Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide

The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide is a free annual report that answers a question the coffee trade spent decades unable to answer honestly: what does specialty coffee actually sell for?

It works by collecting real, signed contracts. Exporters, importers, roasters and support organisations volunteer their own transaction records — price, volume, cup score, origin, certifications — and the project strips out every identifying detail and publishes the resulting price distributions.¹² Nobody’s counterparty, farm or margin is exposed; what survives is the shape of the market.

The point of the exercise is stated plainly by everyone involved: to let buyers and sellers negotiate from real transaction prices rather than commodity futures.¹ That is a direct swipe at the C-market, the New York arabica contract that prices coffee in general and carries no information about quality at all. The Guide’s organising idea is that a coffee scoring 88 and a coffee scoring 81 should not be discussed as the same commodity plus a haggled differential.²

What it publishes

The Guide does not report individual sales. It reports distributions — for a given slice of the market, what the low, middle and high prices looked like — sorted along three variables:²¹

Variable	What it means
Quality	The cup score from cupping, in bands running from the low 80s to the upper 90s2
Quantity	Lot size, grouped into volume “buckets” — a one-pallet microlot and a full-container purchase are different markets2
Origin	The producing country2

Prices are reported on an FOB basis — “free on board”, the exporter’s price at the port of shipment, bundling production, processing, transport and export costs into a single number.² This matters when reading the Guide against anything else: an FOB price is not a farm-gate price, and the gap between the two is where much of the argument in Direct trade lives. Green coffee buying sets out the four different numbers that all get called “the price of coffee”.

Certifications and region are collected alongside the headline variables.³

Who produces it

The Guide is produced by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, under a project called Transparent Trade Coffee.¹² Its own contact address is contact@transactionguide.coffee, and the report is distributed free as a PDF, in English and Spanish.⁴⁵

The 2024 edition, released in January 2025, labels itself Edition 7, which places the first edition around the 2018 harvest data — matching trade-press reporting of a first release in January 2019.⁵⁶ The 2021 edition presents itself the same way, as one in a continuing annual series.⁷

The numbers, and how big the sample is

The clearest published walkthrough of an edition’s contents comes from the importer Royal Coffee, reading the 2018–19 Guide. It reports that the dataset behind that edition covered 17,315 contracts, representing 279.4 million pounds of green coffee worth over US$625 million, contributed by data donors that grew from 21 to 57 — somewhere between 6% and 10% of all specialty coffee traded.²

Two figures from that reading are worth holding onto. The median price across all quality tiers was US2.80 per pound FOB**, and the median for the more ordinary quality buckets sat at roughly **US1.60 per pound — which is approximately the Fairtrade minimum price.² Read together, those say something uncomfortable and useful at once: specialty coffee genuinely does clear well above commodity levels, and the bottom of “specialty” clears at about the level of a floor price designed for coffee that is not specialty at all.

To verify — every figure on this page is second-hand

None of the numbers above were read off a Guide document here. The 2024 PDF was retrieved but is a graphics-heavy report whose tables could not be extracted by automated reading, and the Guide’s own website returned navigation only.⁴⁵ The contract count, poundage, donor counts, market-coverage range and both median prices all come from one importer’s blog post summarising the 2018–19 edition.² They are plausible and internally consistent, but a single commercial source is not a dataset. Anyone quoting a Transaction Guide price should download the current edition and read it directly.

To verify — who leads the project

Royal Coffee names Dr. Peter Roberts and Chad Trewick as the people behind the Guide.² Roberts is widely referred to in industry discussion as the academic lead at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, and the research behind this note explicitly flags that attribution as an inference — neither name appears in the 2021 or 2024 PDFs as read.⁷⁵ The Transparent Trade Coffee website did not resolve when checked here, so the project’s own statement of its leadership could not be consulted. Emory’s institutional authorship is well supported;¹² the individual names are not.

