Nestlé Takes Majority Stake in Blue Bottle (opens in new tab)

He might have a point on water, but...

Where are his statements on their practices regarding infant formula, the use of child slavery for chocolate, the use of general slavery in their seafood production in Thailand, and the intimidation of workers who wish to unionize in India?

And I don't get exactly what it means to declare water a human right. There are certainly people in the world not getting the clean water they need. But how do you solve this? You set up an international agency to acquire water for them. But where do you get the funding for this agency? If it really is a _human_ right, is this agency above local laws? What are the restrictions on this agency? Can this agency ban the building of a dam that would deprive even one person of a suitable source of water?

It's weird because other rights are what others _can't_ do to you, but this right is what others _must provide_ you. Who and how just aren't clear.

This is absolutely true in the general sense, but is negated by the rents being given to those who own water rights due to prior appropriation. In the absence of a payment for these water rights (analogous to the payment we pay for spectrum rights on radio frequencies), there is going to be a misallocation of water and waste.

An essay about the issue: https://www.progress.org/articles/water-creates-rent

Then we should charge Neste more for extracting the water.

Here in BC, numerous articles in past, they are paying like 2-3$ per million litres of water extracted.

That's cheaper than a single small water bottle in many stores which aren't even 1 litre size

He may seem reasonable, but in a lot of cases like this companies seem to take the line of "we're following the rules and complying with all government regulations, we will happily follow any rules limiting X and Y if the state chooses to create them.", but at the same time they have a huge influence over especially local and state governments, but also the federal government. Like a lot of companies, they probably take a hand at writing legislation that is favorable to them, and then try to get it introduced [1]. I'm not familiar with the site in [1], but I was looking for a quick guide to lobbying efforts and it certainly seems plausible but I haven't vetted the info for myself.

The reality is they make huge amounts of money selling something that people can get for next to nothing from their cities and towns and pay next to nothing for it, at the expense of the people living where the water is taken and where it is sold at insane margins. Yeah, it is on us for letting them do it, but like everything they hold a lot more cards than we do, so they are just one more huge powerful corporation that will have to be challenged by the people which will take another gargantuan effort of education and activism.

[1] http://www.mintpressnews.com/nestle-spent-11m-lobbying-congr...

rather have underpriced water be available to people for gardening, washing cars, swimming pools than it be given away for free in corrupt government contracts to a mega-corporation so they can grow rice in the California desert or bottle ground water and sell it at inflated prices.

> He argues water should have a market value so that it is treated more like a resource that should be well managed.

Sounds like a good case for cap-and-trade. That is, don't allow people to withdraw groundwater faster than it's being replenished, and don't allow people to withdraw enough surface water to harm fish populations. And then let folks trade their allocations.

Small nit, some folks without water for 'gardening' can't live. See some of the city farms for examples of this.

There are a range of other factors.

My family owns a water company in Lake Tahoe.

We are precluded from bottling or otherwise selling our water by the PUD to anyone other than the homes for which our water serves.

The bullshit factr in this is that PUDs (public utility districts) have made deals with companies like Nestle to allow them to slurp up thousands of litres per penny from wells/springs/aquifers and then sell that water for thousands % more than they pay...

Yet they limit small water companies who own their full infra and prevent them from going after market value for their water.

So as a small family water company, fuck nestle. I find your argument BS from the front lines of regulations that favor mega-corps and fuck over small companies.

We have been trying to get our Tahoe water bottled for decades - but it takes big money. And our water comes from a natural spring, not from the lake - and should not be regulated the way it is.

Water can be treated as a market asset and companies will pump as much as they can depleting the supply for everyone else in the region (this is already the case some places).

In order for it to work out there needs to be a ton of regulations in that market, but once the market is set, they will just lobby it for decades until regulations are essentially gone.

People like the CEO say that it should have market value, because they are the ones that can only see value in markets. The rest of the world does not need to but a price tag in something to see value in it. Also, habitats all around include millions of plants and animals without a dime to spend, a water market will see no value in catering to them, we should just trust these companies with abysmal track record to ensure habitats are maintained?

> He argues water should have a market value so that it is treated more like a resource that should be well managed.

They could start with themselves. They pay $200/year to suck 130M gallons of Michigan water, and fight attempts to charge a fair rate for it.

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/12/why_nestle_pays_...

What about all of their other corporate abuses, including pitching infant formula as safer and better than breastfeeding (an outright lie no matter how you spin it)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott#Baby_milk_...

>water should be a human right to humans who need it for living, but not for gardening or washing a car

Isn't water already a managed resource? People pay for the water they use to garden or wash cars right? Sure it is the same amount irrespective of what you use the water for, but it is still not free right?

That sounds fair. After all, you can't use food stamps to feed your cattle so why should government subsidize the water for agriculture?

I agree with his position

Still don't want him or the company he manages anywhere near any of it

I always postulated that a cubic meter of water should be a constitutional right to every human for free. Every water company etc. should allow one cubic meter of water to every citizen for free. Everything above can be paid. This would give people in extreme conditions at least some way to ease their chances to survive. Why it sounds like a small amount, it would help less fortunate. People should not worry about basic income more than it should about the constitutional right to basic products first like water, education, food and the internet.

