The Royal Blog

Celebrating long-term relationships and innovation with the Vohora Family in Arusha and Ngorongoro.  Two days is an unfair timeline for a visit with Neel and Kavita Vohora, the brother-sister team behind some of Tanzania’s best coffee. I’m not quite sure how exactly we squeezed all that we did into such little time.  Most recently I […]

Celebrating Women-led Projects in the Heart of Africa: Chris shares his recent trip to Bujumbura and upcountry Burundi.  Disembarking at the airport in Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital city on the shore of Lake Tanganyika is a chaotic and usually sweaty affair, little changed from the last time I visited in 2015. Americans must still purchase visas […]

Celebrating Coastal Coffee from Lake Kivu: Chris shares his recent trip to the Coocamu Coop.  It’s difficult not to be transported to some kind of other world when visiting Coocamu (pronounced with an emphasis on the 2nd syllable, “coo-CA-mu”). There is a road to the station, but the preferred way to visit, if like me […]

News has been making the rounds this week of Fairtrade International’s increase to prices paid for coffee, the first such announcement in more than a decade.  New pricing takes effect for contracts beginning on August 1, 2023, (it does not impact contracts drawn prior to that date.) For washed arabica, the cost increases from $1.40 […]

Despite being geographically minuscule, Burundi commands an outsized presence in specialty coffee sourcing. Its hills provide exceptional climate and elevation for growing, and its most conscientious producers are cultivating, processing, and exporting coffee that rivals the best and brightest from anywhere in the world. The crop is the country’s single most important export by both […]

Royal Coffee’s Inbound Traffic Specialist, Jodi Louws, shares her thoughts on market forces that will affect shipping costs in 2023.  TLDR; Shipping costs are not back to pre-pandemic lows, and we do not expect them to be. Freight rates are improving, but not “plunging”, and low East –West rates are not opening doors for low […]

Wild gyrations in the coffee market, and how to cope. If you’ve been watching the coffee market recently, you are doubtless aware of the massive decline in coffee futures prices on the Intercontinental Commodity Exchange (“ICE”, colloquially still known as the “New York ‘C’ Market,” or just “the C”). Since peaking at $2.30/lb on September […]

I think I first met Neel Vohora in Chicago in a blizzard during the winter of 2008. He wore khaki shorts and a Stetson style hat and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all. Neel and I have spent a little more time together since that day nearly a decade ago, kicking […]

OK, the truth is that we’ve been receiving Ethiopian coffees for months now, but unless you are booking forward with us, you’ve likely not seen many, if any, available on our SPOT Offering List. This is because they’ve all been selling out in advance of arrival, or shortly thereafter. Happily, we are about to reach […]

Editor’s note: This update was a collaborative effort between Caitlin McCarthy-García, Max Nicholas-Fulmer, and Charlie Habegger.  On a global level, weather patterns in Brazil brought doubt to the world’s coffee supply in mid-2021; while in Kenya, labor and input costs on the farm remained ever high due to the pandemic. In Kenya specifically, movement of people […]