The short version. Arabica futures traded around $3.00 a pound in New York in the first week of September 2026, about a fifth below a year earlier and well down from the record above $4 in early 2025, because Brazil is bringing in what may be its largest crop ever. That price, the C price, sets the floor under every bag of coffee on earth, and at today's level the commodity-grade green in a 250-gram bag is worth about two US dollars. The other twenty-five dollars in an Imvelo bag are roasting, packing, the flight out of Lusaka, the card fees, the 5 per cent to Imvelo Studios, and margin, and where those dollars land is the part of the coffee trade that producing countries lose. Here is the arithmetic, including the bits we cannot yet fill in.
The benchmark arabica futures contract traded around 300 US cents a pound on the Intercontinental Exchange in New York in the first week of September 2026, breaking below three dollars as Brazil's harvest came in. That was the lowest level since early August and roughly a fifth below the same week a year earlier.
Eighteen months before that the same contract had gone above $4 a pound for the first time in the history of the market, on 5 February 2025, and peaked around $4.41 later that month, after two bad Brazilian seasons in a row.
Between those two dates every roaster on earth had to explain to its customers why the bag cost more. That explanation has become a genre, and we would rather write ours before we need it.
The floor under everything
The C price is the futures price for a standard grade of washed arabica delivered to licensed warehouses. Almost no specialty coffee changes hands at the C price. But almost all of it is priced against it: a Kenyan AA might trade at the C plus a dollar or two a pound, a Zambian AAA at the C plus a differential negotiated between the grower and the buyer. We are not going to describe our own purchase basis in this piece, because we have not put the contract in front of the person who signed it, and a half-remembered commercial term is worse than none.
So the C price is the floor. At 300 cents, a kilogram of commodity-grade green costs about $6.61. Roasting drives off water and burns carbon dioxide out of the bean, and the bean loses roughly 15 to 18 per cent of its weight in the drum. A 250-gram bag of roasted coffee therefore starts life as about 300 grams of green. At today's C price, that green is worth about $2.
At February 2025's price it was worth about $2.90. That 90-cent swing on a $27 bag is what the whole 2025 price panic amounted to at the specialty end of the market. It hurt supermarket coffee far more than it hurt anyone selling a bag with a farm name on it.
Where the money goes
Now the part that matters more than the C price.
Producing countries ship about 74 per cent of the world's coffee export volume and receive about 57 per cent of the export value, on Coffee Watch's 2025 report on coffee tariffs. The gap is the roasting, decaffeinating, branding and packaging that happen almost entirely in Europe and North America.
The clearest illustration is Germany. It grows no coffee at all. In 2025 it was the world's second-largest coffee exporter by value, behind only Brazil, on Statista's trade figures, because it imports green beans and ships out roasted, ground and decaffeinated ones with a German roaster's margin attached. The 2026 Coffee Barometer traced a kilogram of coffee retailing at €9.71 through the chain: the farmer's gross share was €2.05, and the net, once production costs were paid, €0.41. About a tenth of the value in that kilogram rests on unpaid labour by members of the farming household.
Zambia's coffee follows that path almost exactly. About 97 per cent of the exportable crop is grown by one company and leaves as green beans. It is roasted in Oregon, Ohio, Hamburg and Cape Town, and it reaches a drinker under those roasters' names. The roaster's margin, the brand and the jobs in the roastery stay wherever the drum is.
Ours is in Lusaka. That is not by itself a claim about the farm gate: what a grower is paid is settled in the green trade, before a roastery of any size gets involved. It is a claim about where the next three layers of value sit. When you buy an Imvelo bag, the roasting, the packing, the design and the company's profit are Zambian, and so is the tax on them.
The bag, line by line
Here is the shape of a $27 bag. Where we have a public number we give it. Where the number is ours and unverified, we say so and will fill it in.
Green coffee. The commodity floor is about $2 a bag at today's C price, and specialty Zambian green trades above it. Our own green cost per kilogram and the roast loss we actually measure on our drum are not in this piece, because we want them measured across a quarter of roasts rather than pulled off one batch sheet. They go in when they are measured.
Roasting, packing and labour in Lusaka. Our wholesale price to cafés and lodges is K450 a kilogram before VAT, about $16 to $18 at the 2025 to 2026 exchange rate of roughly K25 to K28 to the dollar. That is the price at which a kilogram of roasted, bagged Kasama leaves the roastery for a Zambian customer with no international shipping attached. It covers the green, the gas, the bags, the people and a margin. A 250-gram share of it is about $4 to $4.50.
So by the time the coffee is roasted and in a bag in Lusaka, we are at roughly $4.50 of the $27. Everything else is the cost of getting a Zambian bag to a kitchen in London or Denver.
