Customers of ZUS Coffee, one of the Philippines’ most recognizable budget coffee chains, have recently been reporting an odd contradiction: stores are open, yet actual coffee is unavailable. Social media users have been complaining that many locations are only serving non-coffee drinks, with baristas often citing “machine calibration” as the reason.
This isn’t just a technical hiccup. It’s a red flag—one that offers a peek at the cracks in a business model many tech-driven coffee startups have pushed into the market. This is about a business model cracking under pressure. One that promises specialty-style coffee at fast-food prices — a promise that’s borderline impossible to keep.
The following are my thoughts as to why.
The Silicon Valley Approach to Coffee
ZUS, along with other fast-scaling chains like Pick Up Coffee and Flash Coffee, has adopted a playbook straight from Silicon Valley: attract a large customer base with underpriced products, grow aggressively through volume, and delay profitability in favor of market share.
But coffee isn’t software, it’s agriculture. So this model works — until it doesn’t.
In coffee, the low prices that attract customers are often made possible by an ecosystem that underpays producers and underinvests in labor and infrastructure. For a while, it works well enough. But as global and local coffee prices rise and shortages deepen, the illusion of “₱50 specialty coffee” starts to fall apart.
Worse, this approach trains consumers to expect unrealistically low prices for a product that is, by nature, labor- and resource-intensive. When the business can no longer absorb costs, service quality and consistency are often the first to go.
The Price Problem
In the last two years, global coffee prices have surged. According to MacroTrends, the average closing price of coffee was $1.70 per pound in 2023. That climbed to $2.35 in 2024, and reached $3.73 in early 2025—an increase of 119% over two years.
Climate pressures are a major factor. In Brazil, extreme heat and drought have cut harvest forecasts. In Vietnam and Indonesia, drought and excessive rainfall, respectively, have damaged crops and shrunk yields. When production in major exporting countries drops, prices rise.
This global squeeze is echoed locally. Philippine robusta beans, often used in espresso blends, have doubled in price—climbing from ₱170–₱200 per kilo last year to as high as ₱400 today. Local arabica prices have hit ₱800 per kilo, making it nearly impossible for chains to maintain rock-bottom pricing without cutting corners.
ZUS recently increased its prices by around ₱25 per cup. It’s a notable jump – especially since they were already higher priced than primary competitor, Pick Up Coffee – but it still may not be enough to keep the model sustainable long-term.
Calibration is Not About Machines, It’s About People
When stores cite “calibration” as the reason for suspending coffee service, it’s worth digging deeper. Both espresso machines and grinders need to be recalibrated frequently to maintain flavor and consistency. This becomes more complicated in hot, humid environments like the Philippines, where even small environmental changes can affect extraction.
But proper calibration requires training and time. Chains built for speed and scale often don’t equip baristas with the tools or experience to manage these adjustments. For ZUS, the “machine calibration” reason for coffee non-availability is a tell — it seems that they fit squarely into this category.
If a company has invested in barista training, every barista should be able to efficiently recalibrate the system when the coffee quality shifts over time.
And what’s the cost to poorly calibrated coffee systems? A one gram mistake in grind setting or dosing, repeated across hundreds of drinks, can waste kilos of beans each day. Multiply that across dozens of branches and at today’s prices, that kind of loss adds up fast against razor thin margins.
In some cases, it may actually be cheaper for a branch to stop serving coffee temporarily than to risk losing money on improperly prepared cups.
What Happens Next
As this model becomes harder to sustain, expect more gaps in service and sudden closures to appear—not because coffee is unavailable in the world, but because these systems were never built to withstand real-world volatility.
Coffee chains that prioritize growth over fundamentals are hitting a ceiling. And customers, who have gotten used to paying less for more, may soon face the sticker shock of what coffee actually costs when everyone in the supply chain is paid fairly.
Rethinking What Coffee Should Cost
The truth is, coffee has always been too cheap. Consumers in the Philippines—and many other countries—are now seeing the effects of decades of artificially low pricing dictated by secondary or even tertiary markets like the New York Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE). These exchanges exist several steps removed from the primary market and reflect only the interests of commodity speculators and consumers, with little to no regard for the true cost of production at the origin.
For those of us in producing countries like the Philippines, those farm-gates are right in our own backyard. You don’t need to look too far to see that a cup of coffee that costs ₱50 doesn’t reflect the labor, expertise, and environmental risk behind a kilo of beans.
It’s time to normalize paying more for better coffee—not just for quality in the cup, but for ethical sourcing, staff training, and long-term sustainability. Patronizing local cafes that work directly with farmers and invest in their people isn’t just a feel-good decision. It’s a high-IQ vote for a coffee industry that can survive a looming storm.
By Kayo Cosio
