We continue to get just generally warmer over time. I mean, you can't fight with a thermometer. That's what's going on, right? So that's what the data is saying.
That's what the data is saying. So the problem that you then have is arabica is and 20% robusta. Don't exactly love heat. And they're not exactly crops that are extremely heat resistant.
So when you have the heat issues, that's what did it to me was the heat issues in 23 and 24. Stalka Central America twice, results twice, Vietnam once. That is enough of big producing areas to get hit that now any little problem feels like a big problem. Initiating direct trade and making it work at a small or medium size scale is hard, especially ahead of harvest.
Arcana coffee market place connects roasters directly with smallholder farmers in Ethiopia and builds in the hard parts. Integrated QC, logistics support, and producer led to transparency. Ethiopia's harvest is underway and samples will be ready in February. We know we're early, but that's the point.
With coffee supply as volatile as it has been in 2025, getting in now helps you understand timelines and can assist in planning your 2026 buying with confidence, even if you've never bought direct before. The minimum is around 20 bags and Arcana can pull multiple roasters to meet the M.O.Q. So you can participate without overcommitting. If you're curious, listen to our recent conversation on the podcast with founder Matthew Thornton, then explore the marketplace via the link in our show notes.
You can also book a meeting with Matthew and he'll walk you through requesting samples, the order process, pooled orders, QC and shipping once coffees are ready. Supporting our advertisers is a great way to support our mission at Map of Forward to build responsible businesses with responsible pricing models. Check the show notes for details and explore Arcana coffee marketplace today. Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Map of Forward friends.
I'm your host Lee Safar and this is episode one of a new five part series with Greg Odor from Sukafina. Greg is a weather strategist. And while this is the first episode of this brand new five part series, this is also the first episode of the last series for 2025. We're gonna be taking a few weeks break.
It's been an intense year folks and we all need a bit of a break. So we're gonna give you the next few weeks to catch up on any series that you've missed. I know there's a lot of content that goes out. We will be coming back in the second week of January.
You're gonna love who the first guest is. But we are finishing on a very high note. We have a weather strategist who specifically works in the coffee industry. So Greg, welcome to the podcast for the very first time.
Thank you Lee, appreciate you having me. New format for me. So my first podcast series I've ever done. So yeah, thank you for having me today.
You're welcome. I'm thrilled to have you. I have been keeping up to date with some of the work that you've been doing with the way that you have been putting out some content. So I'd encourage everybody in the industry to go check out what Greg is doing.
Could you help people understand, Greg, what it is that you actually do do? Yeah, sure. So weather strategist is a very fancy name for someone who does meteorology and trading. So I've been in coffee in some shape or form for the past 15 years.
I've started kind of at a old trade house called Noble Group, which is kind of no longer doing exits. I think it's Kafka Bot, the Ag Unit, and now Kafka kind of does their thing. So I've kind of always been interested in the weather and always kind of wanted to do some sort of meteorology. You don't get into this by accident, right?
And if you're a meteorologist, generally speaking, you're the kid who's sitting there looking at the weather channel or looking at the clouds or obsessed with hurricanes or tornadoes, for me, it's snow and hurricanes are the big ones. And yeah, so I kind of took that passion, went to school for it at Penn State, and they had this program called Weather Risk Management. And Weather Risk Management was basically designed for financial risk assessment with the weather. So it's taking the weather and applying it to businesses.
I didn't know the coffee was going to be the business that I ended up doing. I think a lot of people I kind of ended up falling into the ag space and the coffee space, didn't exactly set out kind of to do that. But I met in my first job with a guy by the name of Dave Behrens, who, as some of you may know, is kind of the managing director head of trading of Sukafina here. So for most of my career, I've done multi-commodity.
I've done energy, oil and gas. I've done coffee, sugar, cocoa, cotton, grains and oil seeds. I've kind of done all of these different things. And in 2021, Dave offered me the chance to come over and just do coffee.
So I'm like, all right, why not? And you're still here. I'm still here. So yeah, so just to answer your initial question about like, what is it I do?
My job is to figure out what's going to happen two days, two months, a year from now, with the weather in terms of where we grow coffee, how are we going to get coffee from point eight to point B? How much do we feel this year's crop is going to be affected by the weather and the positive or the negative? And then figure out then what happens to the price, like what's going to happen to the price at the local level, what's going to happen to the price in the futures market. And kind of meld all those things together.
I think one thing that we will discuss at some point is kind of why the weather matters so much. And I think the obvious answer is how you got to 440 in the first place, or 399, where we are today in the December. This is a commodity and a crop that grows outside. And you are not doing greenhouse coffee.
You are not able to supplement production without the weather impacting it in some way, shape or form. So for a company like Zucafina, which has a ton of risk, my job is to try to help mitigate some of that and try to see what's coming before maybe other people know. The other part of the job is I think external outreach. So I put a lot of content out there.
