I’m sure you’ve noticed it: coffee has gotten more expensive. Tariffs, supply chain issues, demand, weather/climate change… It can be hard to make sense of it all. Coffee prices are going up globally, and not just here at Deeper Roots. To help us understand why, let’s look at the world’s leading coffee producer: Brazil.

Brazil produces more than a third of the world’s total supply of coffee – this year, that amounted to around 64 million bags (that’s 60kg burlap bags, not 12oz bags). Brazil has such an outsized influence on the world’s coffee supply that as Brazil goes, so goes the rest of the world. When Brazil has a larger than expected harvest, the world’s coffee prices go down as a result. Likewise, when Brazil has a bad year, coffee prices go up. We measure this using something called the “C-price.” Coffee is traded as a commodity, meaning it is bought and sold independent of seller or location. Other commodities are more familiar to us, like oil for instance: we hear about the price-per-barrel of oil on the news all the time.

For a long time, the C-price of coffee has hovered around $1.25-$1.50 per pound. That’s for commodity grade coffee, which is significantly lower quality than the coffee that we buy and it’s also anonymous. We know almost all our producers by name, and we pay a lot more per pound. But that pesky C-price affects everything downstream of it – even specialty coffee. In early August of 2024, Brazil experienced a late frost in some of its coffee growing regions where flowering for next season had already begun, sending the global coffee trade into a panic. Buyers were snapping up any coffee they could – and not just from Brazil. Blends that were primarily Brazil were suddenly made up of whatever major players could get their hands on. And that drove prices even higher around the world, topping out at over $4 per pound earlier this year. The price of producing coffee itself has also gone up, both growing and labor in producing countries. Since we try to source our coffee directly and ethically, these price increases hit us early. Our shipping containers for the entire year are arriving as we speak (August 2025), and they’re paid in full when they arrive.

Enter the Trump Administration. Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffing policies have upended global trade on every front. Coffee is no exception; despite the administration’s assertions that tariffs would increase domestic production – coffee cannot be grown in the contiguous United States. While the Specialty Coffee Association (among others) is aggressively lobbying for coffee to be exempted, currently tariffs still apply. That includes an enormous 50% tariff on Brazil set to take effect this week. There is great uncertainty as to how much the tariff will be on any given country, or even if it will still be in place this time next week, and that contributes to anxiety over pricing and panic buying. However, the three containers we received last month were among the first to be tariffed: Ethiopia (2) and Guatemala. We have added the cost of the tariff as a surcharge to the market price, with the hope that the tariffs will be removed and we can lower the price. However, this year’s coffee supply has already been tariffed, so prices won’t change this year even if the tariffs disappear tomorrow. You and your customers may not notice it, as our coffees vary in price from year to year based on the price anyway – but I wanted to make you aware.

Ideally the tariff policy will disappear soon, but there’s nothing we can do to control the C-price. In our modern era of climate change and globalism, you can expect coffee prices to stay higher for some time – perhaps even permanently. We’re doing everything we can to make sure that you and our producers are taken care of regardless. We’ve got their back – and we’ve got yours.

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