Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (7 page)

As a consequence, the only way can makers can achieve the 70 percent recycled content in U.S. soda cans is by importing old cans from elsewhere in the world, mostly Europe. And so the metal in my can of lime seltzer—and every other canned beverage in America—is far better traveled than most of the consumers who buy it, as the industry is forced to outsource the metal from old cans from around the globe to satisfy our thirst. The cost of hauling scrap aluminum cans around the planet might knock some of the shine off the industry's green credentials, but it still pencils out: even old cans transported from abroad are cheaper and have a lower energy and carbon footprint than pulling that same metal out of the mines.

The technology, ingenuity, and massive amounts of transportation
embedded in my simple canned carbonated beverage is in many ways a perfect case study, a microcosm for our entire way of life, commerce, and movement. No one company nor any one country could make the whole widget, from Australian ore to lime flavor. It's real lime, not artificial, the label on my can of refreshe says, so someone had to grow the limes; fertilize, water, and pick them; then squeeze, package, and ship the juice. Someone else had to make the paint and varnish for decorating the cans, and package those products and transport them. Someone else had to make that carton for the cans and the wooden pallets they are shipped on, and the plastic shrink wrap that keeps the featherweight containers stacked instead of flying around inside the truck. It is a true global product, this ghost-brand soda, one that could only be made in this way in today's door-to-door world.

For all its wonder and power, though, a trap lies hidden within this door-to-door prowess. This seamless behind-the-scenes delivery machine can magic a red rock in Australia into a seltzer can in my refrigerator with utter consistency and reliability, and if that's not remarkable enough, sixty days after I drain it and toss it away, it can be back in my refrigerator again, good as new. This is an extraordinary product resurrection. Yet habit, time, and ubiquity have drained this achievement of its true wonder and rendered it not just ordinary but beneath our notice. It's simply a thing we buy and use and expect, which is the unintended but inevitable accomplishment of our modern, have-it-now logistics age: turning the remarkable into the mundane. And that's the trap: Who questions what's beneath notice? Who asks why—if—we need such products, or even if they make sense?

Instead of questioning the very nature of the can—or the ship or the car or any other staple of the door-to-door world that has become part of daily American culture—the focus is almost always on
refining
the magic. Make cargo ships twice as big in
the space of ten years so they can carry even more stuff door to door—but give no thought to the impact on roads, traffic, and infrastructure when all this extra cargo slams into land. Or make cars lighter with aluminum so they burn less gas and emit less carbon. But don't question the transportation fundamentals these lighter cars will perpetuate—a country where 57 percent of households own two or more cars,
²³
all of them spending an average of twenty-two hours a day parked and disused.

And then there's the can. In 1972, the most brilliant manufacturers on the planet managed to squeeze twenty-two cans out of a pound of aluminum. Now the industry standard is thirty-four. Researchers are currently working on eking out a few more. Perhaps they'll reach forty cans a pound someday. Think of the aluminum, the energy, the resources, that could be saved, the industry spokesmen say, and they are absolutely correct. But at the end of the day, it's still a can that we use once and throw away,
sometimes
into a recycling bin. It can't even be resealed once opened. How many quarter-full cans of flat soda or beer are spilled down the drain, wasted because that is the intention behind the design? No one knows for sure, but even with a conservative estimate of 5 percent of canned beverages wasted, that would amount to 9 million gallons a year—all that weight and energy moved across cities and continents just to be thrown out. Is this really the most efficient and sensible solution that our geniuses of movement and design can come up with? You could ask the same sort of question of cargo ships or cars, of course, but just imagining American households without car ownership or American ports without massive imports is a tough sell in a landscape and economy designed around them.

But the can shows the way. History, rather than imagination, reveals an alternative reality. Soda water, seltzer water, club soda—whatever the chosen name—carbonated water has been around
since the eighteenth century, long before the aluminum can came along, or industrial bottling, for that matter. A soda siphon, seltzer bottle, or other reusable device for carbonating water—early versions used bicarbonate of soda as the carbon dioxide source, later versions featured injections from small canisters of the gas under pressure—was a common household implement from the late 1800s through the 1930s. People would drink it straight as a health tonic or mix it with other flavors, usually alcoholic ones. And when Coca-Cola became the first commercially popular soda pop in the U.S., it was purchased as a concentrated syrup. Consumers could make their own Coke at home or, more commonly, go to a drugstore soda fountain to be served a hand-mixed treat, ice cream optional. The notable feature of either alternative was a lack of single-use containers. Consumers could make their own plain soda and add the flavor sold by Coke, its competitors, or additives of their own devising. One purchase of syrup in one container made many servings, a system that was efficient, low-waste, and needed minimal logistics to close the deal. The heaviest and least expensive ingredient in a single serving of soda—the water—was provided by the consumer, so it didn't have to be bottled, canned, or shipped. If there must be mass consumption of a nutritionally deficient, obesity-causing sweet, fizzy beverage, there is no more efficient or low-cost method for distributing it than this original model.

