And now the price. Okay. So pricing was insanely high this year, insanely high, um, especially in the east and the rest it was, it was less, there's a bumper crop in the east. We've got people paying the anywhere from 200, 240 burger per kilo of cherry up to above $3 a kilo.
If you do a direct conversion, maybe just taking the price of red cherry and saying, this is how much a green coffee costs, you're looking at about $4.35 a pound to $5.44 a pound, not including export costs, cost of labor, regions of good. Yes, prices are crazy high in the east. If you're a roaster, you've probably felt it. It's getting harder and harder to find great quality coffee at volumes and prices that still make sense.
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They work with organized producer groups across regions like El Paraiso, La Paz, Olancho and Comoyagua, helping them evaluate quality, tell their farm stories and move coffees that belong on specialty menus, not buried in anonymous blends. What that looks like for roasters is previously untapped to lots that heat your flavor and quality targets, a minimum of just four bags to get started, transparency reports so everyone can see where every cent of the purchase goes, and turning that first buy into a long-term trade relationship, not just a one off. If the idea of forming a long-term relationship with producers in Honduras is of interest to you, reach out to the Honduran Coffee Alliance so that they can work to find you a fit for your 2026 menu. Samples are going to be ready soon.
You'll find Sean Warner's WhatsApp and email in the show notes, send him a message and tell him you heard about the Honduran Coffee Alliance here and start exploring what these overlooked Honduran coffees could do for your menu today. Check the show notes for links. Welcome to the Daily Coffee Pro by Map It Forward Friends, I'm your host Lee Safar and this is episode one of a brand new five-part series with Matthew Thornton coming back as promised to give us a, I don't know, an insight, we'll call it Matthew, an insight, an overview of the Ethiopian Coffee Hubbers for 2026. This is episode one of our five-part series, welcome back to the podcast Matthew.
Thank you very much, it's nice to be back. Exciting times, crazy times. We are recording this in February. It already feels like we should be in 2029, given how much has happened in January of 2026.
That's wild. The world is wild. You're American. No.
No. I'm going to be 13 years ago for a reason. You're saving graces that you're not leaving there anymore. Crazy times.
We have a lot to talk about. In the last time Matthew that you came to on the podcast, you were introducing your expertise in coffee. You were telling us about our Cana Coffee Marketplace, this online marketplace that you had built. Full disclosure folks, our Cana is an advertiser on the podcast.
Again, as I state every time that is not why Matthew is on the podcast, but you don't get to be an advertiser if you're not somebody that I would have on the, if you're not somebody that I would have on the podcast. So Matthew, we are here as promised to talk about what has happened in the harvest and what we can expect moving forward. The reason I'm really excited about doing a series like this and I'd love to do it more with other coffee origins is so that people who are in our industry get to understand from somebody who has sort of an on the ground understanding, like what can we expect from the year ahead? And you're in a very unique position that way.
So remind everyone quickly what our Cana is and then we can dive into it. For sure. I'd like to preface that with buckle. Wow.
And folks, just to let you know, I don't know anything about what he's going to say. So I'm learning about this as you're learning about it. Yeah. So yeah, I am the founder of your Cana Coffee Market.
We are Ethiopia's largest direct trade digital platform for smallholder coffee farmers. Really pushing direct trade. Farmers remain the exporters maintain the ownership of their coffee. We represent them.
And find ways to connect directly with buyers providing tools for both sides to kind of span the logistics and international bridge. And now into the trip. And now let's talk about your trip. So tell people how like how we got to the moment we're about to talk about.
So you have the marketplace, you're not a farmer, but you do have farmers that have to use the platform to sell their coffee. And then what happens? Well, we help them to sell their coffee. We work very closely with farmers.
We do have a lot of supports that we provide them. We try and promote that support through technology or promote the scalability of that support through technology. And really we got here because the last podcast we wanted to come back and talk about Ethiopia. And so you go on the ground, right?
You don't just communicate via WhatsApp or anything like that. You go into the field, you see what's what. And so the data that you're telling us about is like, he's been there, he's touched the coffee, he's spoken to the people in person and has seen him if you don't know. This is not second-hand information folks.
No, it's not. Me and Bios, the operations manager, spent about 30 to 40 days traveling throughout all the coffee producers of Ethiopia. And why don't I say all of them? I mean, all of them.
We drove about 4,000 kilometers or 2,500 miles for people that are not familiar with kilometers. And we went everywhere, even to new coffee places I haven't been to. So for instance, like Bali, a lot of people don't know that, but it's like further east of like Sedama. And Sedama, like the highlands of Sedama, you're a good chef, they are actually from the Bali mountain massive.
So we're a bit further east and we went out to this new region that's almost out to like the Somali state of Ethiopia called Burberry, awesome looking coffee out there, really cool farmers out there. But from Bali into Sedama, into Guji, Geddio, which has like your good chef face and more famous names, further south into Geddio and then we went all the way out west into the Jima, Metu, Bali, Tepi, Misantefari, Bonga, we just traveled, promoted our chain and talked with farmers and asked them a lot of questions about the harvest, things they struggle with. And yeah, we wanted to walk on this trip. Wow.
