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: Crude oil prices extended their rally today, supported by several developments, including escalating Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure and growing concerns about supply disruptions. The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to remove 50 perc...
Total Red Meat & Poultry September 2026 total red meat and poultry stocks totaled 1.97 billion pounds, down 1.4 percent from August despite typically increasing 0.8 percent during the month, and were 1.5 percent below September 2025 levels. The decline pushed total inventories to a new five...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.