The way we were trying to approach it, as I kind of had said, I had that dilemma. Do I lean more into the futures tools if I got into a better or find a way to break it? And basically what I'm saying is like this year with a high price, I think I need to lean into the tools to make sure that the producers will be happy with the price. They benefit from it, right?
But the big opportunity comes, okay, when the price goes down and the C price would say it's this, even if you use the tools, there's no reason that you can't then pay the producer a better amount. So can we, when that happens, convince a brochure to say, here's a new way to do it, let's reward producers for time, and then maybe that can be billed towards a place where we can then also convince producers to bring Tennessee price. Traditionally, businesses have found new leads at trade shows, but in 2026, that model is changing. Fewer business owners can justify the expense of exhibiting or attending trade shows in expensive cities around the world when that money could go to the ever-increasing cost of doing business.
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Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Map of Forward Friends. I'm your host Lee Safar and this is unfortunately the final episode of what has been a absolutely delightful conversation with Sean Warner from the Honduran Coffee Alliance. It has been really great Sean to kind of really explore these topics that are typically unspoken about. People find it very uncomfortable to talk about money in our industry.
This has been absolutely delightful. I really appreciate this. I hope you'll come back. I hope I haven't scared you off.
I'll do it. I'm good. Excellent. In this series, guys, we're talking about the way that coffee pricing is set now and in the future.
And in this episode, we're getting to the and in the future part of the conversation. As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, we have to start really paying attention to the reality of what's going on with the way that that's got Arabica. Arabica is going to continue to get more and more difficult to grow. And it is reducing in quantity every year.
We're seeing the numbers of that in the data. And the reality of it is that right now the C market, which is an Arabica-specific futures market, is the anchor price for the way everything is priced in the coffee market. And what I mean by the anchor price is it is the base price of everything. And then people will add a differential based on cut quality, based on whether it's organic, the origin, et cetera, et cetera.
They'll add different differentials on top of that base C price. Now, it goes without saying that if Arabica goes away, the C market will go away. And we're not looking at that as like, yeah, it might happen one day. Now it's an accepted reality that Arabica is going away.
But nobody's talking about that other part of it. What are we going to do when the C market goes away? Well, OK, there's a robust futures market. But the future of robust is also tentative because it requires a lot of water.
And water is one of the problems that we have. And second of all, there is new data out from the World Coffee Research from World Coffee Research that says, actually, robust doesn't like heat either. So now we're in a situation where we've got to really start looking at for those who care about future proofing their business, which is something that we're focusing a lot about talking about at the moment. We've got to look at what do we do to unhook ourselves from the dependency of the same market or any kind of futures market and build infrastructure away from that.
No matter how small your ecosystem is, that's a viable option. And that direct trade is what we talked about in the last episode. Sean, from your perspective, where do you see the options lying in the future for the way that we price coffee if these things do or when these things eventually? Yeah, I think, I guess you're saying the C price does not work as a tool.
And if there's so many challenges on it, just a rabbit in general. And so finding different ways that we're talking about different price references, there's a path there to do it to be able to have conversations, relationships, based on cost of production, based on what is the reality in that specific country and move away from that. I think it'll take time. But these are the conversations that they had to move it in that direction.
Yeah, I can explain a little bit like our perspective of how we're approaching moving some of those conversations. Yeah, please do. Yeah, I mean, so I think I talked a little bit about the success of those single origin copies in the menu and doing those in the context of relationship and direct trade or what I call it. It just works well.
Especially blender category, which is a huge chunk of, like I said, 80% to 90% of those special roasters menu is a trickier one. It is harder to figure out pricing and to disconnect it from the C price for those coffees. And so how do we move that? I've always kind of had the vision.
If we can get these single origin ones as a great option for producers and a lot of producers thriving that and also have another category of 84 point regional lots, especially blender category and have producers thriving that. Like, yes, there's probably always been another conventional world that's out there that I don't know how to fix. But if we can get a whole lot of producers of roasters thriving in those two contexts, I'm happy with that. Yeah.
Yeah. That's always my vision. How do we get that? I feel like I kind of mentioned, I feel like I've accomplished it and I've accomplished it, but it's working well in that single origin category.
But the specialty blender category, that category is a tougher one. Do you think that's because conceptually people look at it as though it's commodity coffee? Yes. I think it's tougher from the producer perspective.
