Journey to the World of Consumer Coffee - Part 2- Target

After I found out and got disappointed by how World Market sales coffee,, I was curious about other US supermarkets how coffee is sold.   Coffee is extremely time sensitive  material where the peak of the taste is known to be from a day to 2 weeks.  Yet, I found out that World Market sells coffee with label of "best before" for months.I got curious to see how other supermarkets sell coffee in the United States. I tried to see how Target sells coffee.

Target is US based retail giant having close to 2000 retail locations in US (source: Wikipedia).  They tend to target middle to upper class consumers, so I was hoping to find something better than World Mart, but that was not the case.

There is a whole isle of coffee section at Target.   Comparing to World Market, they surely carry a lot more variety of coffee.  The left side of the isle is all the packaged coffee and right side of isle is filled with K-cup coffee.  It is amazing to see how quickly K-cups are gaining momentum in such short period of time; few years ago people didn't even hear about K-cups now half of coffee section is filled with K-cup. I personally don't mind about K-cup, and I especially like how the coffee is sealed airtight to eliminate being stale.

Half of coffee section at Target is K-Cup

There are many different brand you find on the shelf; well-known names such as Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks are being carried. Unfortunately, just like World Market; majority of the coffee packaged at Target are ground coffee, it is difficult to find whole bean coffee. I reach to a whole bean Starbucks coffee, and looked the back. I do not see roasted date like what I saw on Starbucks Reserve.  They must have date somewhere; I looked and looked and found a printed letters which is very hard to find is indicating "BEST BEFORE: 19DEC2015".  December 2015 is 6 months from now.

Starbucks coffee sold at Target

You can imagine my disappointment when I saw it.  The coffee specialist that I like is selling 6 months old coffee.  I looked further but I found no coffee with "roasted date" at Target either.  All coffee has "Best Before" without mentioning the roasted date.


Maybe all supermarket sells coffee this way... I almost feel betrayed as coffee consumer.  I now really want to try digging deeper into how the real world of consumer coffee is.

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Check out other posts about coffee:

• Coffee Gift Ideas
• Un-boxing Starbucks Reserve Online
• My First Roasting Experience
• Coffee Around the World
• Roasters in the Northwest