I’ve been roasting coffee at home for about twenty years. I do it in a steel wok, stirring by hand, on a turkey-fryer burner, in my basement. Very low tech, but effective, at least for my day to day needs. My palate for coffee is not sophisticated enough for me to get geeky and obsessive and expensive about the roasting process, something very doable in this hobby.
I do it for a few simple reasons: 1) the quality of the green beans is better because I source from a knowledgeable and quality-obsessed supplier, Sweet Maria’s in Oakland; 2) I know it’s fresh because I roast it, let it rest, usually, then brew within days of roasting; 3) it’s an enjoyable process, like cooking good food. I also pay attention to brewing methods, again seeking quality without becoming obsessive or breaking the bank. And last and certainly not least, I pay less than I’d pay for high quality local roasted coffee. Lately my cost per pound, roasted, is less than ten dollars.
All this is a wind-up to a short essay on what I’m learning about coffee prices. Discussion of pricing is full of myths and misconceptions, in any market, and this is true in the coffee market. Thom Owen at Sweet Maria’s weighs in here, in the context of April 2025 tariff changes.
It’s complicated. Coffee’s been a globally traded commodity for a very long time. Like all commodities, a lot of factors go into the price for the end consumer. Costs of transport are a large factor. Costs of production, land, labor and supplies are another. Like any crop, coffee has good years and bad, weather and disease come and go, plus the trees’ capacity tends to run on multi-year cycles. All this can change quickly and for reasons beyond anyone’s control. All of these costs have risen sharply since the pandemic, for all commodities.
Another factor is the part of the market hardly connected to the product at all – trading in futures and the derivatives of that type of speculative market. Futures are useful for hedging against uneven cash flow and cost fluctuation, in most food related markets, like grains, but this is most useful for large players, big farmers and traders. When a local market, including the small producers of specialty coffees (most of the producers are small) ties its prices to the price on an exchange in New York City, you get increases even when the other costs aren’t going up as much as the futures and derivatives. This sometimes baleful effect is another facet of the damage speculative markets can do.
The recent insane tariffs will increase coffee prices. This has virtually nothing to do with any market, trade relationship or any real-world part of the trade. Tariffs on goods coming from coffee-producing countries have rarely or never been used to encourage US production, as US production of coffee is almost nil (Hawaii and Puerto Rico, that’s it). So increasing the cost of imported coffee does only that, increases the cost.
So, I’m happy sourcing all my green coffee from Sweet Maria’s. They’re committed to quality. As part of this commitment, they’re also committed to establishing and nurturing close relationships with the people who grow the coffee, the small farmers in the coffee countries. They call their most direct pipeline “Farm Gate”, meaning they buy directly from the coffee farm. These farmers need a lot of support, and much of this support is provided by paying them as directly as possible through vendors like Sweet Maria’s. A number of coffee importers give technical advice, help build the local school, direct aid like that, to improve the lives of their suppliers. The pressures on coffee pricing derived from labor and land shortages can be lessened by this type of support from Sweet Maria’s and customers like me. Sweet Maria’s aren’t the only coffee bean supplier doing this, of course, but they’ve earned my trust.
I’ve been stocking up, partly because it feels good to have a large supply to feed my roasting hobby and partly because I can save a few nickels by buying now rather than later. I’m also thinking of selling some of the roasted coffee, which would definitely reduce the cost of the coffee I drink.
The price of crappy coffee in the supermarkets and the chain stores will go up, and only partly for valid reasons of increased production and transport costs. A fair amount will come from, as we saw during the pandemic, price gouging by Big Corp. Yet another reason to avoid buying from Big Corp.
Note: I’m far from an expert, but I’m learning more every day about this subject. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so I increase my understanding of trade in general by learning about the coffee trade.
More later . . .