I often think about how to price coffee, I'll do it from the perspective and think about the perspective of William Ramirez, the manager of caffeine, one of our main co-ops. And the area where I lived was caffeine, you know, about 120 producers. And so I think it was kind of my start in coffee. I really got to know them and it was my mission.
Tell us about them. Yeah. So in El Preso, I lived in down the El Preso, they're kind of neighboring towns and the regions called El Preso. One of the more largely conventional coffee areas in Honduras.
As in other areas, Honduras are more than known for people who know Santa Barbara or Mercala, other areas better for specialty coffee. But El Preso is very stuck in the conventional system. But that's the area that I really got to know when I also saw. There was awesome coffee there, but there was just not a market.
So, Cathy, you know, when a co-op formed, and actually there was a kind of deep history, there were a bunch of bad parrots came together to help them form. It was actually like a co-op of smaller co-ops. And they helped them bring up some infrastructure there. And it kind of failed for a while.
The producers weren't sure if it was going to work. They didn't really believe in it. They weren't willing to co-invest in it. The non-pouts asked them to invest a little bit of money in it.
And the producers kind of backed out. And really they had no plan of how to sell their coffee differently than all the other people. Okay. I mean, it was kind of like, okay, I can bring us together.
But how are we going to get us by pricing? And interestingly, I think the last chunk of years, William becoming the manager there has really gained the trust of producers. He has gotten to get crazy earfolds from producers of how hard it is. And I remember watching him at times getting yelled at by producers because one of the prices were crazy low.
And still the huge amount of volume of their coffee is still conventionally. But still he's been able to gain the trust of producers. And so he's one I've really leaned untrusted. And I've filtered my perspective through them.
But they're there to an awesome group of producers. And now, you know, instead they have like 20 containers of coffee or so. And it was all conventional. And now we've got like three containers that go theirs into hands of roasters that work with them and partner with them.
So I think it's one of our success stories as well. And the stories I love that more fits in the especially blender category of like getting these producers working together forming really solid 80, 40 point coffees. And in roasters I'm buying that same coffee year and you're out. William also came up with the idea of a couple of years ago to do.
Can we separate out all the women producers and be able to reward them for their quality and make it more like an 85 point coffee, a little bit higher price? And we found a buyer for that. And so those things have been just so fun like letting him almost take a lead in the producers and then we get to buying buyers for him. I often say on these podcasts and shout out to that asshole on YouTube who told me that I was incorrect.
But I often say that producers are the smartest in the coffee supply chain. You've heard me say it on the podcast a lot. We just don't listen to them enough or even offer them the opportunity to suggest the solutions to the problems that we've got. Yeah, I often like like I wish I could get William and his podcast, he doesn't speak English.
But like some of his ideas would be I love to get out there more. I could maybe be the voice for him sometimes, but yeah. Hold that thought because I have some ideas that I'm going to talk to you about off-air with regards to that for 2026. But we want to find a way to highlight more producer voices that aren't happening in English.
So trust me, there's a lot of thinking around that that's been happening for the podcast. And I'm aware that how valuable these podcasts has been for a lot of producers, but I don't think that we've done enough yet. So there is a focus to do that because, you know, we have been, coffee is very extractionist from origin countries. And I think the way that we turn the tables on that extractionism is by asking coffee producers, how can we make this work better for you right now?
What is it that you need? Yeah. I think I told you this one time that sometimes I have the doubt of myself. I kind of feel like the voice of what is happening under us and things should be from there because I think that's something we need to do more as industry.
Lift up those voices more instead of us telling the producers how things need to change. I'm telling us how things need to change. A thousand percent. And I'm committing, like, in 2026, we are going to make a concerted effort to make that happen.
We're waiting for the technology to catch up for us to be able to do it. But in the meantime, like, I don't want that to be the thing that stops it from happening. So we've tried a few things in the past, but, you know, you have, you have used your voice in this series to talk about three different producers through four different producers here. So, like, it's not nothing.
That's not nothing. And it is important for that to be acknowledged. With regards to the getting back to the price of coffee, what do you think happens? Let's say Kali Gana's prediction is correct, that the price goes up, it rallies one more time, and then we say it go down below two.
