Record since 1977: The price of your coffee could soar

The price of Arabica coffee reached its highest level in almost fifty years on Wednesday, with supply being limited due to concerns about harvests in Brazil, affected this year by significant droughts. The pound of arabica listed in New York recorded a record since 1977 on Wednesday, at 320.10 cents. At issue: fears of “bad harvests due to unfavorable weather conditions” earlier this year, particularly in Brazil, the world’s leading producer of coffee, and arabica in particular, which push producers to hold back their beans, despite the strong demand, explained Jack Scoville, analyst at Price Futures Group, at the start of the week, when prices were already reaching records.

After a “long dry and hot period”, coffee trees in Brazil benefited from “significant rains” in October, contributing to “exceptional flowering in most Arabica coffee-producing regions”, according to Guilherme Morya of Rabobank. But the analyst notes an “uncertainty about the progress of flowering, which raises significant concerns” about the 2025/26 harvest. If the flowers do not attach themselves to the branches, they will not be able to later turn into cherries, which contain the coffee beans.

Geopolitical factors such as shipping disruptions in the Red Sea, potential US tariffs and the European Union’s upcoming regulation on deforestation are helping to support commodity prices in general and coffee in particular. “In this context of uncertainty, farmers choose to only sell what is necessary, thus limiting the supply of coffee on the local market,” concludes Mr. Morya. These supply fears also concern Vietnam, the leading producer of the cheaper robusta variety, used for example for instant coffee.

Listed in London, robusta, which now trades around $5,200 per tonne, reached a record price of $5,829 in mid-September, unheard of since the opening of the current reference contract in 2008. This price would even be unprecedented since the 1970s, according to the Bloomberg agency, which relies on archives.

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