2025 Elevator Pricing Updates. 

December 2024
We’ve got some upcoming changes and prognostications we’d like to share about. 2024 has been a very busy year and we are excited about things to come in 2025. But we are also facing some challenges as an industry. 

Coffee Costs and Availability Forecast. 

Commodity coffee has recently surged over $3.45/lb, the highest price in over 50 years, which means prices for specialty green coffee have also increased substantially across the board. As recently as January of 2020, commodity coffee was below $1/lb!!! We have been very much in an era of cheap and accessible coffee. 

But it seems that time could be ending. These price increases are primarily driven right now by drought in Brazil coupled with flooding in Vietnam. These are the two largest coffee producing countries in the world, they produce over 45% of the global coffee volume, and these issues are going to notably affect coffee supply. (see articles such as this and this) Moreover, this will be the 5th consecutive year where demand for coffee is greater than production.

Elevator typically purchases coffee contracted in two ways: forward booking, where we agree to a future delivery of coffee at an agreed price and quality before it is harvested. Or we buy coffees that are spot available, where the beans are already in the US and just need to be shipped to our facility. Already, we are seeing there is much less coffee available on a spot basis due to these shortages. We are currently working through our existing inventory of green coffee and will need to purchase more in January. Based on what we are seeing with prices right now, we anticipate that delivered costs could end up being 25%+ higher (and potentially significantly more) than what we were paying in 2023/2024.

While some of our coffee prices have increased in the past several years (our single producer/farm coffees have always been priced as a function of their landed costs) our blend prices have remained the same. We have not had a policy about our blend prices previously, mainly because our input prices had been relatively stable. For reference, we last changed prices 2023, and at that time, we paid $4.40 per lb (delivered to our facility) for our Ground Floor and Counterweight green coffee. Before that, our prices had been stable from 2017-2023, where our landed costs for our blends were always less than $4/lb.

Both green coffee costs as well as freight costs have increased since 2023, and as of this writing today, getting these same beans would be over $5/lb, and we anticipate even higher prices coming in 2025. Therefore the new policy going forward is our blend prices will be adjusted annually in January to reflect the actual green coffee costs of the blend from the prior year as well as the forecast for the following year. Decaf will be priced based on purchased prices like the rest of our single farm/single producer lots.

All of us in the coffee roasting business are going to have hard decisions to make this year. Holding our prices steady would mean, inevitably, buying cheaper coffee. Elevator has always been a quality driven business. That will continue to be a top priority for us in 2025. We are going to continue sourcing coffees at the same quality targets that we have in the past. That means our prices are going to increase in January of 2025. We have long said that coffee is an undervalued product. We are prepared to stand behind that now and hope you will join us.

While prices will increase, we have held off downsizing our retail bags. We have observed the trend towards 10oz or 8oz retail bags. Our standard retail bag will remain 12oz. But we will also make smaller retail bags available. These mini “half-bag” 150g options will make even our most expensive coffees available at a more affordable price point. 

Shipping and Delivery Services 

Our primary means of delivery has been the US Postal Service. Unfortunately, their rates continue to rise and services are getting slower and increasingly more inaccurate. We will be  switching all of our shipping services to UPS in the coming weeks.

This will slightly increase the shipping fees we pay, but we believe the services should be slightly faster or the same speed as existing, depending on the shipped distance. Plus, we expect fewer “shipping anomalies” (IE lost mail, significantly delayed delivery, etc.)

Going forward, local delivery will be $4.50, flat rate shipping will be $7, and the free shipping threshold will be $65.

Final thoughts 

Even with these challenges, we are anticipating an exciting year ahead. Both of our roasters have qualified to the 2025 USRC finals, which will be held in Houston in January. It's a big deal because only 16 roasters qualified for the championship round!

And while things seem uncertain and some things feel outside our control, we will work hard to excel at the things we do have control over. We will keep finding exceptional coffees and roasting them to the best of our abilities while continuing to provide the best service we can.