All Credit By Steve Kopack and Nidhi Sharma
A Global Coffee Price Spike Is About To Drip Into Your Mug:
Disruptive weather linked to climate change has dented coffee bean supplies, which industry experts warn could soon leave a bitter taste in consumers’ mouths.
Bad news at the breakfast table: Your morning cup of coffee could soon be getting more expensive.
The benchmark that sets the global price of arabica coffee has more than doubled over the past year, with 25% of that surge coming since the start of 2025. For the first time, one pound of arabica costs more than $5 on commodity markets.
“Expect retail coffee prices to keep grinding higher,” Bank of America analysts recently warned, even with “consumers showing signs of price fatigue.”
The price run-up is largely driven by climate-change-fueled weather patterns that have disrupted agricultural production around the world. Chocolate prices are up sharply this year for similar reasons, with higher temperatures and rainfall levels spoiling cacao yields in West Africa. In key coffee-growing regions across South and Central America, Southeast Asia, and East Africa, average temperatures are rising, and precipitation patterns are changing, lengthening and intensifying droughts in some places while boosting extreme flood events in others.
Brazil has been contending with its most severe drought in 70 years, causing water shortages and crop failures. In Vietnam, a months-long drought was followed by severe flooding last year during Typhoon Yagi, which brought extreme rainfall exacerbated by climate change. The two countries are the world’s top coffee producers, accounting for 56% of global supplies.
Climate impacts can increase the prevalence of diseases in coffee crops, reducing overall yields for farmers. Studies have shown that the arabica bean — which makes up roughly 60% of all coffee produced globally — is particularly vulnerable to climate change. And while U.S. coffee producers in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, California and elsewhere sell homegrown beans, their output is nowhere near enough to satisfy domestic demand, a reality shared by farmers of imported specialty crops from wasabi to goji berries.
“As the long-term climate changes, these weather conditions are far more likely to hit extremes and cause losses in coffee yields as well as volatility to coffee production,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a sustainable economist at Columbia University.
Retail coffee prices are expected to rise in a “pronounced” way during the first quarter of this year, the Bank of America analysts wrote in a note to clients. They expect major food companies — such as J.M. Smucker, which sells coffee under multiple brands, including Folgers, Dunkin' Donuts, Cafe Bustelo, and Keurig Dr. Pepper, which sells Lavazza coffee — to pass at least some of the cost increases on to consumers.
Neither company responded to requests for comment.
So far, higher coffee prices on commodity markets haven’t fully percolated into consumers’ mugs. Federal data released Wednesday showed the prices people paid for coffee, in all its forms, were roughly flat from December to January. However, they were up 3.1% from 12 months earlier last month — just slightly hotter than inflation overall. But instant coffee prices have been heating up, soaring 7.1% last month from a year earlier and by 4.4% just from December to January.
The overall cost of drip coffee has risen yearly since 2021, when it was $0.12 per cup, according to market researchers at NIQ. They estimated that one cup of drip coffee cost $0.18 at the start of this year, while coffee pods that get popped into Keurig machines have also trended higher. Those, too, have risen steadily, from $0.50 per cup in 2021 to $0.55 at the start of 2025.
Coffee prices to remain high in the coming months — and climate change is likely to bring more major blows to global food supplies over the next decade. The world must bring down greenhouse gas emissions much faster to reduce these accelerating risks and ramp up investments in agricultural resiliency systems, and other climate researchers warn.
The global coffee shortage has driven U.S. imported coffee bean supplies to its lowest level since November, according to data from Intercontinental Exchange. Arabica coffee production in Brazil is set to decline this year by 12.4% from last year, according to the Brazilian ministry of agriculture. If that production forecast proves accurate, it would be the lowest level since 2022, analysts at ING said last week.
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