Over recent years, the subscription model has gone from strength to strength. At the base of it all, it seems like a truly stupendous idea – you pay out a set amount of money every month, and the company that you’re paying sends you the perfect product in return.
It was only a matter of time, of course, before the world of coffee bought this concept into its fold, and started using it to create some wonderful businesses bringing flavor and caffeine to a wide range of people. Nowadays, we have a range of different coffee businesses offering subscription services, and we’re going to talk about them a little today.
The Pros
Freshness
This is, at least in our opinion, the number one benefit of a good coffee subscription. The reason that a number of different coffee options the world over aren’t as good as they could be are that the coffee has been allowed to go stale, and become a little less good than it could be.
This is almost always down to some level of mistake in the production pipeline. Coffee may have been left on the shelf for too long, or not allowed to rest for long enough after roasting.
The subscription model offers an obvious solution to this problem. Say a company always sends out roasted beans on the tenth of each month, they might know to roast on the third of each month and post on the eighth in order to make sure that you get great coffee by the time the tenth of the month rolls around.
This rolling subscription system can allow you to always get coffee at the perfect level of freshness – fresh, but having been allowed to rest after being roasted.
Never-ending Supply
This is a great benefit to coffee subscriptions – running out of coffee is the worst! If you can roughly measure how much coffee you use in a month, you’ll be able to ensure that your subscription service sends you the perfect amount of coffee each month. In an ideal world, you’ll receive a new, fresh parcel of coffee on the same day that you run out!
While this might take a little bit of practice to get perfectly right, it’s certainly the kind of excellent pro that makes us consider coffee subscriptions to be a great idea – ensuring that you’ve got coffee on hand all the time is something of a necessity to most people out there.
The Cons
Price
This is the first problem that you might see with some coffee subscriptions – they can be a little expensive. Generally, this is because, with more expensive subscriptions, you’re paying for someone else to do the critical thinking and selection process for you. If you’re a little more open to trying anything, you can generally expect the price to go down a little.
Something that we’ve noticed is that you can expect a lower price if you get a subscription directly from a coffee roastery near you than if you were to get a subscription from a larger company. It’s hard to put an exact reason on why this might be the case, but we would suggest that it is mostly because of the sheer number of people involved in a large company.
At a smaller company, fewer wages need to be paid, and fewer overhead costs are needed for calculations. At a large subscription company, though, you might expect more costs to be incurred throughout the process of running the company, so the price of an individual bag of coffee goes up.
Changeability
Having control over the coffee you drink is a big thing for a number of coffee drinkers – being able to have a darker roast one month compared to the last, for example, will allow you to taste the differences in flavor over time.
With that said, though, a number of different subscription companies don’t allow for this fine-grain control over the beans that you get. The reason for this is that allowing that choice would lead to a level of wastage within the company: if some beans are no longer wanted, they may have to be thrown out.
Smaller roasteries will generally disallow this changeability – they’re roasting beans to order, in some cases, so those beans must be the ones that you get. Larger companies, though, may allow this changeability. For example, they may source beans from different companies every month, so that your coffee is inherently new and different every month.
Pact/Trade Coffee
Pact and Trade coffee are two large companies in the coffee subscription world. Trade is a US-based company offering coffee from a number of smaller roasteries throughout the US. Pact is a very similar company, but they operate in Europe.
The reason that we wanted to mention these coffee companies is that they connect you to small roasteries, offering interesting brews that you may or may not like. After your delivery, you can rate the coffee, and they will adjust accordingly going forward.
This is a new way to view the subscription model and is, in a number of ways, the best of both worlds: you get the customer service and price savings of a large company, while also supporting small businesses and interesting roasts.
Local Roasteries
Local roasteries may be ideal for you if you’re looking to make sure that you’re supporting local businesses and also getting the freshest coffee possible. It will allow you to make sure that the coffee you drink is tasty, and low in emissions, due to the inherent low food miles of local businesses.
It’s certainly worth considering local roasteries near you. While they may not have the flexibility of some larger companies, they will often do everything that they can to accommodate you – they want your business much more than a large company does.
Conclusion
We hope that this article has enabled you to gather a thing or two about the world of coffee subscription services. They can be deeply complex, but that complexity can certainly be worth it!