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The Coronavirus is responsible for so many horrible things: so many people dying from COVID-19 and so many more suffering the after effects of losing a family member. Those who had COVID and survived sometimes have lingering health issues. On the business side, countless cafes around the world have had to shut their doors, lay off employees and see their business dreams go up in the very toxic soup that the Coronavirus brought with it.
One segment of the specialty coffee market has not been hurting during this pandemic, and that has been the manufacturing and vendor wings of the marketplace: the companies that make coffee and espresso equipment, and the vendors who sell it. If anything, 2020 was the best year of their business existence, as long as the manufacturers could continue to assemble and build their products.
Boom for Vendors
People love coffee. People can’t be without coffee. And if they can’t get their cafe experience coffee, they would start getting it a home. This meant all the money spent on typical cafe visits to buy a $5 latte or jumbo cappuccino went into the kitty bucket to buy a $500 espresso machine for home use.
“Other than the personal interactions I enjoyed at my office, the biggest thing I missed once we started working from home was the coffee I would get two times a day at this great little cafe a block from my office.” Kendra Tobey, a new home barista told me. “In the home, we had a(n auto drip) Proctor Silex machine that barely got used, and no grinder; we used it as a utility in the morning to get going. It was no winner in the quality coffee department!”
Tobey really missed the americanos and cappuccinos she would get in the morning at work. She also noticed that they had more disposable income over a few months of working at home. So she and her partner decided to buy and espresso machine with the money. They ended up getting a Breville Barista Express, but were lucky to find one. “We did our research online and knew how important the grinder was, and the Express seemed to be the one to go for. But no one had it in stock! We eventually found an online vendor that had a few and placed the order” Tobey said.
Tobey wasn’t alone in her experience. Combined with the fact that a lot of Europe — where the mid and high end ranges of espresso machines and grinders are made — essentially shut down for months at the start of the pandemic, and the massive new surge in demand for domestic espresso machines, it meant that prices climbed and availability tanked: the classic supply and demand scenario.
It even continues to this day. Take a tour around some of the more popular specialist espresso machine vendor websites and you will find many Italian and European brands are perpetually out of stock. Even for a while, the Chinese and Taiwanese built products were low on stock. And really good sales are sometimes hard to come by.
Meanwhile, there’s millions of newly minted “home baristas” who hopefully will rely on a website like CoffeeGeek to help them learn some skills in making great espresso in the home.
What’s in the Future?
I had an interesting talk with a friend in the specialty coffee trade recently. We talked about the boom in home espresso and the suffering of the cafe. I wondered if things would ever get back to normal for cafes. He laughed and shook his head. “Of course things will get back to normal! You’re forgetting the one thing being a home barista can never offer: social interaction! The cafe is a true third place in many peoples’ lives, and everyone is starved for that! There’s going to be an absolute boom period for coffee houses once we come out of this pandemic!”
He’s probably right. As much as it can be enjoyable to learn a craft, learn to be a home barista, it still doesn’t replace the social space that is a cafe, and if anyone else out there is like me, we’re all starved for that human interaction again. We’re going to be climbing the walls to get back into cafes and coffee houses! We are human and we are social animals. It’s going to come.
So what will happen to all those hundreds of thousands of new espresso machines and grinders sitting on peoples’ home kitchen counters? Well I like to hope they’re still going to be well used and loved as devices for delivering a heavenly cup of joy in some quite home time moments, but who am I fooling. I think there’s going to be a glut of them sold on eBay and Craigslist in 2022 and beyond.
About the author
Zuzanna travels the world because of her job, and makes it a point to find the best cafes, best coffee, best espresso in every city, town, or village she visits.