Measuring and mitigating qualitative risk is a critical component of any trading company working with higher-end specialty coffee. Coffee is a perishable imported good. Anyone can travel to origin to taste and buy the best coffees in the world, but to actually deliver them on a predictable timeline with no loss of value through the transit process is a different skill set entirely. At Red Fox, we firmly believe in building stability through a strong, focused logistics department. Reliable delivery is an enormous part of our work on quality control and assurance. Delivering a coffee in optimal condition, exactly on time, involves thousands of steps coordinated in detail within and beyond our team. Every piece ultimately impacts the entire chain.
Why Are Logistics Important?
Coffee grows in the tropics along the equator—very little of it originates in the United States, Europe, or Asia, where we primarily deliver the finished product. That means that when we go origin to source coffee, cupping and quality assessment of each coffee is only the first step of a long chain of labor that needs to take place to get coffee to its port of destination on time and intact.
We’ve talked about signal detection, lot construction and everything that goes into making selections as carefully and unbiasedly as we can. We’ve also outlined how we take an active role in the milling process, where we ensure that both quality and traceability are preserved as coffee makes its way toward shipment.
The next stage in a coffee’s life, and one which can be endlessly difficult and complicated, is getting coffees to port of destination: packed into containers and shipped exactly on time with as little disruption to their cellular structure as possible.
Coffee has a decently long shelf-life, but at the highest level of specialty, coffees can start to show their age and degrade in quality pretty quickly if smooth transit isn’t a priority. Some of this depends on a coffee’s moisture and water activity, which we screen for as part of our quality control work during selection, but even a coffee with good, stable physical readings can lose quality if it’s subjected to humid, excessively hot, and/or volatile conditions on its shipping route. Since we’re shipping from the tropics, those are ubiquitous factors to be on guard against, and we will go the extra mile or pay the extra dollar to avoid that quality loss.
Timely delivery is also critical, since roasters plan their menus far in advance and need predictability and stability to do their best work.
What Do We Mean by Logistics?
Logistics is a term that encompasses basically anything involved in getting coffee from origin to destination. This includes the more obvious stages of getting coffee packed into containers and onto ships, as well as unloaded and delivered to warehouses, but there are much more granular steps that take place on either side of that chain.
For instance, we often take a more active role in making sure coffees are packed a certain way or held in a certain place to protect them from from climatic extremes, take a specific route from their farm of origin to collection centers, and/or from there to milling, and/or from mill to port.
Once coffees arrive at port of destination and get moved to their initial designated warehouse destinations, logistics include warehouse transfers, helping clients coordinate delivery into their warehouses, and more.
Origin-Side Specifics
We have on-the-ground teams at headquarters in Lima and Oaxaca who also move between other origins to ensure that, among many other things, we directly coordinate all logistical details. Logistics coordination throughout Peru and Mexico season is an all-day, nights-and-weekends job that involves putting out fires as they pop up along a complex terrain.
Logistics coordination entails:
- Getting coffee from the field to Lima and Oaxaca (in Peru and Mexico seasons, respectively).
- Getting lots contracted and approved.
- Putting physical contracts in place.
- Getting burlap coffee sacks printed with lot specifics.
- Assessing options for different shipping lines and finding the most direct and shortest even when they cost a little more; getting these approved by all necessary parties.
- Obtaining and ensuring reservations on shipping vessels no matter what.
- Getting exportation paperwork set up.
- Ensuring proper documentation.
- Aligning dry-milling dates so coffees can export asap.
During export seasons, appointments frequently change or are canceled by the dry mill or exporter due to bottlenecks as they process literal tons of coffee. Whenever something falls through, we have to make further arrangements as quickly and efficiently as possible. Close proximity to and communication with the coffee, growing regions, and ports makes rebooking appointments a lot easier and exporting a lot faster.
That work is heavily aided by local team members who intimately know the physical geography and traffic patterns of each region and can anticipate roadblocks due to weather (rains, mudslides, frosts, etc.) and other conditions such as protests, parades, celebrations or construction, all of which have the potential to cause shipment disruptions in ways unseen from abroad. We maintain a map of all these possibilities as we go through each season, plan heavily, and communicate constantly in order to make sure the coffees move quickly around every possibility.
Destination-Side Details
We track coffees regularly while they’re on the water and communicate and coordinate around arrivals based on real-time data. Once coffees have landed at port and stripped into the warehouse, there are additional logistical steps in making sure they’re able to make the most timely, efficient journey to clients’ roasters.
Once coffees are here, we have a stateside traffic and logistics manager who helps organize freight for roasters as needed.
Some stateside logistics details include:
- Ocean freight tracking and documentation.
- Internal and external communication of details and changes as they occur as well as relevant steps based on that information.
- Gathering freight quotes for clients from several vendor options including any special services needed while looking for both cost and time efficiencies.
