As promised, we’re coming to you today with another origin and shipment update with specific focus on the current and anticipated situation in Colombia and Peru, typically our two largest and most critical sources from the Southern Hemisphere. The C Market has been a rollercoaster ride for the past 60 days, the South American harvest is as volatile as we’ve seen it with the Brazilian frosts and competition for parchment in both Colombia and Peru, and the global shipping situation showing no signs of improvement as the 2021 finish line appears on the horizon.
Fret not. We will be flush with Peruvian coffee on all three coasts come fall as well as preparing shipments for Korea, Japan, Australia, and Europe. Colombia, Ecuador, and Rwanda will follow suit from the Southern Hemisphere harvests. Our primary objective is to get fresh coffee into your roasteries as quickly as ever.
With that said, you may have noticed that the time we would usually have opened forward booking for Colombia has passed. As we’ll delve into below, the current harvest and shipment situation in Colombia will leave all green coffee sources competing at higher prices for much smaller volumes of quality Colombia coffee. Because of that, we strongly recommend forward booking the majority of your South America volume in Peru, rather than Colombia. We will not be able to offer a substantial amount of Colombia coffee to forward book this year and the quality we’re seeing out of Peru will absolutely meet the full scope of your menu needs. In order to give you the time to outfit your single origin and blend menu accordingly, we’re extending forward book pricing through September 15. To talk through your menu with us or make a commitment, get in touch.
Supply, Demand & the C Market
The C Market price surged 30+% in July before backing off to the $1.80/lb zone. Three frosts in Brazil have been the driving force in conjunction with dwindling green coffee stocks across both the global north and the Brazilian reserves themselves. The current Brazil crop could be down as much as 10% (roughly four million bags). Long term damage assessment is still in process, though experts forecast even heavier losses in the 2022/23 season due to these three frosts and the horrible drought situation in 2020. The extent of the damage won’t be fully known until after the first rains trigger flowering in the months ahead. It is highly likely that another market spike is tethered to those fall reports.
Colombia
Along with a C Market in flux, the Colombia harvest outlook also appears bleak for the upper end specialty segment. Due to an overly wet harvest season and aggressive internal competition for parchment, clean, sweet, complex 85+ coffee is incredibly difficult to come by. We expect our own purchases to be down somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% from this first semester’s harvest versus 2020. Fabian is currently vetting weekly deliveries to the Asorcafe warehouse in Inzá, Cauca and will soon move on to cup through Nariño warehouse deliveries. Our supply will be extremely limited through year-end 2021. Expect pricing in excess of $4.50/lb ex-warehouse on all of our offerings this season.
Peru
We are knee deep in the Peru buying season with our first eight containers headed to dry mills in Piura and Lima. Coffees from across the north—Amazonas and Cajamarca—were first-in first-out of our Lima lab this year and will therefore hit the water first, along with Cusco coffees from our primary partners at Valle Inca. With vessels scheduled for September departure, we expect our first arrivals to land in October in both New Jersey and Houston, TX. Our first Incahuasi containers hit the water in September as well.
Our strongest cooperative partners remain competitive in their respective regions, both in quality and quantity. Due to Valle Inca’s location in Yanatile and Lares, they’ve faced the most competition for parchment, but Prudencio’s history with his producer members has proven stalwart.
Shipping & Logistics
Transporting coffee remains the specialty segment’s most critical 2021 impasse. Container availability is bleak. Vessel availability is a crap shoot and tremendously expensive. Routes have been cut down, equating to longer transship times. Covid-related port restrictions have led to container ships sitting off the coasts of their destinations for potentially multiple months.
We elected to address the worst situation, Port of Oakland, by landing a healthy dose of our South American offerings in Houston. We will store more coffee at Dupuy Houston than prior years and will also move coffee from Port of Houston directly into The Annex. All East African offerings will land in Port of New Jersey and be railed across the country. Ensuring fresh delivery is critical to us and we’re constantly evaluating and adjusting plans to get coffees to their destination as quickly as possible.
As always, as in all things, we’re here for you—so get in touch to ask us questions, talk, or anything else you need.