This Week at Map It Forward: Week 33, 2025: When Coffee Becomes a Meme Coin
Coffee INDUSTRY & MARKET: When Coffee Becomes a Meme Coin
Last week, the Best of Panama auction broke yet another record. A lot from Hacienda La Esmeralda sold for $30,200 USD per kilogram, a total of $604,000 USD for just 20 kg of coffee. The winning bidder? A business in Dubai only 7 days old, backed by deep-pocketed investors from Turkey.
On paper, it’s a spectacular achievement. In reality, it’s a textbook example of what late-stage capitalism looks like in coffee. The price here isn’t just about quality, but more about spectacle, status, and PR. We’ve seen this pattern before in Dubai and other stunning cities around the globe: newcomers with large budgets enter with headline-grabbing purchases designed to dominate attention from day one.
The reaction to this sale revealed a sharp divide. A small segment of the industry celebrated it as a win for prestige coffee, proof that the very top of the market can still climb higher.
But many others were troubled, seeing it as another sign of a growing imbalance: the extremes (commodity low-end and ultra-premium high-end) get all the spotlight and resources, while the middle, small-to-medium producers, independent roasters, and the businesses that connect them, continue to be hollowed out through consolidation or closures.
This behaviour mirrors trends in other industries. It’s the coffee-world equivalent of buying a meme coin or a limited-edition Labubu figure: value driven less by utility or intrinsic quality, and more by scarcity, hype, and the social capital of owning “the most expensive” or “the rarest.”
In each case, the purchase becomes part of an attention economy where perception outpaces substance, and where volatility and fragility are built into the model.
It also creates a kind of gold rush mentality among other producers. They see a record like this and think, maybe I can do it too. But as history shows, in any gold rush, the people who reliably make money aren’t the prospectors, it’s the ones selling the shovels.
In coffee, the “shovel sellers” are competition organisers, auction platforms, consultants, marketing agencies, and buyers who profit from the buzz. For most producers chasing this dream, the journey is costly, takes a long time, and the odds of hitting the jackpot are vanishingly small.
Businesses built on this kind of hype face another problem: once the big splash fades, they have to keep outdoing themselves to stay relevant. That’s an expensive, high-risk game, and in coffee, most who play it eventually disappear. Not before they do significant damage to local businesses, who thought they had to compete to “keep up with the new guy”.
This record sale might be a triumph for a few (sincere congratulations to the Hacienda la Esmeralda team), but for the industry as a whole, it’s a sign we need to pay close attention to what’s happening.
The more we reward spectacle over sustainability, the more unstable our coffee supply chain becomes, and the more we erase the hard work that went into creating the “specialty coffee” industry.
This is an important flashing red light. Time to sober up. We’re headed for a brick wall.
THIS WEEK ON OUR PODCASTS….
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Now here’s who we’ve got on our podcasts this week…
The Daily Coffee Pro Podcast (GLOBAL)
Nora Burkey - The Chain Collaborative
On The Daily Coffee Pro Podcast by Map It Forward, Lee Safar speaks with Nora Burkey, Executive Director of the US-based nonprofit The Chain Collaborative, in a five-part series asking one big question: Will the Development Sector in Coffee Survive?
This series digs into how the development sector in coffee works, how it has changed, and what its future might look like. We cover topics including whether development work is still needed, how funding moves through the sector, and the myths and realities that often surround it.
Watch the series on YouTube:
Map It Forward Middle East podcast
David Zabinsky and Valeria Garcia - Kurasu Dubai Owners
On the Map It Forward Middle East Podcast, we are joined by David Zabinsky and Valeria Garcia, owners of the Kurasu UAE franchise, to discuss their journey bringing the globally recognised Kyoto coffee brand to Dubai and the UAE.
In this five-part series, they share what it took to prepare and launch, the challenges they didn’t expect, and their thoughts on the future of specialty coffee in the region.
Watch the series on YouTube:
Map It Forward Japan
Felipe Croce (FAF Coffees, Brazil) & Angel Barrera (Belco, Colombia)
Initially released soon after President Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, this series with Felipe Croce and Angel Barrera, exploring the year ahead in 2025, was a huge hit with our audience globally.
This week, it’s been translated for our Japanese audience, thanks to our Map It Forward colleague in Japan, Keisuke Kuga.
The Japanese subtitles are available on our YouTube channel by clicking on the episodes below:
Access “Introduction to Regenerative Coffee Farming” On-Demand for as little as $10 at the new Map It Forward On-Demand Learning Hub here: www.ondemand.mapitforward.coffee
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