3 roasters tell BI why your cup of coffee is getting more expensive — and it's not only because of tariffs

Business Insider

25-05-2025

In February, Cooperative Coffee Roasters founder Matt McDaniel emailed his wholesale clients announcing price increases — two varieties went from $11 a pound to $13, while another two went from $12 a pound to $14. He also increased prices at his coffee shop attached to the roasting facility.
About 125 miles east of Cooperative's roastery in Asheville, North Carolina, you'll find Summit Coffee 's flagship location in Davidson, where the price of coffee increased by $0.10 a cup in February. That's a relatively small adjustment, said Summit Coffee CEO Brian Helrich.
However, Spencer Ford knows of many coffee shops that have had to increase prices by more than a dime a cup.
Ford is a trader at Royal Coffee. He buys green coffee from all over the world, imports it to the US, and sells it to coffee roasters. Most of his clients, recently, have been "kind of freaking out," he said — and for good reason.
"In my career, this is the most volatile time, in terms of just the commodity price of coffee, that we've ever seen," he told BI. When Ford first started trading coffee, the commodity price was less than $1 per pound. The previous commodity market high hit a little over $3 back in 1977. In the fall of 2024, it started to spiral upward and traded up to $4.40 a pound in the new year.
And that was before President Donald Trump's tariffs entered the picture and further rattled the coffee industry. Due to a trifecta of climate factors, geopolitical turmoil, and tariff uncertainty, coffee producers are paying more and passing on these costs to consumers. The average price per pound of ground coffee sold to consumers was about $7.54 in April, a record high and up from $6.06 a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The climate crisis and global unrest: A volatile market pre-tariffs
Ever since Helfrich started buying coffee in 2014, the coffee market has been "pretty stable and low," he said. "It's been minor fluctuations, up and down 20 cents, 30 cents."
The spike to above $4 in early 2025 can be attributed to a confluence of factors. "Everything that could be a variable has become a variable," said Helfrich.
For starters, there's the impact of climate change.
Helfrich points to Brazil, the world's largest coffee exporter, which has dealt with frost and severe drought in recent years. Extreme weather can hurt coffee plants and result in a smaller crop yield. If Brazil expects to produce 30 million tons of coffee but, in actuality, produces 27 million, "all of a sudden supply demand happens and people start freaking out."
Remember that previous commodity market high of about $3 in 1977? That was due to the so-called Brazilian black frost, where freezing temperatures kill plants without forming any visible white frost. "We've seen frost in Brazil like two out of the last five years," Ford said of the once-rare phenomenon.
And then there's general global unrest. Attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, for example, have disrupted key shipping routes. Helfrich said he had to send some of his coffee shipments on a more southern route to avoid attacks, which led to additional shipping time and costs.
As supply has been decreasing, demand has been increasing, added Helfrich: "There are a lot of new coffee drinkers in the developing world."
The commodity price of coffee has dipped since its peak — it's around $3.70 per pound, as of May 2025 — but that's still higher than it's ever been, and Helfrich expects it to remain in the $3.70s.
Tariffs add to uncertainty in 2025
Tariffs have added another layer of complexity to the already volatile coffee market.
Cooperative and Summit haven't felt the side effects of tariffs yet, since they purchase their raw green coffee beans so far in advance.
"That's the interesting thing. Coffee that was already on the water was not subject to tariffs," said McDaniel. "And so it'll definitely be a downstream effect. It's something that we'll start seeing in coffee that arrives in June and July."
Helfrich has a coffee supply that will last through about November and said he isn't putting anything new under contract right now: "This usual six-to-12-month runway we have, we're letting that get shorter and shorter and shorter in hopes that maybe that coffee market goes down, maybe the tariffs go away."
There's risk in sitting and waiting, too.
"It'll come time for us to decide if we want our partner in Peru to send us a shipping container of coffee," he said. "If we locked it in right now, we'd be paying a 10% tariff fee. If we decide to wait a little bit and be patient, they might sell their coffee to somebody else, and then, while we might be able to get coffee at a lower price, the coffees we've always relied on are not going to be available."
Helfrich hasn't completely avoided tariffs. At the peak, when tariffs on Chinese imports hit 145%, he owed an extra four-figure bill on his coffee bags, which are manufactured in China.
"We had already paid our 50% deposit on the bags — they were produced — and in order to receive the shipment, we had to pay an over $8,000 instant tax bill. We couldn't switch to a US producer because we didn't have enough time," said Helfrich. "It more than doubled the price of our bags, which, across 20-something thousand bags, hurts."
Ford's company is just now starting to pay the 10% tariff on all imported goods. Time will tell how that extra cost impacts the business and, ultimately, consumers.
"Right now, we can still average some of the untariffed stuff that we have already, so we don't have to raise everything so dramatically," he said. "But eventually, we're going to run out of untariffed inventory."
The future of coffee
Chances are, your cup of coffee or bag of beans will start to cost even more, potentially as early as this summer.
Especially if tariffs persist, roasteries and cafés "don't have a choice," said Helfrich. They rely on importing because most parts of the US cannot grow coffee. "The reality is, everybody's going to raise prices a little bit since I don't think it's going back down. I think we need to get used to a slightly new normal."
Before you start complaining, keep in mind that coffee might cost closer to what it always should have.
"Coffee has historically been undervalued. We take it for granted in the US as this cheap pick-me-up, and that neglects the reality of coffee and what it takes to even have it," said McDaniel. "This is an agricultural product that's only grown in the tropics, and high-quality coffee is only grown in really high elevations. There is so much human labor associated with growing coffee, harvesting coffee, processing it, preparing it to be exported, and then bringing it into the country."
How big a price jump will vary from business to business.
"It's the coffee companies that don't roast their own coffee that are going to get hurt the hardest — because roasters have to increase prices," said Helfrich. Cafés like his that roast in-house have more control. For the shops that outsource, "If a roaster needs to raise its prices, then the coffee shop just has to deal with that accordingly."
Another factor is how much a business first raised its prices pre-tariffs.
"Depending on whether the roastery or the business raised their prices enough initially to cover the tariff increase as well, then maybe they won't have to raise them again," said Ford. "But my thinking is that, in a couple of months, as roasters and importers start running out of untariffed inventory, the price will go up again because they're going to be buying everything at the new, higher price."
He's less sure about how consumers will react. So far, he hasn't seen any drop-off in demand.
"People might be upset, but it might not stop them from buying," said Ford. "Coffee consumption in the US has been pretty resilient to price rises. Now, how much they go up before people start saying, 'this is crazy,' I don't know."