-
Chris Kornman is a coffee specialist and educator for an importer that runs a high-end coffee shop.
-
The café raised its coffee prices by 50 cents because of tariffs.
-
Kornman says other coffee roasters, shops, and even grocery stores will probably raise prices too.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Kornman, who is the director of education for Royal Coffee and works out of the company’s café and coffee lab, called The Crown, in Oakland, California. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m in a very unique position in the coffee industry, where I get to speak to almost everyone in the supply chain.
At Royal Coffee, we import beans and sell them to coffee roasters. Our business model also includes classes and the coffee we sell at The Crown café.
On April 10, we raised our café prices by 50 cents for every drink, except our $2 dark roast, which is an entry point for people who might not be used to specialty coffee and specialty prices.
That’s because, as an importer, we are the first ones hit by the actual cost of tariffs. At the ports we get billed, literally, for the tariffs.
We bring in a lot of coffee from Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, as well as every coffee-producing country in Central America and Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. In total, we buy coffee from more than 30 countries.
President Donald Trump paused some of his proposed tariffs, but we’re still being impacted by a 10% increase at the point of import for all those countries except Mexico. That erases our entire profit margin if we absorb it.
I think the coffee industry at large is facing an unprecedented crisis. We have to figure out how to make rising costs and uncertainty about tariffs and climate change sustainable for everyone involved, and part of that equation is asking our customers to pay a little bit more for a cup of coffee.
The tariffs come on top of historic high coffee-bean prices for the entire calendar year of 2025. That’s been attributed to bad weather in Brazil and Vietnam, the world’s two largest coffee producers.
Energy and labor costs continue to go up, too. Shipping costs have also gone up astronomically over the past couple of years. The cost of wholesale, unroasted coffee is already double or sometimes triple what people are used to paying.
I don’t see a lot of real, meaningful relief on the horizon.
I was just speaking to a small roaster in Cleveland, Ohio, who’s raising his prices. I’ve had a conversation like that with folks almost every day this year so far. So there was a pre-tariff concern about cost, and then the tariffs hit.
