Market & pricing (17)
- Australian café culture — How post-war Italian migration turned Australia into an espresso country with its own drink names, why Melbourne became the world’s most-cited coffee city, and the rare case of a market where the independents beat the global chains outright.
- Buying consortium — When several roasters agree in advance to split one auction lot and the bill, and one of them places the bid — the arrangement behind most modern record coffee prices, and the reason a record price is not one buyer’s number.
- C-market — The New York futures contract that sets the world price of arabica coffee — what it actually is, what it can and cannot tell you about a bag of coffee, and why almost nobody pays it.
- China coffee market — How a tea-drinking country became one of the loudest bidders at the top of the coffee market — and why the buyers there look different from Western ones.
- Coffee supply chain — The physical journey a coffee makes after it leaves the mill — the exporter who must sign for it, the sealed container that carries it, the weeks it spends at sea, and the importer’s warehouse it sits in before a roaster ever smells it.
- Coffee trade shows — The travelling industry fairs where coffee actually gets bought, sold and judged — above all World of Coffee, the Specialty Coffee Association’s show brand, which now runs five editions a year across four continents.
- Direct trade — The most-used and least-defined phrase in specialty coffee sourcing — a roaster buying green coffee straight from a producer, with no certifier, no auditor and no agreed meaning behind the words.
- Ethiopia Commodity Exchange — The state-backed marketplace that has stood between Ethiopian farmers and the export market since 2008 — the institution that graded the country’s coffee, and, for nearly a decade, erased the name of whoever grew it.
- Green coffee buying — How raw unroasted coffee actually gets from a farm to a roastery — the people in the middle, the two numbers that make up the price, and the four ways a roaster can buy.
- Green coffee trading — The merchant layer of coffee — the handful of global firms that buy, finance, hedge, ship and resell raw coffee by the container, what customs and world statistics actually see, and why published estimates of the market’s size disagree so badly.
- Japan coffee market — A flat, enormous, century-old drinking market built on instant and canned coffee — sitting underneath the single most persistent record-buyer at the world’s top coffee auctions.
- Nairobi Coffee Exchange — Kenya’s national coffee auction — a weekly public sale on Haile Selassie Avenue that has set the price of Kenyan coffee since the 1930s, catalogues lots by bean size rather than by farm, and pays growers through a state-mandated settlement system.
- Premiumisation — Why a small group of buyers — largely East Asian — pay prices for auction coffee that look impossible next to the wider market.
- Producer cooperatives — The seller-side pooling structure behind most of the world’s coffee — smallholders too small to fill a container, get certified, or reach an exporter on their own, joining together to do all three, and the economics that makes them do it.
- Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide — An annual, free report that publishes what buyers actually paid for specialty green coffee — built from anonymised real contracts donated by exporters, importers and roasters, so prices can be discussed without reference to the commodity market.
- Third wave coffee — The name the trade gave itself around 2000 for treating coffee as a named agricultural product rather than a commodity drink — where the phrase came from, who built it, and why the date is disputed.
- Vietnam coffee market — The country that grows the world’s Robusta — second in volume, almost invisible in specialty — and what it would take for that to change.