An Update from the Roastery | The Future of Better Coffee

February 7th 2025

At Coffee Embassy, we’re on a mission to provide exceptional coffee while ensuring farmers are fairly compensated and sustainable sourcing practices are upheld. Due to significant increases in the cost of green coffee over the past year, we will be adjusting our retail coffee pricing as of next Monday 10th February. This change is necessary to continue providing the best coffee possible while maintaining a viable business dedicated to sourcing, roasting, and sharing high quality coffee with you.

We’d like to share some of the key factors driving these changes. We appreciate your support and understanding, and we invite you to read on for insights into the current coffee market, and why we think that for the future of coffee, it’s not such a bad thing.

Kabingara Factory - Kenya

C Price

The commodity coffee price, commonly called the C market price (a futures market) is a global baseline meant to inform buyers and sellers of a minimum price for commodity coffee. The system is well-established and accepted around the world as a way to determine the price of coffee. 

As you may have seen in the media, over the course of 2024 there was a steady increase to the C Price, followed by a sharp spike. The C Price is currently at its highest point ever, having doubled in price in the past year alone, reaching $4 USD/lb for the first time ever a couple of days ago, and increasingly daily as we write this - it’s hard to keep up. 

 

C Price graph and chart as of this morning

Supply Challenges at Origin

Since 2021, the coffee market has been in a supply deficit due to ongoing climate impacts such as drought followed by heavy rains in Brazil (one of the main origins we purchase from). Similar weather has caused the same harvest issues in Vietnam. These two countries supply the majority of the world’s Arabica and Robusta coffee. There has been a knock-on effect throughout the coffee industry from a lack of commodity coffee available which has driven prices up across the industry.

Unpredictable weather changes and climate events are causing uncertainty with growing seasons. This greatly affects the hard work of the farmers at origin, and when crops are damaged it can take multiple years to recover.

Global Instability and Rising Costs

There are many complex factors across the world affecting supply chain, but to highlight a few of these issues;

Supply chain disruptions such as Suez Canal and Red Sea conflicts.

Unfavourable exchange rates and general inflation impacting import costs.

Increased fuel and shipping costs exacerbated by trucking strikes.

Labour shortages on farms causing wage costs to soar.

Increased Demand for Coffee

New EU regulations requiring deforestation-free certification on several commodities, coffee included, have led to increased stockpiling by buyers, tightening supply. Panic buying is causing shipping delays due to stockpiling of these commodities, and the demand is higher than the supply. 

Global coffee consumption also continues to rise, with new markets emerging. As demand increases while supply struggles to keep up, prices inevitably climb. 

Banko Chelchele - Ethiopia

Why We’re Sticking With Better Coffee

Listening to interviews with farmers on the ground at origin, we understand there is frustration. They’re trying to earn a living whilst upholding contracts with buyers; since the C Price has soared so quickly, direct trade contracts with roasters may currently be earning farmers less than C Price, leaving them wondering why they’re selling the coffee they’ve worked so hard to produce at a high quality to long standing customers for less than commodity.

This begs the question, how many farmers will continue making the effort to grow specialty, high quality coffee, when they could be paid more to grow average coffee to sell to the masses, or leave the industry altogether for something more profitable? Without the farmers we would have no coffee to share with you, and without farmers remaining dedicated to growing high quality coffee, we'd have little choice in what coffee we can offer.

We’re confident that by continuing to source high quality green beans from our trusted partners who genuinely care about the farmers at origin, those doing the hard yards to cultivate quality crops will remain dedicated to their craft.

Cofinet has close relationships with many of the farmers they source coffee from in Colombia (the owners and their family are also highly regarded farmers who we buy coffee from). The Cofinet team assists farmers by providing training programs, upskilling opportunities, and offering higher prices for their coffees.

Selecting coffees from some of the world’s most passionate and skilled coffee growers means we can continue to share excellent brews with you whilst ensuring the farmers are looked after. Many of the coffees (especially microlots and exotics) we’re so excited to share with you are priced far above the C Price, and rightly so, meaning these farmers are not as directly affected by the volatile market.

Longterm, we believe the higher C Price will benefit the farmers and the future of coffee. The global uncertainty and volatility of the current market is not an ideal situation for anyone along the supply chain, but our hope is that the price will stabilise and the “new normal” for the C Price will remain high enough that farmers globally can be paid fairly, and we can all continue to enjoy this beverage for the right price - the price we believe it should have been for a long while already.

Wbeimar Lasso - Colombia

What This Means for You

We’re here as ambassadors for better coffee; sourcing, roasting, and distributing quality coffee beans and doing our best to make a positive impact in the process. Our focus remains on sharing with you the best tasting coffee we can find, and these coffees come at a cost we are more than willing to pay; it’s a non-negotiable for us.

In an effort to minimise the impact of our price increases on our loyal coffee drinkers, we’ll be slowly adjusting the prices of our main blends, Embassy and Ranger, over the next few months. The rest of our coffees will be adjusted from Monday. All subscriptions will have a grace period with the adjustment coming into effect from March 10th.

The good news is that we've been slurping and sampling plenty of amazing coffees we're excited to share with you this year. We have an exciting lineup of single origin filter coffee releases in the works, and we’re planning more options for our espresso drinkers too. We hope you’ll agree that the cost of better coffee is more than worth it and we look forward to sharing with you all that we’ve been working on!

If you’ve made it this far, we thank you for taking the time to read this post! We understand it’s a lengthy one but it’s important to us that we share our thoughts - we appreciate your interest.

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David, James and Gemma, the Coffee Embassy Roastery team