- Tracking discrepancies between freight quotes and final bills, rebills, and upcharges by freight companies.
- Moving coffees between warehouses to more efficiently land and better distribute them.
- Assisting customers with claims when they experience issues with logistical third parties.
The Big Picture
A lot of what goes into top-tier logistics is minutiae, but it’s also important for us to track large-scale movements that can affect our work days, weeks, or months down the road.
Some big picture details include tracking larger news trends like:
- Container supply, demand, and concentration in different areas.
- Where port congestion is occurring or projected to occur.
- Shipping line consolidations.
- Labor negotiations and potential strikes for port, rail, trucking, and other related freight industries.
- Ocean route congestion or blockages.
- Tariffs.
Perceived threats in the larger logistics industry affect actual outcomes. If freighters think there will be slowdowns or stoppages in a port, they will reroute accordingly, affecting the overall picture. If they expect their operating costs to increase, they will increase the amount they charge to offset that in advance. Suspected or even hypothetical future trends are movers with real-world implications, so staying on top of them is critical.
If any issue starts to seem like it may affect our operations or decision-making, the sourcing team addresses it right away using options like alternative routes, staggered arrivals, overland transit where applicable, bringing in new origins to fill gaps, and more.
Going the Extra Mile, Paying the Extra Dollar
We plan our position carefully all year including a constant flow of logistical detail in our decision-making: where which coffee should go, at what particular moment, to ensure we’re getting the right coffees to the right people. In order to create as much stability as possible in an increasingly complex logistical world, it’s important to us to go the extra mile and/or spend the extra dollar when it comes to logistics.
The difference between the fastest route and the slowest route can mean no more than a few thousand dollars, adding around 5-20 cents per green pound to avoid immense risk to both us and our roaster partners. It’s part of why our coffees aren’t always the cheapest possible, and why they are stable and reliable in both quality and arrival timeline.
We focus on using the most stable, reliable carriers over the most stable, reliable avenues. We avoid transshipments whenever possible to mitigate the amount of time coffees spend in containers, at hot ports, and/or on the ocean, weathering climatic change. When we have a great experience with a carrier, we make note and prioritize working together where possible. When we have a bad experience with a carrier, we also make note of it and avoid working together in the future. We also encourage roaster partners to document their experiences with carriers and do the same.
Some times and places where we’ve made strategic choices even if they cost more or took more work:
- In 2025 as we planned for Mexico season with the threat of tariffs looming, we decided to truck our coffees overland through Laredo and avoid extra time and potential for extra charges that might land if we waited.
- Similarly, we moved to get containers out of Ethiopia faster than ever this year in order to strip as many in before any potential tariffs solidified.
- We’ve been shifting oversea routes to land more coffee on the East Coast as West Coast routes became more expensive and unpredictable over the last several years, then moving it overland to other destinations as needed to minimize volatile sea travel.
- We regularly pay more for sea routes that avoid or minimize transshipment to reduce time on the ocean or at hot, humid ports where coffees are vulnerable to disruption.
- We sometimes short ship containers so that coffees don’t sit around waiting until we have an FCL.
- In Peru (specifically Puno because we store the coffee in Lima a bit longer), we transfer parchment to GrainPro for storage.
- And many, many more.
Dedicated Logistics: More Important Than Ever
The global logistics landscape has shifted dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic, and we’ve found that having dedicated logistics specialists is critical to our work. It’s a lot of work and a huge part of providing stability and value to roaster partners.
Since 2020, we’ve seen so many large-scale global logistics challenges including:
- Containers backing up in specific ports after the COVID-19 pandemic ground global shipping to a halt in 2020, creating long-term container shortages and short- and long-term chain reactions.
- Labor strikes both in the US and origin countries that required selective routing, often causing port backlogs.
- The long-term closure of the Suez canal, leading to long-term reroutes around the Horn of Africa which is more expensive, climatically harsher, and more time-consuming than the Suez route (still ongoing).
- Various weather events that have created complexity in routing.
- Surges in demand around milling and shipping due to C market and local market competition, leading to increases in rolled containers.
- Freight industry consolidation and generally rising costs.
- Major volatility in freight costs and difficulty in making predictable cost estimates.
- Tariffs and tariff uncertainty.
- And many more.
As we’ve all come to better understand the interconnectedness of the global logistics infrastructure that brings coffee from origin to destination, we’ve worked harder and harder and gotten better and better at logistics as a primary focus. Without high-quality logistics, it’s impossible to deliver high-quality coffee in any consistent way. It may not be as glamorous as cupping, but it’s just as critical in making great coffee happen.
Interested in sourcing coffee with us? Reach out at info@redfoxcoffeemerchants.com. To learn more about our work, check out our journal and follow us on Instagram @redfoxcoffeemerchants.