Specialty Coffee Wiki

C-market

Properties3
descriptionThe 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.
tagsconcept, trade, prices, supply-chain, futures
aliasesC price, C-price, Coffee C, Coffee C futures, KC, KC1!, ICE Coffee C, Arabica futures, Coffee futures, Coffee C futures contract, Coffee C Metric

18 min read

C-market

The C-market is a single futures contract traded in New York, and it is the number that most of the world’s coffee is valued against. When a trader, an importer or a farmer says “the C is at 250,” they mean this contract.

Its formal name is the Coffee C contract, ticker KC, traded on Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Futures U.S.12 It prices arabica — the fine-flavoured species this whole wiki is about, as opposed to Robusta, which has its own separate London contract.23

The single most useful thing to know about it: it is a price for coffee in general, not for any particular coffee. It carries no information about quality at all.4

What the contract actually is

A futures contract is a binding agreement to buy or sell a set quantity of something at a set price on a set future date. Its purpose is not shopping — it is hedging, letting an importer or a large roaster lock in a price months ahead so a bad harvest somewhere doesn’t blow up their business.24 Most contracts are closed out financially and never result in anybody receiving coffee.

ICE publishes the specification. The load-bearing parts:1

ExchangeICE Futures U.S. (New York). Its trading hub is called NYCC, for New York Coffee & Cocoa, and the product name on the screen is Coffee “C” Futures1
TickerKC — the nearest-expiry month is written KC1! on data platforms, and that is the number quoted as “the C”2
Contract size37,500 pounds of green coffee — roughly 283 bags of 60 kg4
Price quotationUS cents and hundredths of a cent per pound12
Smallest move allowed5/100 of a cent per pound, which works out to $18.75 per contract1
Value of a one-cent move$375 per contract1
Delivery monthsMarch, May, July, September, December
SettlementPhysical delivery — this contract ends in somebody actually taking coffee out of a warehouse, not in a cash payment1
First notice daySeven business days before the first business day of the delivery month — after this date a buyer holding the contract can be handed real coffee1
Last trading dayOne business day before the last notice day1
Delivery pointsExchange-licensed warehouses at the Ports of New York District, Virginia, New Orleans, Houston, Miami, Bremen/Hamburg, Antwerp and Barcelona
CertificationA Notice of Certification is issued after testing the grade of the beans and cup-testing for flavour

Two of those rows explain why the number moves in the increments it does. Because a contract is 37,500 pounds, a one-cent change in the quoted price is worth exactly 375** to whoever holds it, and the smallest permitted flicker — five hundredths of a cent — is worth **18.75.1 This is also the arithmetic that converts a headline into a price you can compare to an invoice: ICE quotes cents per pound, and multiplying by 2.2046 gives US dollars per kilogram.5

Note the certification row. There is a quality gate — coffee has to pass grading and cupping to be deliverable at all — but it is a pass/fail threshold for “exchange grade,” not a scale. Nothing above that bar earns a cent more on the exchange.

How to read a contract name

Only five months trade, and each has a one-letter code inherited from the wider futures world: H for March, K for May, N for July, U for September, Z for December.6 A specific contract is written as the ticker, then the month letter, then the year — so KCU26 is the September 2026 Coffee C contract.65 Anyone reading a trade publication or a broker statement will meet coffee prices in this form rather than as “the C.”

To verify

Which last-trading-day rule applies. ICE’s own specification page, read directly, gives the last trading day as “one business day prior to last notice day.”1 A widely used market-data provider instead states it as “eight business days prior to the last business day of the delivery month.”6 These are two different formulations and this note has not reconciled them; the two may or may not land on the same calendar date. The ICE rulebook is the authority and was not consulted. Do not use either phrasing to calculate a real deadline.

Options on the contract

Alongside the futures, ICE lists options on Coffee C — the right, rather than the obligation, to buy or sell one Coffee C futures contract. For a roaster or importer this is the gentler hedging instrument: it caps the damage from a price move without locking in a position that can itself go wrong.

