After successful market entries in China and the United Arab Emirates earlier this year, specialty coffee roastery from Warsaw, KawePale, will showcase its newest products at one of the biggest industry events in the region – SIAL Middle East 2019. Besides the classic blends, all coffee lovers and professionals will have an exclusive opportunity to try their brand new bottled cold brew. 

In 2014, when two coffee fanatics Piotr Wilczewski and Piotr Mietelski founded KawePale, no one really knew what specialty coffee is. Only big European “hipster” café hubs, such as London, Berlin or Warsaw had some interest in it. Product of such quality can’t be mass-produced, so naturally, it has a relatively high price tag. But it didn’t scare the consumers – quite the contrary. Once they tried it, they didn’t want to go back to the standard premium brands. Craft coffees took the European market by storm and it didn’t stop there.

“We found our niche in Warsaw and other neighboring cities, but we both knew it was just the beginning. We needed another, even bigger challenge, so we seized the opportunity to exhibit in China and UAE. We saw the growth rates in multiple market research analysis and we decided to get out of our comfort zone and explore the markets” – said Piotr Wilczewski, founder, and CEO of KawePale.

Indeed, the numbers for both China and UAE speak for themselves. In 2019, coffee consumption in China grew by 20% – it’s 2% above the worldwide rate (source: Chinabgao). It doesn’t look like a huge difference, but taking into consideration the size of the Chinese market, it’s absolutely massive. And it’s no less impressive in the UAE – according to Gulf News, sales at Emirati coffee houses have seen a 70% growth in the last year.

“Dallah coffee pot is one of the symbols of the Emirati culture and we’ve always been aware of the Arabic coffee heritage. That’s why we were even more excited to witness a shift in the way people consume coffee during our business trip to Dubai. You can buy cold brews in a bottle or enjoy it straight from the tap, just like beer. It makes perfect sense in such a hot climate. As it is our second visit to UAE, we’re now confident that our cold brew will fit in the trend nicely” – comments Piotr Mietelski, vice-president and barista at KawePale.

“Interestingly, the biggest international brands such as Starbucks or Costa Coffee seem to miss the opportunity resulting from the specialty coffee boom. They simply can’t produce small batches and adapt to different tastes around the world like us. What’s more, coffee traders want something new. It gives us a competitive edge we could only dream of just a couple of years ago when we started” – adds the CEO Piotr Wilczewski.

Last year’s edition of SIAL Middle East welcomed 28,324 trade attendees and hosted 1089 exhibitors from all over the world and the numbers are expected to be even bigger this year. All participants will have a chance to try KawePale’s products at stand P077 in Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre from 9th to 11th December. More information about the company is available at https://kawepale.pl/en/

Project co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund in the framework of the operational programme Smart Growth.

This was revealed in a survey of the European P2P investors conducted by the platform Robo.cash. According to the findings, such an amount will be spent by 55.5% of respondents. It is notable that 58.5% of investors are going to buy presents online.

The second most popular sum, which the respondents are willing to pay for Christmas gifts, is up to €100. This answer was given by 29.0% of them. 11.6% of P2P investors are going to spend from €500 to €999 and 3.9% – €1,000 or more.

Analysts of the company clarify that the most common range mentioned by the respondents – €100-499 – is just enough to buy presents for family members and close friends. At the same time, the limits are explained by investors’ reasonable approach to spending and a thorough budget planning.

It is noteworthy that 58.5% of respondents are going to buy Christmas presents online, whereas 65% of average Europeans are planning to do it in offline stores.

Such a tendency among P2P investors is due to several reasons. On the one hand, they are active users of digital tools in general. Apart from investing on P2P platforms, 32.3% of them regularly use online banking and 25.7% – mobile payments, according to Robo.cash findings. On the other hand, investors value their time. Therefore, they opt for fast and convenient online shopping instead of waiting in a queue.

The survey was launched by the platform in mid-November. In total, it collected responses of 440 P2P investors from European countries.

Robo.cash is a Croatia based fully automated P2P platform with a buyback guarantee on investments operating within the European Union and Switzerland. Launched in February 2017, the platform belongs to the financial holding Robocash Group that unites non-bank consumer lending companies in seven markets in Europe and Asia. As a part of the group, Robo.cash works according to a “peer-to-portfolio” model providing an opportunity to invest in short-term loans issued by the affiliated companies. For the time of operation, it has attracted over €9 mln of investments, which has allowed to finance €115 mln worth of loans.

Gone are the days of teenagers spending their spare time engrossed in a novel, according to findings from a study conducted by the American Psychological Association.

As a matter of fact, 1 in 3 high school students in the US didn’t read a book for pleasure in 2016. Also, 82% of 12th graders regularly visited social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in the same time period.

The lack of reading books is concerning. And today, we’re going to talk about how social networks have displaced books from our lives.

It’s No Longer a Top Priority

In the past 10 years or so, with the advent of social media, our lifestyles have transformed dramatically.

To a teen born in today’s age of the Internet, reading a book for fun doesn’t seem very exciting as most kids their age are already immersed in the world of social media.

Television used to be the king of digital media during the pre-internet era. Teenagers didn’t have many choices for watching things that would align with their likings. Therefore, spending downtime reading on topics they loved was very common.

However, things changed drastically after the arrival of the internet. As time went by, more people started using Google to learn how to detox knowledge and information, rather than reading books.

Don’t get us wrong here. The Internet might just be the greatest invention of the modern era. It has surely made our lives easier. However, the internet today is mostly influenced by social networks, which in many ways have veered from the key purpose of it.

Today’s generation prefers using social media over reading books because it seems more fun and they feel this sense of connection toward a community from which they’re accessing information. Little did the know, the information found on social networks is often unreliable—which normally isn’t the same for books.

Short Attention Span

With the entire world at your fingertips, you’re always multitasking and obtaining information from the internet faster—often at the cost of obtaining the full information.

Therefore, multitasking has slowly made us become more impatient, especially in terms of gathering knowledge. Instead of getting quality information and details on a specific topic, we scroll through several different pages on social media and end up receiving incomplete knowledge on a number of unnecessary topics.

To read a book, you must invest your time and fully focus on it. However, a short attention span, combined with impatience, might just be the reason why most people today favor quantity over quality.

One article posted on The New York Times regarding “The Eight-Second Attention Span” further discussed the short attention span of society and how this occurred.

We cannot solely blame social networks for this sudden decrease in attention span. However, giving unnecessary time to socializing in the virtual world versus spending some quality time in real life surely has its consequences.

Lack of Leisure Reading

“The lack of leisure reading is troubling,” said Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. According to her, the most crucial discovery hidden in the data is the following statistic:

In the 1970s, nearly 90% of high school goers reported reading a book, newspaper, or magazine daily. Four decades later, 16% of high school students reported doing so in 2016.

This decline in reading books is troubling as the attention and skillset required to digest topics in long-form writing are significantly different from glancing at a status update on Facebook.

Reading long-form texts (e.g., books, magazines, articles, etc.) is vital for learning complex ideas and for improving critical thinking abilities.

The lack of effort makes the whole social media experience less rewarding.

Wrapping Up

We spend more hours on social networks than on reading books. We take more pleasure in technology than reading books. Therefore, our sole purpose is to bring the present vulnerable condition of reading habits into everyone’s attention.

Feel free to share this post with your friends and family members. Remember what Mark Twain said, “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

Spread the word.