Coffee Quebec

The Quebec tea and coffee industry is the eighth largest manufacturing branch of the food and beverage sector, with $378 million worth of manufacturing shipments in 1999, up 31% from 19946. The size of the industry, which employs 716 people (1997 data), is all the more remarkable given that supplies of raw materials come entirely from abroad.

The $200 million plus anual in added value illustrates how dynamic the coffee roasting and marketing sector is in Quebec.

The variety in manufacturing shipments in the Quebec tea and coffee industry reflect fluctuations in the world prices of the commodities on international markets.

Overall consumption is fairly stable, so annual variations of 5–10% in world production cause sharp price swings. 3,300 -- number of cups of coffee that are consumed each second worldwide

6.3 million -- are the metric tons of coffee produced in the world in the 1999-2000 crop year

* 25 million -- the number of farmers who grow coffee worldwide, the majority on small-scale farms
* 600-800 AD -- the era in which an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi reportedly discovered coffee after observing that his goats become very excited upon eating the little red berries of the shiny green plant.

* 60 -- the percentage of Ethiopia's export earnings derived from coffee sales in most years.

* 40 -- the percentage of coffee-growing lands in Colombia, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean that are "technified" sun coffee plantations, where coffee is densely planted with little shade cover from native trees and doused with chemical fertilizers and pesticides and blight fixes of all kinds.

* 90 -- the percentage drop in migratory bird species populations found on technified sun coffee plantations as compared to traditional shade-grown coffee plantations.

* $80 million -- dollars from U.S. Agency for International Development funding for projects in the 1970s and 1980s that encouraged Latin American farmers to switch to technified coffee-growing methods which still sets todays standards.

* 80 -- the average in milligrams of caffeine per each cup of coffee, in a study of Canadian homes, offices, and coffee shops. How many did I have?

* 402 -- is the number of cups of coffee consumed per capita in Canada in 1997 which is 77 more than in the U.S. and 152 more than in Europe at that time.

* 20-300 -- micrograms of caffeine per liter of output from a typical municipal wastewater treatment facility. (Caffeine is often one of the highest volume contaminants in the morning, thanks to all those early cups of java or rather the results of .... well er....)
-- by starbuks

Frost, which hit the big coffee-producing areas of Brazil in 1994, led to a significant hike in prices, which in turn had an impact on the value of shipments from 1994 to 1997. The shift in demand to speciality products with greater added value explains the upward trend in shipments.