Each option sits on one Coffee C futures contract, so the same 37,500 pounds.7 They are American style, meaning the holder can exercise at any point up to expiry rather than only on the final day.7 The smallest price move is finer than the futures — 1/100 of a cent per pound, or 3.75 per contract** — and strike prices step in increments ICE's page writes as **"0.025 cents per pound” — a mixed unit in the source itself, so read it against the rulebook before relying on it.7 Anything one tick or more in the money at expiration is exercised automatically, so a profitable option is not lost by inattention.7

The month structure is where options differ most usefully. Regular series follow the futures months — March, May, July, September, December — but ICE also lists serial series for the seven gap months: January, February, April, June, August, October and November.7 Each serial option references the next regular futures month as its underlying, which means a buyer can hedge a shipment landing in, say, February without waiting for a March contract to be the only thing available.

The twenty origins, and what they’re worth

The contract accepts green coffee from about twenty approved producing countries, and ICE assigns each one a fixed premium or discount against the par price. This is the closest the commodity market comes to admitting that origin matters, and it is worth reading as a blunt statement of how the trade has historically ranked producing countries:1

TierCountries
1,000-point premiumColombia, Costa Rica, Kenya
500-point premiumGuatemala
ParMexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea, Panama, Tanzania, Uganda, Honduras, Peru
100-point discountBurundi, Rwanda, Venezuela, India
400-point discountDominican Republic, Ecuador
600-point discountBrazil; Vietnam as of May 2027

Where the coffee is delivered matters too: New York and Virginia are par, New Orleans, Miami and Houston take a 0.50 cents per pound discount, and the European ports — Bremen/Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona — take 1.25 cents per pound.1

That Brazil sits at the bottom of the origin table while producing most of the world’s arabica is not a quality judgement so much as a volume one. The discount reflects abundance and shipping economics, not the cup.

Why almost nobody pays the C price

Physical green coffee is essentially never bought at the flat C.4 It is bought as C plus or minus a differential — a premium or discount negotiated for that specific lot, reflecting origin, grade, cup quality and how much of it exists.14 A specialty contract described as “80 over” means eighty cents per pound above whatever the C is on the pricing date.2

So the C is the floor slab, and the differential is the building. Green coffee buying walks through the same arithmetic from the roaster’s side; Direct trade is largely an argument about how far above the slab a price should sit and who verifies it.

This structure is also why the C’s indifference to quality is a feature rather than a bug for traders — and a chronic problem for producers. Differentials are where quality is rewarded,4 and a farmer who has no buyer negotiating a differential simply receives the commodity number.

The forward curve

Futures for different months trade at different prices, and the shape of that curve is a market opinion about the near future.2

  • Backwardation — near months more expensive than far months. Somebody urgently needs coffee now; supply is tight.
  • Contango — far months more expensive than near ones. Coffee is comfortable, and traders holding stock get paid to carry it.

A specialty buyer reads this the way a sailor reads a barometer. A sharply backwardated curve means the origins are short and differentials are about to get harder to negotiate.

Where it came from

For most of the second half of the twentieth century the world coffee price was not set by a market at all — it was negotiated. The International Coffee Agreement, first signed in 1962 and administered by the International Coffee Organization from 1963, ran an export quota system: when the ICO’s indicator price fell below target, quotas tightened; when it rose above, quotas loosened.8 Successive agreements followed in 1968, 1976, 1983, 1994, 2001, 2007 and 2022.8

The quota system collapsed on 4 July 1989, when the ICO could not agree new export allocations — Brazil, the dominant producer, resisted cuts to its own quota.8 The consequence was immediate and brutal: the average indicator price fell from US1.34 per pound to US0.77 per pound across the first five years of the free market, a drop of about 43%.8

That collapse is the hinge in modern coffee economics. Everything this wiki covers on the sourcing side — Direct trade, Premiumisation, the auction channel at Cup of Excellence and Best of Panama, the certification schemes, the entire idea of Specialty coffee as a separate market — grew in the space left when the price stopped being negotiated and started being traded.

