Dry bean. wrote:
I suspect the boom years of the coffee/cafe scene in Oz are over, too many cafes, not enough customers, it's an up hill slog nowadays. Certainly not an industry I would consider investing in. 🙂
In Australia / too many cafes / too many roasteries / too many experts / resulting in extremely fragmented market / causing "musical" client effect / diabolical competition and aggression between suppliers / training cafe clients that they can be very very demanding if they want to. Competition amongst roasters placing those willing to compromise their principles, in riskier and riskier business in terms of their profitability. And others willing to compete with that taking more and more risks with their profitability. Not a good spiral to hop into. Without doubt the biggest BS mill in the universe. A lot of trouble for a steady supply of work. The market is saturated, and older roasters have market share picked off by newer roasters so a redistribution of market rather than a big growth in the market. The "trust network" promoting new (inexperienced) roasters as hip and with it and as being worthy of your patronage, and older established (experienced) roasters as having "been around too long" and not worthy of your patronage..... whatever all that means.... possibly meaning that there is so much BS in the market that newcomers with little experience who are unable to offer their clients a full range of products and services, are more worthy of your patronage than experienced roasters that have a solid business model and offer a wide range of products and services, to support a lot of newby cafe owners that don't have any experience of their own and are prepared to believe advice from effectively anonymous forum junkies (bona fides unknown) in the "trust network" over advice from professional experienced traders.... Ergo the real reasons behind the bigger roasters all moving into the Asian and Philipine markets top grow their businesses. It used to be a happier business to be in although it was always hard work. Now its harder and harder work for shrinking profit margins due to saturation and its effects on competition. Good for cafe clients that want to take as much as they can get from suppliers who are busy fighting each other for the kilos. But aside from all that./...its all good 😉 ! I can vouch for the fact that the Australian market uses a very high proportion of quality coffees however truth be known, a well made cuppa using well roasted FAQ quality beans, is going to be significantly better than a badly made cuppa using high quality beans. Not to mention that you can also badly roast good quality coffee beans. You will always be at the mercy of the individual behind the machine and his or her level of competence and understanding of good barista skills. Ergo...the standard of training education and understanding of the barista. Lastly however lets not forget that these news stories are written by people that don't have the faintest what is actually going on in coffee industry and are usually just looking at writing a filler for the sunday rag (ie slow real news day), so what that means in terms of taking the news headline literally, I dont really know.
