Coffee futures prices continue to surge past multi-year highs, sounding alarm bells for Britain’s caffeine lovers.
The Intercontinental Exchange’s Coffee C Futures contact is the benchmark for Arabica coffee, tracking the physical delivery prices of exchange-grade green beans.
It has soared 57% in the past 12 months, while Robusta futures have more than doubled.
Giuseppe Lavazza, chairman of the namesake Italian coffee company, yesterday warned that bean prices will remain “very high” through to the middle of next year.
“We have never seen such a spike in price as the trend right now,” Lavazza said in comments published in The Financial Times.
Vietnam, an important global coffee bean supplier, has been battling heatwaves that have hurt harvests, while Brazil and Colombia are battling their own adverse weather conditions.
Lavazza warned that UK consumers could see retail prices on a one-kilogramme bag of beans soar up to 25% in the coming year.
“We have faced very, very strong headwinds. I don’t see any reason why coffee prices will go down,” he said.
“Climate change has affected the production in the most important robusta countries around the world, mainly Vietnam and Indonesia, reducing quite a lot the quantity available of these kinds of varieties.”