Fwd: Your coffee is going to taste different

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Loretta Lohman

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Nov 29, 2025, 10:52:10 AM (7 days ago) Nov 29

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Whether you’re a pourover snob or a diner sludge diehard, coffee is an essential morning ritual for billions of people around the world. Does the day even start before the first cup? Debatable, really.

But climate change is altering the growing conditions for desirable arabica beans. In their place, growers in Brazil are increasingly turning to robusta, arabica’s more acidic, more caffeinated counterpart. That shift — and what it means for coffee drinkers — is the focus of today’s newsletter. Go ahead, brew up a cup and take a read.

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Brewing troubles

By Renata Carlos Daou

In the coming years, coffee from Brazil might start to taste a bit different.

The South American country is the world’s biggest producer of arabica, a mild variety of coffee bean. But as climate change makes it harder to grow those beans, some farmers are investing in robusta, which produces a more bitter bean but can tolerate higher temperatures and is more resistant to diseases.

Brazil’s traditional coffee growing regions, which largely produce arabica, have been beset by more intense and frequent droughts, and hotter temperatures. Arabica is still the country’s main coffee export, but robusta production is now growing at a faster rate: by over 81% over the past 10 years, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, which tracks global coffee production.

For Brazil, robusta provides an opportunity to remain the world's largest coffee supplier in the future even as the effects of climate change intensify, says Fernando Maximiliano, Coffee Market Intelligence Manager at StoneX, a financial services company.

“It wasn't necessarily demand that resulted in the growth of robusta production,” he adds. “In reality, climate problems and losses in arabica were the main factors that contributed to stimulating robusta growth.”

Robusta has a higher caffeine concentration than arabica. It has a stronger and more bitter taste, but younger generations pay less attention to the type of coffee they drink or its roast, and tend to prefer customized options, adding in things like milks, creamers and syrups, which hide the flavor of the beans.

“They're not so much about the origins, the tasting notes,” said Matthew Barry, global insight manager for food, cooking and meals at market research firm Euromonitor International.

If coffee prices keep rising, consumers might also gravitate towards robust, which costs less.

Click here to read the full story. Want more food and commodities news? Subscribe to the weekly Business of Food newsletter to see how the world feeds itself in a changing economy and climate.

A new blend

$18.4 billion

The amount Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. agreed to pay for Dutch coffee company JDE Peet’s NV in August. The deal will be followed by split operations, effectively undoing the 2018 takeover of soda maker Dr Pepper by Keurig.

Coffee constraints

"If we don’t build resilience today, the reality is the availability of coffee will continue going down."

Roberto Vega

Vice president of coffee agronomy, Starbucks

The coffee giant purchased two new research farms last year to study how climate change threatens coffee, and how to adapt to hotter, drier conditions.

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Your weekend listen

This month, tens of thousands of people took to the city of Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, for the annual United Nations climate summit: COP30. Alongside tense negotiations, there were indigenous protests, daily rainstorms and even a fire at the COP venue. But at the end of it all, what did COP30 achieve? Bloomberg Green’s Jennifer Dlouhy joins Akshat Rathi on Zero, to share her takeaways.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Your weekend read

Insurers are trying to get a leg up on the increasingly risky climate. One way is to help prevent losses in the first place. That’s led to the rise of the climate risk engineer: Experts at spotting weak points in companies’ supply chains and infrastructure where extreme weather can worm its way in and wreak havoc.

Gautam Naik spent time with a team of engineers looking for chinks in the armor of warehouses in Antwerp belonging to Katoen Natie, a Belgian logistics company. They found them in the form of pockmarks in skylights that weaken the glass and moss on a roof that would eventually lead to leaks. Today’s excerpt shows you the world through a climate risk engineer’s eyes.

ZRS engineer Tabea van Hasselt at a Katoen Natie warehouse. Photographer: Simon Wohlfahrt

Earlier this year, Ruben Torres Rico and fellow engineer Tabea van Hasselt walked out to the local dike that skirts Katoen Natie’s premises.

Desktop calculations had indicated that rising sea levels would cause the river to overflow in three or four decades. A visual check quickly confirmed that there was nothing to worry about for the foreseeable future. The water level in the channel was low, and the dike protections looked strong.

Having discovered weeds flourishing on one roof, the pair decided to investigate another.

They strapped on hard hats and safety harnesses and rode a cherry picker to the top of a 50-foot-high depot, which stored consumer products. Katoen Natie’s 300 warehouses in Antwerp occupy a large footprint — equal to 360 soccer fields — so the team decided to inspect only older, high-risk structures.

Once again they noticed a few dinged skylights, wobbly solar panels and sprouting vegetation. The findings would later be sent to Katoen Natie’s board.

Picking up a pair of binoculars, van Hasselt scanned nearby warehouses. A few older ones appeared to lack a secondary drainage system. That could be a problem, she said, because any failure of the primary drains would lead to significant water accumulation that could press down and weaken the roof.

Leaks were less of a worry at another facility where Old Masters paintings and other pricey art are stored for wealthy clients and museums. The humidity and temperature in the building are kept constant, and the air is refreshed eight times an hour. Owners can make an appointment to view their art in a private room and then return it for safekeeping.

“Have you had any water leakage here?” asked van Hasselt, determined to check on all possible problems. The answer was a firm “no.”

This is the second story in the Disaster Industrial Complex series that looks at the business of defending against and rebuilding from climate disasters and how it increasingly drives the economy. You can read part one here.