Where it may be going: pounds to tonnes

The pound is an oddity here. Almost everyone who actually grows, ships or buys coffee works in kilograms and 60-kilo bags, and then converts into cents per pound to talk to New York. A change to that is reportedly coming.

To verify

A metric replacement for the pound-based contract. The research behind this note reports an ICE regulatory submission (No. 25-157) describing a new Coffee “C” Metric futures contract intended to coexist with, and eventually replace, the contract described on this page.9 The reported specification: symbol AC, contract size 10 metric tons, quoted in US dollars per metric ton, with a minimum move of 1.00 per tonne** equal to **10 per contract. The reported transition is that March 2028 would be the final expiry of the current pound-based Coffee C future and May 2028 the first expiry of the metric contract, with the name “Coffee ‘C’” then covering both.9 The same filing is the source for the often-repeated line that Coffee C has been a benchmark for “over 60 years.”

This is flagged rather than stated because it could not be confirmed here. The filing is a primary ICE document, which is the right kind of source, but the PDF was not machine-readable when checked, and ICE’s live Coffee C Futures specification page makes no mention of a metric contract or any transition.1 Regulatory submissions also describe proposals, which can be amended or withdrawn — a 2028 date is far enough out that nothing here should be treated as settled. Check ICE directly before planning around it.

If it does proceed, the practical effect on specialty buyers is modest — differentials are negotiated per lot either way — but every spreadsheet, contract template and price chart in the trade that assumes cents per pound would need rebuilding.

What moves it

The C is a supply story far more than a demand story. Demand for coffee is famously steady; supply is not. The drivers repeatedly named across the trade literature:410

  • Harvest size in the big origins — Brazil, Colombia and Vietnam between them dominate world supply, and Brazil dominates arabica specifically.
  • Weather, above all frost in Brazil, which can remove a chunk of next year’s crop in a single night.
  • Certified stock levels in the exchange warehouses, and shipping and logistics constraints.
  • Speculation. A large share of trading volume belongs to funds and banks that will never touch a bean, which is why the C can move hard on news that has nothing to do with anybody’s farm.

The C is not the ICO price

Two different numbers get called “the coffee price” and they are not the same thing.

The C is a futures price for one deliverable contract. The ICO composite indicator price (I-CIP) is a statistical average the International Coffee Organization publishes across four market groups (Colombian Milds, Other Milds, Brazilian Naturals, Robustas), blending arabica and robusta. The I-CIP averaged 248.90 US cents/lb in June 2026, down 2.8% on May; within that month it fell to 231.96 on 9 June — its lowest in nearly two years — then rebounded 17.4% to 272.39 by month end.3 March 2026 averaged 273.70 and April 266.24.3

Those swings inside a single month are the honest picture of what producers are living with, and they are the reason Specialty coffee spent thirty years building a way to price a lot on its own merits instead.

To verify

The 40-year range and the 1.28 average.** The research report behind this note states that over roughly 40 years the C has moved between lows near **US0.50/lb and highs around US3.00/lb**, averaging about **US1.28/lb.11 This comes from one roaster’s blog, with no methodology and no date range given, and ICE’s own historical price series would be the strict source. The figures are also plainly stale against the market described above — the C traded well over $4.00/lb in 2025.2 Treat the range as illustrative, not as data.

To verify

“Coffee is the second most traded commodity after oil.” Repeated constantly in coffee marketing, including by one of the sources here.10 The research report behind this note explicitly cautions that the ranking is “industry-conventional rather than a formally standardized statistic” and depends entirely on the metric and period chosen. No primary trade-volume series was found here that supports it. Do not repeat it as fact.

To verify

Specific price levels quoted in the sources are snapshots, not facts about the market. One technical explainer illustrates a backwardated curve with arabica at 414.20 cents/lb; the article does not date that observation in its text, and the figure appears to come from a chart screenshot timestamped 14 March 2025.2 A separate financial quote site showed 277.25 with a previous close of 275.75, contract month unstated.12 Both are moments, not levels; check ICE for a current number.

