Green coffee, the raw unroasted beans every roaster in the world buys, recently hit the highest prices ever recorded.
Not "highest in a few years." Highest ever. At the peak, raw coffee was trading at more than four US dollars a pound on the world market. A few years ago it sat closer to one dollar.
So what happened? It's not one thing. It's four things stacking on top of each other.
Here's the whole story, explained simply.
First: Coffee Is Traded Like Oil Or Gold
Most people don't realise this.
Coffee isn't priced by farmers or roasters. It's priced on a global exchange in New York, where it trades as a commodity called the "C price".
That's the benchmark price for arabica coffee, the good stuff.
Every roaster on earth, including us, pays a price anchored to that number. Quality coffee trades at a premium above it, but when the C price moves, everything moves.
And the C price moves on anything that threatens supply, anywhere in the world.
Which brings us to the weather.
Thing One: Brazil Had A Shocker
Brazil grows roughly 40% of the world's arabica. When Brazil sneezes, coffee prices catch a cold.
Over the past few years Brazil copped drought, then unseasonal frost, then more drought. Each one damaged trees and shrank harvests. And here's the kicker with coffee: trees take 3-4 years to mature. You can't just plant more and fix it next season. A bad year echoes for years.
Vietnam, the world's biggest robusta grower, had its own drought at the same time. Both major coffee types, squeezed at once. Global stockpiles of certified coffee fell to their lowest levels in decades.
Less coffee in the warehouses, same number of coffee drinkers. Prices go up. Simple.
Thing Two: The Red Sea Turned Shipping Upside Down
This is the part most people never hear about.
Around 12-15% of global trade normally sails through the Suez Canal, via a narrow pinch point called the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the bottom of the Red Sea. It's the shortcut between Asia, East Africa and Europe.
From late 2023, Houthi rebels in Yemen started attacking commercial ships in that strait. Shipping companies did the sensible thing: they stopped going that way.
The alternative? Sail all the way around the bottom of Africa.
That adds roughly 10-14 days and thousands of kilometres to a voyage.
Why does that matter for coffee?
- Ethiopian and Kenyan coffee, some of the best in the world, normally ships out through the Red Sea. Suddenly it's slower and dearer to move.
- Longer voyages tie up ships. A ship doing 40-day round trips instead of 30-day trips can carry less cargo per year. Fewer available ships means everyone bids up the price of space.
- Container costs jumped. At the worst of it, the cost of shipping a container on some routes multiplied several times over.
- Insurance went up for anything still braving the route.
None of this grows or shrinks a single coffee bean.
But it makes every bean more expensive to move, and slower to arrive. And when supply chains slow down, buyers panic-order early, which pushes prices up again.
(You may have also heard about the Strait of Hormuz.
That's a different chokepoint, in the Persian Gulf, and it's mostly about oil. But it still touches coffee indirectly: tension there pushes oil prices up, and oil is what powers every ship, truck and roaster in the chain.)
Thing Three: The Currency Problem
Coffee is priced in US dollars. We buy in Australian dollars.
When the Aussie dollar weakens against the US dollar, our buying power shrinks. The same bag of green coffee costs us more, even if the world price hasn't moved at all.
So Australian roasters can get hit twice: once by the global price, and again by the exchange rate. Some years the currency helps. Lately, mostly not.
Thing Four: The Traders Piled In
Here's the bit economists find interesting.
Most of the "coffee" traded on that New York exchange never gets roasted or drunk. It's bought and sold by investment funds betting on where the price goes next.
When supply looks tight (bad Brazilian weather, low warehouse stocks, shipping chaos) those funds pile in and buy, betting prices will rise. All that buying pushes prices higher, which attracts more buying. The price can overshoot what the actual beans-and-drinkers maths would justify.
It works in reverse too. When Brazil's next harvest looks big, funds sell fast and prices can drop 30% in months. That's why coffee has swung so wildly lately: record highs one season, sharp falls the next, then spikes again on a slow harvest.
Volatile is the polite word for it.
So What Does Fox Do About It?
Honestly? We plan ahead and we don't panic.
We buy forward. We work closely with our importers and commit to coffee months in advance, which smooths out the wild day-to-day swings. We're never buying at the top of a panic spike.
We buy on quality, not just price. Specialty coffee already trades above the C price because farmers are paid for quality. Those relationships are steadier than the open market.
We wear what we can. Rather than bouncing our prices around every time the market moves, we absorb the swings where possible and only adjust when something genuinely changes long-term.
The result: your bag of Fox Coffee stays consistent while the market behind it does cartwheels.
The Bottom Line
Green coffee prices went to record highs because of a perfect stack: bad weather in Brazil and Vietnam, a shipping crisis that rerouted global trade around Africa, a soft Aussie dollar, and traders amplifying every move.
Coffee is one of the most traded commodities on earth, and your morning cup sits at the end of a genuinely global chain. A farm in the tropics, a ship dodging a war zone, a currency market, and a trading floor in New York.
Kind of amazing it still lands in Geebung tasting brilliant, really.
Shop freshly roasted coffee here Roasted in Brisbane, shipped within 24 hours, roast date on every bag.
No bad coffee. No bad days.