Maine Morning Micro Roasters is committed to serving the greater good and providing fresh, top notch, small batch coffee roasted with love sourced from family farms where people are being supported for their hard work.

Fairly traded coffee empowers farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by investing in their farms and communities, protecting the environment, and developing the business skills necessary to compete in the global marketplace.

WHY IS THE PRICE OF COFFEE INCREASING?

The biggest contributing factor to the rise in coffee prices over the past couple of years stems from weather issues and concerns of weather issues in coffee-producing countries, including droughts, record-breaking temperatures and prolonged dry conditions have raised concerns about the upcoming May and June harvest. This has caused the coffee market to behave similarly to the Cocoa futures market, which has been impacted over the past 18 months by drought conditions in the Ivory Coast (the largest producing region for cocoa beans). Non-commercial traders, i.e., Wall Street hedge funds and managed money commodity funds that participate in markets solely on technical factors, have viewed the coffee market as the next “Cocoa market.”

These Index funds and commodity funds currently control over 40% of the Open Interest in the Coffee Futures markets, a percentage unheard of. The financial power of these funds has overwhelmed the coffee industry, and their long position only continues to grow. This has left the physical trade (origin, exporters, importers, roasters, and all of our customers) struggling to keep up.

We at Maine Morning Micro Roasters are doing our best to keep our prices fair to honor our loyal customers. We are believers in fair trade and unfortunately this situation we find ourselves in requires us to adjust our prices to deal with our increases in the cost of coffee beans and shipping. We hope you understand we are not trying to increase our profits at your expense! We are trying to stay afloat in this unpredictable commodity trading world we find ourselves in with the impact of climate change on upcoming crops. You have our word that we will keep our prices as fair as we possibly can.

Thank you,

Mer, Nancy and Jen