Maxwell House coffee to go 100 pct arabica
Posted by TheShot on 24 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Fair Trade, Quality Issues, Robusta
Corporate spokespeople frequently speak volumes more in what’s left unsaid than in what they say. Take yesterday’s Reuters news release from The Big 4‘s Kraft Foods. Kraft’s flagship coffee, Maxwell House, has desensitized American coffee taste buds for decades. Kraft has just recently decided to use 100% arabica beans in Maxwell House’s cans of unholy horror: INTERVIEW-Maxwell House coffee to go 100 pct arabica | Reuters.
In a statement made yesterday by Kraft senior vice-president and general manager of coffee in North America, John LeBoutillier, Kraft is changing the Maxwell House blend “to give mainstream America a richer, less bitter cup of coffee.”
The unsaid message from Mr. LeBoutillier? “For decades we have knowingly given mainstream America a weaker, more bitter cup of coffee. In more recent years, while the likes of Starbucks has created a market for much better coffee than the crude commodity we’ve been forever slinging on supermarket shelves, we countered by offering mainstream America even worse coffee: using cheap Vietnamese robusta beans, chemically treating it to taste more like our usual coffee, and passing the savings on to our shareholders. And by diverting our massive coffee purchases from our usual growers to cheap suppliers of low-grade beans, we helped instigate the global coffee crisis, inspiring desperate measures such as the Fair Trade movement.”
To also cite the Reuters article, “The move is neither an effort to challenge premium coffees nor in response to the hike in robusta futures prices to a recent nine-year peak, LeBoutillier said.” As if we didn’t predict exactly this ten months ago.
5 Comments »
[...] these circumstances, does Maxwell House’s recent announcement of their switch to 100% arabica beans really make a difference? Especially if we can secretly [...]
I will no longer be drinking Maxwell House coffee – the new blend tastes like watered down dishwater.
I am in total agreement with Bill W. I used to put three to four spoons of coffee per pot – now I have to use five and a half spoons….and I still don’t have that Maxwell House taste. Sorry, I don’t like the Arabica Bean flavor and after talking to numerous friends, they agree with me. I am going to have to try another brand.
I totally disagree with all the folks here who liked the old Maxwell House. As a person who is so picky about coffee that I have a $300 coffee brewer and have roasted my own green coffee before grinding it myself, I can say that the new Maxwell House is what coffee should taste like and I have actually started using it exclusively since seeing the new 100% Arabica on the label and trying it. Maybe the disgruntled Maxwell House buyers should just go with instant, which is still an improvement on what they were used to drinking with the old Robusto beans! Yuk. No wonder coffee houses have done so well. They have educated coffee drinkers to a higher standard.
Carol, if say that you’ve roasted your own greens and — despite that experience — that you have started using Maxwell House exclusively, our alarms go off that you’re corporate shill for Maxwell House. A plant. A blogger receiving checks paid through Kraft Foods.
I honestly cannot see any reasonable scenario where someone who bothered to go through the effort of roasting their own fresh could ever willingly choose any sort of pre-ground, mass produced, canned coffee after that. Even if one were to suddenly become financially destitute, that switch — and the claim “new Maxwell House is what coffee should taste like” — doesn’t even add up. Something here stinks to high heaven.