Yeah. I'm still tired from that trip. I can imagine. And that was like more than a month ago, wasn't it?
It was. It was. I was still recovering. I feel I realized I'm not as young as I used to be.
Yeah. And it was bumpy roads. I feel you broke. Trust me.
The beginning of the season, I was like, yeah, I got this no problem. By the end of it, I need a bed. And I said, Tyler, no, it's like a month's rest. I feel that way about taking a long haul trip to Australia.
Well, it was really cool. We did seal. We learned a lot about the harvest. Something about the harvest.
If you break it down, you have the actual quantity of the harvest, yeah, the quality of the harvest and then you have pricing, which I think will be of big interest to a lot of people. Yeah. But let's start with the quantity first. For those of the listeners that are not familiar with Ethiopia, the Rift Valley cuts through the middle of the country.
And there's a lot of lakes that for long. And people have heard of Holosville and Ghana, Lake Abaya, those are all lakes. It's in the Rift Valley. And it distinctly separates out the coffee regions.
For me, you kind of have like the east, which is again, Ballet, Sidah, Mancucci, or the Chef Faze, some of the bigger names from the far much larger west, which is Shima, Teppi, Bongo. And what I've noticed about this, working in Ethiopia and coffee over 10 years now, is that the regions, they seem to oscillate. You may have off seasons, you have bumper crops. And every other year, the other regions oscillate and they seem to oscillate opposite of each.
So last year, there was a bumper crop in the east. So Yurgicheth and Gucci, C-Dah, quality was good. And last year, West, it was an off season. They didn't have as much coffee.
This year, it's opposite. So in the east, Yurgicheth and all the places, all the big names, I was not trying to stay clear. Yurgicheth and Gucci. So in the east, we noticed that the crop was down.
And that was from our personal observations and talking every term that we came across. And it seems like the crop is down 15% to maybe 20% in some places. There is variability. Out West, the crop is good.
It's doing really well. There's a lot of coffee out there. The good thing, and this is now moving into quality, is that many times when there's an off-prop, it could be related to whether it may be heavy rain during flowering and it disturbed the fruit set. Or maybe no rain when the beans were developing and a lot of them were reported.
This year, thankfully, both the east and the west, it seemed like the season was really good. The rains came at the right time. They left at the right time for processing. It wasn't really degrading on the quality.
We're starting to get samples in. They're all looking very good. Blutch. It's not consistent.
I know. I should preface this. It isn't consistent everywhere. You can still have some places in the west where the crops are a little under.
Even sedama in the east, it did full that 15% reduction of production. But there could be a few areas within that. I think sedama was crazy two years ago. It was almost complete.
I think the crop was down like 40, 50%. It was really bad one year. Okay. If you're looking around for coffees, it can vary a little quantity.
And now the price. Okay. So pricing was insanely high this year, insanely high. Especially in the east.
In the west, it was less. There's a bumper crop. In the east, we've got people paying the $200, $240 per kilo of cherry up to above $3 a kilo. If you do a direct conversion, just taking the price of red cherry and saying, this is how much the green coffee costs, you're looking at about $4.35 a pound to $5.44 a pound.
Not including export costs, costs of labor. Oh, my God. Yes. Prices are crazy high in the east.
That sounds like it's a supply. It's driven by supply, right? Because supply is down in the east, correct? That attributed to it.
But I think there's a lot of other things that happened. Yeah, supplies down. We also have the fact that last year, the last year, it's 2025. So 2024, as you know, the government floated their currency.
So it went with the market rate. And overnight from end of July to the beginning of August, the burger devalued by half. It went from $50 to $1 to $123. That next season, so the 2024, 2025, harvest season of the previous harvest season, export is named, because the price of cherry did not, that devaluation was not reflected in the price of cherry.
Really all. We were doing experiments with techno service in the south and we were purchasing cherries from a few farmers that we had chosen based on the farm practices. And I went back to the data because I just didn't make sense to me, but we only paid slightly more to farmers the next year. We just went with the market rate and we added like five Berber kilo because the farmers are doing it specifically for our project.
And the price didn't really increase. So farmers really missed out and exporters knew. And a lot of people took note of that. And you had a lot of new people out there competing for an already diminished supply of coffee.
You also had farms that were like, why am I going to sell my cherry to you? I'm going to drive as the cherry pot, which we call a genfolk here. And I'm going to sell that in the secondary market and make more money. So they were claiming they're part of the pie, their piece of the pie.
This year is kind of like, we don't really want to sell our cherry. We want to try and get more value out of it because we got, you know, we had taken advantage of kind of screwed over the year before. So the farmer is starting to realize that they were taken advantage of in 2024 or 2025 by the exporters, whether they did it or not. Like the exporter is not going to turn around and say, well, I made more money this year.
So I'm going to go back down the supply chain and I'm going to pay everybody who was involved. That's not how it works. And guys, when I tell you, Matthew and I had a whole podcast conversation before we started recording the podcast. But when I tell you that the coffee industry is a dirty, dirty, dirty game, commodities in general are a dirty game.
