Gourmet coffee drinkers may find themselves staring into empty cups if the fashion for fine coffee keeps spreading as fast as in recent years, Costa Rica coffee expert Grace Mena said on Monday. At a time when cash-strapped growers are struggling to emerge from a five-year coffee price crunch, more are going to have to produce high quality coffee to keep up with the trend toward specialty coffees, Mena said.
She made her comments as hundreds of coffee industry officials, buyers, growers, exporters and roasters gathered in San Jose, Costa Rica, to discuss the future of the coffee industry.
High on the agenda at the conference was the future of the specialty market, and the challenges to meeting a still-growing demand for the top quality beans sold by companies like Starbucks in the millions of coffee drinks sold around the world every week.
"There is growth because of demand in the Asian countries. We have to be prepared, and that requires a lot of training so that growers know what quality is and how to produce it," Mena told Reuters at the opening of the annual International Coffee Week in Costa Rica.