But it is not the most
profitable
model. Taking its cue from the beer industry, which crafts a product not so easily made at home and therefore in need of a bottle or can, the soda industry marketed a new innovation: single-serve, ready-to-drink glass bottles, which led eventually to plastic bottles and aluminum cans. Shipping all the extra water and weight was a challenge but well worth it from the industry's point of view: there was so much money to be made selling many single-serve containers to a customer
instead of one container of concentrated syrup. You bought a soda siphon only once and a supply of syrup only infrequently. But single-serve containers have to be bought over and over, and from the industry's point of view 95 percent of the drink being sold is simply water (99 percent for diet sodas). The most costly parts end up being the container and the transportation.

From an efficiency, shipping, and waste point of view, this shift made no sense. Consumers were paying more to get less. But it was marketed as an innovation, as progress, as convenience. And that fussy old siphon belonged to an older generation. Drugstore soda fountains, which had gained in popularity when Prohibition shut down the bars, became passé. The market—and the marketing—spoke. Now, a century later, there is a slowly growing niche for home soda makers offering a back-to-the-future appeal and a more sustainable model, but America for the most part wants its soft drinks in disposable, single-serve containers. The can business is booming. But the history of the can reveals this to have been a choice, not an inevitability—one that has been profitable for a few enterprises, but costly for consumers as well as for the planet.

When considering our most popular, enduring, and costly container, the car, and how inevitable its current form has seemed since World War II, it may be useful to think of it, too, as a great big can: a choice, not an inevitability, for the future of the door-to-door world.

“T
he Industrial Revolution absolutely ruined coffee,” Jay Isais is saying over the basso roar and BB-pellet clang of his coffee roasting and packing plant. “Entire generations grew up drinking an absolutely terrible product you could only tolerate by masking the taste with lots of milk and sugar.”

Isais is showing off his caffeinated domain as he speaks, a business launched back in 1963 on the then-novel notion that java could and should be better than the traditional big cans of brown grounds on the supermarket shelves. As he watches, the latest batch of Costa Rican Tarrazu tumbles out of one of the giant Probat roasting machines with a sound like pounding rain, 600 pounds of beans cooked to 400 degrees for 13 minutes, give or take a few very critical seconds. The roast time varies from one coffee variety to the next, and it doesn't take too many seconds over the limit to ruin a batch.

Not today, though: a lovely hot, sweetish, overpowering aroma of coffee wafts from the stainless steel cooling platform where the beans just landed, its rotating arms sweeping them around and around as if panning for gold, lowering the coffee temperature enough to be moved to either the grinder or the automated packing station for whole bean customers. At the same time, a technician grinds and scans a sample of this batch with
an ultraviolet sensor. He must make sure the beans have achieved the right color of a proper medium roast, not too light and not too dark, cast-iron low tech meeting computer-age refinement in the quest for a truly good cup of java.

Jay Isais is nodding and smiling as the readout comes within a percentage point of the target. He is an unabashed coffee nerd who also happens to run sourcing and manufacturing for the biggest coffee house chain in the U.S. not named Starbucks. He's the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf's senior director of coffee, roasting, and manufacturing—or, in lay terms, the company coffee guy. He literally lives, breathes, and slurps coffee for a living: the company has nearly a thousand stores in thirty countries, and every one of the 8 million pounds a year the company buys is personally chosen by Isais. He oversees the whole convoluted supply chain from field to ship to roasting to store, all centered in the company's single roasting plant in little Camarillo, California.

“This would be a tough job if you didn't love coffee,” he allows, not that there's much doubt about where his heart lies when it comes to America's most frequent daily sip.
¹
His office is a monument to coffee. The pictures on display are primarily group shots of Isais with coffee farmers he has visited and worked with in developing countries. His credentials include being a founding member of the Roasters Guild, a volunteer instructor for the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a certified judge for various coffee competitions and organizations, a certified supply chain professional specializing in coffee and tea, and a licensed “Q Grader”—the coffee industry's anointment for experts in the art and science of tasting and judging the qualities of coffee. There are about a thousand Q Graders worldwide. Isais talks about coffee as a spiritual experience as well as a business, and it's clear he takes bad coffee as a personal affront.

This is what bugs him about the legacy of the Industrial Revolution.
It worked wonders for the advancement of cars, plumbing, and electricity, he says. But it wreaked havoc on our cups of coffee.

