“It was amazing to me that you’d have coffee selling for $80 a pound in Japan and yet the farmer was only making $4 a pound,” he said. “As a guy who didn’t come from that industry I couldn’t get away from the fact that coffee is worth more now than it’s ever been, there’s more consumption of and more demand for coffee than ever in history, and yet the farmers are in some cases making less per pound than it costs them to produce.”
Great article about the commodity of coffee and keeping prices high or low while farmer wages don’t reflect what we’re paying per pound. Unfortunately, the margins won’t be changing so:
Both Askinosie and Giuliano point to the need to educate the consumer market and push retail prices up further, too. “One thing everyone agrees on in coffee is that it’s too cheap,” Giuliano said. “And no consumer feels that way. The $20 bag of coffee from Blue Bottle is probably, in the long term, an unsustainably low price.”
If you’re fighting for equal pay to the people growing and harvesting beans, expect your per-pound price to go way up.