this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
10 points (69.2% liked)
Coffee
2253 readers
1 users here now
The Magical Fruit
The Oromo people would customarily plant a coffee tree on the graves of powerful sorcerers. They believed that the first coffee bush sprang up from the tears that the god of heaven shed over the corpse of a dead sorcerer.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's not a bit hyperbolic, it's a full blown straw man argument.
There is nothing inherently expensive in a good grinder, not from an engineering, manufacturing or materials perspective. Sure small volume manufacturing is more expensive, but we're still talking brands making thousands of units and not small one-off productions, so it's not that much more expensive.
I want a good grinder, and I also want to pay for quality. They simply charge more for the equipment than I believe is reasonable, because the amount of work and cost required to produce the product is fairly low.
The costs you are minimizing are extremely high. Things like engineering, cost of manufacture, heck even the cost of a higher quality motor with less play/tight tolerances is vastly more expensive than you are letting on. Figure parts costs alone on a base model grinder are around 20 dollars for a 200 dollar sale price. Most of these are probably in the 200 dollar range with more time required to assemble.
In comparing a <200 dollar grinder to a 700 dollar grinder like the niche, the difference is night and day for parts, layout, and requirements for output. Plus the cost of higher quality burr sets and tight tolerance burr carriers.
The per unit costs associated with what is required to produce a small output, high quality part is high. How many units do you think each one of these companies makes? Compare that to baratza or kitchen aid. It’s not even in the same ballpark.
Obviously it goes towards insanity with the 3k dollar plus units, but then again many of them are commercial focused and can happily churn out hundreds of pounds of ground beans. Or into fully billet cnc machines one offs.
From purely engineering, manufacturing side, maybe, but you often have pay more than just the manufacturing cost. The companies have to pay for a good marketing team, customer service team, and after sales maintenance team for example. They might need the capital for certifications entering a new market too, for example. All of these cost money.
Grinder companies are still innovating too IMO. Burr design is an ongoing r&d in a lot of companies. Ionizer is another quite recent addition to combat retention.
Thousands in monthly production sold at close to cost might not be enough when considering ongoing expenses like salaries, r&d, etc.
You can do R&D, but you can make absolutely terrific grinders without it. Most of the "innovation" happening in this space seems to be more novelty than actual noticable performance/quality gains for the end user.