You are not imagining it and your café is not gouging you. Coffee got genuinely, unusually expensive, and it happened fast.
US ground coffee went from about $6.12 a pound in January 2024 to about $9.51 in May 2026 — up roughly 55% in under two and a half years. Over the twelve months to June 2026, coffee rose 12.9%, close to five times the rate of inflation generally. The median price of a regular cup at a restaurant reached $3.59.
The weather did most of it
Brazil and Vietnam grow most of the world’s coffee between them — Brazil the arabica, Vietnam the robusta. Both had badly damaged harvests in 2025, at the same time, which is roughly the worst thing that can happen to a commodity with no spare capacity.
Buyers panicked, as buyers do, and bought ahead. World coffee stocks have now fallen five years running while consumption keeps setting records. When there is less of something and more people want it, the price does what you would expect.
And then everything else got more expensive too
Fertilizer, fuel and labor on the farm. Shipping, after Red Sea disruption pushed African coffee the long way around. Tariffs on imported coffee, running anywhere from 10% to 50%. Packaging, energy at the roastery, wages and rent at the café.
Every one of those lands on the same bag. None of them is anybody’s fault in a way you can be usefully angry about, which is unsatisfying.
Does the farmer see any of it?
Some, and less than you’d hope. High green prices do reach growers, and for once that’s real money. But their costs went up too, most sell through several intermediaries, and a good year at a record price does not undo a decade of being paid below the cost of production.
If this matters to you, the thing to look for is a roaster who will tell you what they paid and to whom. That’s the actual difference between the labels, and it’s worth ten minutes of reading.
What you can actually do
Buy whole beans and grind them — a bag lasts longer because it stays good longer, so you throw less away. Buy the amount you’ll drink in a month instead of the big one. Make it at home more often than you buy it out; the gap between $3.59 and about forty cents is where the real money is.
And don’t buy cheap coffee to save money. It’s the one purchase where trading down reliably produces something you don’t want to drink, which is how a bag ends up going stale in a cupboard — the most expensive coffee there is.
Our own position, since it would be odd not to say
We sell forty bags a month. We are small enough that we buy at the going rate with no leverage at all, and our prices reflect what the coffee costs plus what it costs to get it to you. When that number moves, we’ll say so rather than quietly shrinking the bag.
Where these numbers come from
Price figures are from US Bureau of Labor Statistics data as reported in mid-2026. Background on the harvest failures and the market response is from CNBC’s reporting on coffee prices. If you’re reading this well after July 2026, check the current numbers — this page is reviewed quarterly but the market moves faster than we do.