Coffee prices triple, putting pressure on roasters, cafes, customers 

The price of green coffee beans has nearly tripled in recent years and coffee roasters in Eugene are feeling the pain. They can absorb only so much of the cost increase before passing it along to customers to keep their businesses percolating.

“I’ve been in this business for 21 years, and I’ve never seen it like this,” said Eric Pierce, owner of Caffé Pacori.

Before the pandemic, Pierce said it was common for roasters to pay less than $2 per pound for green coffee beans from Brazil. Now, it’s common to pay nearly $7 per pound for the same beans, and that’s before factoring in new 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports, which took effect in August.

Roasters are the link between coffee farms and your morning cup. They purchase green, raw beans from importers or directly from farms, then roast them to develop flavor before selling to cafes or directly to consumers. It takes skill to carefully control roasting time, temperature and airflow to develop light, medium or dark roasts. 

What caused the price spike? 

Prices for green beans jumped, starting in 2021, due to a combination of factors. Extreme weather in Brazil caused crop loss. Remnants of supply chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic contributed, as did a shipping barge getting stuck in the Suez Canal. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 contributed to a spike in oil prices.

Okon Udosenata of Equiano Coffee Roasters in Eugene said that before December 2024, coffee warehouses in major ports like Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area always maintained a surplus of beans.

“If you didn’t get this year’s fresh crop of coffee, it was never really a big deal,” he said. “You could always get something from the last crop, and you could usually get a deal on it.”

That changed virtually overnight, when coffee companies large and small were trying to stock up. In December, warehouses were empty, Udosenata noticed. 

Then in February, when the first talks of tariffs hit the media, the price of coffee almost doubled overnight.

In March 2025, the Food and Agriculture Organization reported that summer droughts in Brazil and Vietnam decimated the 2024 harvest and could threaten 2025’s crop as well. In 2024, world coffee prices increased 38.8% from the previous year, mostly because of climate disasters. In Vietnam, for instance, which grows most of the world’s Robusta beans, drought caused a 20% drop in coffee production in 2023 and 2024, with exports falling by 10% for two years in a row.

The 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports compounded the crisis. With Brazilian beans more expensive, beans from other producing countries, such as Colombia, Mexico and Ethiopia, are now more in demand, which will contribute to global shortages and increase the costs of beans from those countries as well.

For the first time ever, Pierce said, Brazilian beans are now more expensive than premium beans that used to command higher prices.

“I’m used to paying $4 or $5 a pound for those, and $3 a pound for Brazil,” Pierce said. “Now Brazil is more than Sumatra, which is a premier bean.”

How businesses are coping

After a historically severe frost in Brazil in 2021 sent bean prices soaring, Pierce raised his prices for roasted beans 50 cents per pound. As a small business owner with a sense of loyalty to his wholesale customers, Pierce didn’t want to have to do it. His customers, he said, mostly understand that he has to and is not “just being a jerk.”

It’s not just beans that are more expensive. Materials the business uses and the costs of doing business itself are more expensive — rent, electricity, coffee cups, paper. Pierce said that during the pandemic, certain paper products were unavailable, so he had to switch from paper bags to foil bags, which cost more. Prices for the labels he uses on his bags have gone up, too.

“I don’t think that happened entirely because of the pandemic, but that’s the marker for me as to when everything went up exponentially,” Pierce said.

While Pierce works with blends of coffees that come from Ethiopia, Sumatra and Indonesia, and works with a broker to help him find traditional supply chains, Udosenata sources small-farm, single-varietal beans directly from farmers he’s built relationships with over the 20 years he’s been in the business.

Udosenata’s direct-trade approach typically costs him 20% to 30% above commodity prices, but Udosenata says it’s worth it to pay more for quality beans and farmer relationships. He frequently purchases from farms in Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, Rwanda and the Congo.

Like Pierce, Udosenata initially tried to absorb the increases.

“At first we had to absorb a bit, because we weren’t quite sure if the tariffs were going to stick, or if the prices were going to come back down,” Udosenata said.

Eventually, reality set in.

“Every time we kept buying coffee, it was just getting more and more and more expensive,” Udosenata said. “The uncertainty was too much, and the writing’s on the wall. It’s not going to come back down.”

Udosenata’s costs increased about 30%, but he raised prices only 15% to 20%. A cup of espresso from his cafe went from $3 to $4, and his customers, like Pierce’s, have been understanding about the increases.

