Dear Somasippers/slurpers/suckers,
We’ll start with our sad news - circumstances have compelled us to bring forward next year’s price adjustment for our Daintree cacao.
Our policy is to never increase prices by more than the cost of a cup of coffee - we’ve stuck to that policy through commodity price surges and post-COVID inflation, and this adjustment will be the same.
Unfortunately, while most of our adjustments are in the “cup of black coffee at a North Queensland bakery” range, this one is more a “single-origin double ristretto made by a barista named Raffael in Fitzroy” change.
Until recently, we sourced our Daintree cacao from a company run by Wayne Simmons, who passed away last year. Wayne worked tirelessly to hold together a company with independent suppliers, dubious shareholders, high overheads, and a legacy of prior mismanagement. John said Wayne never made him a promise that he didn't bend over backwards to keep, and he was the same with us.
Since Wayne's passing, new management at his old business have concluded that Australian cacao is not viable for them, and have stopped supplying it. Because of this, we now deal with Farmer John directly. This has helped us cut some costs, especially in transport and storage.
But we’ve learned that John has been treating his cacao trees as a passion project, and relying on rent from the rest of his farm to make a steady living. This doesn’t seem right to us - we want to have a long and mutually enriching relationship with John, see his cacao farm expand, and help make cacao appeal to other Australian farmers. So John has sat down with his son (the brains of the family - an engineer), added up labour, equipment, and material costs, and calculated a price for his beans, which we have accepted.
