Supply chain issues and a cold snap in Brazil is making your morning cup of coffee more expensive
It’s a bit of a perfect storm in the coffee world, with poor harvests, supply chain issues, and labor shortages setting off price increases for beans, labor, and transport, reports The Wall Street Journal. And with Brazil, the world’s biggest coffee producer, facing a cold snap and one of its worst droughts in almost 100 years, your coffee probably isn’t going to get less expensive any time soon. While companies like Starbucks and Nestlé are considering raising prices, big brands may actually be the most protected from these rising costs: According to the WSJ, Starbucks has already locked in favorable prices for over a year’s worth of coffee. But smaller operators don’t have that luxury. “These increases are making me nervous because one of the main tenets that we operate on is being able to make specialty coffee and make the pricing affordable,” Quincy Henry, a co-owner of Campfire Coffee in Tacoma, Wash., told The New York Times. “It’s got me thinking about how we’re going to survive.”
