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Comment by martinpw | Hacker News Reader

The decaf process seems expensive so you might expect the end result to cost more, but it never does. Which means either the producers are making less profit on decaf, or they are using lower quality beans. If the latter is true, which seems more likely, that might explain why decaf sometimes tastes less good, separately from the effect of the process itself on taste.

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The German inventor of a decaf process sold the extracted coffein separately in pills, which might have given him a second income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Roselius

I guess nowadays most of the extracted caffeine ends up in energy drinks like Red Bull.

This is like what happens with milk fat. I was surprised to see whole milk cost more, and I found out that it's because the fat skimmed off is used for other products.

Same with yogurt. Whey protein isolate goes for $11/lb, which is ridiculous pricing as a side note.

Yoghurt doesn't generally produce whey. Cheese does. Whey protein used to be the cheapest form of protein by a long way because it was just a byproduct that doesn't taste good and most people have no need for. But we are now in an age where regular people buy stuff with the word "protein" slapped on it, for some reason.

Most people in this world don't eat enough protein (cca 65g daily for average human IIRC) and way too many carbs, hence a lot of civilization diseases. Or ratio protein : carbs (ideally complex) : fats (ideally unsaturated) is bad long term.

But its true that not healthy food that has some additional protein mixed in ain't magically healthy.

> don't eat enough protein (cca 65g daily for average human IIRC) and way too many carbs, hence a lot of civilization diseases

We as a specie haven't eaten as many protein as today since the invention of agriculture millennia ago, so idk what you mean by “civilization diseases” but if you mean diabetes and such, then it's clearly wrong.

We're currently eating too much and too much sugar though.

There's apparently scientific studies that show how animals as well as humans tend to continue eating until they've satisfied a mostly fixed daily need for protein, mostly regardless of _what kind_ of food they're eating.

Now if people choose a diet low in protein/calories ratio, they'll have a tendency to ingest more calories than people who eat protein rich diets. Try eating eating 300 g of cheese/meat/tofu in one meal, it'll be difficult. Eating 300 g of chips/fries is something many people can absolutely do, if the chips aren't too salty.

One significant difference between our modern western lives and the lives of people tens to hundreds of years ago is IMO that people back then quite automatically used up all the carb calories of their comparably protein diluted diet because life required much more physical activity and came with less home heating than today. Today, most people will just not expend much of the caloric energy of carb rich diets and thus develop metabolic diseases and such.

A carb rich diet is usually fine as long as you expend the energy via physical activity.

> Try eating eating 300 g of cheese/meat/tofu in one meal, it'll be difficult. Eating 300 g of chips/fries is something many people can absolutely do

I don't know where you get the idea that eating 300g of meat is difficult …

> A carb rich diet is usually fine as long as you expend the energy via physical activity.

Any balanced diet is fine if you ingest no more energy than you spend, which is exactly what I said: people today are eating too much.

> .. don't know where you get the idea that eating 300g of meat is difficult.

You're right, 300 g of meat isn't much of a challenge. The more appropriate comparison would be between 300 g of chips and an equal amount of calories in some protein rich food like meat. That should be much more challenging.

> .. people today are eating too much.

Yeah, the important question is: why are they eating too much?

I assume that a lot of it is unintentional. Overeating mostly happens because people aren't aware of a few simple mechanisms or are misunderstanding them, not because the world is hard. Mechanisms which they could quite easily use to overeat less or avoid it altogether, instead of falling prey to them.

Just telling people that they're eating to much doesn't help in any way. People need to know why and how they can quite easily change it.

The reason is because whey protein has some huge advantages for modern consumers. It stores for long periods, can conveniently be added to smoothies, and has an incredibly high protein content. When people are for example weightlifting this is a massive boon for reaching macro targets.

People into bodybuilding have been using whey protein for decades. There's not that many extra people into bodybuilding now to account for the extra demand.

There are orders of magnitude more people exercising at gyms with the specific goal of achieving some kind of desired body type, even if they aren't bodybuilders per se.

Theres definitely a much larger population who cares about 'macros' now vs just those specifically in the bodybuilding space. A very high percentage of people that workout regularly in any capacity supplement their protein. Whey protein is generally the most economical way of doing that.

Wow I sure wonder why people might want to supplement their intake of vital macro nutrients in a world where they do not get enough from a typical diet.

Boutique-roasted decaf coffee beans often are more expensive. But the logic also doesn't hold: it assumes coffee is being sold at or near the cost of its material inputs, and that's certainly not true. If you have a reasonable built-in margin for your coffee --- and boutique roasters certainly do --- it can be normal and rational to price irrespective of your cost basis. Customers are brand-loyal (especially if they have to go out of their way to buy your stuff). You want to get them in every packaging they're interested in. All sorts of products are "loss leaders", for that reason, and here we're not even talking about that; we're just talking about something slightly less profitable.

Finally, just a note that the "lower-quality bean" thing is itself sort of hollow, in that: you're probably not buying the absolute best quality means no matter what coffee you buy, even if you're driving to a coffee roaster to get them. Unless you're an extreme coffee weirdo, there is, I'd confidently bet, a higher-quality bean available to you that you're sacrificing because of cost and convenience. Certainly, if you're buying beans of any sort at a supermarket, the "best bean" thing is inoperative.

GP observed that either the profit margin or the input cost is absorbing the difference, so I think the logic holds well and you are in agreement :)

Not so much? Like I said: decaf beans often are more expensive, and they believe margin hits for decaf are unlikely, which is probably not at all true unless you're talking about Starbucks.

The premise may not hold - you're right - but the logic seems to.

The price difference between cheap supermarket coffee and high-end local roaster is large enough (up to 10x) that the potential additional cost for decaffeination doesn't seem that big of a deal if you're looking for coffee at the higher end of the quality scale.