What most consumers don't realize, Isais says, is that when they buy coffee in a big can at the supermarket, it's already stale before the first cup is brewed—even before the can is opened with its impressive hiss of a vacuum seal released. This is simple chemistry at work: along with its delicious aromas, coffee gives off copious amounts of carbon dioxide for a day or two after leaving the roaster. Stick the java right in a can, and that can will begin to bulge or even rupture from the pent-up gas pressure. Wait until the outgassing slows before sealing the can, and the problem goes away—but so does freshness. This had been the problem with American coffee since early in the twentieth century, when mass production and canning techniques were first applied to what had previously been a commodity sold fresh or even raw to the public.

This seems like a packaging problem, but at root, Isais says, it's a problem of transportation and of a supply chain that, in its own way, is as complex as a smartphone's. How do you handle a highly prized commodity that grows only in certain tropical locations at very specific altitudes, on millions of mostly small family farms, none of which are near the bulk of the customers who want to buy and drink the stuff? What do you do with a product that is highly perishable when it's picked, that can be partially processed to a raw, green stable state that will keep for many months, but that becomes highly perishable again once it's roasted and ready to brew and drink?

Unless individual consumers can take the time and trouble to roast the green beans themselves
and
use them right away, or go to a coffee shop and drink brew made from recently roasted beans whenever they want a cup, everything about the taste of coffee is going to be a compromise between convenience, freshness, distance, and time. In other words, it's about transportation.

“Many people never know what coffee is supposed to taste like,” Isais says. He has a lean, expressive face framed by a closely trimmed beard and mustache that can't conceal his pity for the 85 percent of Americans who drink at least an occasional cup, and the 63 percent who drink it daily.
²
A majority of these regular coffee drinkers are making stale brew and think it's supposed to be that way. He vividly recalls the first time he tasted really good coffee. He was a college junior starting what was supposed to be a temporary job at a family friend's coffee roasting business in the Northern California coastal town of Monterey. “It was a revelation. Coffee wasn't just that muddy brown stuff that came in cans that you had to dump a ton of milk and sugar in, but something amazing.”

Before the mass production techniques Henry Ford brought to the automobile were applied to coffee, the product was most often sold in its raw green bean state in the U.S.—the beans having been cleansed of the fruit skin, pulp, and an inner husk called the parchment, but not roasted. Coffee can stay good for up to a year in this state if kept dry and indoors. Consumers would take it home, roast it in a pan or oven, and grind it with a hand-cranked coffee grinder. The drink became somewhat popular in America during the American Revolution. Patriots wanted to supplant their previous favorite, tea, after the Boston Tea Party. Serving coffee represented a statement against British custom and rule. But coffee really took off as an American staple nearly a century later, during the Civil War. It was one of the few luxuries—as well as a welcome stimulant—offered troops on both sides, although only the Union Army had reliable supplies after the first year at war. Hundreds of thousands of men came home from the war hooked on java. Green coffee beans were part of the daily rations given to Union soldiers, who had little roasting kits in their packs or just used cast-iron skillets on the campfires. Some of the government-issue carbines had little grinders cleverly built
into the rifle butts, but others just used their regular, solid rifle butts to hammer the beans until they broke up enough to brew.

Isais finds this bit of history fascinating and illuminating, because America fell in love with good coffee in those days. “The irony is those Union soldiers were drinking better coffee out there in the field than any fine diner was served in the best restaurants in America in the 1950s.”

That difference not only hooked Isais into a career, but also powered the modern coffee industry to new heights. Then it split the industry in two. Today there is the commercial coffee, canned and least costly, that nearly everyone in the U.S. served and drank up until the seventies, even at the finest restaurants. And there is the specialty coffee business, jump-started by the founder of Isais's company in 1963, and catapulted into ubiquity by one dominant player, Starbucks, with its mega-fleet of 32,000 stores. Now that specialty branch is forking again, pushed into the gourmet beverage stratosphere by so-called third-wave artisanal coffeehouses whose product is sourced, swished, savored, and scored like fine wines.

