I’m reading Starbucked by Taylor Clark. I learned some interesting information from Taylor which I want to share with you:
1.) In 2006 a $3.95 cup of Starbucks Frappuccino breaks down like this financially:
$0.20 – Coffee – (5%)
$0.40 – Dairy Product (10%)
$0.07 – Cup, sleeve, lid (2%)
$2.84 – Labor & Overhead to serve (72%)
$0.44 – Profit (11%)
2.) Dunkin’ Donuts did a survey in 2005 and found that most of the respondents would give up sex before giving up their daily coffee
3.) Another Dunkin’ Donuts survey found that habitual coffee drinkers have more sex than those who abstain, from coffee that is.
4.) There is more caffeine in a Sunkist Orange Soda then there is in a similar serving of Coca-Cola or Barq’s Root Beer.
5.) In England a cappuccino now costs more than a line of cocaine.
6.) Good bean such as Coffea arabica has forty-four chromosomes. Humans have forty-six. Cheap poor quality coffee beans only have twenty-two chromosomes.
7.) Kopi Luwak beans are harvested from the droppings of a catlike animal called the Indonesian palm civet – the creature eats ripe coffee cherries, partially digests them before passing them on enhanced. It’s a special gift to the world appreciated mostly in Japan and costs as much as $300 per pound.
8.) Starbucks has been wrongly accused of running off many Mom & Pop coffee houses over the years. Contrary to this belief, many Mom & Pop shops thrive right next door to a Starbucks.
9.) In 1999 the Panda keepers at the National Zoo in Washington DC found that Hsing-Hsing loved blueberry muffins. Not just any muffin would do though – he only wanted Starbucks blueberry muffins. This was important since they hid his arthritis medicine in the muffins.
10.) A Texan who calls himself “Winter” has made it a full time pursuit of visiting every Starbucks store on the planet. By 2007 he had visited Sixty-Five hundred locations.
11.) Starbucks only purchases 2% of the worlds coffee production each year
12.) The Big Four coffee conglomerates are Nestle, Proctor&Gamble, Philip Morris and Massimo Zanetti (which bought the Sara Lee coffee Brands). They provide over 60% of America’s coffee supply and make massive profits at it. One way they achieve this is buy diluting the good bean with Robusta bean, a poor quality coffee bean. Estimates are that the major blends of Folgers and Yuban are not 65% Robusta.
13.) in 1927 Gus Comstock, a Minnesota barbershop porter challenged anyone to drink more coffee then himself. He previously drank sixty-two cups in ten hours. Then H.A. Streety of Armadillo Texas drank seventy-one cups in nine hours while Perry Wilson of Canyon Texas drank seventy-two cups in ten hours. A mob showed up for the challenge and sat around for seven hours and fifteen minutes to see Comstock down eighty-five cups of coffee. A record that has not been broken yet. (Note – it must have been weak coffee because eighty-five cups (5 Gallons) of good bold coffee would have up to thirteen grams of caffeine in it, well over the highly fatal dose of five to ten grams.)
Teddy Burriss 