The patent-pending part is the ‘microground’ coffee – essentially, after the drying of the brewed coffee, we add more of the same coffee, which has been ‘microground’. This powder is finer than an espresso grind. 

“You will notice that, unlike most soluble coffee, a little sediment remains in the cup, as you would expect with a filter coffee.  This is the suspended solid matter, which gives the coffee its body.”

A leaked Starbucks email ten days ago said that its two types of the instant coffee ‘will absolutely replicate the taste of Starbucks coffee’.   The goal, says Anthony Carroll, is to match the typical high-roast Starbucks taste of its Italian Roast, given the additional tag ‘extra bold’, and its Colombian medium filter coffees.

“If you were to go into a Starbucks store and have a cup of brewed Italian Roast or Colombian, that is the taste we have been looking to replicate,” says Anthony Carroll.  “Our expectation for the Italian Roast is of sweetness, good body, but dark-roast depth and roundness. Our expectation for the Colombia is of some acidity and a nutty complexity in the finish. This one is more about ‘taste of origin’ than ‘taste of roast’.

“The quality requirements of the green bean are exactly the same as for our filter coffee.”

There is a generally accepted description of instant coffee in the British coffee trade, which says that instant coffee is a nice, comfortable warm beverage, but is a different beverage from  ‘real’ coffee.  Howard Schultz is expected to launch the product in the States by saynig that the coffee market is ‘ripe for disruption’, and the British managing director says that this relates to changing the image of soluble coffee.

“He means that this is a multi-billion dollar market which has had no recent innovation,” Darcy Willson-Rymer told Coffee House. “The whole notion is to bring a completely different coffee into the category. We are talking specifically about bringing the Starbucks taste to coffee on-the-move, and portability is a great opportunity for coffee – I go camping, and my wife always objects when I try to pack a cafetiere!  This is an opportunity to bring a branded product to a new place.”

He was asked by Coffee House magazine about the potential for the catering market, and whether 20,000 greasy spoons and roadside caffs up and down the UK, all of whom have relied on cash-and-carry tin-and-spoon coffee, could now legitimately become Starbucks outlets?   

“This is a fantastic idea!” he replied, sounding slightly taken aback. “We’re not doing catering packs yet, because it wasn’t in our plans.”

Equally, when asked about the massive potential for Starbucks branded soluble-coffee machines in offices, factories, petrol stations, and railway stations, he replied: “This wasn’t in our plans either, but we are aware of the potential, and will be evaluating it.”

*

This is Via, the product with which Starbucks proposed to transform the soluble-coffee market.

It was presented in single-serve sticks, at what was thought to be a fairly high price per serving - maybe 35p or so.

Yes, we have tried it. When Starbucks asked what we thought, we replied, truthfully, that we could tell it was a Starbucks roast.