What do you think happens in that situation with regards to the future pricing of coffee? Yeah. I mean, answer the question. I was going to go back to one thing.
I was just going to say, from the perspective of William, I often look at, like, how can we do things differently? And I know one thing he's often said is, like, the producers he works with that come from many, many years of awful pricing, trying to convince them to say, okay, we're going to change how we do pricing. That might mean, though, when the speed price is higher, you have to take a lower price. He's always kind of saying, I know I can do that right now.
Like, the producers will walk in from me. Oh, should they? No, should they? Yeah.
Which, but then I kind of get frustrated because I think that means that we're put back in the whole of basing on the sea price because of that. Right. But not should they be like connected to that. If you're going to go off the path, I guess it's difficult, right?
Because they say the price go up and they say, well, I've been suffering for so long, I want to get me some of that. Yeah. And maybe the context will be different if they have a long history of someone paying them well when the price was low. But that's not the reality, even really for the producers.
I work a lot of these relationships are still fairly new. Right. Yeah. So in that situation, and a lot of people, a lot of producers are really worried that this is going to happen.
So my fear is that their fee gets realized, the price drops, and they say, I'm out. Yeah. I think the way we were trying to approach it, as I kind of had said, I had that dilemma. Do I lean more into the futures tools to figure out if you do a better or find a way to break?
And basically what I'm saying is this year with the high price, I think I need to lean into the tools to make sure that the producers will be happy with the price. They benefit from it. Right. But the big opportunity comes when the price goes down and the C price would say it's this.
Even if you use the tools, there's no reason that you can't then pay the producer a better amount. Right. So when that happens, convince the producers to say, here's a new way to do it. Let's reward producers for time.
And then maybe that can be billed towards a place where we can then also convince producers to break into C price. Well, because look, the price of roasted coffee is not going down again. Yeah. Right.
Like what we need to look at this on a holistic level, the prices are where they are and they're not going down. Just because the C price goes down, the cost of a bag of coffee to the consumer is not going down. And now we've demonstrated that the roaster can afford to pay a minimum of four dollars a pound. We know that.
We have data and lived experience that shows us that anyone worth their salt that wants to stay in this business should be having four dollars as their benchmark now. Yeah. Exactly. Let's just say like this worked.
Let's keep doing it. Reward the producers when the price goes lower and then be able to use that in leverage to say, let's find a place where we have more stable pricing for pricing for all. I think I do think that is an opportunity when that's the price goes down and opportunity to break from the C price. And perhaps this is like a movement that needs to happen where roasters need to turn around and say, look, I am just going to base the reality of the way I'm going to build my business moving forward, that the base price is four dollars.
Yes, it's high. Nestle's been buying at four dollars. They didn't, you know, they were able to hedge and whatnot. But essentially they were buying in the same market.
And if we're going to be able, if we want to stay in business and we want to get producers in business, we have to find a way to unhook ourselves from that volatility. Otherwise, we're not giving producers a reason to want to stay in this business. And like you said, I think there's a path to do that. It takes time because this may be nice in the year to try to change how we do the models.
But we can do models based on different price services, cost production as the C price goes down. Can we have like where everyone's thriving in those specialty blender category coffees? And that's a huge chunk of producers that can fit that category of coffee for roasters. Well, and you know, there's a lot of talk right now.
And there's a lot of commenting. I don't know why in the last couple of days on our YouTube channel about roasting at Origin. As a way to move away from this volatility of selling green to other countries. Yeah.
Yeah. There's more and more that happened in Honduras. And I'm very curious to see how that will continue to affect things in Honduras. That's more and more brochures are building their own brand than selling it.
And I can make better money doing that than selling it elsewhere. And there's less risk. Yeah. Yeah.
Less risk. It makes so much more sense when they can do it. There's still some extent of living in market. I don't think it's sell 40 bags doing that, but like an exportable coffee.
But I'm more and more saying I can sell at least five bags. You can have my own little brand over here. And so it is a better thing. And I'm curious if it can grow and expand in Honduras.
And I see it in other countries even more so where it's such a robust market internal market where like it makes more sense to keep coffee in country than export it. Brazil's number one customer is America. Brazil's number two customer is Brazil. Yeah.
Yeah. More and more countries can have that reality than they can. When the market tries to pay low, they can just say no. Yeah.
