You can hear this expression in Armenian cafes, restaurants and bars. As a rule when clients answer to the question of waiters “what kind of coffee?” they say “sweet”, “medium” or “bitter”. But this is not so important, the important thing is that it would be more logical to say what kind of coffee they would like to taste, what kind of coffee, etc… But in fact 80% of people are not interested in that, but the waiters always expect this answer to their question.
Nowadays Armenians use more coffee than many other nations, but we don’t know what it means to drink real coffee because you can hardly find real, high quality coffee in the market and good coffee costs much. First of all I’d like to note that in these articles I will not write any names of companies or brands, because the purpose is not to count the money companies make but rather to help consumers as much as we can.
Before writing this article I talked to some people who are involved in this business. All they say is that there are too many laws about the “culture” of coffee in the country. We still are not able to differ good coffee from bad coffee.
So what is good coffee? We understand 100% coffee by saying good coffee. For instance they say “100% Arabica”, and that’s all.. But what if someone drinks this 100% Arabica, or let’s say 50% Robusta and doesn’t like the quality? People selling coffee explain this with the habits that we have inherited from the Soviet times. The Soviet Union used to buy a lot of Arabica coffee from Brazil. Then they “decaffeinated” that coffee, used the caffeine in medicines and sold the rest of it to citizens. Soviet citizens, as well as Armenians have been drinking this coffee since those times and are already used to it.
So what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union? A lot of new brands appeared in the market. Then Armenians thought that it would be better to import coffee and then pack it here. Then Armenians started to make coffee here and called it “coffee production”.
Now let’s turn to the coffee market again. As one of the representatives of this field said, there is no coffee market in Armenia as a unique system. You may either agree with him or disagree, but anyway there are questions that still need to be responded.
The biggest question is the price… that has a lot to do with the law. We visited the web site of the “International Coffee Organization” and found out about the international price. I must say that we were very surprised. The prices were so high that we could export coffee from here to Brazil. We talked to a person that is specialized in this field and he offered to make simple calculations. So, let’s take the cheapest coffee: Robusta. According to specialists the cheapest coffee is the coffee that is imported from Vietnam and Indonesia. The prices for this coffee range from 1,45-1,65 dollars in the stock markets of Paris and London. At the same time this price is for very large quantities, our companies can’t import so much coffee, and accordingly the price is higher for them. Anyway, let’s make our calculations based on 1,45 dollars. And if we add the transportation expenses, 20% VAT, other 10% taxes, packing and other expenses, advertisement expenses and as well as the loss of 20-22% capacity when making the coffee, the price becomes 4 dollars per kilo. In addition, companies also have to make profit. This means that the cheapest coffee in our market should cost more than 2000 dram, but we can buy coffee for about 1300 dram in shops.
The second questions concerns the quality. When producing coffee it is not enough to pack the coffee and go through other procedures, but producers also have to think about the flavor of the coffee in order to provide high quality. For this purpose serious companies hire “degustators”. But in our country if the businessmen that invest in this business like the taste, that is enough. People have already gotten used to this: when a new brand appears in the market, people like it, but later they change the taste and quality. And in this case our consumers say: “they spoilt this too”. But in the coffee market things are different. The same coffee sort grown in different places has different taste, even more, the same coffee may be different in different seasons and depending on other things. Big companies buy coffee with big quantities so as not to change the taste during a long period and to not disappoint their consumers. This is not seen much in our country. Almost all companies will change their partners if someone offers them coffee at a cheaper price. At first they produce everything well, but later when they see that consumers have already gotten used to their products they start to save more money, thus spoiling the quality of the product… and consumers are the losers in this case.
Now let’s discuss the price, which is lower than the normal price and there should be an explanation for this. If the low prices of some other goods can be explained by using cheap labor, in this field labor doesn’t play a serious role. This means that there are other ways to maneuver. Some coffee producers informed us about these ways. Most of the coffee is produced with cheap and low quality raw materials. Second: some people think that producers wet the coffee to increase the weight. The process of frying is more interesting. They fry coffee with the help of special materials and technologies, in the result of which coffee beans become bigger and shiny. One of the field specialists said that the coffee in different packs and different prices called “Arabica”, “Brazilian coffee” or “Columbian coffee” may be the same coffee fried in different ways. Some people say that coffee is also fried by using some materials that are dangerous for health. People usually buy coffee beans to be sure that producers haven’t put different things in it (rice, etc).
And this is the main problem that has to do with our health. Who can say that the coffee that we drink is not dangerous for our health? We have a special institution that checks the quality of these products and takes care of their health standards. But they don’t really do their job well. First of all, there is no modern laboratory in Armenia that is able to organize such procedures. Secondly, producers can bribe and buy all kinds of documents. According to our information several years ago an Ambassador to a European country collected all the types of coffee in our market and sent to Europe for research. The answer was nearly the following: minimum 15% of the content does not have any content of coffee. In other words it is “garbage” and is put with coffee to increase the weight. Alas some officials made intimidations and didn’t let them publish the results of these tests. There were some articles like this in the press before too, when they found some things in coffee that are bad for health, but this was forgotten too.
Generally we may assume that in our country people think less about our health than about other things. One of the field specialists told us that a foreigner once drank coffee in Armenia and surprisingly asked why the producer hadn’t been arrested yet. Can you imagine how people that understand what real coffee is will be surprised and frustrated when watching the advertisements of Armenian coffee: “The best coffee”, etc. We forgot to mention prizes. Producers compete not with quality of their products, but the prizes they put in the packs. By the way, has anyone asked them whether or not consumers run high risk factors by opening those prizes?
This and all the abovementioned reasons are why our coffee is so cheap. We prefer this. Diaspora Armenians sometimes say: “Life is expensive here, one cup of coffee costs 2-3 dollars”. This price is not fixed by chance. They pay high prices but instead of this they are sure that they buy high quality coffee that is not bad for health. The same goes for the cigarette market; we will touch upon this in our next editions.
We don’t say that all coffee brands that are produced in Armenia have bad quality. No, there are even companies that export their products to Europe, which is a better factor of quality than the false documents given by some state bodies.
This means that if producers want they can produce high quality coffee in Armenia. The coffee that is exported to Europe from Armenia has that good quality, but the coffee they offer to local citizens has bad quality. And we buy this. In other words this is not only the producers’ fault, but also the consumers. You may say that the economy is not developed and the purchase power is weak and this price is good for us. But can you say how many of us look at the pack of products before buying and check what is written on it? At least our best “prize” is our health…
P.S. In spite of all this there is a little development both in production and in the taste of consumers. In the next article we will write about the coffee market of Armenia, the capacities, participants, as well as about the existing problems of the field.