Divided or not, coffee is big business—with $28.6 billion in worldwide exports alone.
³
Those exports generate at least five times that amount in resales by the pound and by the cup, in a world where 1.4 billion cups of coffee are consumed daily.
⁴

However, contrary to oft-repeated claims in print and online, coffee is not the second most valuable traded commodity on the planet after crude oil. This bit of lore had been accepted and repeated for years, perhaps because it resonates so powerfully, this idea that there are two great black elixirs in the world, oil and coffee, that keep us moving, albeit in different ways. But even the most rudimentary research reveals that coffee is not even the second most valuable
agricultural
commodity traded globally, much less in comparison to such mega-products as oil, gas, coal,
alumina, and all the metals and gems that are traded in the world. Coffee is, however, among the top ten agricultural imports in the world—number eight, to be exact—behind such products as soy, wheat, maize, rubber, and wine but ahead of beef, cigarettes, cheese, and rice.
⁵

None of the countries that produce coffee are among the top per capita consumers of the beverage, except Brazil, which is in tenth place worldwide. And although the U.S. consumes the greatest volume of coffee of any country in the world—second only to the collective imports of the entire European Union—Americans are way down in the pack when it comes to how much coffee
per person
we imbibe. The U.S. is in twenty-second place on that list, tied with Poland and Hungary. The Scandinavians are the coffee-drinking world champs, with Finland taking the caffeine crown by consuming more than twenty-one pounds of coffee a year—about two and two-thirds cups a day—for every man, woman, and child in the country. That's more than three times the per capita consumption in the U.S.

If all that coffee could grow anywhere on earth, Jay Isais's life would be a great deal simpler, as would the challenge of keeping coffee fresh and delicious for people from Finland to Florida. But it cannot. Coffee is a tropical shrub adapted to a specific climate that rules out growing coffee where its main consumers live: in Europe and North America. Every U.S. state consumes the stuff, but the only state that actually grows it is Hawaii, and its volume is barely a blip on the world's coffee radar, although its Kona coffee beans are both famous and famously expensive. And no traded coffee at all is grown in Europe.

So coffee requires massive amounts of transportation to reach the world's java guzzlers—not just from the producing countries to the consuming countries, but through a web of intermediate processor, broker, and marketing nations. Germany, without a
single commercial coffee tree on its soil, is in the top five coffee exporting nations in the world, acting as broker for other nations and also as the world leader in making decaffeinated coffee through a process that removes the stimulant but leaves the coffee in its raw green bean state. The extracted caffeine is then sold, primarily to the pharmaceutical industry, and the beans are shipped out again. Five percent of all U.S. coffee imports come directly from Germany—more than from the coffee nations of Costa Rica, Peru, and Nicaragua.
⁶

All told, more than 142 million bags of coffee, each weighing 132 pounds, are moving each year through a complex dance of ports and countries.
⁷
Each coffee plant produces about a pound of raw green coffee beans a year, so it takes a great many plants and a great many pickers to keep the world's cups full.

T
he coffee I'm brewing on Friday the thirteenth is a medium roast from the Ethiopian village of Yirgacheffe, in the equatorial highlands of the Sidamo region, where local growers believe the first coffee plant originated and where ancient methods of processing are still used. Whether or not this place really is ground zero for all coffee on the planet has never, and may never, be proven. But there's no question it produces some highly prized beans.

My coffee's physical journey starts when the beans leave Yirgacheffe on a rugged 250-mile ride to the capital city of Addis Ababa for final processing and packing. Ethiopia is landlocked, so the next leg in the coffee itinerary is another 536-mile drive across the border to the bustling commercial port in the Republic of Djibouti. From there the beans travel by ship north through the length of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea. They cross the Mediterranean's entire length, then pass
through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Atlantic Ocean. Typically there would be numerous port calls along the way. Then the ship heads west and south again to the Panama Canal and passage to the Pacific Ocean, where it turns north and west to California and Jay Isais's waiting hands.

Assuming the coffee travels the most direct route, that's about 11,000 nautical miles. (By contrast, a coffee shipment from number one producer Brazil to New York would be just under 5,000 miles at sea.) But it's not usual for coffee to stay at sea two months before reaching its final destination, as ships often take roundabout routes to ports of call for pickups and drop-offs in the opposite direction, so the final mileage could end up being much more.

Coffee blends—different varieties shipped separately and blended in the consuming nation after roasting—can double or triple mileage as well, depending on the sourcing. Most commercial coffees sold in the U.S. are blends that include beans from both Latin America and Asia, and many popular specialty coffee sellers blend beans as well, including some of Starbucks' most popular coffees. The upshot: the average American coffee-drinking household (with two moderate coffee consumers using blended bulk ground or whole bean coffee) never has fewer than 572,000 miles of travel pass through its coffeemaker every year.
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My household, which consumes java at a rate more in line with Finland's, pencils out at about 1.7 million miles—and that's just counting the transportation from farm to first arrival on U.S. soil. There's also the added travel from port to roaster to distributor to grocery or coffeehouse. There are still more miles if the household buys decaf or uses a single-serve coffee machine, for which many of the coffee capsules—Nespresso's, for one—are sourced from Europe.