What The F**k...Is The C Price?

It’s crucial to the production of coffee – and it’s currently having a devastating impact.

- Stuart Ritson

In the most basic terms, the C Price is – as you might have guessed – the Coffee Price. However, it’s far more complex than the cost of your morning cup. The true meaning of the C Price has implications for millions of coffee producers around the world.

Let’s get all the facts in order first. The C Price is the value of coffee as a commodity. Specifically the tastier, less hardy arabica variety coffee and not the more caffeinated robusta. The coffee market trades at New York’s Intercontinental Exchange and the price is set in US dollars. The price traded represents the value of one pound (1lb) of arabica coffee. So if the C Price is $1, that means $1 USD buys 453.6g of green unroasted coffee prepared for export.

Every step of preparing the coffee – milling, bagging, export documents – is included in the C Price. And actually, you can’t buy 453.6g of green coffee for $1 because the smallest quantity you can trade as a commodity is one full container, which is 37,500lb (17,010kg). Even more confusingly, an actual container load of coffee weighs around 42,000lb (19,051kg). As with any stock or commodity, the price is driven by supply and demand. When there is a good harvest and supply goes up, prices go down; when demand outstrips supply, prices go up. The C Price has nothing to do with quality or cost of production.