Originally published 3rd April 2020.
During uncertain times, there's a tendency to look inward. Isolation narrows our focus – on ourselves, our households, our immediate needs. The panic buying and sharp drop in charitable giving seen in recent weeks reflect something deeply human: when survival instinct kicks in, the wider world can start to feel very far away. But we need to resist that pull. Now more than ever, it matters that we keep looking outward.
For us, looking outward means thinking about the coffee producers we work with.
Returning from our Central American buying trip on 17th March meant going straight into self-isolation. Three weeks ago, we were on the farms where we source our green beans – meeting the people who grow our coffee, walking the land, tasting the harvest. Now we can't travel further than the supermarket. The world has changed at extraordinary pace, and since getting home we've been in touch with those same producers to understand how much their lives have shifted in that very short window.
El Salvador
The Salvadoran government implemented a nationwide lockdown, reviewed on 21st April. The agricultural sector and industries classified as essential services are exempt – but most coffee pickers have returned home (picking is largely seasonal and transient work), or are isolating and understandably anxious about COVID-19. At the time of writing, 32 confirmed cases have been reported in El Salvador, with one death, since the first case was confirmed on 18th March.
Guatemala
Guatemala's initial lockdown ran for seven days from 22nd March – just nine days after the first confirmed case. It has since been extended to 12th April. There have been 38 confirmed cases to date, with one death.
Costa Rica
Costa Rica declared a State of Emergency on 18th March and closed its borders to foreign nationals. With 347 reported cases and two deaths at the end of March, numbers have remained relatively stable. Coffee production has been classified as an essential service, so farms can continue to operate. Fortunately, most of the picking had already been completed before the State of Emergency was declared. Costa Rica's smaller farm structures – compared to other producing countries – have also helped, with remaining picking manageable by family and farm workers on site.
Nicaragua
Nicaragua has largely kept to business as usual, with the country's first confirmed COVID-19 case recorded on 18th March. Since then, reported case numbers have climbed sharply, though these figures are widely considered unreliable given the Nicaraguan government's approach to reporting. The Vice President Rosario Murillo – also the President's wife – called for the public to gather in the streets in a march she dubbed 'Love in Times of COVID-19', and declared that Nicaragua would not follow other countries in restricting movement. Land borders have remained open.
What this means for our producers
None of this is normal – not for us, and not for the people who grow our coffee. This pandemic is having sweeping effects on the global economy's ability to function at even a basic level. From a logistics perspective, shipping containers are in extremely short supply and sailing slots are increasingly hard to secure, pushing shipment delays out by one to two weeks. Those delays are manageable for us right now, but the cashflow knock-on for our producers is a real concern in the medium and longer term.
The single biggest threat to our producers, though, is the response from consuming nations. With cafés and restaurants closed around the world, the wholesale coffee market has effectively disappeared overnight. Many small roasteries have gone into hibernation, ready to reopen on the other side of this. Others are pushing through – driving online sales, managing reduced teams, and adapting quickly to new safety requirements. But online retail, while valuable, deals in much smaller volumes than wholesale. Any gains there are quickly swallowed by the loss of wholesale accounts.
From our own experience and from conversations with exporters and importers over recent weeks, it's becoming increasingly common for uncontracted coffees and pre-orders to be cancelled. Roasters watching their cashflow disappear are not able to honour commitments they made in better times. For our Central American producers, whose harvests are ready to move right now, the timing couldn't be worse.
Our own team has had to make some genuinely difficult calls on coffees we hadn't yet contracted, or where negotiations were at an early stage. In some cases we've reduced shipments; in others, plans have changed completely. None of it has been easy, and none of it has been done lightly.
Over many years we've travelled to producing countries, built direct relationships, and wherever possible bought exclusively from individual farms. We love working with a coffee no one else has – and getting to share it. That's the job we love. But those exclusive arrangements now carry real risk for producers who haven't spread their exposure across multiple buyers. We've never thought of this model as high-risk before, because we've always grown alongside our partners and weathered the tough times together. Now, more than ever, we feel the weight of that responsibility – and we're not walking away from it.
Over the past two years, we've been working to put long-term contracts in place for our key producers, giving them predictability on both price and volume. We're honouring every one of those contracts, even without any clear end date in sight for this pandemic. We made those commitments, and we're keeping them.
Not everyone is in that position. Exporters have told us about contracts being cancelled outright as roasters' markets dry up – and we're only a few weeks in. It's likely to get harder before it gets easier.
This is a challenge specific to specialty coffee. Supermarket shelves have been cleared and restocked; the New York C-Market, while low, has actually seen a small rally. Specialty coffee is different. The producers who have developed interesting processes, planted unusual varietals, and worked to build this market don't have the safety nets that governments in consuming nations have extended to businesses here. There are no furlough schemes for smallholder farmers in Central America.
We need to protect this. Keep drinking specialty coffee – not just to support roasters, but to make sure the producers at the heart of it are still there when we come out the other side.
Keep drinking good coffee. Keep safe. And wash your hands.