International shipping. A 250-gram parcel leaving Lusaka by courier for the United States or Europe is the largest line after the coffee itself, and on a single bag it can rival the coffee. The rate moves with fuel and with the courier's quarterly tariff, so the honest thing is to quote it on the checkout page and not in a journal post that will still be online in two years.
Payment and platform fees. Card processing and the storefront take a low single-digit percentage of every sale, and the rate depends on the gateway and on where the card was issued. We are not printing a figure we have not reconciled against a full month of settlements.
Duties and taxes at the border, which used to be the small line and are not any more. The United States suspended its $800 de minimis exemption for parcels from every country on 29 August 2025, and the suspension was continued by executive order in February 2026. A 250-gram bag now clears customs the way a pallet does, and 2026 is the first full year in which that is true of almost every package into the US.
The 5 per cent. Five per cent of what Imvelo earns goes to Imvelo Studios and to Zambian artists; that is the wording on our own site and it is the reason every label on a bag is a commission.
And margin. What is left after all of that is the profit, and on a single 250-gram bag shipped internationally, once courier costs are counted, it is thin. The DTC bag is the story of the brand, not its economics. The wholesale kilogram in Lusaka is the economics.
Why $27 is still the right number
James Hoffmann, the most-watched coffee educator on earth, has argued that taste alone cannot justify a price, and that there are three things that can: scarcity, competition, and preparation. His examples were a tiny Japanese lot, an auction, and a coffee aged or brewed in some laborious way.
Zambia scores on the first without trying. In a good year the country exports around 2,000 tonnes of green coffee, which is about 33,000 bags. Brazil alone is heading for a record crop this season, put at around 75 million 60-kilogram bags and at 77.2 million on StoneX's forecast, which is roughly four and a half million tonnes. The USDA's forecast for world production in 2026/27 is 189.7 million bags. Zambia's exports are about two hundredths of one per cent of the coffee grown on earth, and we recalculate that line each year rather than carrying it forward.
That scarcity is real and it is not a marketing invention. It is also, as we said in the piece on the collapse, a consequence of the industry nearly dying. We would rather it were less rare.
What we will do next
We will publish the missing numbers on this page once we have measured them properly: our green cost per bag, our roast loss, and the courier rate. We will update the C price line each quarter. And if the C price falls further, as the forecasters expect while Brazil's crop comes in, the green line in this bag will fall with it, and we will say so.
Roasted in Lusaka. The margin stays here.
Shop the Zambian single origin
More from this series: the origin that died and came back and why we joined the Specialty Coffee Association.
Frequently asked questions
What is the C price? The New York futures price for a standard grade of washed arabica coffee, quoted in US cents per pound. Almost all coffee, including specialty lots, is priced as a differential above or below it.
How much of a bag of coffee is the actual coffee? At the September 2026 C price of about 300 cents a pound, the commodity-grade green in a 250-gram roasted bag is worth about $2. Specialty lots cost more, and roasting, packaging, shipping and retail account for most of the retail price.
Why is coffee cheaper in 2026 than in 2025? Brazil, the world's largest producer, is bringing in a record crop, put at around 75 million 60-kilogram bags. The USDA expects world production to rise about 6 per cent to 189.7 million bags in 2026/27.
Where does the money go when coffee is roasted at origin? The roaster's margin, the packaging and branding work and the jobs in the roastery stay in the producing country. The farm-gate price is set separately and is not automatically higher.
Sources
Trading Economics, arabica coffee futures news, September 2026, and the January and February 2025 entries. Perfect Daily Grind, February 2025, on arabica passing $4 a pound on 5 February and peaking near $4.41. Barchart, arabica coffee futures quotes, September 2026 (Brazil crop forecasts from Marex, Sucafina and StoneX). Coffee Watch, “Unfair Business: How Tariff Wars and Tariffs Crush Coffee-Growing Countries,” 2025 (74 per cent of export volume, 57 per cent of export value; tariff escalation on roasted coffee). Coffee Barometer 2026, June 2026 (€9.71 retail kilogram; €2.05 gross and €0.41 net to the farmer; unpaid family labour). Statista, “Biggest coffee exporters worldwide 2025,” June 2026. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, “Coffee: World Markets and Trade,” June 2026 (189.7 million bags forecast for 2026/27). US Customs and Border Protection and Executive Order of 30 July 2025 suspending the $800 de minimis exemption from 29 August 2025. James Hoffmann, TikTok, 2024 (scarcity, competition, preparation). Perfect Daily Grind, “Exploring Zambia as a coffee origin,” 2021 (2019 export volume via ZCGA). Imvelo Brands price list, 2026 (wholesale K450 per kilogram ex-VAT). Perfect Daily Grind, “Why coffee roasters are explaining price increases,” April 2026.