Coffee News Club: Week of April 27

Have you been affected by Trump’s tariffs? You may be entitled to compensation—eventually. Plus, a new corporate partnership aims to map the coffee-growing world, and researchers find that coffee has a positive impact on our gut microbiome.

‘The Federal Portal for Tariff Refunds is Now Open’ – via Daily Coffee News

Two months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s global tariff policy. Now, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will begin refunding the $166 billion in tariff revenue collected in 2025.

Businesses that paid tariffs, including U.S. coffee importers, can claim refunds through the CBP’s portal. However, as Nick Brown reports for Daily Coffee News, “there is still no clear view of precisely how much money coffee companies may recover or when refunds will arrive.” CBP said it will issue refunds in stages, focusing first on more recent tariff payments. Once approved, refunds will take between 60 and 90 days to process.

The Trump administration imposed tariffs on all imported goods, including coffee, starting in April 2025, with rates varying widely by country—some countries saw tariffs as high as 50%, while others saw rates as low as 10%. Importers shouldered the initial burden, but many passed on the increased costs to their customers. (The trend was not limited to coffee: across industries, price increases associated with tariffs were passed on to the end consumer.)

Coffee retailers responded in different ways. Retail costs at the grocery store went up, many coffee companies raised prices, and others tried to weather the storm by absorbing the added costs. In November, after months of pushback from lawmakers and industry groups, the administration finally exempted coffee and several other commodities from tariffs.

Will coffee shops or roasters see any refunds? Brown noted that the topic had come up in interviews with many coffee importers over the past year. Some smaller companies, he wrote, made contractual promises to roasting companies to pass on reimbursements should they ever come.

Some roasters are already sending messages to their consumers, letting them know they plan to pass on tariff reimbursements. In a statement on its Instagram page, the importer Onyx Coffee (not to be confused with Onyx Coffee Lab) said that “every cent we receive in tariff refunds will be passed directly back to you. You do not need to take any action.”

‘Coffee Giants Will Map World’s Farms to Fight Deforestation’ – via Bloomberg

In many coffee-producing countries, most coffee is grown on an informal network of rural and remote small farms. As the European Union looks to implement its deforestation legislation at the end of the year, which mandates that companies prove their products do not come from deforested land, mapping all those farms is becoming more and more essential to ensure traceability.

However, building a map of all these isolated farms is challenging. Now, some of the world’s largest coffee companies have launched an initiative to create an open-source map of global coffee production. The goal is to provide data for compliance and help communities protect and restore forests.

The project, called the Coffee Canopy Partnership, is being led by JDE Peet’s and includes Louis Dreyfus Company, Sucden, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Touton, Sucafina, and Tchibo. It will use satellite data and on-the-ground verification to map coffee-growing regions, beginning in East Africa.

The EUDR, the term used to refer to the European Union’s deforestation legislation, has been a major—and controversial—topic within the coffee industry. To comply, importing companies need to show that coffee wasn’t grown on deforested land and provide traceability information: basically, they have to be able to show which farms each of their coffees comes from.

While environmental groups and activists have welcomed the legislation, industry stakeholders have raised concerns. Fairtrade International, for example, wrote in a 2024 statement that it is “very concerned that producer organizations will be cut off from trade … not because they farm on deforested land, but because they face challenges in collecting, managing, and submitting the necessary data.”

Individual mapping and compliance programs have been underway since the EUDR was first announced, as companies and producing countries sought to get ahead of the legislation. At the same time, mapping datasets have often mis-classified coffee-growing regions as “high risk” for deforestation which could lead to some farmers being excluded from the E.U., the world’s largest coffee market.

In a press release, Pablo von Waldenfels, Tchibo’s managing director of corporate responsibility, noted that ensuring coffee is produced without deforestation is a shared responsibility for the industry. “A fundamental challenge has been the lack of precise mapping data, which undermines effective conservation efforts and threatens to unfairly exclude millions of smallholder farmers from the market,” he said.

The initiative will begin with a trial in East Africa, mapping 1.2 million square kilometers of coffee farms in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. By 2027, it aims to map all coffee production worldwide.

“Mapping all the plots of coffee is a huge effort that the industry is starting, but we’re still missing some,” Laurent Sagarra, vice president of engagement at JDE Peet’s, told Bloomberg. “There’s no way that a single company alone can do it and keep it up to date.”

Read the full story on the collaborative mapping project here or via Yahoo! Finance here.

More News

‘Luckin Coffee Opens Massive Qingdao Roastery, Claims World’s Largest Roasting Machine’ – via Daily Coffee News

‘Nestlé, KDP Strike New Partnership’ – via Global Coffee Report

‘Coffee Climbs on Iran Conflict Concerns and Brazil Weather Risk’ – via Bloomberg

‘Nestlé Confirms Sale of Blue Bottle Coffee’ – via Global Coffee Report

Is Coffee Good For You?

Many of coffee’s health benefits can be traced back to caffeine. It has been linked to a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can be beneficial to people living with asthma, and has even been linked to lower mortality rates.

So are decaf drinkers missing out? Not anymore. New research from Ireland found that coffee—caffeinated or not—can alter our gut biomes and “significantly” boost mood and reduce anxiety.

In the study, published in Nature Communications, scientists at University College Cork’s APC Microbiome Ireland research center explored coffee’s impact on the gut-brain axis. This axis is a communication network that sends signals between our gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system.

Researchers followed 31 coffee drinkers and 31 non-coffee drinkers, who completed a series of psychological tests and caffeine intake diaries. Half the coffee drinkers were assigned caffeinated coffee, and the other half decaf. Both groups reported lower perceived stress and depression and improved mood.

In the analysis, the researchers found that coffee drinkers had higher levels of beneficial gut bacteria compared to those who didn’t drink coffee. This, the authors wrote, “suggest(s) a positive influence of coffee on gut health.” They also found that decaf drinkers reported notable improvements in learning and memory, while caffeinated coffee drinkers reported reduced anxiety.

“Coffee is more than just caffeine — it’s a complex dietary factor that interacts with our gut microbes, our metabolism, and even our emotional wellbeing,” Professor John Cryan, one of the authors, said in a press release. “Our findings suggest that coffee, whether caffeinated or decaffeinated, can influence health in distinct but complementary ways.”