I buy the same coffee every two weeks, and all year I have been waiting for it to get cheaper. Every report says the crop is enormous and the price is coming down. My bag has only gone up.
The crop really is enormous. The July 2026 edition of the USDA's Coffee: World Markets and Trade puts world production for 2026/27 at a record 189.7 million bags of 60 kilos each. Brazil alone is at a record 71.9 million, its arabica harvest rebounding by 9.5 million bags after five bad years. Global stocks are rising for a second year, though they are "expected to remain below the long-term average." The agency notes, in passing, that coffee prices "dropped 25 percent in the last 7 months," measured on the International Coffee Organization's monthly composite index.
So why is a pound of ground coffee dearer than it was a year ago? I buy mine in Seoul, where nobody publishes a monthly number for my shelf, so take the best-documented shelf there is. The average US supermarket price for ground coffee was $9.32 a pound in July, up 10.7 percent on the year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It has been coming down since April's peak of $9.72, but three months of falling only took 4.2 percent off.
Because the number that moves this market is not the crop. It is a pile of beans in a handful of licensed sheds, and it is nearly gone.
Traders watch certified stock: coffee that has arrived at an approved warehouse, been sampled and graded, and been issued a certificate saying it can settle a futures contract. It is not the world's coffee. It is the slice of it somebody could take delivery of tomorrow.
On August 19 that stock came to 229,214 bags, according to the daily stock report published by ICE, the New York exchange where the world's arabica price is set. A year earlier it was 736,573, so it has fallen 69 percent. Brazil, the largest single source of the world's arabica, had 133,075 bags certified then and has 6,428 now. Colombia has 250.
ICE gives no weight for those bags; its rulebook asks only for "a recognized commercial size." Treat them as the 60 kilos the USDA and the ICO both count in, and the whole deliverable stock behind the world's arabica price comes to about eleven hours of world consumption, against a day and a half a year ago.
There is no single coffee price, either. The contract those bags settle, ICE's Coffee C, is defined in its own rulebook as 37,500 pounds of "washed arabica coffee" from twenty named countries. Washed is a preparation, not a grade: the fruit is stripped off in a pulper, then water and fermentation take away the sticky layer underneath before the bean is dried. Robusta, the hardier plant with the harsher cup, trades separately in London and is not in that stock at all.
The two went opposite ways in the same month. In the ICO's June report, US certified arabica stock fell 13.3 percent to 0.41 million bags while London's certified robusta stock rose 4.8 percent to 0.68 million. ICE's own file for June 30 reads 377,465 bags, which is what the chart uses; the two published figures for that date sit about 8 percent apart, and I could not establish whether they are drawn on the same basis. The ICO's verdict on the month was that deliverable stocks across both were the thinnest since February 2024, leaving the market with "limited buffers." Since then the price gap has widened. In June, robusta averaged 52 percent of the Colombian Milds price. Through August 19, on the ICO's daily indicator file, the Colombian Milds group, a basket of washed arabicas, averaged 383.92 US cents a pound against robusta's 182.79, or under 48 percent. The shortage is not of coffee. It is of one preparation of one species, in the right warehouse, on the right day.
Down at the shelf, everything arrives late. Nestle told investors in July that Nespresso's margin fell as higher coffee costs worked through its accounts, and that commodity prices reach that business later than the rest of its coffee operation "due to the longer supply chain." Profit in its wider coffee category slipped too, the company said, mainly on higher input costs only now hitting its books. In Europe, growth has slowed over four quarters on what it called "reduced pricing in coffee" along with the impact of an infant formula recall. In company language that means price is adding less to growth than it used to, not that anyone cut a shelf tag. Put the cost side next to the price side and my own reading is that the giants are still booking beans they bought high, while the part of their growth that came from charging more is thinning out.
Small roasters have no such cushion. Fresh Cup asked thirteen of them in March how they were holding on. Rick Evans of Evans Brothers Coffee in Idaho said that to keep the margins he had 18 months earlier, "we should increase our wholesale prices by more like 75 to 100%." He has not raised them anywhere near that much, and neither have his peers. Across the thirteen, Fresh Cup found increases running from none at all to 40 percent, with a median of around 15 percent.
So expect the supermarket price to keep easing slowly as the big roasters work through what they bought at last year's prices, and expect your cafe to move last and least, because on my read, though I have no figure for it, green coffee is a smaller share of a latte than rent and wages. The number that tells you where this is going is not the harvest forecast. It is how many bags are in the shed.
This piece is not investment advice. I hold no position in coffee futures and none in any company named here.
