Commodity coffee peaked in February 2025. Retail coffee in American supermarkets peaked in April 2026. That is a fourteen-month gap, and understanding it explains most of what people find inexplicable about coffee pricing.
Retail prices lag the commodity market by roughly a year, and they fall more slowly than they rise. So there is a long stretch where the wholesale price is falling, the shelf price is still climbing, and nobody in the chain is doing anything unusual.
What actually happened
The ICO composite indicator, the standard benchmark for green coffee, reached 375.00 cents per pound on 13 February 2025. The monthly average for that month, 354.32 cents, exceeded the previous nominal record set in March 1977.
US retail did not respond for over a year. Ground roast coffee went from $5.964 per pound to $9.723, a rise of 63.0%, and did not peak until April 2026. As of June 2026, the most recent reading available to us, it remains only 2.7% below that peak, long after the commodity price came off its high.
The euro area behaved differently. It peaked in November 2025, roughly nine months after the commodity peak rather than fourteen.
That asymmetry between the US and Europe is most plausibly explained by the US tariff on Brazilian coffee, and we want to be clear that this is our inference rather than a documented finding. The timing fits and the mechanism is straightforward, but we have not seen it demonstrated, and we would rather label it than let it harden into a fact by repetition.
Why the lag exists at all
Four reasons, none of them sinister.
Coffee is bought forward. A roaster buying today is often drinking through contracts signed months ago. When the market moves, they are still working through inventory purchased at the old price, so the shelf price reflects a decision made a season earlier.
Green coffee is a minority of the retail price. By the time a bag reaches you it carries roasting, packaging, freight, warehousing, distribution margin, retail margin and marketing. A large move in the bean is a smaller move in the total, diluted by everything downstream that did not change.
Repricing is expensive. Changing shelf prices means renegotiating with retailers, reprinting packaging, updating listings. Nobody does it for a movement they expect to reverse, so they wait to see whether it holds. That waiting is the lag.
And prices are sticky downward. This is the part people notice. Rising input costs get passed through relatively promptly, because margin is under pressure and the justification is easy to make. Falling input costs get passed through slowly, because nothing forces the issue until a competitor moves first. The result is that the gap between the farm price and the retail price tends to widen when green prices fall.
That last point is worth sitting with. It is not a conspiracy and it does not require anyone to collude. It is what happens when the cost of changing a price is real and the pressure to lower one is weaker than the pressure to raise one.
Why the commodity price swings so hard in the first place
The underlying volatility has a physical cause that most explanations skip.
A coffee tree takes three to five years from planting to meaningful harvest. So when prices spike, farmers plant, and the resulting supply arrives years later into a market that has usually already corrected. Then prices fall, and the trees are still there, because a farmer cannot cheaply abandon several years of sunk investment.
That lag on both sides is what produces coffee's boom-and-bust cycle, and it is why coffee is more volatile than annual crops where supply can respond within a season.
What this does not mean
It does not mean your roaster is profiteering. A small roaster buying forward at the peak genuinely paid those prices, and is genuinely still working through the consequences.
It does not mean high commodity prices were good for farmers. A price spike driven by drought means the price is high because many growers lost their crop. The farmers celebrating and the farmers ruined are frequently not the same farmers, and a grower who sold forward before the spike captured none of it.
And it does not mean prices will fall back to where they were. Some of the increase reflects durable changes in freight, inputs and tariffs rather than the bean.
One number worth knowing
The premium of arabica over robusta has widened to roughly 182 cents per pound on the Colombian Milds indicator.
That is the operative figure for anyone reformulating a blend, and it is the economic pressure behind a shift you can taste on supermarket shelves. When the gap gets that wide, robusta stops being the cheap option and starts being the only viable one for a lot of commercial blends.
Which is a large part of why the species everyone was taught to avoid is being quietly reconsidered, and why that reconsideration is being driven by arithmetic rather than by anybody's palate.
The practical version
If you want to know whether coffee is expensive right now, the shelf price is a lagging indicator of a market that moved over a year ago. If you want to know whether farmers are doing well, the shelf price tells you almost nothing at all.
And if you are reading any article that quotes a coffee price without a date attached, treat it as fiction. Prices in this category moved 63% in fourteen months. An undated price is not a rounding error, it is a different market.