Behind Coffee Pricing Part I: What Impacts The Price of Specialty Coffee (Part 1)

The price of coffee can be confusing. Why does one bag cost $8 at the grocery store while another costs $22 at your local shop? Is it actually that much better… or is the bag just prettier?

Short answer: It’s generally better — in flavor, in cultivation, and in impact. (Though good design doesn’t hurt.) Long answer: Read on...

"Geisha" coffee varietal seedlings ready to be planted in Guatemala

PART I: Coffee Species & Varietal

Before coffee is processed, shipped, roasted, and brewed, it starts as a plant. And that plant matters more than most people realize. There are two main commercial coffee species grown worldwide:

Robusta (most "cheap coffee")	Arabica ("specialty" coffee)
Hardier and more resilient	More delicate and climate-sensitive
Grows in a wider range of climates	Requires specific altitude, temperature, and care
Higher yield per plant	Lower yield per plant
Generally harsher, more bitter flavor	Wider flavor range and higher sweetness
Lower market price	Significantly higher market value

Robusta

Robusta is cheaper to grow, easier to farm at scale, and produces more volume than Arabica, which is why it's usually used in large-scale commodity and instant coffee. It also tastes worse – more burnt, more bitter, less nuance. Think Folger’s and your mom’s giant bag from Costco that she keeps in the freezer. (No shade, moms.) If you’re buying an inexpensive grocery store coffee, it likely contains robusta.

Robusta / commodity is a monoculture, which means it's essentially cultivated in row crops, a process that transforms diverse land into a plot of a single crop. Specialty is often grown with more spacing, intermixed with native species, which not only provides ideal growing conditions for the coffee (shade/sun, soil health, etc.) but also helps steward tropical forests and provides habitat and food for all kinds of creatures.

Arabica

Almost all specialty coffee — including Onda’s — is 100% Arabica. One main reason is its nuance in flavor. Florals, citrus, stone fruit, chocolate… those words you hear thrown around in coffee-snob circles like “structure” and “acidity” – Arabica can be bright, sweet, and so many other things.

But that potential comes at a cost. Arabica plants are more vulnerable to disease, temperature swings, and climate instability. They require more attentive farming, and many are grown at higher elevations where land is harder to access and labor is more intensive. Yields are smaller, and risk is higher.

Arabica is also a more human-cultivated product than Robusta. Nothing is machine picked because the terrain is so steep, but also because hand picking allows for picking at perfect ripeness / with multiple passes.

Within Arabica: Varietals Change Everything

“Arabica” isn’t a flavor — it’s a species. Within that species are dozens (hundreds, really) of varietals: Bourbon, Caturra, Gesha, Typica, and many more.

Varietals can be:

• Lower yielding but exceptionally complex (see Enrique’s Tierra Prometida nanolot Reserve)
• Rare and more highly sought after
• More or less expensive to cultivate and maintain

When we source coffee at Onda, we’re often selecting specific varietals because of their cup quality and long-term viability for farmers. That might mean:

• Paying more for a lower-yield crop
• Committing to smaller lots
• Investing in producers who are taking agricultural risks to grow better coffee

That cost begins at the farm level — long before roasting, shipping, or packaging ever enter the equation.

So… Is It Really Better?

If a coffee is priced higher because it’s arabica grown at altitude, carefully selected by varietal, and cultivated for quality rather than volume — yes. It is fundamentally different.

The lower-priced coffee at scale is optimized for:	Specialty coffee is optimized for:
Yield	Flavor
Stability	Traceability
Commodity trading	Long-term producer relationships
	Sustainability

Why This Matters

If we want coffee that tastes better and supports farming practices that can survive climate change, we have to incentivize it. When producers grow higher quality Arabica varietals, they’re often taking on more risk. And if the market only rewards volume, those varietals disappear.

That often leads farmers to shift toward lower-cost, higher-yield crops, and as a result, quality declines. Biodiversity also shrinks when farming practices orient toward higher yield rather than cultivating healthy, thriving land.

In other words, paying more for coffee isn’t about luxury for luxury’s sake. It’s about protecting:

• Flavor diversity
• Farmer livelihoods
• The future of specialty coffee

At Onda, we choose to build from the plant up — starting with exceptional Arabica varietals and a business model that supports their cultivation and the farmers who grow them. 

Next up in Part II, What happens after harvest? What is a "processing method," and how does it impact the price of coffee? After that, we’ll explore the elusive “C Market,” the impact of climate change, and the process of actually roasting and packaging the coffee. (Like we said, there’s a lot to it!) Stay tuned.