To verify

Whether the contract’s deliverable is formally “washed arabica.” A technical explainer states plainly that the Coffee C prices “washed arabica,”4 and this is the standard trade shorthand. ICE’s own specification page as read here describes certification by grade testing and cup testing for flavour without using the word “washed.”1 The ICE rulebook is the authority and was not consulted. The species — arabica — is not in doubt; the processing qualifier is.

To verify

That the C sits at or below the cost of production. A transparency-focused roaster states that the C-market price “has been lower or equal to the cost of coffee production in many countries,” locking producers into “an endless cycle of borrowing money from large banks to finance their coffee farms, then paying back the banks at the end of the season with little or no profit.”10 This is an industry description, not a costing study: no country, year, or production-cost figure is attached to it, and real profitability varies enormously by farm and harvest. The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide is the nearest thing to a public dataset on what buyers actually pay. See Ngäbe-Buglé coffee labour for the part of the cost structure that no price series captures.

Why it matters

Read a coffee bag and you will see a farm name, an altitude, a variety and a tasting note. None of that reaches the C-market. The exchange knows only that some green arabica passed a grading test and sits in a warehouse in Antwerp.

That gap is specialty coffee. The 80-point line in Coffee scoring, the Cup of Excellence auction, the Coffee Value Assessment, every transparency report a roaster publishes — all of it exists to attach a price to information the commodity market structurally cannot see. Understanding the C is understanding what specialty is defined against.

And it still sets the floor. A record auction lot at Best of Panama is priced in its own universe, but the overwhelming majority of coffee in the world — including much of what specialty roasters buy — is still quoted as a number added to whatever New York did that morning.

Footnotes

  1. Intercontinental Exchange — Coffee C Futures contract specifications — confirmed via WebFetch; primary source for contract size, quotation, delivery months, delivery points, origin premium/discount tiers, the Notice of Certification, the NYCC hub and screen product name, the 5/100-cent tick and $18.75 tick value, physical delivery, and the first-notice-day and last-trading-day rules ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16

  2. Algrano — What the C?!? The C-market explained — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the KC1! convention, cents/lb vs USD/tonne, contango and backwardation, the differential convention and the 414.20 cents/lb chart figure ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

  3. International Coffee Organization — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the June 2026 composite indicator price, the intra-month low and rebound, and the March/April 2026 averages ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Coffee & Tea Culture — The Coffee Futures Market: How the C-Price Is Set — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the “washed arabica” description, the 283-bag equivalence, “almost no physical coffee is bought at the flat C-price” and “differentials are where quality is rewarded” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  5. Trabocca — Coffee futures: the basics for coffee roasters — cited via research report only; source of the cents-per-pound to USD-per-kilogram conversion factor (×2.2046) and the ticker-plus-month-code-plus-year naming convention ↩ ↩2

  6. Barchart — Coffee Sep ‘26 (KCU26) contract specifications — cited via research report only; source of the H/K/N/U/Z month codes and of the conflicting “eight business days prior to the last business day of the delivery month” last-trading-day phrasing ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Intercontinental Exchange — Coffee C Options — confirmed via WebFetch; primary source for the options underlying, American exercise style, 1/100-cent tick and 3.75 tick value, the strike increment as written there ("0.025 cents per pound”), automatic exercise at one tick in the money, and the regular and serial options series months ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  8. International Coffee Agreement — Wikipedia — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 1962 signing, the quota mechanism, the 4 July 1989 collapse and the US1.34 → US0.77 price fall ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  9. Intercontinental Exchange — Regulatory Submission No. 25-157, Coffee “C” Metric Futures — attempted via WebFetch but the PDF was not machine-readable; reported contents of the metric contract proposal are cited via research report only and are flagged as unverified ↩ ↩2

  10. Red Rooster Coffee — What is the C-Market? — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the “second most traded commodity after oil” claim and the cost-of-production and producer-borrowing description ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  11. Abyss Coffee — The C Market: Understanding Coffee Prices and Coffee Markets — cited via research report only; source of the US0.50–3.00 range and US$1.28 average ↩

  12. Investing.com — US Coffee C Futures — cited via research report only; source of the 277.25 quote ↩

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