There are meteorologists who sit on trade houses for us who do not post anything for anybody. They don't really sit there and are interested in sharing their views. They'll look at mine as a benchmark. They'll look at some other vendor as a benchmark and then go do their own thing.
I think part of the reason I joined here and part of the reason I stayed here is that we're a little bit more in your face transparent about what it is that we're seeing and why we're seeing it. For me, I'm certainly not afraid to share a view. I've been someone who's put information out there that I think others have questioned why I would put that out there, but the honest got truth is producers need to know and roasters need to know and everybody along the supply chain needs to know. You don't have to believe what I'm saying.
You don't have to take my view. In fact, it's really boring if everybody believes the same thing and I don't think everybody will. But if I can offer at least some sort of assistance for people if they're trying to deal with, hey, super cold and Brazil guys, you're not gonna be able to stop the weather but you can maybe prepare for what's gonna happen. I think that's advantageous.
It allows me to kind of straddle the line of public service and also serving mistake holders and the people who rely on me to make decisions on the deal of this. And that's really why I wanted to have you on the podcast. I really got the vibe from the content that you're putting out that yes, you work for a bit corporate, but you want yourself or a brand and you are really putting out information that makes your knowledge accessible to people and what they do with it, they do with it. You're not holding anybody's hand.
You're not, this isn't, you know, witchery. This isn't like, when you and I talked, the whole conversation was about, listen, everything that I'm doing is based on data. I'm not predicting anything. I'm not like going off vibes or anything like that.
What I'm doing is looking at data in what I went to university to study and we're applying it to the business that we're doing. So this isn't trickery and fuckery and wizardry and all of that kind of stuff, this is not that guys. When you're listening to what we're talking about, we are giving you some insight here into the role that weather is playing in the coffee market from a very corporate perspective. We're also looking at it from the perspective of if you want to do what you want to do with this data and with the perspectives that are being shared here, run with it.
Because this is the first time I had ever come across somebody who did this job. I've not met anybody that does what Greg does. That doesn't mean that there aren't people that do what Greg does, but I've never met them. And he gives the information openly and freely.
So I wanted to highlight that and give you more visibility into the not corporate side of the industry and hope that the people who do listen to this see you as a resource and whatever happens from there. So in this episode, folks, we are asking the question, why should we pay attention to the weather if we're in the coffee industry? So Greg, why should we pay attention to the weather if we're in the coffee industry? Yeah, I mean, is there anybody in this industry these days who has not just had their head on, you know, spin cycle from dealing with the price volatility and the landmines that have popped up over the past three years, right?
Yeah, of course. Unfortunately, a lot of that is because of the weather. Unfortunately, the reason why our supply titan, the reason why we had so many issues, really, the beginning of our problems were less than a percillion for us at 21. Like that was where overnight, you completely fundamentally changed the way the coffee market was going to behave over the next four to five years.
You changed the way a roaster does business. You changed the way a producer has to manage their risk, manage their farm. You changed everything because the one thing about coffee is that while it's grown so many areas, right? Ultimately, there's like three or four big guys and there's one behemoth.
And that behemoth, as we all know, is Brazil. It is grown in a very concentrated area, a very narrow band of producing areas are responsible for exporterable coffee and soft hollow and municipal ice. And when you have a major event like that hit the largest growing producing region of the world and have the most damage caused to a crop in 30 years, that touches everybody. That touches everybody from the guy who's, you know, a single holder, single shareholder farmer in Burundi to the roaster in the EU, the US, you name it to the person who's drinking the coffee and wondering why the hell it's $11.99 for a pound, right?
Everybody is impacted on every level of what we do by unfortunately something that is not within our control, which is the weather. Let's tell people very specifically how, because this is the dots that people often struggle to connect, right? It's like, how come what's happening in Brazil is affecting coffee that's being grown in Burundi? Especially because the smallholder farmers, which are in the plenty, don't understand how all of these dots are being connected.
So perhaps you can connect to those lots of people. Yeah, absolutely. So we have any given year. We have an X number of coffee beans or X amount of coffee produced by everybody all over the world.
In any year, we have Y number of cups of coffee being drank by people all over the world. If your demand for coffee, the amount you're drinking doesn't change, but your supply goes down 6 million bags, you have a problem. You have less coffee produced than coffee that you are drinking, which means you have to pull from some warehouse, some stock that you hopefully have left over from the prior year. While roasters are very specific on their blends, I think you would, having worked with them, you would probably agree with that.
They're very, very protective of that. If you don't have enough of a supply of a certain type of coffee, you have to find a substitute. Or if the coffee is too expensive for you to buy, because there's not enough of it from that specific origin, you gotta find something else. So what we're seeing now is, you know, and I think anybody who's been in this industry even paying $3.99 or $4, $4, $4.50 for a decent, you know, pound coffee.
