Sips: Single-serve, Slippery figures, Sbux

News from biggish coffee:

• Single-serve coffee now 7.5% of U.S. market. The good news: this comes largely at the expense of unsustainable instant coffee. The bad news: Over 20% of households that make coffee at home (other than instant) use a single-cup brewing system, mostly Keurig machines. People, please at least use your own coffee! (See my posts on refilling K-Cups, the My K-Cup reusable filter, the  Solofill K-Cup replacements, and/or Ekobrew K-Cup replacements.)
• 4-C Compliant Coffee purchases doubled last year. The bad news: 4-C coffee merely meets some marginal “standards” for corporate coffee.  Even worse news: The total purchases of 4-C coffee, 48,000 tons, represents only 3% of the green coffee purchased by the two companies which boasting about their sustainable coffee sourcing in the article. Greenwashing!
• Starbucks constructs a store constructed of up-cycled shipping containers. U.S. ports have a surplus, in large part because of imported goods from China. That’s where…
• Starbucks has now opened  over 500 stores. None of which, so far as we know, is made of shipping containers.