Despite tariffs on pause, coffee prices surge for climate reasons
PHOENIX (AZFamily) — If you’re looking for a coffee boost, expect a price boost as well. Despite a pause on a 10% tariff on all U.S. coffee imports, one Valley coffee shop is sounding the alarm on the impact of climate change on coffee prices.
Many of us start our day with a cup of joe, but only 1% of coffee is grown within the United States, so most are drinking coffee from halfway around the world.
Cultivate Coffee in Phoenix’s Sunnyslope neighborhood knows the issue all too well.
“We use around 50 pounds a week in our own shop, so just for our supply, whether it’s retail bags on the counter or what we’re serving drinks behind the bar. But then we also have a few different wholesale clients. And so we’re doing easily 100 pounds a week or more.” said co-founder and head roaster Christopher Priebe.
He knows everything there is to know about coffee. “Coffee is a weird thing because it always fluctuates. It’s an organic material. You know, it comes from different countries and so the market price is always changing, but this last year especially, we’ve seen a huge change in that and it’s really become unpredictable,” Priebe said.
For the second half of 2024, coffee traded around $2 to $2.50 per pound. It’s been at $3.50 to $4 for most of this year after peaking at $4.39 in February.
“What we end up doing is absorbing a lot of those price increases or the changes and jumps in price as much as we can, but you can only eat so much of that cost before it begins to put you out of business. So at some point it trickles down to the customer,” he said.
That’s why Cultivate Coffee tries to diversify its supply.
“We have Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Honduras. And then we also have Tanzania and Ethiopia,” he said.
Brazil alone grows 38% of the world’s coffee. Last year, it battled severe flooding, while this year, it’s seeing extreme heat.
“The cost for us jumped about 21% in the last year and that’s one of the smaller jumps that we saw,” Priebe said. “Our coffee from Tanzania has jumped about 57% and then we’ve even seen our coffee from Peru has jumped 98% in the last year. So it’s doubled the cost to us.”
Cultivate Coffee is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with the founders using the coffee business as a vehicle to give job skills training to youth in the city. Their bagged coffee has gone up a dollar. As far as the drinks on their menu, some have gone up by 25 cents. Consumers are also feeling increased coffee costs at the supermarket, with prices growing there too.
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