Page 28 - CTI81_EN

C C Story / Victoria Rovenskaya. Illustration / Yuzhen Cai

How much does your

coffee cost?

E very morning millions of people pay from 1 to

5 dollars for a cup of aromatic coffee, which
brightens up the beginning of their day. We do
not regret paying this money, because in return
we get not just 150-200 ml of a drink in a cardboard cup,
but a good mood, cheerfulness and generally good luck that
someone tried and brought to our world (if we are lucky,
even with love) ...
But how much is this pleasure really worth? We thought
and calculated.
As with any served food, the price for coffee is made
up of the cost of the ingredients used to make it and the
cost of creating and maintaining it, as well as (in some
cases) the cost of the utensils. Below we will look at typical
costs for a small cup.

Coffee

To prepare one cup of standard Americano, cappuccino
or espresso, barista uses on average about 18 gram of ground
coffee. Sometimes more, sometimes less. At the same time,
the cost of beans, of course, can be very different: often small
“specialty” coffee shops prefer elite varieties, in the chain ones
the beans are usually the cheapest ones; but in most cases this
is a standard amount of about several cents per gram. Thus,
the cost of the coffee component rarely exceeds couple of
cents per cup. At the same time, the coffee that is used in the
‘mass market’ rarely costs an institution like Cofix or One Price
Coffee more than 1 dollar per cup.

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