They've just got to cultivate, right? And once it catches fire, now they're de-risking. And the moment that they've actually built that ecosystem, that ends up becoming, it becomes a viable and sometimes preferred option. And that way, it means that the people who they do sell to are the relationships that they want to sell to.
Yeah. I do think like you mentioned this on the podcast. Not only for getting better prices to producers, but also for securing coffee. The relationship is a key for that.
And because producers, I hope we'll have more and more choices in the future. Yeah. And we'll choose the ones that have invested them in the relationship. Because what I say that you're doing, and I've mentioned this on the podcast a lot, but people are quite confused by what I mean by it.
So I want to clarify it here. So what I see that you're doing is you're helping solve for the currency that is going to get more and more expensive into the future. And that currency is access, right? And what I mean by that, folks, is price is not going to be in the future.
The only thing that is the determinant factor of whether you get coffee or not, it's just simply not going to be. Because producers have been treated like shit for so long that they have just decided, maybe I want to sell to you anymore. We have seen that happen a lot this year. And they have preferential treatment for the customers that paid on time, for the customers that bought from them regularly, from the customers who didn't complain when the price went up.
The way that you build the relationships over time as producers get more and more options for where they can sell their coffee, access is going to be a huge determining factor of whether you have coffee or not. So your relationship with someone like Sean and the Hunter and Coffee Alliance, because they have access to coffee, could be a determining factor of whether you're roasting company leaves or dies, rather than the price of coffee. And as Arabic gets less and less and less in supply, access is going to be more and more of a valuable currency. People don't believe that.
Yeah, and I don't think I did for a while until more recently. I mean, that my first seven, eight years in the industry was very much roasters. There was no argument to work with me because they needed access. They could go anywhere and find plenty of decent coffee, other places, spot coffee and other things.
And well, that is changing a bit now. There's much less coffee available and access is becoming more of an argument for roasters to say why they want to do relationship coffee. Sean, this has been an absolutely delightful conversation. I'm kind of really sad to say come to an end.
So you must come back. 2026 is going to be a very, very long year. It's a lot of easier. I have no idea if it's going to be easier or if it's going to be more of the same shit.
But let's just hope if it's not worse than what 2025 was. Can you tell people where they can find out more about the Hunter & Coffee Alliance and how to get in contact with you? Yeah. Yeah.
You can read me an email, John, at www.HendrenCoffeeLiance.com, or on socials as well, www.HendrenCoffeeLiance.com. So yeah, we'd love to get in touch and have some conversations. Yeah. I will include a link to Sean's WhatsApp in the show notes.
You'll notice that on the episodes that the Hunter & Coffee Alliance sponsors or advertisers, there is a link to Sean's WhatsApp. So if you do want to get in contact, just reach out and start a conversation. And you'll be very happy that you did like do business with good people folks. It makes you happier and it makes everybody even happier when there's challenging times.
It really does. So we have one final question, as always. When the future version of you comes back and watches this, what do you hope for him, Sean? I think there was moments we talked about earlier.
I think I just would love to be able to look back and see that in the wake. I had a bunch of really cool moments of relationships that flourished and I'm excited about working together and I get to be a part of it. So I get more and more than moments, I guess. Those moments that you have to earn rather than that you pay for?
Yeah, those moments where you can say, look, I got to be a part of something good. And really the basis of it for me is having a lot of relationships, roasters and producers that are loving working together and you need to work together. I hope that 2026 is incredible for you and your team. You've earned it and I really am excited to see where the Hunter & Coffee Alliance goes.
It's just really lovely to meet people who are walking the talk and we don't see it enough in the industry. So I'm always excited to elevate the voices of people who are doing that. I appreciate being on this and the network that has been formed here is exciting to some people. I've been trying to figure it out and think of ideas but be able to come together with others.
It's so cool, isn't it? The discussion group. I'm excited to see where that goes. We still haven't figured out where that's going to go but it's sort of sorting itself out.
The conversation, if you think of the conversations on this podcast are great, imagine that with 25 people. It's really awesome. Anyway, check the show notes if you'd like to be a part of it. It's a part of the Patreon community, the rosa coffee tier of our Patreon and it is just going to continue to get better.
Having said that Sean, would you sign us off for this series? Sure, I'm good. Peace, love and peanut butter. Have an amazing rest of your day everyone.
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