Americans have had an obsession with coffee since we dumped all our tea in Boston Harbor. We buy our paper cup wholesale, and you’ll find someone with a coffee cup in hand nearly every hour of the day. Here are the crazy statistics that prove just how much we love what we’re pouring in our paper coffee cups.
- We buy more than any other nation. This might not seem all that strange until you compare our population size with a really big country, like China or India. In 2014 the United States imported 27.5 million bags of coffee, or one-quarter of un-roasted imports.
- We have very specific tastes. The average person in America drinks 1.64 cups of coffee every day. That stat’s enough to suggest that we ought to be buying our paper cup wholesale, but the details are interesting, too. When it comes to the coffee itself, 37% of what we’re putting our cups is specialty coffee, which is considered the highest quality in the world. Half of us, or about 150 million people, drink something other than just a plain cup of joe in cheap coffee mugs: espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, and iced or cold coffees. About 35% of us prefer our coffee to just be black, and 65% want sugar, cream, or both. There are even 30% of us who are only drink coffee occasionally.
- Where are we drinking our brew? While the coffee shop industry is doing well and independent coffee shops have sales of about $12 billion every year, more people are making it at home again. The percentage of people making it at home is up 4% in the last year, in part due to the popularity of single-serve brewing machines which make it faster and easier to have a cup. And, of course, a lot of us are drinking it from paper cup wholesale lots our employer got for the office.
- It’s hard to overestimate how strongly we feel about coffee. When asked whether they would rather give up coffee for life or gain 10 pounds, 55% of coffee drinkers claim they’ll take the 10 pounds. Almost as many, 52%, would rather give up their morning shower than their morning coffee, and 49% would rather give up their cell phone for a month.
- Seattle’s coffee love isn’t your imagination. When coffee stores are counted per 100,000 residents, Seattle has 10 times as many as the national average.
- We don’t drink coffee like our grandparents or great-grandparents did. Not just because they’d never heard of a half-caff, soy milk latte, either. Previous generations typically had their coffee with a meal or as an after-meal cuppa to savor while chatting with family. Today, 30% of our coffee is drunk between meals, 65% during breakfast hours (though for many it is breakfast) and only 5% with lunch or dinner.
- We use an awful lot of those paper coffee cups with lids. We throw away 25 billion styrofoam coffee cups every year, and styrofoam can never be completely recycled. The average office worker will drink 500 cups a year out of disposable cups. This makes paper coffee cups the better choice when you have to go disposable, and is hopefully why paper cup wholesale purchases are what you’re encouraging at your place of work.
- We have different reasons for drinking our coffee. When men are asked about why they drink coffee, they typically say it’s because it helps them get work done. Women asked the same question say that they drink coffee as a way to relax. When people are polled as a group, 78% say they drink to wake up and almost as many, 74%, as a way to warm up. Only 25% say they choose coffee when they want a healthy drink and just 29% when they are thirsty.
There’s no denying Americans love their coffee. We buy more of it than anyone else, drink it our own way, and buy our paper cup wholesale in lots. It looks like the future of coffee’s place in America is pretty secure.