“A lot of the customers that come here want to be immersed in the coffee culture,” Udosenata said. “If there’s any information about what’s going on globally in terms of climate or politically, they want to know. And usually, information helps [explain] raising the prices.”

Local roasters are finding creative ways to increase revenue. Pierce expanded Caffe Pacori’s video game and rentable area for parties, which has helped the business increase revenue without having to raise prices too much, he said. Udosenata is using part of the building Equiano Coffee shares with The Hybrid gallery as a shop where he is selling vinyl records.

Pierce said he’s making a living but all of these pressures are adding up.

“I drive a beat-up Prius, and I live in a one-bedroom apartment,” he said. “I’m not living large. I’m just surviving, trying to stay in business, and we’re finding ways of doing that without, hopefully, having to raise the prices. But it’s inevitable.”

Caffe Pacori sells its coffee to other coffee shops as well as direct to consumers through its shop in west Eugene. Some of his wholesale customers have asked him if he will lower his price when his costs comes down.

His response is, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but the price hasn’t come down … and you’re going to have to raise your price, too.” 

Tariff shock for a 21-year-old business

Wandering Goat, a coffee roaster, cafe and venue in Eugene, announced Sept. 22 that the business was reducing its hours by 28 hours per week. The announcement read, in part, that the cafe was absorbing a “recent, sudden and unprecedented” rise, due to tariffs, in the price of the sustainable and organic green coffees it purchases.

The reduced hours affected eight employees, some full-time and some part-time, which represents a reduction of 40% of the cafe’s workforce.

Maltz described the impact of rising coffee prices combined with tariffs as devastating. The 21-year-old coffee business has seen prices increase between 21% and 30% since August.

Before the abrupt August increases, the cafe had been absorbing the continuously rising prices, but Maltz said, the recent increases are more than they can bear.

Wandering Goat currently purchases beans from Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea, all of which now carry tariffs, but not as high as the tariffs on Brazilian and Vietnamese imports. 

Wandering Goat makes a commitment to purchase most of its coffee ahead of time, anywhere from two months to nine months in advance. What made the situation even more challenging was the uncertainty. Throughout the summer, Wandering Goat’s importers couldn’t provide clear answers about costs. 

“We called our importers, and they basically said, ‘We don’t know what this is going to cost,'” Maltz said. “The countries of origin were holding their coffee because they didn’t want to ship it in case the tariffs were suddenly lifted.”

When they got the bill for their most recent order, Maltz said it was a “code red” situation.

The business had been insulated from tariff impacts earlier in the year because they had already contracted for coffee that had been warehoused in the United States before tariffs. But once new shipments started arriving, the reality hit hard.

Maltz and owner Michael Nixon ran the numbers with their financial team. The conclusion was stark: Without immediate action, the cafe would run out of money and might have to pivot to wholesale only, which they didn’t want to do. Maltz said before the new tariffs, the business was doing well. 

“Everything was pointing in the right direction, as far as maintaining what we are doing,” Maltz said. “But this is taking the legs out from us.”

Maltz and Nixon are committed to their products and their roasting technique, which Maltz said they would not compromise.

“We’re not going to buy coffee that isn’t as good, because it tarnishes our name,” Maltz said. 

Maltz said he has been discussing the pricing pressures with other coffee roasters, and they are all expressing shock at the prices they’re seeing. He’s also frustrated by the feeling that Wandering Goat and other successful small businesses are being squeezed by factors they can’t control. 

“The worst part of it is that we didn’t do anything wrong,” Maltz said. “We were doing everything correctly, and the business was going well.” He called it a “manufactured crisis in the system.”

No immediate solutions

Unwavering demand, combined with ongoing supply constraints and climate challenges, suggests the coffee industry may need to fundamentally rethink how it approaches both brewing and sourcing.

Climate change may force growers to find new growing regions, which also means that farmers may be able to demand higher prices. Farmers could plant more coffee plants, but it takes three to five years for coffee to reach commercially harvestable levels, so that’s not an immediate solution.

Despite coffee prices continuing their upward trajectory, people aren’t likely to give up their daily coffee ritual anytime soon. Eventually, Pierce said, coffee could become something like cigarettes or alcohol — or eggs. People who really want their coffee will figure out how to pay the higher prices.