That Burundi guy, all of a sudden, could see new people want his coffee, that never have bought his coffee before in the past, or that, you know, the Peruvian, or whoever, could find a new area of people or new people who need coffee because the Brazilian supply isn't there anymore, right? And the reason why the Brazilian supply isn't there anymore is because of the weather. So, you know, the weather affects production. That's the number one thing it does, is it changes the amount of coffee we have available to drink in any given year.
And when there's less of it, generally speaking, the prices are more expensive. When there's more of it, generally speaking, the prices are less expensive, not to drink. So I think in simple terms, you know, the number one variable above all else, in determining what we're producing in coffee is the weather. And then the second thing is acreage, you know, how many new trees have come online.
And that was a fantastic answer. I really appreciate the sickness of that. And that was an example of what happens with one, weather issue. Sure.
2025 has been a year that's come off the back of a couple of years before it that had weather issues. And this year is the third year in a row that we've had multiple weather issues that have played a lot of problems. And it seems as though people don't know if this is something that is happening just, this is something that's going to pass. Or is this the new normal?
Or in your mind, as somebody who tracks the weather and connects with the prices uses the data, is this a new normal? Because it seems like the frost in 2021 was a big deal. Then the weather changed the next year. And then the weather changed again this year.
So these are three years in a row that we've had these profound events. And that's just in Brazil. What are your thoughts? Well, I think the, the honest truth is I've been doing this for as I said before, 15 years.
And there's never been a year where everything's been perfectly normal. Like there's never been a year where everybody has just had this massive bumper crop. So only one or two guys, odds are it's Brazil, or it's Colombia, just has a massive amount of coffee that they produce. Everybody's, you know, the problem's in not to say it's not important to the farmer, but the problem's in your staff to get to the price or not as concerning when you have this massive Brazilian crop that is being produced.
It's to answer your question. I mean, yes, the climate is certainly changing. I did a talk in Houston at the SCA Expo this past year, kind of about this, you know, what is the new normal? And one of the things that I was very, very clear and specific on, I apologize for the.
You're in New York, bro. I'm here. We understand that. You can hear it.
No, but one of the things that I covered was that we are in this cycle where every seven to 10 years, we get a really, really strong El Nino, which is not, that's, you know, seemingly that's generally what happens. It's every seven to 10 years, you get a really, really strong El Nino. And global temperatures rise coinciding with that, plus you have the background warming from, you know, human inputs and all that. But the super strong El Nino years are really kind of the new record temperature.
Right. The problem is seven to 10 years later, your rolling five year, your average five year temperature is at the level that the previous record was at. So we continue to kind of step up over time and we continue to get just generally warmer over time. I mean, you can't fight with a thermometer.
That's what's going on, right? So that's what the data is saying. That's what the data is saying. So the problem that you then have is arabica is, and 20% robust though.
The only exactly love heat and they're not exactly crops that are extremely heat resistant. So when you have the heat issues, that's what did it to me was the heat issues in 23 and 24. Stung in Central America twice, result twice, Vietnam once. That is enough of big producing areas to get hit.
That now, any little problem feels like a big problem. Because it's stacked, right? Because it's stacked and stacked and stacked on top of each other. Thankfully, this year, Brazil is really good.
So hopefully now that we're starting to get better weather in Brazil this year, temperatures, global temperatures are still hopping. They're not as crazy as they were a year and a half ago. Your hope is that global production starts getting into more of a balance or a surplus or things start to calm down a little bit. But I think overall, I don't expect the warming trend to change, and that's something that I have to confront head on as an industry over the next 15, 20, 30 years as, what do you do when your global temperatures keep warming and you're going to get El Nino's and El Nino's are hot.
So what do you do when that happens? I think the idea that we are able to fully control what's going to happen is folly. But we can prepare, we can do things to try to mitigate what's going on. So normal is constantly shifting, but the normal is definitely getting warmer.
As far as, are we going to get a frost next year? I don't know. It's six to eight months away, frosted one off. We had a big one in 94.
We had a big one in 2021, generally speaking, every 25 to 30 years, we got learned. Doesn't mean it can happen. So that's kind of the long-winded way of saying, whether it's not going to be perfect and probably going to be getting warmer and we're probably still going to have to deal with frost at some point, that way. Yeah, it sounds like the theme of 2025 is the new normal, which is 2025 was all about volatility and instability, and that seems to be going to continue for, we don't know if it's the next couple of years or that's the foreseeable future.
And the weather is a major part of that for our industry. All right, so in the next episode, folks, we're going to talk about how is where they're connected to the price of coffee. We're going to dig deeper into that. So join us for that.
Peace, love and peanut butter, have an amazing rest of your day. This episode is part of a five-part series produced by Mapper Forward. Check the full playlist and guest details in the show notes as well as how you can support our work in the coffee industry. Become a premium YouTube subscriber, explore our Patreon and any brands we've partnered with to bring you this podcast.
Please don't forget to like, share and subscribe. It really does help us grow our audience.