✉️ This story was featured in our Coffee News Club year-end wrap-up—our weekly digest of the most important stories shaping coffee.
The only place to start is with the word that overshadowed the industry for nearly the entirety of 2025: tariffs.
Almost as soon as he took office in January, President Donald Trump threatened to place tariffs on most U.S. trading partners, a threat he followed through with in April. In August he targeted Brazil with 50% tariffs. That one decision impacted nearly a third of U.S. coffee imports, leading to a shift in global coffee trade as Brazilian exporters looked for new markets.
Coffee prices already neared record levels in 2024, and tariffs made that even worse in 2025. The C price reached a record high in February, and continued to rise and fall over the next few months. That record was broken just months later in October.
👋 Get the Coffee News Club newsletter in your inbox weekly—sign up.
High commodity prices, combined with tariffs and inflation, led to higher prices at the grocery store and at coffee shops. It wasn’t just in the U.S., either: Retail prices in South Korea and Brazil rose too, while disputes over prices between big roasters and European supermarkets resulted in bare shelves in the coffee aisle. Rising prices also led to a rise in coffee theft—including several hijackings—while some roasters began adding cheaper beans or even non-coffee items to their blends to cut costs.
In November, the Trump administration rolled back (most of) the tariffs on coffee after months of lobbying and pressure from industry groups. However, that doesn’t mean coffee prices are coming down any time soon. Experts and executives noted that prices are sticky: once raised, they’re unlikely to come down.
Trump’s impact on coffee wasn’t confined to tariffs. In February, the administration announced sweeping federal layoffs and cuts to programs that supported both foreign aid and domestic grants to the Hawaiian coffee sector. Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeted Kona coffee farms. The threat of raids put the island’s harvest at risk as coffee pickers, many of whom are from Mexico and Honduras, thought twice about going to work and potentially being detained.
Other countries had mixed fortunes when it came to their coffee production. Reports of a better-than-anticipated harvest in Brazil briefly lowered the C price in September, although the country’s exports fell due to the impact of tariffs. Uganda overtook Ethiopia as Africa’s top coffee exporter, while labor shortages in Costa Rica impacted the coffee harvest due to new migration laws in neighboring Nicaragua.
For some countries, however, a tiny amount of coffee was all they needed. In August, the Best of Panama auction set a new record as a 20kg lot of gesha coffee sold for more than $600,000.
While coffee farming is still a male-dominated sector, several programs worked to level the playing field. In Uganda, entrepreneur Meridah Nandudu encouraged more women to get involved in the business side of coffee production by paying extra for coffee cherries from female farmers.
As part of its work to support the next generation, the Brazilian cooperative Expocacer runs a project that incentivizes women to become involved in managing their family farms. And author and photographer Lucia Bawot launched SANA to provide mental health services for women coffee farmers in Colombia.
The year was also defined by big changes from the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA). In April, the SCA announced it would be taking over the Q Grader certification exam from the Coffee Quality Institute, leaving the coffee community divided. Some worried about increased costs, while others mourned the loss of a shared language around coffee quality. Still others saw the changes as a positive step towards making coffee education more equitable.
The move was part of the SCA’s attempt to drive wider adoption of its updated cupping standard, the Coffee Value Assessment (CVA), within the specialty coffee industry. Throughout 2025, the SCA would announce partnerships with various regional coffee associations to use the CVA instead of old cupping standards.
