Ethiopia's coffee harvest is wrapping up, and coffee samples are becoming available and ready to ship in the Arcana Coffee Marketplace. Arcana Coffee connects roasters directly with smallholder farmers in Ethiopia and builds in the hard parts—integrated QC, logistics support, and producer-led transparency. With every passing day, new samples are being registered on Arcana's online marketplace with all the information you'll need to help you make buying decisions and build direct relationships with farmers across Ethiopia. Registering for an account 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 that MOQ 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 and register for an account. 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. Samples are becoming available now, and supporting our advertisers is a great way to support our mission at Mapper 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 Mapper Forward. Friends, I'm your host, Leah Safa, and this is episode 2 of a fantastic five-part series with Carly Garner from DeCali Trading. Carly is not an advertising sponsor of the podcast, but I am saying this because if I was buying futures contracts, I would trust nobody else other than Carly to put my money with.
So if you are looking to hedge against the coffee that you're buying or any other commodities, I would a thousand percent encourage you to go and look Carly up. We all always talk about values-driven businesses. We talk about making sure that you're doing business with people who have integrity and the right standards and all of that kind of stuff. And in Carly's industry, those kinds of people are far and few between.
I can give you my assurance that Carly and DeCali Trading are one of those people. So she's a dear friend of mine. I trust her. I would trust her with my money if I was allowed to put it with her.
I'm not really allowed to play in this game. So go forth and do the magic with Carly if you want to do the magic there. So we're talking about what's happening with commodities in 2026. Carly, it is an incredibly volatile time.
I remember we talked soon after Trump got inaugurated last year, and we were saying then, you know, eventually things will calm down. And then 2026 went, bitch, hold my beer. And now we find ourselves in political tensions that are fastly spreading all over the world. Nobody even thinks about the war in Russia anymore.
Nobody's talking about what's going on in Sudan. Nobody's talking about Gaza because that has spread and it is getting wild. So I want to read you a question that came from a couple of different people in our community, in our Patreon community. And Nadia Schwartz said, I would be very interested in her perspective of the influence of the war.
It's always very interesting when people like Carly share their view because they may see things one hasn't considered yet. So in your mind, where do you see this being right now? And then we can talk about where it's going to go. So specifically dealing with coffee, I think, you know, everyone's focused on straight up oil and things getting in and out.
And, you know, coffee obviously isn't like a primary product from that part region of the world. So but fertilizers are going to is a problem. So producers are probably going to face increased growing costs. Shipping of coffee is probably going to be impacted, obviously, with the higher energy costs.
But what I really think the biggest impact is, is just the uncertainty of it all. I mean, we've come off 2025 was, you know, where tariffs are on and then tariffs are off. And then what's what's it going to do to us? And what's this?
And then it just like all goes away. And then here we are. And I think people are just really fatigued in the coffee industry. I think it's just there's a fatigue and a frustration.
And I think we're looking at higher interest rates because there's an expectation of inflation. To be fair, I actually think this is a knee jerk reaction in interest rates. I think interest rates go back down, but we'll have to see how that goes. At the moment, interest rates are higher than they were a month ago because of the war.
And that's, you know, if you're a small business owner, you need operational loans and things like this. This is something that might just push you out of business. It might push you over the over the edge. So I think that and consumers possibly cutting back because they're facing higher energy prices.
I think those two things work against the coffee industry and against coffee pricing. So I think there's more of a bearish coffee story here than a bullish if we're talking specifically just the war impact. It's interesting you say that because I see that there are going to be second order effects that are going to have huge impacts on coffee. So and we're seeing them immediately.
The price of fertilizer has gone up significantly immediately. The price of shipping has gone up immediately. The price of energy has gone up immediately. And these are things that people might think, well, look, the price of fertilizer going up is not going to really affect me yet because I'm the coffee roaster.
Well, that part of it is going to affect you later because the cost of production is going up. And if we don't subsidize that, if we don't pay a fair price for that coffee, that coffee is going away. But also the cost of energy to transport coffee all through the supply chain. I can tell you, I'm driving around the streets of Sydney right now.
They're pretty much empty. Our bowsers, our gas stations here on a daily basis, more of them have zero gas petrol. Our price has gone up. It went from about $2.95 a litre.
It is now closer to $3 a litre. And that's only in a couple of weeks. And we are being told, like a lot of countries around the world, we are being told, work from home. We are being told all of these things.
So what that means is going to be that coffee, the coffee industry and coffee. And we'll talk about what the impact is going to have on the price of the sea market in a second. But the impact is pretty immediate, given what's happening with oil. So can you talk to me about what's happening with energy and energy futures?
Right. So actually, I think, couple stories, there's a couple of things going on here. So the energy, like the energy, everything ties to energies, obviously. Most plastics, most transportation.
So it's a really, really big factor to the entire global economy. But what people are probably not recognizing, or maybe they are, anytime, I've been doing this for since early 2000s. So over 20 years. And I've only seen crude oil move this far, this fast, three other times, two other times, actually.
Three other times. But each of those times resulted in a recession. Or if it's 2022, technically, it didn't, the U.S. didn't go into a recession because the people in the White House changed the rules.
And so the recession, they changed the definition of recession, didn't they? Yes, yes, they did. That was, I mean, yeah. So maybe we had a recession.
Maybe it depends on who you ask. But anyways, basically, this type of shock in energy prices tends to really thwart the economy, even if it's temporary, because it's so sudden. Gas here doubled, almost doubled. Yeah, and you're in Vegas, right?
