On coffee semiotics's maddening intricacies
A story problem regarding the seemingly simple look of a coffee and what might be its value. The item, and the purchasing, always require context.
In downtown Cork, there’s a little mall. It’s got an outlet of major grocer Tesco, it’s got a jeweler, it’s got a bizarre “French Taco” restaurant advertising what look to be wraps. (I’m told it’s not bad!) I visited because there’s also a coffee bar so pink it might offend Glinda, in all her dubious goodness. It’s called Guji.
There are multiple coffees on bar, ranging from dark to light. All the pastries are gluten-free, muffins and power bars and outrageous cookie sandwiches winking from the case. The espresso machines are metallic reconfigured Patrick Star-looking engines. But it’s the coffee bags that serve as our story problem here.
The wall of bags on the window is, more or less, information free. Each bag is some 80 percent shiny white. To indicate any particular difference, there’s huge block letters indicating the country of origin or the roast. Ethiopia. Brazil. Morning Coffee. The 500 gram bag of Ethiopia is what got the wheels turning in full-force: it’ll cost €43 to take home.
It was giving Miyazaki’s No Face, a shapeless growth gobbling vice and money into its swelling maw.
My alarm bells started going off. In all my holy self-righteousness, I was ready to point to this as yet another example of nefarious coffee practices. Yes, racist reductions of coffee farmers is longstanding foul play. Divorcing a commodity of its laborers, though, is another malpractice. For the heady brutes out there, you might even call it alienation through semiotics. American marxist George Novack writes “what is taken from the dispossessed is vested in the dispossessors,” and “money has the magical power of turning things into their opposites.”
I’m being a tease, but here’s the real catch.
The journalist in me was skeptical to leap to a fetishized commodity conclusion straightaway. Upon even brief inspection, one learns Guji is a boutique operation from larger Irish coffee company the Old Barracks. The business opened at Cork’s Marina Market as the first tenant in 2020, announcing its closure of that original location in early 2025. The spin-off, it looks like, allowed owner Alan Andrews to lean into social media aesthetics and generate a new income stream for his business. There are now multiple Guji locations throughout Ireland.
I didn’t want to leave the twist for too far down the road here, no Wizard of Oz final act revelation is this as it wouldn’t be fair to besmirch this small business: Old Barracks is happy to list relevant coffee information on its website. That shifty-seeming Ethiopian bag of beans has its data presented in fine form: Wosasa is the village of source, the specialty score of 86.75, and even coffee varieties 74110 and 74112 listed.
Buckle up for the full circle conclusion. It’s a humdinger. (Side note, I have so enjoyed edits from non-rural people over the last few years as they intercepted words including humdinger and barn-raiser as too bizarre.)
Andrews and his approach is the real thesis of this piece: What are coffee professionals to do with the fact that, by and large, customers not only do not care where their coffee comes from, but presenting the information actually impedes sales? More directly: the rousing succeess story of Guji leads one to conclude it works better to leave any information on the wayside for drinkers.
Shoppers reckoning with hot winds sparking embers that devastate their cityscapes since those cityscapes haven’t had a drop of rain since the spring before are more than ever wondering how to protect the environment with their purchases. The Silicon Review cited data firm Whatnot in finding British shoppers, for instance, indicating “buyers increasingly drawn to inclusivity, storytelling, and heritage in their purchases.” That maps to working and workplaces, too; sustainability consulting firm ERM found in 2024 “labor relations refuse to return to normal” post-pandemic and “worker engagement remains low, while workplace disruption remains high, forcing companies to revisit their human capital approach.”
We don’t need to spend time wading into “is there ethical consumption under capitalism” territory. There is, especially if you live in anything close to resembling mainstream society in the country of your dwelling. The question remains how ethical can one consume, if we want to play in that limited logical arena for the sake of getting to the point, and how do sellers and business owners make that doable, if they themselves even care? We know many don’t — looking at Tartine’s coffee pros for an easy A here — but some do.
That brings us back to Andrews. If I am reading this all right (since in reality I’m new to this business and have never met this person) I think the logic and morals track.
Here’s what I wrote as my answer: if Andrews runs a coffee company that, as far as I can tell, is an ethical player in the industry, then isn’t he right to use modern marketing techniques to sell that coffee in the competitive landscape in which he exists?
Let’s add the context. We are not here talking about how the entire centuries-long ecosystem of producing, buying, selling, and drinking coffee should instantly vanish; that’s more or less how Specialty Coffee Association’s executive director Peter Giuliano summed up his response to the synthetic coffee revolution in a Linkedin post. Within coffee, if one’s sourcing is as direct and ethical as it can be, distributing that coffee with intelligent semiotics checks out. We’re not knocking Bartholomew Jones and his exquisitely packaged Cxffeeblack project for its smart design and use of social media. We’re not, then, doing that across the board, right?
At a big boy price of €43 for 500 grams, one can be an optimist and say Andrews and his businesses are paying farmers a better price than most. A quick search for 500 grams of Illy coffee, a competitor across the plaza and inside the mall’s grocery lines, fetches some €26.25. Even if profits are split somewhat similarly amongst the roasters rather than the farmers, the price point does indicate a better quality, better sourced product (or a really intense marketing scheme I’ve stumbled upon, but I choose to think Guji is better than that). Important: the marketing and presentation of the bags are quite similar. No information present other than “100% Arabica” and, unlike Guji and Old Barracks, nothing more online.
That’s the rub, though. Take Jones’s business: the connections to the coffee’s origins, the land, are not ommitted. Those shoppers who want to “buy better” shouldn’t just be dumbly believing Guji, or any brand, is better just because the business says it is; that slippery slope brings us to greenwashing pretty fast. Red Bay Coffee, for my general dislike of the coffee’s taste, is another good example of weaving touchstones of history and culture to the coffee through design and marketing. At Old Barracks, those touch points are at play. But to capture larger profits, Guji is leaving them on the side: those bags are as naked as baby Jesus the day he slipped right into Bethlehem.
This trend falls into one general consumers should clock soon. That’d be specialty roasters entering grocery aisles and playing for this dumbed down, lazy consumer crowd. In late 2023 and 2024 I worked for Kevin Bohlin, owner of Saint Frank Coffee and Juniper bakery (where I was on the opening team), and he said as much. His goal is to bring these better beans to crowds that aren’t wearing tiny beanies and ordering flat whites. Usually, they go with blends and less heady descriptors. This approach sees larger shares of the entire coffee consuming pie fall under “more ethical consumption,” or better buying than the really crappy stuff out there.
I’m not doing my usual “so here’s what I do and here’s what you should do” protocol with this one. I wanted to get into a Knives Out-esque journey through how to investigate a business, hold it accountable in an inherently ruinous industry, and see how to proceed. I actually do think Guji, and Old Barracks de facto, pass the should-buy test. Considering Illy and McFrappes are within spitting distance, this is the better move; Let’s not smother our darlings in a purity test quest.
It’s just important to look at a story problem for what it is: a story, and a problem.
