A s you step into Moxie Coffee Co.’s crisp, modern space, the smells of coffee, milk and fresh bread greet you. Sunlight cascades over 16th Street and through the midtown cafe’s shaded windows. An energetic indie play- list hums over the voices of girls on a group trip and workers click-clacking on their laptops. Dads sip single-origin brews while their kids gnaw croissants, perched in robin’s egg chairs around long oak tables. Baristas buzz behind the coffee bar and breeze through the cafe when they drop off steaming earthenware mugs for regulars they know by name. In many ways, Moxie is the portrait of Phoenix’s robust coffee scene. It’s cultured with a low-key vibe — the sort of place where you can order a reserve pour-over or an Instagram-worthy latte topped with a torched marshmallow. At the heart of the shop is owner Matt Heltzel. On a warm fall morning, he takes a seat in the cafe with a mug of coffee and a sticky cardamom bun. His hair is tightly cropped and he sports a Moxie T-shirt with the shop’s cobalt blue logo of a Kintsugi-esque coffee cup. He loves talking about the farms where he sources his beans or about how fermentation imbues coffee with complex flavors. But top of mind lately are the costs. When the conversation turns to prices, Heltzel’s breezy demeanor turns more serious. He picks at the pastry in front of him. “It’s a little bit of a scary time,” he says. Around the Valley, as around the country, cappuccinos and cold brews are getting ever more expensive. In conversations with a half dozen roasters and cafe owners around the scene, tariffs were an easy culprit for the rise. Since the spring, Donald Trump has slapped hefty tariffs on many imports, forcing American companies — and by proxy consumers — to pay outsized taxes. Trump hit the world’s largest coffee producers, Brazil and Vietnam, with import taxes of 50% and 20%. Yet it turns out tariffs are just the capper on a hellish year. Coffee prices were near all-time highs even before Trump’s taxes walloped roasters and coffee shop owners. Shuffling past WhatsApp alerts from farmers and email notifications on his phone, Heltzel pulls up a graph tracking coffee bean prices. A line jitters up and down before bolting upward. In the past 12 months, the cost of coffee on the world market has skyrocketed, driven by rising demand and climate change that keeps wrecking crops. “It’s at least double what coffee, for me as a roaster, has ever cost,” Heltzel says. Those historic highs coupled with the double whammy of tariffs could soon cut a swath through the independent coffee scene, he says. If you’re a coffee drinker in the Valley, you’re bound to notice and maybe even watch your spending at cafes like Heltzel’s, if you haven’t already. “I know many, many (coffee shops) who are desperately struggling and kind of on their last breath,” he says. GLOBAL COFFEE PRICES SPIKE Current prices be damned, the global thirst for coffee has been growing for years. Some dire knock-on consequences have followed. In Brazil, which grows more than a third of the world’s coffee, farmers since 2001 have razed millions of acres of Amazonian forests (an area the size of Honduras) to make way for plantations. A report this month by industry watchdog Coffee Watch notes that deforestation disrupts the rain that coffee depends on. In the past four years, frost and severe drought in Brazil have turned coffee plants brown and brittle. In Vietnam, heatwaves followed by heavy rains drowned planta- tions and disrupted harvests. The loss of forests is “killing rains and leading to crop failures,” Etelle Higonnet, Coffee Watch’s director, said in the report. It’s creating a vicious cycle: Crop failures will only drive up the price of coffee further, enticing farmers to cut down more forests. Coffee Watch’s report cautions that costs will keep rising if deforestation, and the climate disruption it causes, continue. “Rains are failing where coffee expands at the expense of forests,” the report said. “As a result, climate shocks are hitting wallets.” Arabica coffee bean futures, the global benchmark for coffee prices, show the fallout. Flagging harvests and high demand have driven up prices before: In 2011, coffee commodity prices topped $3 per pound for the first time since 1977. By October 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, they sank to about $1 per pound. This year, they hit an all-time high of $4.41 per pound. Bags, tins and K-cups of coffee lining the grocery store shelves are now nearly 19% more expensive than last year, per the latest Consumer Price Index report, which tracks how prices change with everyday goods like food, gas and clothing. Coffee shops, cafes and restau- rants are begrudgingly following suit and raising prices. SQUEEZED Coffee prices were already at an all-time high. Now tariffs leave coffee shop owners hard-pressed to manage costs. BY SARA CROCKER Baristas at Moxie Coffee Co. stay busy making lattes, pour-overs and Americanos. (Brigette Doby) Moxie Coffee Co. owner Matt Heltzel (Brigette Doby) Coffee cherries on the Peixoto family farm in Brazil. (Peixoto Coffee Roasters)
