Traded volumes of high-quality specialty coffee declined as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic while volumes of lower-quality specialty coffees increased, according to a recent analysis from the authors of the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide.
Peter W. Roberts and Chad Trewick penned the 19-page report documenting the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on specialty coffee purchasing behaviors in the 2019-20 harvest year. The report covered thousands of contracted transactions from the dawn of the pandemic through October 2020, providing comparisons to the prior year.
The data used for the report came from 58 “data donors” who submitted their coffee contract data for anonymized analysis in the two most recent years’ harvests as part of the ongoing SCTG project.
The 2020 Specialty Coffee Transaction explores FOB prices on green coffee contracts. Daily Coffee News photo by Nick Brown.
The 2020 Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide has been released, offering a remarkable review of data on green coffee pricing in the specialty coffee market.
Overall, the Guide showed a dip in median free-on-board (FOB) prices from $2.75 per pound in the 2018/19 harvest year to $2.60 in 2019/20. The decline was attributed by the Guide’s authors as due to a shift away from the highest-quality “fancy” coffees towards more higher-volume and lower-scoring specialty coffees.
Now in its third year of publication, the 2020 Guide summarizes anonymized data from some 51,000 green coffee purchasing contracts as submitted by a group of 81 volunteer “data donors,” including roasters, importers, exporters cooperatives and producers.