Coffee
I enjoy trying new coffee and cafés. Exploring coffee also maps into my love of travel and my research on globalization and international supply chains. This page highlights some of this with a specialty coffee map I built, a short account of the supply chain behind a cup, how climate change will impact the cost of this cup, and a small index, for fun, of how many minutes of work it takes to buy the cappuccino you just ordered — remember this number the next time you tip your local barista.
Know your Grounds
A global map of specialty cafés you can trust
A café earns its place by naming the roaster it buys from, by brewing pour-over and syphon by hand alongside espresso, and by being independent, since chains are excluded outright. Cafés the coffee press has written up score higher, while crowd star-ratings count for nothing, and the method behind the score is published in full so anyone can see why a café sits where it does. I also add the ones I have particularly enjoyed on my own travels.
Why climate matters for the coffee supply chain
Coffee reaches the consumer through a long supply chain, and most of what a cup costs is added a long way from the farm. Taxes on coffee differ so much between countries that they swamp everything else, so the figure below strips them out. What is left divides roughly into thirds: a third to the farmer, half to roasting and retail together, and an eighth to moving the coffee. Four-fifths of the farmer’s third goes on growing the crop, which leaves an income of about a twelfth of the price.
Climate presses on the early stages hardest, and its effect thins as it travels. A world price that roughly doubled between early 2024 and February 2025 left the price of a cup of coffee in a café close to where it started. The green coffee in a $5 drink was worth about 17 cents at the top of that run, against nearer 7 cents at more ordinary prices.
Where climate and disruption hit the chain
The farmer
Frost and drought in Brazil have preceded every large spike in the world price since the 1970s. Robusta, the hardier half of the crop, loses about 14% of its yield for every degree above a mean of 20.5°C, an optimum several degrees below the range the industry had assumed (Kath and others, Global Change Biology, 2020). Coffee leaf rust compounds this, since its worst epidemics have come in low-price years when growers cut back on management (Avelino and others, Food Security, 2015). Rain then damages coffee that has already been grown and picked, at the point where it is drying. Above 750mm in the harvest window, with mean minimum temperatures over 22°C, the chance of above-average defects passes three in four (Kath and others, Climate Risk Management, 2021). In November 2025 more than 1,100mm fell on Vietnam’s Central Highlands in five days, against a November norm of 104mm, while part of the harvest lay on the drying patios (International Coffee Organization, Coffee Market Report, November 2025).
Export
In September 2024, 84% of container ships at Santos were delayed and 2.2 million bags of coffee sat backlogged. Cecafé attributes the congestion to container infrastructure that has not kept pace with the volumes moving through it (Cecafé, October 2024).
Trade and shipping
After the driest October since 1950, 41% below normal, the Panama Canal cut daily booking slots from about 36 into the low twenties through 2023 and 2024, and one transit slot went at auction for $4 million (Panama Canal Authority, Advisory A-48-2023). Red Sea diversions then pushed four to five million bags into coffee not yet imported at destination, tightening European supply while every harvest stayed where it was (International Coffee Organization, Coffee Market Report, December 2024).
Roasting
Green coffee is about 68% of what one of the world’s largest roasters spends on product, and energy is too small a line to report separately (JDE Peet’s, full-year results 2024). The exposure that matters at this stage is carbon pricing, with the European Union’s second emissions trading system now due in 2028.
Retail and cafés
At Starbucks, running the stores costs about half of revenue while every product sold costs under a third (Form 10-K, financial year 2025). Wages, rent and milk carry that half, and a frost in Minas Gerais leaves them where they were.
The cappuccino index
A cappuccino costs a barista in Australia about ten minutes of their own working time, and a barista in India a little under three hours. That ratio is the cappuccino index: a local price divided by the local wage of the person who made it. Since both sides are in the same currency, the exchange rate cancels and none of the comparison depends on how a currency is valued. What is left is a price measured in working time, which is a real wage upside down — the lower the number, the more coffee an hour behind the machine buys.
The fit is surprisingly strong, especially for an index built on cappuccinos! The slope in logs is about minus one. That is, doubling income per head roughly halves the barista time a cappuccino costs. Countries below the line get their coffee cheaply for the income they have, and the three furthest below are Australia, Italy and New Zealand, which will surprise nobody who has ordered a coffee in any of them. Singapore, Turkey and Malaysia sit furthest above.
The index is James Hoffmann’s and all I have added is the second axis. He explains how he built it, and what went wrong while he was building it, at rather more length than this page does.