​Uncertain! It would probably be the answer that most of us would have as a first option, but fortunately, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in various aspects that disturbed us in 2021. We have divided them into three main themes and we relate them to what unite us, which is specialty coffee.

This month we have received many messages from roasters asking when the new coffees we have selected in Peru and Indonesia will be arriving to our Barcelona warehouse. And the answer is not easy to articulate. 

We have recently read that due to the logistical problems that conflict the world these days, the American multinational Amazon is innovating in its logistics supply chain by reforming twin-engine aircraft to adapt them for cargo and leasing container ships to be able to fulfil their orders and avoid the traffic jams that we are seeing in all the ports of the five continents since last year.

A supply shock is an unexpected event that suddenly changes the supply of a product or raw material, resulting in an unforeseen change in price. Supply shocks can be negative, resulting in a decrease in supply; or positive, which produces an increase in supply; however, they are often negative. Assuming that aggregate demand does not change, a negative supply shock causes the price of a product to rise, while a positive supply shock reduces it.

We work hard to add value in coffee. If your product does not make any difference from the rest of the coffees in the market, it becomes a commodity. The price of a commodity is established as the point of equilibrium of supply and demand of future contracts. Price fluctuation (that is, the movement of the supply and demand curves) is affected by such a large number of variables that they are uncontrollable. For example, if there is a frost in Brazil, Sumatran coffees rise in price; And if there is an excess of production in Brazil, Sumatran coffees will lower their price; In both cases, without the Sumatran coffee farmer having moved a single finger.

1.- The birth of a new reality.
 
With this article, we begin a new series of educational content, this time focusing on one of the biggest and probably most controversial topic in the coffee industry: PRICE.
 
All of us who work here know that our industry is in an unprecedented crisis in various fields; Ethical, Environmental, Genetics and Socioeconomic. We know that the prices we pay to coffee growers (with only few exceptions) is well below their production costs. And when we pay excellent prices for quality, for example in Kenya; we know that most of this revenue does not reach farmers, because there are so many hands, so much corruption and so much bureaucracy in the industry, that most of the benefit is lost in the darkness of a network of connections that we do not fully understand.