Coffee prices are crashing. What it means for your cup of joe
With the coffee market crashing, what does the next decade hold for the price of coffee?
I have been writing weekly coffee columns for the past three years. I’m not a coffee geek and I don’t know all the answers. My focus has always been on finding out what’s happening at the ground level—the price, availability, quality, variety, origins, packaging and retailers. I’m not here to tell you that the coffee market is going to collapse and that there’s now a glut of coffee available. I also don’t offer answers because I don’t know the answers. I don’t know which factors will push prices lower, which factors will push prices higher or in which markets they will rise or fall over the next few years.
But I do know that this year marks the third consecutive year that prices went down in January and the second consecutive year that prices went down in December. In January 2010 the price of coffee surged with the price of coffee for every day of the year. In 2012, in the same way, prices plunged one of every 12 days of the year with prices the lowest on New Year’s Eve and the highest on Good Friday.
The price of coffee is not something that happens or something that stays in one place. What is happening right now is that the price of coffee is crashing. My guess is that prices are falling most sharply in the first quarter, which means that even as we have increased the supply of coffee, there is a large supply of coffee on the market.
Over the next several years, there could be another small explosion in prices. If you had told me in January that the price of coffee would be down in the first quarter, I would have said, “This is crazy! It’s a new year!”
But that’s what’s happening. We have a glut of coffee on the market, and at the moment, the price of coffee is going down. This could mean that the price of coffee, in fact, continues to fall for the rest of 2013.
But here’s an unsettling question: What will actually happen if the price of