When I heard thatcoffee futureswere reaching record highs, I got a bad case of the jitters.
What would happen to my morning cup of Joe?
How expensive could it get?
Could I affordenough coffeeto get me through the day?
I set out on a mission to find out.
Caffeine is the world’s most popular drug, and coffee is the second-most-traded commodity after oil.
After the pandemic began, prices for coffee futures rose, along with everything else.
Accordingly, theconsumer price indexshowed a steepincrease in prices for store-bought coffeethroughout 2022.
The problems didn’t stop there.
Then, this past November, the commodity skyrocketed.
The clouds that usually shade coffee trees went missing.
It would be the second bad harvest in a row.
When the news hit, traders rushed tolock in arabica contracts, sending prices to all-time highs in December.
Now prices are more than double their 2023 peak.
Robusta beans, often used in instant coffee, hit their own record high this month.
Is this the end of coffee as we know it?
Climate experts say the underlying supply problems aren’t going anywhere.
Coffee prices have already been going up for a few years.
Prices at my local cafe went up $0.35, so I started grinding my coffee at home.
But, the addict that I am, I kept caffeinating.
Both Folgers' parent company, J.M.
Smucker, andNestlereported higher coffee sales in the US last year despite raising consumer prices.
But how much higher could prices get?
Two decades ago,US Department of Agricultureeconomists looked at how commodity coffee price swings affected grocery shelves.
In Indonesia, coffee shops are even mixing corn and rice with their coffee beans to stretch supplies.
Some people have called this phenomenon of companies swapping in cheaper and lower-quality ingredients “flavorflation.”
“If I was Starbucks, I’d worry much more about the unionization drive,” he said.
Last year,Starbucksactually came out ahead on coffee futures.
The company expects that it has enough beans in storage or contracted to last through at least September.
She opened a 12-ounce bag of coffee and poured a handful of beans onto the table.
It’s not clear how much more consumers would be willing to pay.
The big question for Whalen is what happens when the climate crisis makes these supply shocks more frequent.
“I have anxiety, like probably 85% of the population,” Whalen said.
The climate crisis is already changing coffee growing.
The past two years have been thehottest on record, bringing more evaporation and making droughts more severe.
Coffee harvests have suffered.
“In the last year, I saw scorched coffee beans.
Coffee beans that were shriveled because of extreme heat,” Whalen said.
Unfortunately for connoisseurs, that new land will likely work best for robusta beans, not arabica beans.
In response to the changes, more growers are drying beans rather than washing them to save on water.
That’s the thing."
Environmental concerns also popped up the last time coffee futures spiked, back in 1977.
That prediction turned out to be wrong.
Since the 1960s, agricultural production has grown every decade.
We have not solved our coffee problems; we have merely postponed them.
Is sad, watery 1950s diner coffee our fate?
Or will we find new ways to make coffee growing productive and resilient?
Zagorsky said that the futures market predicts a price decrease.
But beyond that, he doesn’t want to make any predictions.
“Economists are terrible at guessing the future,” he said.
“This is Mother Nature’s way of saying, ‘You know what?
In return, I’m going to give you guys the shittiest beans.'”
Honeybrew foresaw the sting of change.
The chaos of revolution.
And a shared love of coffee that, against all odds, could bring Americans back together.
Without a major course correction, even a cocker spaniel in the Oval Office probably won’t save coffee.
Meg Duffis a reporter covering climate change and the environment.
