Food commodities are rising in price and that includes coffee, but the coffee bean market is also changing. Out of 100 species of coffee, just two dominate: Arabica and Robusta. And of those two, Arabica has been the bean to beat. Because of a higher lipid and sugar level, it is considered sweeter and smoother than its Robusta cousin. It is also more expensive because the higher demand runs into harder to grow. Robusta is more bitter in taste due to higher caffeine (2.7 percent versus 1.5 percent for Arabica), which along with a higher content of chlorogenic acid helps to deter pests and helps boost yield. Adverse weather has led to smaller, more erratic Arabica crops, plunging stocks to their lowest level since February 2000. The pr...
What You Need to Know Today: There has already been a strong run of flash soybean sales announcements in recent weeks, but more than 1.4 MMT reported this morning is an exceptionally large single-day total with major implications for the market. If the sales to China and unknown destinations w...
On Friday, at 6:57 AM, President Donald Trump announced, via a social media post, a 90-day window during which up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef could be imported outside of tariff-rate quotas—a move aimed at bringing down costs for American consumers. This is the secon...
From WPI Consulting
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.