Counterpoint:

Saying water isn't a human right is different than saying not everyone should have access to water.

I generally agree that water isn't a right. I think it's a misuse of the word "right" and a misapplication of the concept of a "right".

Rights define what you're free to do for yourself, and the various ways in which those freedoms can't be infringed upon by others. For example, you have a right to free speech and people can't infringe on that. You have a right to not be tortured and people can't infringe on that. In the US, if the government is going to take your property or jail you as punishment for a crime, you have a right to a fair trial first before they can do that to you.

There's a distinction between that and things like water and healthcare. One is a list of rights, and the other is a list of things people generally need to live a happy and healthy life. If we're going to dilute the definition of "right" down to that degree, why don't we just throw in housing and free trips for vacation and a loving partner while we're at it?

South Africa has housing as a right in their constitution. They also have 200,000 homeless people. So who's infringing on their rights? Every citizen of South Africa?

The UN General Assembly declared water a human right. The world also has close to a billion people who don't have access to clean drinking water. Who's infringing on their rights? Are you?

Rights aren't about what resources (time, money, commodities, services, etc) you're free to take from others. When you start defining rights that way, rights all start contradicting each other. What about a doctor's freedom to choose who they perform surgery on? What about your freedom to live a life not solely dedicated to plumbing in Gabon?

I think the water quote is unfair, that's not exactly what he said. If you watch the interview of him on his desk, which is what I think you're referencing, he says there should be a difference between what a person needs and what you should be able to treat as a commodity. Obviously Nestle would love to sell the water out from under you, but to say that he doesn't think people deserve _any_ water as a right is disingenuous.

His specific number could be argued - I don't remember what it was, but I think it was in the liters per day. Regardless, I think it's interesting to think about the idea that the commoditization of something begins after a certain amount, unlike chocolate for example.

That being said, I wouldn't trust the current political climate to be able to come up with a reasonable number here

Just for completeness, this is what the CEO of nestle believes regarding water being a human right: http://www.nestle.com/ask-nestle/human-rights/answers/nestle...

I don't know how you think Philz is any different. They're a chain with the same desired path to global domination in the coffee space as any other business. And their coffee is awful.

Don't forget pushing "free" baby formula on new mothers in developing countries, so their milk supply dries up.

Philz is not really an alternative to Blue Bottle - they don't roast their own beans, they don't make espresso.

You can do much better the Philz, depending on where you are at there are lots of good options. In you're in the bay area look up Four Barrel, they roast great beans and their SF coffee shop is really nice.

Blue Bottle sucks. Line is long, coffee is so-so.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Mike from craftcoffee.com here. I love 3rd wave style coffee but that statement from the article is very misleading. This is a common trick that 3rd wave proponents pull all the time. They conflate "3rd wave" and "specialty", as Oliver did here, and then pretend that "specialty coffee" metrics are referring to only 3rd wave coffee. In actual fact, 3rd wave != specialty coffee. In reality, 3rd wave coffee is just a tiny fraction of specialty coffee. Specialty coffee includes Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Peet's, and many others like that. All those companies sell "specialty grade" coffee, which is a technical term that more or less means the beans score above a certain level when evaluated for defects. So when people quote the size or growth of specialty coffee, that's the pool of companies they are actually talking about. And in fact, depending on the source it's often unclear if those numbers include things like frapuccinos. There's very little data on the niche because it's so small that it doesn't make the top 25 or 30 sources of revenue or consumption in industry reports, but 3rd wave coffee certainly accounts for less than 1% of coffee consumed in the US. Blue Bottle has 25 cafes, Starbucks has 24,000.[1] Starbucks is worth $80B today. In aggregate, Blue Bottle + Stumptown + Intelligentsia + [any other locals you can think of] are likely worth less than $1B. So yeah, 3rd wave coffee is delicious and fun, but unfortunately it simply does not account for that level of consumption.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks

If they measure "coffee consumed in the United States" by dollars than it could mean each cup of craft coffee counts for ~4x cups of McDonald's coffee.

This is very surprising, as last time I did research on this subject I remember seeing that Starbucks alone owned 40%+ of the "single cup" coffee market share. The runner up was the McDonalds/Duncan "lower end" group of coffee sales.

Specialty coffee was great for the margins, but the market-share was not even close to the numbers being reported in this article.

I think it's pretty clear that the article intends "rapidly expanding niche" to refer to all of "third-wave specialty coffee," not just Blue Bottle.

Maybe the mean by total dollars spent. Which given the high prices at least passed the snug test. Maybe.

I think it's reasonably fair to say that so far it hasn't, but could it? If not, to what would you attribute the fundamental roadblock?

I'd argue consumers themselves, but I don't know if that's really just a cop-out or not.

This is the first comment you've ever made and it's basically PR handwaving away Nestle's history of human rights atrocities. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a shill account.

There is! But not within walking distance of my office, unfortunately (I'm in L.A.). Blue Bottle is just down the street, and Stumptown is just too far to realistically walk to on a short coffee break-type timetable.

So this news is a little disappointing, but I'm hopeful nothing at my local cafe will drastically change for at least the next several months. I am, however, curious to see what impact this will have on the bean and roast quality.

Just because a company owns two of the same thing, doesn't make them the same. Using that logic, Blue Bottle is now just Folgers.