Analysis: Instant coffee blenders go gourmet after arabica price drop
www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/09/us-coffee-robusta-arabica-idUSBRE9380Q220130409 Instant coffee drinkers may soon be getting a more gourmet brew than they realize at no extra cost as roasters consider adding higher-quality arabica beans into their blends. Soaring demand for instant coffee in emerging markets has caused demand growth for caffeine-rich robusta coffee, widely used in soluble coffee, to outpace that for arabica beans, which dominate the gourmet ground-coffee market. That has pushed the typically cheaper and lower-quality beans to almost par with some arabicas. With the price of some arabicas near that of robusta, some instant coffee makers have already taken the rare step of adding the typically more expensive arabica to their highly secretive blends, coffee buyers said. The move marks a possible a precursor that other coffee makers who currently use robusta in their blends may be reverting their blends to include more higher quality arabica beans, a change t