Coffee: Large Acquisitions of Premium Retailers Doesn't Indicate a Near-future Monopolisation of Specialty Coffee Farms

You can't get a monopoly on specialty coffee farms yet because there is no monopoly in specialty coffee in general at any point in the supply chain. I would say, without thinking about it for longer than it takes to write this.

Price of coffee will go up, and then it will become as classy as drinking wine. Do you see a monopoly on vinyards?

(Also, usually it is the downstream price and classiness that goes up first before upstream prices go up... unless you have huge preemptive bids for upstream assets. LOL. BB is a retailer first, not a farm first.)

Update: erm, actually wine is already cheaper than coffee in places like the US where you can buy a bottle for less than an hour's minimum wage... it's a huge, fat market. In the long run I think we'll just see that specialty-grade coffees become less special. For example in MY we have some local roasters buying at the 81-points range just to quality as Specialty, whereas the some richer guys are buying a minimum of 85 points. Eventually there'll be so many people playing in the 85-point space that you'll have the new hipsters drawing the line at 90-point-minimums. This is only possible if you see consumer growth for 90-to-95-point-coffees. If the market doesn't grow, there's a cap in a profitability for quality, and there's thereafter no reason for an investor to chase alpha by investing in quality upstream assets...

I'm actually waiting for someone like Monsanto to produce a 85+points product. So many farmers are going to suffer. But it's an obvious direction.

Seriously, it's going to be cheaper to develop lab-grown hydroponic specialty-grade coffees than to monopolise traditional farms. LOL. Monsanto, hurry up.

Don't worry - the Whole Foods customer base will happily prop up exquisite prices for non-GMO, farm to cup things.

That might take a while to be true ;)