Prices were up even before the tariffs. Can Americans live without it?

October 14, 2025, 7 AM ET

Coffee is in trouble. Even before the United States imposed tariffs of 50 percent on Brazil and 20 percent on Vietnam—which together produce more than half of the world’s coffee beans—other challenges, including climate-change-related fires, flooding, and droughts, had already forced up coffee prices globally. Today, all told, coffee in the U.S. is nearly 40 percent more expensive than it was a year ago. Futures for arabica coffee—the beans most people in the world drink—have increased by almost a dollar since July. And prices may well go up further: Tariffs have “destabilized an already volatile market,” Sara Morrocchi, the CEO of the coffee consultancy Vuna, told me. This is a problem for the millions of people who grow and sell coffee around the world. It is also a problem for the people who rely on coffee for their base executive functioning—such a problem that Congress recently introduced a bipartisan bill to specifically protect coffee from Trump’s tariffs.

Coffee is a bit of a funny place from which to start trying to legislate against import taxes. Many, many foods and drinks are currently being tariffed to outer space, but coffee has basically no nutritional value and plenty of functional substitutes—walk into any gas station and you will see a wall full of energy drinks in every flavor, color, and chemical composition. We do not need coffee.

But of course we need it. This is precisely why Ro Khanna—the Northern California Democrat who is sponsoring the bill along with Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska—introduced the No Coffee Tax Act, he told me. He had been talking a lot on cable news about the dangers posed by tariffs, but the message wasn’t getting through. Coffee is a vivid and concrete way into a broader conversation about what import taxes actually do. “This is something that a lot of people have in their house,” he said. “They’ve noticed that it’s more expensive. The cost of coffee really matters to people.” He pointed out that Americans have historically proved themselves willing to go to war over high taxes on what’s in their mug in the morning, and that President Richard Nixon, when he imposed wide-ranging tariffs in 1971, exempted coffee.

Read: The quest to make the best worst cup of coffee

Coffee is fixed in our culture, our economy, our rituals, and our brain chemistry. It is the country’s most consumed beverage aside from water, and its psychoactive ingredient, caffeine, is by far the most popular drug on Earth. On any given day, an American is likelier to drink coffee than they are to exercise, pray, or read for pleasure. The U.S. has more Starbucks locations than public libraries. Coffee gave us the Enlightenment, and insurance, and the most puissant bop of summer 2024. It is so crucial to the machinery of capitalism that many employers give it away, like pens or any other essential office supply. It is the only consumable I can think of that people regularly joke about dying without (which is funny because, again, it provides nothing our bodies actually need to live). It is the thing in a big carafe at every meeting, and on the menu at nearly every restaurant, and built into our language as a widely understood shorthand for “having a conversation with another person.”

It is also a fascinating symbol of the interdependence, and the limitations, of an internationalized food system and the free-trading global order. “Coffee is a good way to think about how the world works,” the author and food historian Augustine Sedgewick told me when I called him to chat about it. Aside from on a few comparatively tiny farms in Hawaii, California, and Puerto Rico, coffee doesn’t grow in the United States: We cannot make the drink that we cannot live without. And though we expect coffee to be cheaply and abundantly available, its production is tremendously costly and difficult, even before tariffs.

Read: Capitalism’s favorite drug

If human beings weren’t so addicted to it, coffee would make no sense as a mass-produced crop. It prefers rocky soil and high altitudes, where “mechanization becomes very difficult,” as Morrocchi put it; for that reason, coffee is typically picked by hand. After that, it is dried, hulled, cleaned, sorted, graded, and roasted—often by people making poverty wages, some of whom are children—before it is shipped around the world, and even then it is not yet ready to drink. Coffee is the driver of a great deal of work, but also the product of it. Eleven dollars is an awful lot to pay for a latte, but also not very much at all when you consider what goes into one. “We really have a really strange disjuncture,” Sedgewick told me, “where coffee is both too cheap and way too expensive.”

Sedgewick’s excellent book Coffeeland traces coffee’s centuries-long role in the exploitation of millions of workers in Central and South America and beyond; he knows more than anyone I’ve ever talked to about the historical problems with the beverage and the industry that produces it. But he’s still human: He cherishes a well-made quad cappuccino—though, “at some point relatively recently,” he told me, “that became a $10 drink.” He has cut back, begrudgingly. He loves the caffeine, obviously (“I hate to work as much as anyone else”), but he also loves the ritual of it, the way it thrusts him out into the world in the morning.

Sedgewick stopped short of saying something such as Coffee brings us together, probably because that is a cliché, even if it is true. Everything he or you or I have ever eaten, we have eaten because someone—probably someone we will never meet—picked or processed or nurtured it, and then someone else prepared it. All food is the product of a colossal global apparatus designed to make pleasure and sustenance accessible; coffee, because it requires so much hands-on labor, is even more a product of it. Needing it makes us need other people. “Our lives depend on the lives of others,” Sedgewick told me, whether they live a hemisphere away or work at the Starbucks down the block. A tariff is protectionism— closing oneself off from the world. A cup of coffee is a reminder of how hard doing that actually is.

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