Kona coffee growers in Hawaii are now eligible for settlements in a 2019 class action lawsuit; Digital Coffee Future will host a series of webinars on the intersection of climate change and technology; Canadian chain Tim Horton’s has announced significant investment into the digital guest experience; UK press outlets cover the staying power of coffee consumption shifts.

US coffee roasters have seen significant cost increases in their operations due to shipping and transport logistics; Demetria, an Israeli-Colombian food-tech startup, closed a seed funding round after emerging from “stealth”; Hurricanes devastated more than 200,000 hectares of crops in Central America last year; a new coffee trend is sweeping TikTok.

World Coffee Research announces its next five year strategy will prioritize origin diversity; researchers at the the University of Reading, the Andean Information Network, and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru explore the similarities between Bolivia and Peru’s coffee and coca trades; 12 of the 16 winning lots in the recent ACE Private Collection auction with Hawaii’s Isla Custom Coffees featured controlled yeast fermentation in processing.

The Alliance for Coffee Excellence announced a partnership with scientific traceability company, Oritain, to build a database of coffee origin “fingerprints”; a new study explores the relationship between coffee leaf rust and a co-evolved hyperparasite; the International Coffee Organization’s Coffee Development Report 2020 finds the that the value of annual coffee exports has more than quadrupled from 1991 to 2018.

Rabobank Group, a lender known for financing agricultural traders, joined other commodity lenders in reducing its activity following a difficult year; the Hivos 2020 Coffee Barometer suggests there is little evidence coffee companies’ voluntary sustainability efforts have made an impact; Sucafina has announced a number of growth initiatives, including the acquisition of a Costa Coffee green supplier, Complete Coffee Limited; Seven Miles Coffee Roasters has launched a new telemetry system.

Although estimates of damage to coffee-growing regions have been slow to arrive due their impact on vital infrastructure, Hurricanes Eta and Iota's sustained winds, flash floods, and mudslides have impacted what was expected to be a fruitful harvest for Central America's coffee-growing communities; the Deputy Chief Executive of Ghana's Cocoa Board has called for cocoa farmers to expand and develop the coffee sector by growing and processing coffee.

In this week’s episode, Recap explores the recent Communiqué from the International Coffee Organization: Where did it come from? What does it mean? Widely reported as the first time that major private sector actors across the value chain came together to agree to jointly implement solutions to the economic unsustainability of coffee production, the Communiqué and corresponding Annex outlines an ambitious ten-year plan across four areas of action and seven technical workstreams.

Market research and polls continue to try and illuminate the shifting conditions caused by COVID-19: Bloomberg rounds up a variety of market research indicating that the number of coffee shops in the US is set to decline for the first time in the US since 2011, while a recent report from the US National Coffee Association shows that while the pandemic has changed where Americans drink their coffee, there’s a strong desire to return to coffee shops.

Three long-term initiatives were announced on International Coffee Day, including the ICO’s “Coffee’s Next Generation,” the IWCA’s “Empowered Voices,” and the launch of the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity; Indonesia’s coffee producers are asking for help with financing as the COVID-19 pandemic impacts the demand for coffee; Australian-based Breville Group has acquired the US-based grinder maker, Baratza; a recent feature in Asia Times explores how women entrepreneurs in the Gulf are overcoming the additional hurdles of the pandemic.

Amid the rise in protectionist trade policies, the International Coffee Organization shared results of a quantitative analysis of trade interventions between 2009 and 2019; coffee berry borer has been discovered on the Hawaiian Island of Kaua’i for the first time; coverage from the UK’s popular press of Neguse Gemeda Mude’s top-scoring lot from the first-ever Ethiopian Cup of Excellence unfortunately focused solely on the per cup price as served by London’s Queens of Mayfair; also recently released: two long-form accounts of challenges facing coffee’s complex value-generating ecosystem and the impacts they’ll have on coffee farmers.

The steady growth of the C market price over the past two months could be destabilized by an increase in coffee supply across International Commodity Exchange warehouses; Qima Coffee announces the discovery of a new genetic group of Arabica, Yemenia; three NGOs have proposed a plan to alleviate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the African coffee sector; Flash Coffee Thailand appears to be thriving despite the difficult operating conditions of the pandemic.

This week, we focus on the strong increase in at-home consumption of specialty coffee. Tracing the trend across earnings reports for large corporations, our own COVID-19 community impact surveys, and recent media coverage of the at-home category growth, we explore some of the ways in which specialty coffee companies have been making coffee easier for consumers to access and enjoy on their journey to learn and adapt to the ongoing pandemic.

Arabica coffee futures rose as the Brazilian real strengthened against the US dollar; one of Beirut’s first specialty coffee shops is seeking support rebuild following the devastating explosion last week; the recent El Salvador Cup of Excellence Auction set a new price per pound record; a recent survey from Hanns R. Neumann Stifung suggests the effects of climate change might be more difficult to manage for smallholders.

Three years after they merged, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ have announced a new Sustainable Agriculture Standard that will replace both programs in July 2021; the International Coffee Organization has released the third report in its series on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the global coffee sector; Guatemala has officially begun its exit from the International Coffee Agreement of 2007.

This week on Recap: The first-ever Ethiopian Cup of Excellence auction broke the record for total auction sales, raising US$1,248,690 across 28 lots; The Standard reports that coffee farmers in Kenya have uprooted their trees in protest of poor earnings; a new study published in Global Change Biology suggests that Robusta is far more sensitive to temperature than previously thought; World Coffee Research announced four global priorities for their work after conducting a global consultation.

This week on Recap: An industry-wide conversation about the structural inequity in specialty coffee takes place amid a historic, global Black civil rights movement; coffee communities in Africa are facing unprecedented hardship as they attempt to manage the effects of torrential rain and swarms of locusts amid the ongoing global pandemic.