A lot of the time, the dirty game is about how unfair it is. And how certain people take advantage of the game because they can. And other people are left out of advantage of the game because they don't understand the game. They're not in the right place at the right time to be able to take advantage of hedging, for example, or currency exchange or all of those things.
So the dirtiness in our industry comes from a lot of imbalance. And I'm not going to go into it now, but those of you who are so fucking fixated on these competitions, you are useful idiots to the people who know how to use these tools. I will just say that. And the rest you can go and see on social media.
Trust me, there's more coming. But the farmers sounds like they are realizing we don't want to be useful idiots anymore. You won last year. We want to reclaim some of that position back.
In a way, yes. I don't think like I wanted to clarify. I don't think exporters took advantage of it. I think it just worked.
It happened. Yeah. Like the market, the market freeze was there. Right place, right time.
People were selling cherry at that price. Okay, great. And then the problem that happened was farmers saw and other people saw the profits against workers made. And they're like, I want a piece of that pie this year.
And I think that's where a lot of this restriction came from or the farmers were like, I'm just not going to sell to you. I think almost the prices up here. And there's also some people, I think, I don't know. So it's really easy.
It's not really easy. The market can be influenced by a few backers. I'm talking about the sharing market. So their efforts are also maybe a couple of actors were very confident and be sales and volumes again.
And they were going to secure that. And they're not sharing any price. Anything is awesome. So they were not afraid to just jack up the price.
And everyone else was just following suit. And a lot of guys were like just walking into a blind, like, hey, there's really is a lack of information for us. So they're like, well, he's paying it. And it must mean there's a market for it.
So I'm going to do it as well. And the market just went. It's an inflation at insurance. Goodness.
So that's a very interesting development that's happened this year. Don't be scared. Stick or shock folks. If you're listening and looking into words really high quality, if you'll be in stick or shock, you're ready for it.
So, so the, so you broke it down really well. So the three different areas is quantity, quality and pricing. I really like this framing. And we should try and figure out how to kind of frame every origin that way.
And obviously with generalizing here, but in quantity and quality, you broke it down between the east and the west of Ethiopia. And from a quantity perspective, the east is down. The west is up. How much?
Fifteen to 20%. Fifteen to 20. Okay. So the east of Ethiopia is down.
The west of Ethiopia is up. It's up to the west. It follows the same or is it choppy all over the place? It's a bit choppy.
I get concerned about quality in the west because it is up on the crop. Usually when you have more cherry, people will still bite and then they may pile higher up on dry beds, it's harder for them to manage. So if you're buying all this, be careful of defects like mold, earthy, phenolic cups, things like that. And if it's in the east, try and get it early.
Right. It's going to go because it's not supply. Yeah. I would also like to add a think in the east, you're going to see a lot of reduction in wash coffee specifically.
So if you're one of those people looking for like a washed floral, good chaffee, kitchen or contracts in fast because not only was it cherry down and there's a lot of farmers that are drying it naturally to have value and so on. Later markets, which also have massive liquidity crunch here. Again, with that build up of the, sorry, the devaluation of the currency, you know, even if washing stations get financing from banks on paper, actually taking delivery of cash, which really economies are dependent on, is really hard. And when they don't have cash, it can be hard for them to secure sufficient cherry, to process into parchment to wash the coffee.
So my prediction is that wash coffees in the east are going to be below. So get in early, trying to contract some of these. And what cash be king here, like, is it the people who are paying for, actually, let me ask that better. Augusto Amaya was telling us in Colombia, if you don't pay for the coffee, you don't own the coffee, right?
Like you have to, someone has to actually pay for the coffee. It's not like the situation where the coffee gets shipped and you get to pay instalments, blah, blah, blah. That's not how it works. In Ethiopia, is it the same thing?
If you want the coffee, you have to pay for the coffee? Well, yes, you have to pay for it. Yeah, so there's three primary ways that purchase a secure coffee in Ethiopia, and really all relies around getting a contract in exporter and is registered at the National Bank. Once they're registered at the National Bank, they have an obligation to export it, and they're going to follow up with them to make sure they do.
And then the payment terms for them could be advanced payments where, before it ships, the coffee can still come to you out as a bubble, you can check the quality before it ships, but before it starts moving to port, they would have to have a proof of payments in their bank account to show the National Bank to get the export printed. And then you have, you know, caching its documents, CAD, you could do CIF, and you could also do a letter of credit, or an LC. And with those, you would hit the first, get all the documents, and then you'd pay for it, usually when it's on the water. But yeah, you really just need to get a contract to the next quarter, get that thing registered with the National Bank, and then your coffee is secured.
Yeah, well, okay. So we have the lay of the land. Thank you, Matthew, for kind of giving us that helicopter view of what the harvest looks like. In the next episode, folks, we're going to talk about the uniqueness of how coffee is traded in Ethiopia.
And there are some interesting things that are very unique to Ethiopia, and I don't understand them, and Matthew's going to help us all understand them. So join us for episode two of this series. Peace off and paint up, but I have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting Mapper Forward, our guests and advertisers on social media.
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