Yeah. Is that like what happens usually in Los Angeles, where, you know, the price of petrol is of gas is naturally very, very high because of Texas? Yes, so in California, I've seen memes or pictures on the Internet. I haven't driven to California to verify, but I've been to California many enough times to know that their price is usually $3 or $4 higher than ours.
So, yeah, we're $5-ish a gallon, which is pretty high for us, maybe $6 in some places. I think California is probably $9 or $10 a gallon. So it's really, really expensive. And it does, you know, people change their behaviors.
And now suddenly people might skip an extra Starbucks trip or they might skip eating out or whatever the case is. And it's going to happen very, very quickly. So I think that is really what we're looking at here. I expect a lot of people are thinking inflation, because energy prices are going up, everything's going to be more expensive.
But the problem is, if we see what we've seen in the last three times crude oil has done this, consumer is going to basically just stay in their house, put their hands in their pockets, and stop spending. And if that happens, it's deflationary, not inflationary. So it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out in the next couple of months. I'm not optimistic.
I think we've got a little bit of a rough time ahead. Something that a lot of people, well, actually nobody in the coffee industry is talking about right now is gas, natural gas. And most coffee roasting machines operate on natural gas. Or a version or a derivative of natural gas.
So what is very interesting right now is if we can get the raw product, which is going to be very high, like I think it's going to continue to climb for some time. And I may be completely wrong, guys, so please, I want to give a disclaimer for this entire series This is a good question, so I'm going to just mention something I should have mentioned in the last section real quick. This event, regardless of what happens or how it works out, it is changing a little bit of the world order when it comes to energy. Some of your listeners may not even realize, natural gas prices in the U.S.
are like $3. So we're actually under $3, where on the other side of the world, it's skyrocketing. The U.S. has done a lot of things wrong and we continue to do things wrong, but the one thing we did right was energy independence.
And so we have enough natural gas to be a major supplier to the other parts of the world. The problem is building facilities to liquefy it and get it over there. And we're in the process of doing that, but it takes time. So that's something that in the next, if this type of thing ever comes up again, hopefully we're better prepared logistically.
Because believe it or not, in the U.S., natural gas is a kind of a byproduct of crude oil extraction. And we have so much, we actually burn it because it's cheaper to burn it than to pipe it somewhere. And that would be great for the environment. Right.
It smells like rotten eggs if you want to know. Right. So, that said, I do believe, like I mentioned before, especially in energies, high prices, cure high prices. If you look at a monthly chart of crude oil over the last 20 years, we've been trading in this really, really big range.
Like it's crazy. Basically, we're making lower highs each and every shock we get, and we're making slightly lower lows. So at this point, if you draw very simple lines, the top of the range is about $120 a barrel. The bottom of the range is $15 a barrel.
And that's obviously an insanely wide gap. But I would not be shocked to see within a year or two, I think we might be talking $30 or below in crude oil, believe it or not, because if you look at, I know it sounds crazy, but literally a month ago, if someone would have said, we'll be $120 a barrel in March. No, everyone would be like, what are you talking about? That's insane.
Commodities do wild, wild things. And especially a commodity like crude oil, it can't be stored because it's a liquid. So it's really, really volatile and we go from feast to famine very quickly. If you look at 2008, we rallied to $150 a barrel.
And immediately, like when we got to $150, my mom bought a Prius because she told me that gas prices were never going down and she has to buy an electric vehicle. So I said, okay. The next day, crude oil turned around and it's literally never been to $150 again. In fact, it went from $150 to $36.
So you see these kinds of swings. In 2022, we went from $120 to $55. So these things happen and I, again, without getting into politics, the Trump administration has pretty aggressively tried to work towards lower energy costs. And you can argue whether he's good or bad at it, but the reality is we have global SPR releases.
We're putting, there's rigs in California that have been shut down and those are coming out of retirement because they've pushed through some regulation issues. So there's a lot of oil coming online. We have Venezuelan oil slowly coming back online. I actually think if, and it's a big if, maybe things don't correct themselves in the Middle East, but if the Strait opens back up, I think we end up with more oil than we had before.
And I actually think it kind of collapses on itself. Sometimes oil rallies are its own worst enemy. And I think that's what we see. In addition to that, like I mentioned before, I think the rally itself is probably changing the economy enough to where we have a chance of going into a recession or something close and that alone will put pressure on prices.
So I'm worried about the downside, not the upside. Right. And while we're talking about that, about energy and the geopolitical situation, let's talk about data centers for a second because they require an extremely large amount of energy. I don't see any of them stopping to use the energy while we're all being asked to kind of cut back, right?
Are you getting a different signal in America? No, I don't think nobody's talking about that. I question, I really question AI and its usefulness, but I guess that's a whole different conversation. I mean, I know I use it every day for research purposes, but I find, you know, just like anything else, it's literally just pulling information off the internet and that information may or may not be right.
And sometimes, you know what I mean? So I'm not as strong ho as some of people are on this technology. I think it actually might be complicating our lives instead of making it simpler, but we'll see. Yeah, the energy part around all of that is very interesting because they're building them everywhere, these data centers.
And I don't, they need a huge amount of clean filtered water and they need a huge amount of energy. And I don't know where that goes and what that does to the price of energy in amongst all of this because it seems like everybody's bills are going up and they're using less energy, but the data centers, anyway, that's a whole other kind of place. In the next episode, we are going to be talking about the path for the C market to be a functioning tool for farmers. So join us for the third episode of this series, guys.
Peace, love and peanut butter. Have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting Mapper Forward, our guests and advertisers on social media. Subscribe, hit the like button, leave a comment and share this episode with a friend.
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