The 2023 edition of the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide (SCTG) guide ADD LINK went live today, providing actors throughout the coffee chain data-driven tool for green coffee price discovery.
Traded volumes of high-quality specialty coffee declined as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic while volumes of lower-quality specialty coffees increased, according to a recent analysis from the authors of the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide.
Peter W. Roberts and Chad Trewick penned the 19-page report documenting the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on specialty coffee purchasing behaviors in the 2019-20 harvest year. The report covered thousands of contracted transactions from the dawn of the pandemic through October 2020, providing comparisons to the prior year.
The data used for the report came from 58 “data donors” who submitted their coffee contract data for anonymized analysis in the two most recent years’ harvests as part of the ongoing SCTG project.
Mentors Gabriela Flores and Marjorie Canjura visit a coffee farm to record learning materials for participants of Grounds for Empowerment’s virtual workshop. Courtesy photo.
Most of the dollar value of coffee as much as 90%, according to the 2018 Coffee Barometer is captured in consuming countries.
To address this inequity in the expanding specialty coffee market, we must develop programs that empower farmers with the information, connections and business skills needed to capture a greater share of the value generated on their farms.
Working with partners like ANACAFE in Guatemala and IWCA in El Salvador, our nonprofit Grounds for Empowerment (GFE) initiative piloted business tools workshops in 2018, 2019, and early 2020. GFE is supported by the Social Enterprise @ Goizueta research center at Emory University, and is a companion initiative to the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide.