Tag Archives: price

Farmgate Price: An Important – but Partial – Piece of the Sustainability Puzzle

2017-09-19 Kraig Kraft Comments Off

In March, I wrote about my reaction to Kickapoo Coffee publishing a minimum FOB price for all their coffees. That article focused on Kickapoo and other efforts to make pricing more transparent – an aspect of the specialty coffee business that can be quite murky. I had 3 takeaways of things that I liked about […]

A closer look at what a $2.75 /lb. FOB minimum price means

2017-03-13 Kraig Kraft Comments Off

A few weeks ago, Kickapoo Coffee Roasters publicly committed to paying farmers in their supply chain a minimum of $2.75 FOB per lb. FOB (FOB stands for Free on Board, which means this is the price of the coffee ready for export) for all of Kickapoo’s green coffee purchases. Their press release says that it […]

More PRM! Best practices with contracts for cooperatives and farmer associations

2016-10-18 Kraig Kraft Comments Off

(Influenced heavily by these fantastic reference pieces Trading Practices for a Sustainable Coffee Sector – IISD, Jason Potts, with Guido Fernandez and Chris Wunderlich and by the International Trade Center’s – The Coffee Exporter’s Guide) Recently, we’ve been working with the cooperatives participating in the Blue Harvest project in Central America to improve the commercialization […]

Price Risk Management revisited: Reality check and back to basics

2016-06-20 Kraig Kraft Comments Off

If you have been following the Coffeelands blog, you’ll know that Price Risk Management is a topic that if increasing importance to us. I’ve been writing about this topic for the last 9 months and talking about it for even longer. Finally, this last week, I got to walk the walk. With the help of […]

Conversations in PRM, part 5: The HOW to get price insurance

2016-02-01 Kraig Kraft Comments Off

For the final (for now…) Price Risk Management conversation, I wanted to go in a different direction. So far we have heard about a PRM perspective for cooperatives, estates, small farms and from the exporter. Our conversation today is with someone who really understands the mechanics of how price insurance and hedging with futures work. […]

Conversations in PRM, part 3: Jorge Cuevas – A shared cost approach to price insurance

2015-11-23 Kraig Kraft Comments Off

“Price Risk Management is one of the most misunderstood topics of the coffee crop cycle.” This is how my conversation on PRM with Jorge Cuevas, the Chief Coffee Officer for Sustainable Harvest, began. Sustainable Harvest has been training cooperatives and incorporating the use of price insurance for many of their client cooperatives. It’s part of […]

Conversations in PRM, pt. 2 – prototyping future coffee farmers

2015-10-14 Kraig Kraft Comments Off

If you wanted to make a prototype of what the future of coffee farming could look like – you’d make sure farmers had an entrepreneurial approach to farming coffee; that farmers understood and used the complex financial tools available to offset risk; and you’d imbue farmers with a sense of how to take advantage of […]

Perspectives on PRM, part 1: Ed Canty – “risk management is everyone’s business”

2015-09-28 Kraig Kraft Comments Off

A few days ago, I wrote about the need for producers to manage their exposure to price. Let’s start with a disclosure: I have no formal financial training. However, my work with the coffee sector, I recognize that my focus has been on mitigating the risks on the production side – climate change, diseases – […]