Such price controls “protected neighbourhood bars for a long time”, said Jonathan Morris, a coffee historian at the University of Hertfordshire in England. “That’s why no one really ever set up coffee chains in Italy.” (Starbucks actually did, but did not open its first Italian outpost until 2018, 47 years after the company’s founding.)
Italians gather outside a coffee bar in Noto.Credit: iStock
Even after the controls were lifted, prices remained low, with few bar owners willing to test whether higher prices would push their customers toward the nearest competitor, usually no more than a block or two away.
“There is a kind of communism,” Morello said, “when actually one should pay for the quality one receives.”
The make-up of the traditional Italian espresso, a brew of darkly roasted arabica and robusta beans, also helped keep prices low, Morris said. As arabica bean prices rose, some Italian producers increased the proportion of cheaper robusta beans in their coffee blends, but that formula was no longer as effective when robusta prices also surged, he said.
An espresso in Italy averaged €1.16 (about $2.06) as of the latest analysis this year by Assoutenti, a nonprofit consumer rights organisation, with the lowest average prices found in southern Italy. The national average in January was up about 11.5 per cent from two years earlier, the analysis found, though Italy still sells some of the cheapest espressos in Western Europe.
Coffee bean prices have come down somewhat from their peak earlier in the year. But they remain higher than before the surge, and experts fear extreme weather will continue to shrink global supply and keep prices high for roasters, bars and consumers. US tariffs on coffee-producing countries, like Brazil, could drive up prices further.
A coffee plantation in Brazil. Coffee bean prices around the world have jumped.Credit: Rodrigo Capote/Bloomberg
The traditional Italian coffee bar relies on coffee sales for about 30 per cent of its revenues, according to Luciano Sbraga, deputy director for the Federation of Italian Public Establishments, a trade association for the food and hospitality sector. Some owners have found it is more profitable to also sell food, for breakfast, lunch or an aperitivo dinner known as apericena, rather than just coffee.
“Many bars are becoming more similar to restaurants,” he said.
That was the choice Consilvio made when he bought and renovated his bar, in a stately plaza with a Parisian air in central Turin. The previous owner had sold espressos at the counter for less than a euro apiece, a price that Consilvio said simply “can’t work”.
He sells espressos at his bar, Cicinin, for €2 for table service on the plaza and €1.30 at the counter because nearby bars charge €1.30. (He had wanted to charge €1.50.)
Consilvio, who says he drinks seven to eight espressos a day, lamented that espresso machines had become standard in offices and businesses – “Hairdressers have them,” he scoffed – so fewer customers go to bars. When they do, they demand “the perfect coffee,” he grumbled, “not too bitter”.
In a sign of how much the industry has changed, a capsule coffee machine by Lavazza, the giant Italian coffee producer, has now taken its place at the company’s museum in Turin, alongside revered machines that helped create modern espresso.
Executives from Lavazza and Illy, the Italian coffee producer based in Trieste, have warned for more than a year that higher coffee bean prices are most likely here to stay, presenting challenges to everyone from farmers outside Italy to large companies to mom-and-pop coffee shops to consumers.
At Gran Caffè Gambrinus, a cafe in Naples established in 1860, an espresso at the counter now costs €1.80, up from €1.50, said Massimiliano Rosati, one of the owners. The cafe can get away with that price, he says, because for a tourist who comes to Naples, the increase makes no difference.
That is often not the case for traditional family-run coffee bars, which tend to compete on price.
At Giolitti near the Italian parliament in Rome, where King Charles III and Queen Camilla stopped by for a gelato in April, Giovanna Giolitti said she and her brothers recently raised the price of an espresso at the counter to €1.30 from €1.20. Coffee bean prices justified an even bigger hike, she said, but that would have hurt locals who have come to the bar for years.
“Coffee is something that everyone drinks every day,” said Giolitti, who is among the fourth generation of Giolittis to run the bar.
In Sant’Eustachio il Caffè near the Pantheon, on a sunny spring Saturday, every outdoor table was full and a line of customers snaked out the door. At one table, two friends, Filippo Facchinetti and Gabriele Bonfanti, shook their heads when their two espressos came out to €9.
Bonfanti, who lives in Rome, said he had started making more coffee at home, in part because of pricing but also because he found that some bars use too bitter and dark a roast for his liking. Facchinetti, who lives in Genoa, called two espressos a day his “bare minimum”, though that day he had already had four, and some days he has six.
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Even recent mark-ups, he believes, will not chase away a nation with a serious coffee craving. “It’s too important,” he said, adding that the Italian espresso ritual “won’t ever change”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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