WHAT IS THE SPECIALTY COFFEE TRANSACTION GUIDE?
The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide is a collaborative initiative that generates relevant pricing benchmarks for differentiated coffees. These benchmarks provide an alternative for the current reliance on the volatile C-market price for price discovery.
Each annual Transaction Guide is the result of a combined effort of a dedicated research team from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School along with more than 100 coffee companies and organizations that donate information from more than 50,000 coffee contracts. This creates an anonymized and aggregated dataset that provides context for coffee price negotiations based on quality scores, volumes purchased, and country of origin.
The Transaction Guide is a useful tool for both sellers and buyers of differentiated green coffees who want to see increased equity and economic sustainability within their supply streams.
WHY DOES THE COFFEE INDUSTRY NEED THE SPECIALTY COFFEE TRANSACTION GUIDE?
There are big questions facing specialty coffee producers and buyers. According to numerous studies conducted throughout the coffee-producing world, prices paid for green specialty coffees often do not cover the full cost of production, let alone support thriving livelihoods for producers and their families. Unless price discovery for green coffees moves beyond a reliance on commodity price references, producers cannot expect these prices to evolve in ways that excite them about investing in their coffee farms. Nor will these prices inspire the next generation to take up the mantle of differentiated coffee production.
This makes specialty coffee buyers increasingly concerned about future supplies of the differentiated coffees that they need to push this growing segment of the industry forward.
THREE YEARS OF SPECIALTY COFFEE PRICES
The current Transaction Guide is based on data describing thousands of contracts from the last three harvest seasons. These data are summarized as follows:
After reviewing the data donors that support this project, we invite you to download the 2023 Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide and learn more about how recent green specialty coffee prices were influenced by coffee quality, lot size, and producing region and country. This information will be valuable in negotiations that determine the prices paid during subsequent harvest seasons by empowering sellers and buyers to look beyond commodity reference prices.
*Free on Board (FOB) prices are paid for coffees that are delivered and placed onto the ship at the port in the country of embarkation. They typically cover any overland transportation costs from mills or warehouses to the port of origin, but not any overseas shipping, insurance, or any transportation, customs, and overland freight costs incurred on arrival to the port of destination (International Chamber of Commerce)
SPECIALTY COFFEE TRANSACTION GUIDE REPORTS AND DATA BRIEFS
Our expanding database of specialty coffee contracts provides the foundation for a series of practical reports and data briefs that explore how specialty coffee markets work. These regular data summaries illuminate factors that systematically influence prices for green specialty coffees.
SCTG Reports and Data briefs
