Specialty Coffee Retail Price Index Jumps 8.1 Percent in Q2

Image courtesy of Transparent Trade Coffee.

The Transparent Trade Coffee project has released its Specialty Coffee Retail Price Index (SCRPI) for the second quarter of 2016, finding an 8.1 percent increase over the Q1 index price, and a 9.1 percent year-over-year increase against the Q2 2015 price.

Transparent Trade and the SCRPI were developed by researchers at the Social Enterprise @ Goizueta Business School program within Emory University. We first reported on the project in April of last year, keeping an eye on the index and the group’s insights ever since. In short, the SCRPI tracks the per-pound prices of coffees sold directly to consumers from approximately 60 “blue chip” roasters, a group largely comprised of past Good Food Awards winners, highly-rated submitters to Coffee Review, and past Roast Magazine Roaster of the Year winners.

For Q2, the SCRPI showed the average price of coffee among the 57 roasters tracked was $24.00 per pound, with an average of $16.40 per pound for the lowest-priced coffees (a 1.2 percent increase over the previous period), and an average of $31.61 per pound for the highest-priced coffees (a 12.2 percent increase).

One coffee in particular — the much-ballyhooed Yemen Hayma Hussein al-Haba sold by Blue Bottle Coffee — played an influential role in skewing the Q2 numbers upward. The Transparent Trade group said that if the $173.33-per-roasted-pound coffee were removed from the index, the SCRPI would fall from $24.00 to $22.72.