Hello, it’s December 2025 and a good time to reflect on the impact of the harvest in Brazil of the same year.
We know many coffee producers in Brazil so we talk all year round and occasionally visit them as they do us. We can say many of them are good friends and go back many years so our conversations are honest and upfront.
For this year’s harvest, we were even present in Brazil at the beginning of the flowering section of the season way back at the end of last year. The flowering is the first indication of what might happen in the harvest so at first there was an air of celebration and it’s a beautiful thing to see, all the white flowers covering the coffee trees like snow.
However, the flowers did not last long on the trees and some trepidation was already entering the picture.
Next came the appearance of the beans (inside the cherries of course) and whilst a lower yield was expected this year there wasn’t too much indication yet that it would be drastically different. It was obvious yields were naturally at the lower end of a typical “bad” year though.
The physical harvesting went to plan and the weather patterns were different to the year before; it appeared that the drought was not as drastic this year, in some Minas Gerais microclimes at least. Then followed some heat waves and a frantic harvest revealed percentage points even lower than expected, again more some than others.
At one farm for instance we were hearing 80% of normal which then looked like 60% when the stacks of cherries went through their processing.
A few weeks after that the cupping and scoring analysis was underway and it became clear that there was even further damage and the normal levels of highly valuable screen sizes were low to non-existent. At another farm that became clear that there had been an insect problem unseen until that point in time, probably a result of the extreme heat days. I understood there to be a species of insect that bores into the mucilage then seeds that you tend to spot after the fact.
60% became 40% there, now 85 became 65 at another. The 2025 coffee tasted great which is usually the main thing to be excited about however a bit of solemn reticence in our conversations with our producer friends had crept in and the availability of coffee was diminishing fast.
Some producers just hadn’t grown enough and couldn’t accommodate us. Our backup plans who had shown good commitment earlier in the year had to cover their costs and sell at very good prices before they could get to our orders.
In the end, we have managed to satisfy our forecasting for the year ahead and have successfully purchased enough containers of Brazil to keep our range stable with a few new names appearing this year, however all connected through our old friend Bruno de Souza
The main consequence for our company and many other roasters is a much higher premium for the same coffees we always buy and because we had to also look elsewhere to make up the volume, the new relationship coffees are priced according to the C-market premium as opposed to our status as lifetime buyers and there’s little room for preferential negotiating as such.
We have had to accept that coffee costs even more now and is unlikely to return to some lower baseline levels seen in the rearview mirror. Of course this inflation is visible everywhere in the consumable product universe; why should coffee be any different?
It’s important to not gamble on the future when it comes to the climate crisis and geopolitical volatility so we have bought enough to cover for the next year ahead and we will assess the situation at a similar time of year for the 2026 harvest. Many experts are predicting things will stabilise from here which basically means that supply will be higher next year and demand won’t drive the market even higher. Very few experts are seeing it much lower though.
The open market higher prices do mean producers are now covering their own costs and turning a slightly better profit than before in the cases of some people we know. It’s very hard to produce Coffee and we need our friends to continue doing so if we are going to continue doing so here in the UK!
The end result is our wholesale prices have risen to make up the difference of the higher prices to us. We will continue to seek new and interesting coffees and also we will continue to watch the market so that you don’t have to.
Quite how you communicate that to your customers, the people that come in every day and rely on you for a flat white, Espresso and iced latte is your challenge. We’ve had to do the exact same thing in our own shop and have Implemented a 20p per cup increase across the board.
We think of that as an extra £10 of revenue to offset the extra £2 of cost from the coffee costs and the extra £3 we expect this year with increases in wages tax, and who knows what else? It’s fair to say, no inputs look to be going down.
At this time, communicating the value that you create is essential. Your team are highly trained baristas and people tend to forget that they ask for a drink that you make for them, to their order, right there in front of them.
A project we have been working on in the background is to allocate a small portion of every bag of coffee we sell to you is to go into an impact fund which we will deploy in ways we can share with you in a few months time.
Please get in touch personally if you want to know more about any of the above or some of the questions it raises, my email address is danny@climpsonsons.com
Thank you for your time
Danny