To verify — how many data donors, and when

Three different donor counts circulate and they do not obviously line up. Royal Coffee describes growth from 21 to 57 donors around the 2018–19 edition.² The roaster Five Senses describes an earlier version built on 38 producers, roasters, importers and exporters, and the 2023 report as drawing on 115 data donors.³ These are probably snapshots of a growing dataset at different moments rather than a contradiction, but no edition-by-edition series was confirmed, and the 115 figure rests on a single blog.

To verify — what the Guide does not report

The publicly available descriptions consistently list quality, lot size, origin and certifications.²¹³ Altitude and processing method are not named as reported variables in any source consulted here. Do not assume the Guide breaks prices down by washed versus natural or by metres above sea level; if it does, that was not established.

What it is not

It is not a competition, an auction or a price index.

There is no bidding, no winner and no ranking. Unlike Cup of Excellence or Best of Panama — where a named lot from a named farm fetches a public headline price — the Guide deliberately anonymises everything, precisely so that commercially sensitive contracts can be donated at all.²¹ No buyer is named, no farm is named, no score belongs to anybody. See Green coffee auctions for the mechanism that works the opposite way, and Premiumisation for why an auction record and a median contract price describe different universes.

Nor is it a live quote. It is descriptive and observational — a record of what already happened in recent harvests, not a forecast or a settlement price.² You cannot price a contract off it the way you can off the C-market; you can only check whether the number you were offered looks normal.

Why it matters

Specialty coffee has always had a measurement problem on the money side. It built elaborate machinery for scoring quality — Coffee scoring, the Q Grader licence, the Coffee Value Assessment — and then priced the results against a futures contract that cannot see any of it.² Roasters publish transparency reports, but each one is a sample of one company’s buying, usually presented favourably.

The Transaction Guide is the closest thing the sector has to a public, multi-party, non-promotional answer. Its authority rests entirely on volume of donated contracts, which is why the donor count is the most important number in it — and why the project’s own estimate that it captures somewhere in the region of a tenth of specialty trade is stated up front rather than buried.² It is a partial map, honestly labelled as one.

Related

• C-market — the commodity benchmark the Guide exists to argue against
• Green coffee buying — the channels and price bases (FOB, farm gate, spot, forward) the Guide’s numbers sit inside
• Direct trade — the sourcing model whose price claims the Guide gives a way to check
• Premiumisation — why the auction headline and the median contract price live in different worlds
• Specialty coffee — the grade being priced
• Coffee scoring · Cupping · Q Grader · Coffee Value Assessment — where the cup score in each contract comes from
• Green coffee auctions · Cup of Excellence · Best of Panama · Alliance for Coffee Excellence — price discovery by bidding rather than by survey
• Buying consortium — how roasters split lots too expensive to buy alone
• Coffee supply chain · Producer cooperatives — the actors who donate the contracts
• International Coffee Organization — the other public publisher of coffee price data, working from indicators rather than contracts
• Ngäbe-Buglé coffee labour — the cost buried underneath every FOB price in the dataset

Official links

• Official site — Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide

Footnotes

1. Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) — The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Emory University authorship, the “exporters, importers, roasters and other support organizations” donor description, the anonymised-contract methodology and the “real transaction prices rather than commodity futures” purpose ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Royal Coffee — Unpacking the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the three variables, the FOB basis, the Peter Roberts and Chad Trewick attribution, the 17,315 contracts / 279.4 million pounds / US625 million figures, the 21→57 donor growth, the 6–10% coverage estimate and the US2.80 and US$1.60 medians ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

3. Five Senses Coffee — Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide 2023 — cited via research report only; source of the 115 data donors and the earlier 38-contributor figure ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide — official site — fetched here; returned navigation and language options (English/Español) only, no report content ↩ ↩²

5. 2024 Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide (PDF, released January 2025) — fetched here; the contact address contact@transactionguide.coffee was legible but the report’s tables were not machine-readable. Edition 7 labelling and release date cited via the research report ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Daily Coffee News — Another Giant Step for Transparency with the 2018 Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide (10 January 2019) — the site returned HTTP 403 to automated reading; the first-edition date cited via the research report ↩

7. 2021 Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide (PDF) — cited via research report only ↩ ↩²