Yeah, that's a much better and more concise way of saying what I did.

You both described the same thing, but fabian2k better.

I protest! Thou hast mistaken mine claim!

I thought the means should be beans

The ends justify the beans.

The same decaf coffee is more expensive. The producers decaffeinate their lesser coffees. But you've hit on why the "sugar-cane method" i.e. the solvent based approach produces better coffee. It's possible for it to be done at origin and so the actual coffee producers can choose what coffee to decaffeinate and can absorb some of the additional costs in the "processing" stage while using higher quality coffee in the process.

Not true in my experience - at least when I buy decaf beans online they are normally more expensive, which I put down to them being niche in comparison.

>but it never does

Depends on a producer, I guess. Where I'm from, same amount of decaffeinated coffee by the same producer is around 42% more expensive.

Maybe the extracted caffeine has some market value that can make up for some of the cost of extracting it.

Dry Arabica beans are about 1.5% caffeine by weight. Synthetic caffeine costs maybe $40 per kilogram, wholesale. A kilogram of beans could have perhaps $0.60 worth of caffeine extracted from it, unless there's a price premium for "all natural" caffeine extracted from beans.

I’ve seen it marketed as “organic caffeine” in some beverages. Organic coffee was the base.

Bit of an eye roll from me, but hey whatever.

There is nothing saying that a product needs to pay for all the processes inherent in making that particular product.

There is value in having flat pricing across all your products. Especially if some of them aren't as popular, yet might driving purchasing decisions.

Consider cafes that need to stock decaf, but want to buy from a single supplier. If you don't have decaf you're not going to see their custom, despite their order largely being non-decaf.

So they'll want to supply decaf, but in order to encourage the sale of it (so they can reach a better economy of scale) keep the price the same as the equivalent non-decaf.

I suspect that when you buy decaf beans from a roaster they don't aren't the ones decaffeinating the coffee beans. I think roasters have a lot less choice when buying decaffeinated beans so I bet your theory is correct.

There are two main decaf plants, one in Vancouver and one in Mexico.

The Mexican one is supposedly superior in taste, but the majority is processed through Vancouver with the Swiss Water plant. https://www.swisswater.com/blogs/sw/swiss-waters-new-decaffe...

Is this for North America or worldwide?

Definitely not worldwide, Colombia has a plant doing EA decaf

I've noticed many roasters have only one decaf option. But there are exceptions. Equator Coffees has many blends available in both regular and decaf, with the decaf costing slightly more (e.g. $15.30 vs. $15.75 for a subscribe-and-save 12 oz bag). They advertise "decaffeinated using the mountain water process of caffeine extraction", which I believe is the same as the article's Swiss water process. Not sure if they have their own equipment or if they assemble their blends, send them off, get them back and roast them.

The decaf I buy states they have close ties with the farmers. The company they use for decaffeination seems to be a service-oriented company. You send them the raw coffee, they decaffeinate it, and then send it back with recommendations for roasting.

So, the "roaster" (if they don't use a separate company for that) does have the ability to select the exact same beans between their decaf and regular coffee products. Whether they sort the beans they get from the farmers and choose which go to be decaffeinated according to some criteria, is a separate thing.

Decaf that I buy is more expensive. It is the grocery store brand and looks identical to the regular bags they sell for a similar price but on close inspection you will find the decaf contains ~9oz net weight and the regular is 12oz net weight.

They use higher-caffeine beans for decaf coffee - Robusta instead of Arabica. Robusta beans aren't considered as good so they're cheaper, and they sell the caffeine they extract to e.g. soda companies.

Just not true. Cheap coffee is already robusta anyways, and arabica is used in good quality decaf coffee. Even still, arabica is consistently used as a marketing bullet for coffee… even if there’s plenty of really really bad arabica coffee out there.

View it as a separation process wherein both products can be sold; the caffeine extract is also profitable.

CO2 can be reused so it's not that expensive, and the caffeine that gets extracted is sold separately, so it's possible decaffeinated coffee could have more profit that caffeinated.

After all, we don't really make synthetic caffeine, we extract it from tea and coffee and add it to a lot of things.

Synthetic caffeine has been commercially used in beverages and medicine for over 100 years. I believe that most caffeine consumed today is actually synthetic, but it's hard to find a good citation for its prevalence. Most of the web pages mentioning synthetic and natural caffeine are spam for "market research" reports or natural health woo.

You can see section "2.1. Production and use" for some relevant information about synthetic and natural caffeine production, as well as dated 20th century statistics about synthetic production:

"Coffee, Tea, Mate, Methylxanthines and Methylglyoxal"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK507027/

My statement of synthetic not being super prevalent comes from a memory of a really old how it's made episode, so it could be wrong or out of date

Decaf is bad business becuase processed beans are loosing taste more rapidly. You should drink it freshly roasted, buy more often but smaller packs and if this is not the case decaf simply tastes less good.

So as a producer you have more expensive process and less consumer satisfaction...

> So as a producer you have more expensive process and less consumer satisfaction...

This is illogical. People buy decaf for several reason, that don't include it's taste. Either they're allergic to coffein, they get nervous from it, they get elevated heart rates from it, or want to enjoy a coffee in the evening. All of of these reasons are fulfilled, therefore satisfactory.

Personal note: I don't taste a difference in caf and decaf and ALWAYS prefer decaf.

they either resell the caffeine for a profit themselves,

or often the coffee producer send the beans to be decaffeinated, which is done for free. the company doing that process keeps the caffeine and resell it to pharma companies

I don't know if this makes a difference, but my understanding is that most additive/non-natural (for lack of better terms) caffeine comes from caffeine extracted to make decaf.

> decaf process seems expensive so you might expect the end result to cost more, but it never does

Where? Decaf coffee does cost more...

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