I managed a cafe about 12 years ago and we always carried about 3-4 weeks of roasted coffee on hand. That said, we were importing our coffee from abroad and didn't have local or in-house roasting facilities.
I do think that at least *some* coffee went stale and was thrown out due to the abrupt nature of the lockdowns. That said, most cafes probably don't have such strict quality standards that they would throw out the coffee - they probably used stale roasted beans for the first several days / weeks when they reopened.
Regarding demand, it doesn't surprise me that you're seeing it down 20% if your end customers are getting your coffee in cafes. Disappearance data that we have clearly shows that global demand isn't down 20% though - I expect that roasters who primarily sell coffee through grocery stores are seeing very strong demand. Even Starbucks, which doesn't primarily sell through grocery stores, is showing global demand higher than 2019. There's a high degree of variance, but overall demand is not down that much and may in fact be higher.
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