Specialty Coffee Retail Price Index Down 1.3% in 2016 Q4

Transparent Trade Coffee photo.

The average per-pound price of roasted coffee among the currently 57 roasters being tracked in the Specialty Coffee Retail Price Index (SCRPI) fell by 1.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 to $22.18 per pound, while the year-over-year decrease from the fourth quarter of 2015 to the fourth quarter of 2016 was 1.6 percent.

The SCRPI is an ongoing project of Transparent Trade Coffee, a pricing-transparency program being led by The Social Enterprise @ Goizueta at the business school of Atlanta’s Emory University. The roasters indexed are composed of past Roast magazine Roaster of the Year winners, Good Food Awards winners, and regular submitters of coffees that have scored well on Coffee Review.

For comparisons’ sake, TT Coffee also stacks the specialty coffee prices in the SCRPI up against ongoing commodity prices. Here are some of the group’s notes from the Q4 SCRPI:

The corresponding ICO Composite Price for green coffee fell to $1.35 per pound in December 2016. Thus, as retail prices for specialty coffees fell by 1.3%, commodity prices fell by 2.6% during the fourth quarter of 2016. Year-over-year, as average retail prices for specialty coffees fell by 1.6%, the ICO Composite Price increased by 15.1%.

The SCRPI is being developed by researchers at Social Enterprise @ Goizueta to track the retail prices charged by a representative group of North American specialty coffee roasters.