Finest coffee under threat

Abstract

Mark Dunhill, CEO of English coffee, tea, and cocoa retailer Whittard of Chelsea, is obsessed with sourcing the finest ingredients. His kitchen brims with parcels of dark chocolate and tea caddies full of exotic varieties. But Dunhill’s even bigger obsession appears to be coffee. Every 10 days, a silver pouch packed with freshly grown and roasted coffee beans arrive from countries such as Guatemala, Tanzania and the Congo. He carefully weighs and grinds the beans before pouring them into an espresso machine that hisses as it delivers caffeine-powered perfection. For Dunhill, as for most of the world’s billion or so coffee drinkers, coffee has to be made with beans from Coffea arabica—a shrub discovered hundreds of years ago in the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia—or not at all. To switch to the bitter beans of C. canephora, also known as robusta, would be anathema. “Arabica beans provide a radically different and