Trouble brewing: Trump’s tariffs drive up coffee costs
Coffee bean prices are lingering near historic highs. Tariffs aren’t helping.
Cory Vaillancourt photo
The roaster looks almost like an old steam locomotive, its polished steel drum gleaming under fluorescent light, a hulking American-made machine with heat coursing through its belly. Bins of beans — raw, pale, grassy — wait their turn to be transformed into fragrant, oily perfection.
The space around it smells sweetly of smoke and hard work. Every batch is a delicate gamble, as Cabell Tice of Waynesville’s Orchard Coffee wrestles with temperature curves and roast times. But even as the machine hisses and grumbles, the real heat is coming from elsewhere.
Far from this small Western North Carolina town, a series of tariffs announced by President Donald Trump is rippling through the global coffee trade. Although ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court on Aug. 29, the tariffs will remain in place pending a Supreme Court challenge. Meant to punish competitors abroad, those tariffs instead are beginning to punish American coffee drinkers at the cash register.
THE RISE OF THE ROASTERS
Tice, who moved to Waynesville in 2017, opened Orchard Coffee six years ago and got into roasting a year later.
“We started roasting coffee as Steamline Coffee Co., kind of a sister company of Orchard,” said Tice. “So from the beginning, the goal was to eventually start a roasting company that could do kind of a little bit more of this ‘third wave’ approach west of Asheville.”
“Third-wave” is coffee-speak for a more artisanal, craft-like outlook on roasting and brewing one of the world’s most popular beverages — with high-quality, ethically sourced beans prepared with precision.
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According to the National Coffee Association, two-thirds of all Americans drink coffee every day. The industry supports more than 2 million jobs and has an economic impact of $340 billion annually.
Tice’s gamble has paid off. Steamline’s wholesale accounts now range from the Times Bar & Coffee in Asheville’s historic S & W building to the Swag and Cataloochee Ranch in Haywood County, along with other high-end boutique spots in Jackson County and Black Mountain. In an average month, Tice roasts more than 3,000 pounds of coffee. It’s a modest amount by industry standards, but in Haywood County it makes him part of a small group that includes Panacea Coffee and Smoky Mountain Coffee Roasters.
Behind each bean is a complex supply chain stretching from mountain farms in Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico to warehouses in the United States, where little coffee can be grown due to largely unsuitable climates.
Often on plots smaller than 10 acres, foreign farmers sell the beans to local mills or cooperatives. Importers consolidate those lots and move them through ports when roasters like Tice buy the beans by the pallet.
The process bleeds value at every step. A pound of green coffee loses about 15% of its weight in the roasting drum, meaning Tice sells less than he buys. Packaging, shipping, labor, rent and utilities add further strain.
Cabell Tice, owner of Orchard Coffee in Waynesville, roasts more than 3,000 pounds of beans per month — 25 pounds at a time. Cory Vaillancourt photo
Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer at around 40% of total weight, is ground zero for the tariff fight. Brazilian beans anchor blends across the United States, including Tice’s own Blue Ridge Blend, which relies on Brazil for two-thirds of its flavor profile.
As of Aug. 6, Trump’s tariff schedule imposes a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports, along with lower tariffs on goods from other major coffee-producing countries — 25% for Mexico, 20% for Vietnam and 10% for Columbia, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Honduras.
Those distinctions are already forcing roasters to rethink their blends, substituting other origins, absorbing higher costs or, as has been the case with companies large and small, passing them on to consumers.
On June 10, J.M. Smucker, which owns the Folgers brand, said in an earnings call that the company would again raise prices for the fourth time in a year. In early August, social media reports from customers began to show that the shelf price of one of those big red tubs of ground coffee had nearly doubled in a month, from $13 to $20. On Aug. 27, the Wall Street Journal reported that Smucker, which also owns Café Bustelo, had seen its retail coffee division profit drop 22% and that it would continue to raise prices.
Smucker is only the 10th-largest coffee company in the world, with annual revenue around $1.1 billion. Starbucks, with $32 billion in revenue, is the largest but has seen its stock price decline 24% over the past six months due to rising costs and could implement price adjustments for consumers — but hasn’t so far.
Technically, tariffs are paid to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol by importers, which in Tice’s case is Wes Tirey, director of sales with Holly Springs-based De La Finca Coffee Importers.
