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Cafe Hopping

From
s
Rus ia

With Love

Coffee is the second most popular product in the 70,100 tons to 125,500 tons, where 74% goes for instant coffee
world stock market after petroleum. As we all know, Rus- and only 26% for beans, which are sold mainly by cafés and
sia has no lack of petroleum, but we also know this cold restaurants. Among these 26%, specialty coffee does not exceed
country cannot grow coffee trees due to its climate; nev- 5%. Nevertheless, small coffee shops that decided to highlight
ertheless, each year Russians consume more and more high-quality coffee and use it as their main point of different
coffee beans. Instant coffee still has the most of Russian influence the market and set the trends.In 2012, two teams of
market; even so, coffee in beans is getting popular due to young coffee lovers opened LES and Cooperative “Black”,
big cities’ fashion to gather with friends in cafés or to where at that time started to use unusual for Russian custom-
order coffee to-go. In recent years, specialty coffee shops ers Chemex, Hario, Aero Press and so on. Two coffee shops
have been popping around big cities like mushrooms and became pioneers of specialty coffee in Russia and started to
we interviewed some of them to understand how exactly educate customers about beans’ difference and what ‘spe-
coffee works for Russian market. cialty’ actually means. “At that time we had to go abroad by
ourselves to look for good-quality raw beans as all the big import-
Mass & Special ers were bringing only commercial coffee into the country,” says
Oleg Polovnikov,founder of LES, “Today Russian market has
The volume of the Russian coffee market reached $ these companies that bring specialty coffee here. “And they
3 billion, percentage of Russians regularly consuming coffee achieved it due to the relatively low price: “Specialty coffee shops
has remained consistently high over the past years: 76-77%; and try to set their pricing same level as mass-market not to scare
up to 30% of all coffee sales in Russia are made in Moscow and St. the customer away, but taking into consideration that our beans
Petersburg. According to BusinesStat analysis, the supply of coffee are much more expensive, this pricing strategy does not seem
in Russian market in 2009-2014 increased by almost 80% - from fair,” says co-founder of Cooperative “Black”, Artem Temirov.

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