This new post in Roast Magazine's Daily Coffee News caught my eye, and I thought the link within it to a group calling themselves Transparent Coffee Trade was of perhaps even greater interest.
The first article lists a composite average retail coffee price among so-called Blue Chip Roasters of $21.94 per pound, while the Transparent Coffee site shows that the (very) few roasters in their roster, most of whom charge retail prices well above the $21.94 per pound average, are remitting about 18-25% of their selling price to their growers.
Clearly there aren't enough data points in any of these articles to draw any conclusions, but they do make me want to raise a few issues that I don't see getting discussed very much.
One of the most obvious things is that consumers are certainly being asked to pay the price for inefficient buying on the part of small roasters. Setting aside true exotics like Geshas (which are excluded from these surveys anyway) or top-quality Kenya auction lots where there is a direct relationship between cup quality and the green price paid, any specialty roaster buying full containers and committed to paying farmers well above their cost of production ought to be doing just fine with average F.O.B. prices in the $2-3 range for the bulk of their volume, heading well north of that for small quantities of exotics such as East Africans.
Add in ocean freight, customs, exporter/importer profit, 25% for shrink during roasting and a generous dollar per pound for state-of-the art vacuum packaging in Fresco bags (uncommon except among the larger players) and most roasters should be making double their roasted-and-packaged cost at $10 per pound, or triple that at $15 - which happens to be the average selling price from, for example, Peet's mail order, which certainly buys excellent coffee, has a shrink rate to end all shrink rates, roasts to order and packages superbly.
As a home roaster buying mostly expensive Kenyas and Yirgacheffes and a smattering of top Centrals and Indonesians from Sweet Maria's - and paying UPS freight rates - I still have a roasted cost of well under $10 per pound for coffees that are at least as good as the top Third Wave folks are selling for triple the price or more.
Going from the still-abstract level of price per pound to actual beverage coffee, my wife and I most often brew a 1 liter pot of coffee and share it over the course of a morning. That means I get seven pots (at 65 grams per liter) out of a roasted pound - meaning that if I were paying the "Blue Chip Roaster" average price of $21.94 per pound our coffee habit would cost us $3.13 per day, or $94 a month.
That's nothing compared to a couple with a daily cappuccino-and-pastry coffeehouse habit but it certainly isn't cheap - and it goes a long way towards explaining the immense popularity of good-not-great whole bean coffee (in this case from Lake Atitlán in Guatemala) for $6.65 per pound as found at Costco. Now of course the mega-growth area in Costco and other big box stores is single serve, but Peet's K Cups are selling for 54 cents each there at the moment and Starbucks Via Instant can be had for about the same price - meaning a consumer could enjoy a full quart of brewed coffee made by these very expensive, packaging-intensive methods for less than $2.50. That doesn't even buy you a single mug of cinnamon-roasted pourover swill at your local Piercings-'n-Beans outlet.
Studies like these two are focused on what percentage of coffee's selling price ought to go to the grower rather than looking at price pie charts that include all of the stakeholders in the transaction - including the consumer. Rewarding farmers is obviously important, but so is delivering value to the consumer. Costco and its key suppliers, from JBR to Starbucks, Nestlé and Green Mountain certainly understand this but there's not much evidence of such sanity on the boutique roaster side of things - which goes a long way towards explaining why the Blue Bottles and Stumptowns get all the fawning press coverage in the world while selling such small volumes of coffee that, at the end of the day, they're just microlot noise in a container-load universe. That's also why most of the PR is about canned or bottled cold brew, insanely expensive microlots of interest only to staff and the press, the latest in ridiculous latte "art" competitions and the rest. Talking about the actual taste and value of coffee is bad business - or at least not the business many folks want to be in.
