Who Pays When Coffee Is Too Cheap?

Coffee prices seem to make the news every few months.

A cafe puts their prices up by 50 cents and suddenly everyone's got an opinion. Some people say coffee has become too expensive, others argue cafe owners are charging too much, and before long you've got thousands of comments online debating what a flat white should cost.

To be honest, we understand why.

Coffee has become part of everyday life for a lot of Australians. It's not just something you buy every now and then; for plenty of people it's built into the weekly budget, right alongside groceries and fuel. When the price changes, people notice, and they're entitled to ask why.

What we've realised though, especially over the last few years, is that most conversations about coffee stop at the register. They start and finish with the number on the menu board, without ever looking at everything that happened before that coffee reached the cup.

And that's where the conversation gets really interesting.

See, we're not here to tell you coffee should be expensive. We don't think that's the point at all. The better question, at least in our minds, is what actually happens when the market decides coffee needs to be cheaper.

Because someone always pays.

The question is... who?

When we first got into coffee, we honestly didn't spend much time thinking about it. Like most people, we looked at the price of a bag of beans or the price of a coffee and that's about where our thinking stopped. Since getting into roasting and spending more time learning about coffee at origin, we've realised just how many people are involved before we ever open a bag of green coffee.

There's the producer who might spend years growing coffee trees before seeing a meaningful harvest. There are the people processing the coffee, exporters organising logistics, importers taking on the risk of bringing it into Australia, warehouses, freight companies, roasters, cafes and baristas. Every one of those businesses has costs, employs people and is trying to build something sustainable.

By the time someone orders a flat white on a Saturday morning, that coffee has already travelled an incredible distance and passed through a surprising number of hands.

That's why coffee pricing isn't as simple as most of us think it is.

When people say coffee should be cheaper, it sounds like a simple enough statement. But coffee doesn't magically become cheaper on its own. Somewhere along the line somebody has to absorb that pressure. Maybe a producer receives less for their harvest. Maybe an importer works on tighter margins. Maybe a roaster delays replacing equipment or buying better coffee. Maybe a cafe owner puts off hiring another staff member or upgrading a grinder that's well past its best.

The pressure doesn't disappear.

It just moves.

That's something we've become increasingly aware of, and honestly it's changed the way we think about value altogether.

One of the things we're trying to understand better at Moon Boy is transparency. Not because transparency solves every problem, but because it helps explain where value is actually being created throughout the supply chain. The more conversations we have with importers and people working closer to origin, the more we realise there are very few simple answers in coffee. Every harvest is different, every country faces different challenges and every business has different costs to manage.

It's messy.

But maybe that's okay.

We've also realised that the best coffee relationships aren't built around finding the cheapest possible coffee. They're built around finding a price that allows everybody involved to keep doing what they do well. Producers can continue investing in quality, importers can continue sourcing exceptional coffee, roasters can continue buying it, cafes can continue serving it and customers continue getting a cup they're excited to come back for.

That's a much healthier conversation than simply asking, "How cheap can we make it?"

Something we often come back to is this: coffee isn't essential. Nobody needs a flat white to survive.

But for a lot of people, ourselves included, coffee is one of those little rituals that makes the day feel a bit better. It's twenty minutes catching up with a mate before work. It's the first quiet moment of the morning. It's supporting a local cafe you've been going to for years. Those things have value too, even if they're hard to put a dollar figure on.

We're not suggesting every coffee should cost the same, because every cafe is different and every business has different costs. What we are saying is that when we only focus on the number at the register, we miss the much bigger story behind it.

The deeper we've gone into coffee, the less we've started thinking about price and the more we've started thinking about value. Value for the producer who's spent years growing the crop. Value for the cafe owner who's invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into creating a place people love. Value for the customer who wants a consistently great experience every morning.

Maybe there isn't a perfect answer.

Maybe there never will be.

But the next time coffee prices become the topic of conversation, instead of asking whether coffee has become too expensive, it might be worth asking a slightly different question.

If coffee gets cheaper...

Who pays for that?