Italians panic as price of espresso spikes

Straits Times

14-07-2025

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A server pours a caffe shakerato, an espresso-based drink, at Cicinin in Turin, Italy, on June 25. The high price of beans has put coffee bars in a bind in Italy, where the drink is a ritual and customers demand cheap espresso.
TURIN, Italy – Mr Andrea Consilvio did something in early 2025 that he called 'a little crazy'. He bought an old and well-known coffee bar in the north-western Italian city of Turin, his home town.
Brewing coffee for Italians, the people who invented espresso and the commercial machines and stovetop pots to make it, might hardly seem like a leap of faith.
Nearly three-quarters of Italians drink coffee – by which they almost always mean espresso – at least once a day. Most Italians consider their daily coffee ritual to be sacrosanct.
Yet they also expect their coffee to be cheap, available for little more than pocket change at any bar counter. And that, amid a global jump in coffee bean prices caused in part by trade disruptions and climate change, has set off simmering anxiety among Italians.
They worry that higher costs could push up retail prices and unsettle a part of the food and beverage economy that feels distinctively Italian.
Among the most worried: owners of the country's ubiquitous coffee bars.
'The world of coffee is changing,' Mr Consilvio said. 'If prices continue to increase, it could become a serious danger' to both livelihoods and tradition.
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Mr Andrea Consilvio (left) with his business partner Gian Luca Gatto outside their coffee bar in Turin, Italy.
PHOTO: FABIO BUCCIARELLI/NYTIMES
Mr Luigi Morello, president of the Italian Espresso National Institute, which safeguards the quality of Italian espresso (it should be hazel brown to dark brown, with foam, among other things), said higher coffee prices had 'rightfully alarmed' consumers.
'The whole supply chain is in a crisis,' he said.
Italy once designated espresso a necessity by law. Just before World War I, the Italian government allowed municipalities to set price controls for basic needs. That included bread, but also coffee served at the bar counter.
Such price controls 'protected neighbourhood bars for a long time', said Dr Jonathan Morris, a coffee historian at the University of Hertfordshire in England. 'That's why no one really ever set up coffee chains in Italy.' (Starbucks actually did, but did not open its first Italian outpost until 2018, 47 years after the company's founding.)
Even after the controls were lifted, prices remained low, with few bar owners willing to test whether higher prices would push customers towards the nearest competitor, usually no more than a block or two away.
'There is a kind of communism,' Mr Morello said, 'when actually one should pay for the quality one receives.'
The make-up of the traditional Italian espresso, a brew of darkly roasted arabica and robusta beans, helped keep prices low, Dr Morris said.
As arabica bean prices rose, some Italian producers increased the proportion of cheaper robusta beans in the coffee blends, but that formula was no longer as effective when robusta prices also surged, he added.
A coffee menu in Turin, Italy.
PHOTO: FABIO BUCCIARELLI/NYTIMES
An espresso in Italy averaged €1.16 (S$1.74) as of the latest analysis in 2025 by Assoutenti, a non-profit consumer rights organisation, with the lowest average prices found in southern Italy.
The national average in January was up about 11.5 per cent from two years earlier, the analysis found, though Italy still sells some of the cheapest espressos in Western Europe.
Coffee bean prices have come down somewhat from their peak earlier in 2025. But they remain higher than before the surge, and experts fear extreme weather will continue to shrink global supply and keep prices high. US tariffs on coffee-producing countries, like Brazil, could drive prices up further.
The traditional Italian coffee bar relies on coffee sales for about 30 per cent of its revenue, said Mr Luciano Sbraga, deputy director for the Federation of Italian Public Establishments, a trade association for the food and hospitality sector.
Some owners have found it is more profitable to also sell food, for breakfast, lunch or an aperitivo dinner known as 'apericena', rather than just coffee.
'Many bars are becoming more similar to restaurants,' he said.
That was the choice Mr Consilvio made when he bought and renovated his bar, in a stately plaza in central Turin.
The previous owner had sold espressos for less than a euro apiece, a price that Mr Consilvio said simply 'can't work'.
He sells espressos at his bar, Cicinin, for €2 for table service and €1.30 at the counter because nearby bars charge €1.30. (He had wanted to charge €1.50.)
Mr Consilvio, who says he drinks seven to eight espressos a day, lamented that espresso machines had become standard in offices and businesses.
'Hairdressers have them,' he scoffed, so fewer people go to bars. When they do, they demand 'the perfect coffee, not too bitter', he grumbled.
In a sign of how much the industry has changed, a capsule coffee machine by Lavazza, the giant Italian coffee producer, has now taken its place at the company's museum in Turin, alongside machines that helped create modern espresso.
A server at Caffe Torino in Turin, Italy, in June.
PHOTO: FABIO BUCCIARELLI/NYTIMES
Executives from Lavazza and Illy, the Italian coffee producer based in Trieste, have warned for more than a year that higher coffee bean prices are most likely here to stay, presenting challenges to everyone from farmers outside Italy to large companies to mom-and-pop coffee shops to consumers.
At Gran Caffe Gambrinus, a cafe in Naples opened in 1860, an espresso at the counter now costs €1.80, up from €1.50, said one of the owners, Mr Massimiliano Rosati. The increase makes no difference for a tourist who comes to Naples, he added.
That is often not the case for traditional family-run coffee bars, which tend to compete on price.
At Giolitti near the Italian Parliament in Rome, Ms Giovanna Giolitti said she and her brothers recently raised the price of an espresso at the counter to €1.30, from €1.20.
Coffee bean prices justified an even bigger hike, she said, but that would have hurt locals.
'Coffee is something that everyone drinks every day,' said Ms Giolitti, who is among the fourth generation of Giolittis to run the bar.
Breakfast customers at Caffe Baratti & Milano, in Turin, Italy.
PHOTO: FABIO BUCCIARELLI/NYTIMES
In Sant'Eustachio il Caffe near the Pantheon, on a sunny spring Saturday, every outdoor table was full and a line of customers snaked out the door.
At one table, two friends, Mr Filippo Facchinetti and Mr Gabriele Bonfanti, shook their heads when their two espressos came up to €9.
Mr Bonfanti, who lives in Rome, said he had started making more coffee at home, in part because of pricing, but also because some bars use too bitter and dark a roast for his liking.
Mr Facchinetti, who lives in Genoa, called two espressos a day his 'bare minimum', though that day he had already had four, and some days he has six.
Even recent mark-ups, he said, will not chase away a nation with a serious coffee craving.
'It's too important,' he said, adding that the Italian espresso ritual 'won't ever change'. NYTIMES