“We’re a small green coffee importer as well as coffee traders,” Tirey said. “We’re bringing in our own containers of coffee with relationships that we’ve cultivated, and then based on what a client might need, if it’s not coffee that we’re actively buying on our own, we have relationships with other with other green coffee traders, so we do trader-to-trader business.”
The company was founded by fifth-generation Honduran coffee farmer Nelson Amador in 2013. Tirey’s been in the coffee industry for 20 years and thinks the tariffs have been a disruption.
“The daily effects of it are that it just makes it really hard to plan,” he said. “Everything is so touch-and-go, volatile, unpredictable. It makes it hard to plan as traders. It makes it hard to pursue relationships with producers and exporters that otherwise we would be interested in because of the tariffs, having to pass that on to our clientele.”
Tirey presented a radically simplified model of how it all works at scale — without profits, price adjustments or other costs included.
On Aug. 29, the price of a pound of Brazilian coffee beans was $3.86. The beans come in big burlap sacks weighing 132 pounds, so a whole sack costs $511. The containers carrying the sacks across the sea can hold 320 sacks, so a full container would cost $163,395. Once the container hits U.S. shores, the importer has to fork over another $81,698 to get the $163,395 worth of coffee they ordered.
“What if this is a trader who’s got 10 containers committed to for three months? What if they’ve got 100? What If they’ve got 500?” he said.
The answer is millions in tariffs paid with the cost spread out all along the way, from the container to the cup — but mostly to the person who ends up holding that cup.
Even before Trump’s tariffs, the underlying commodity price of coffee had doubled in the past five years. Throughout 2025, prices have lingered near historic highs. Tirey said De La Finca has “paused” its Brazil business until market conditions improve.
“We can’t move forward with any new contracts because 50% is staggering,” he said. “I’m having conversations with clients about replacing their Brazil positions with different coffees that don’t have a 50% tariff on them.”
Making things more difficult is the fact that there’s no way to make up for the immense volume of coffee shipped to the U.S. by Brazil if importers theoretically stopped buying it altogether.
“Historically, I believe it’s about 8 million [132-pound] bags [from Brazil],” Tirey said. “The challenge is that places like Mexico, Peru, Columbia, Honduras, all of those places combined won’t even get close to that. It’s maybe 5 million between all of them, give or take.”
As a small business, De La Finca isn’t in a position to absorb the tariffs.
“Ultimately, the last person in the chain of all of this is the consumer,” said Tirey. “In order for roasters to survive the situation themselves, they have to raise their prices, and they have to pass on the cost to the consumer.”
Last year, Tice raised wholesale prices about 15%, the first increase in five years, yet even those adjustments lag behind costs.
“Coffee roasters have been eating the cost of rising coffee just to not pass it on to our customers,” he said. “I think it’s partially because we’re afraid of losing customers, losing our wholesale accounts to a larger company that can say, ‘I’ll eat the loss more than you could.’”
The challenge is psychological as much as financial. Customers see a $4 cup of drip and assume the shop is raking in huge profits.
“Coffee has always been seen as recession-proof, but the margins aren’t what people think,” said Tice. “Coffee shop owners aren’t driving Ferraris.”
The tariff conversation doesn’t stop at coffee beans. Energy costs, shipping fees and inflation in everyday goods like milk and flavored syrups add further strain.
For now, some importers may be absorbing some part of the tariff hit, especially on beans already warehoused in the U.S. But once those stocks run out, higher prices will almost certainly pass down the line. Large brands like Folgers can hedge futures and buy lower-quality beans at scale. Independent roasters can’t.
“The full impact hasn’t hit yet,” Tice acknowledged. “We might have to raise prices a little bit, but it’s hard. Thankfully, people know coffee prices are going up, so they won’t be surprised.”
For Tice, survival hinges on more than spreadsheets. After a terrible fall 2024 tourist season following Hurricane Helene, he hopes fall visitors will bring renewed business. And in the roastery, the steel drum keeps turning, roasting batch after batch against the backdrop of geopolitics and global economics. Each pound represents a fragile balance — between farmer and importer, policy and palate, livelihood and luxury. If tariffs tighten further, the cost of that balance won’t be measured in future contracts or customs receipts. It will be measured in the rising price of a that warm, inviting morning cup.
“Tariffs are a tax on the American people,” Tice said. “It’s not being paid by the other countries.”
