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th
wherever it spread. By the 16 century, it became popular in Europe ad began replacing the other regular
beverages such as beer and wine. Two centuries later, in what would become the United States, Thomas

Jefferson would declare it as “the favorite drink of the civilized world.” (“History of Coffee,” n.d.).

While the United States is currently one of the top coffee consumers in the world, the widespread

commodification of coffee is fairly recent. It was in 1906 that coffee became mass produced, specifically in

instant coffee form (as shown in Figure 1) but it was during Prohibition in the 1920’s that coffee sales in the

US skyrocketed. By the 1940’s, the United States imported 70% of the world’s coffee, partly influenced by

men’s consumption of coffee during World War II

(Thaxton, n.d.) The coffee itself was generally in the

form of instant coffee and blends as those methods

were far easier for the mass production that was

demanded across North America (“The History of

Coffee,” 2019). While it was now mass produced and

consumed, the quality of the blends and instant coffee

does not hold to what coffee can (and should) be in a

single-origin form. At the start, the coffee shop you

can now find on every US street corner (and now

around the world) – Starbucks – began radically

changing the way people in the US drank their coffee.

While its quality has plummeted, it reoriented the

habits away from the instant coffee that dominated
Figure 1. Washington’s Instant Coffee
decades in the 1900s. (“The History of,” 2019)

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