Coffee Shrinkflation

Shrinkflation 😬

Does that mean less coffee or more money?

Or maybe…Neither!

Over the past few years, you’ve likely noticed changes in the availability of familiar things…Or noticed higher prices…Or noticed things getting smaller.

With coffee, the change in availability & price are to be expected. Coffee is an agricultural product and is subject to variations in weather and other inputs where it’s grown. Coffee price fluctuates due to changing labour and production costs but also because of unforeseen disruptions in the supply chain, in levies and tariffs  and in some cases, because of natural disasters or civil unrest. In our minds, as your coffee roastery, our job is to react to all of this and shield you from the ups and downs in the market. The Stick tries to be as predictable as can be.

As a customer of ours, you can rest assured that we don’t do that shrinkflation shizz! At The Roastoreum, we price our coffee based on logic even if that makes us an outlier in this regard!

Our bags have been the same size for about a decade: retail bags are 400 grams (1 unit), and bulk bags are 2 kg (5 units). Simple! Now and then we sell 200 gram bags  (0.5 units) but those are pretty limited and the pricing model remains easy.

When you’re out scouting coffee from other roasters, look past the tasting notes and have a look at the bag weights. Some roasters these days sell coffee bags of 300 grams or 250 grams or even smaller. Quite a few sell in 340 gram bags (12 ounces) and here and there you’ll still find full pounds (16 ounces/454 grams). Price matters. We get that, but be sure you’re paying attention to the weights because the cost per serving will be quite different even between bags of the same price. 

So how do we determine our price per bag? 

I have always thought that charging what the market will bear is a terrible idea. A fair price is our goal so again, we revert to logic.

Cost plus is the formula. 

Cost = green coffee, shipping, wages, bags, labels, utilities and all that stuff. 

Plus = a margin for the future, for repairs and expansions, for RnD, and for the occasional staff party.

Then what is the CRS I see posted in the shop?

The Cost Recovery Sum is a Market Price modifier adjusted each Tuesday. 

It is a measure implemented last spring to account for radical and unforeseen fluctuations in green coffee on the Commodity Market. (C Market price uncertainty came from a variety of reasons from poor crop yields, to low $Cdn, to Trump’s tariffs and from speculation on the market…)

Last January we set our price as we do most years but by March coffee prices had jumped as much as 120% over our benchmark. While coffee isn’t our only cost, it is a significant portion of the cost of a bag of coffee! The CRS allowed us to hold our base price from last January rather than implementing irregular and reactive price changes throughout the year. The weekly CRS became the predictably unpredictable method to recover the replacement cost of what we sold!

2025 was a weird year for coffee pricing... take my word for it, I have been roasting since 2010! The weekly price changes from last year were the same as what might have been seen over the period of multiple years.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Thots?

If you have any questions about what we do, how we do it, why or W-H-Y, send a note and we'll delve into it.

Rest assured, you’re important to us, not just because we like you and we like that you enjoy our products and services but also because you pay our rent and buy our food. I have always operated with the motto that I do not want to run a business where I would not want to work…This means treating our suppliers, our customers and our staff as well as possible. There will be ups and downs and while we could scrape more profits than we do - and many people tell us that we should - I prefer to be fair and transparent.

- David