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No country claims a larger share of our collective energy than Ethiopia.
It is by far our biggest import source, densest offer sheet, and has been our most luminously showcased origin for several years running. With our allied Co Qua office in the capital city of Addis Ababa plus frequent visits from our North American team members, it is also a place to which most of us develop an earnest personal connection—when goals are achieved celebrations feel earned, and when the opposite is true we are wracking our brains as to why.
Heading into 2026, our goals largely echo those of last year, and this is intentional. With a supply chain as complex, demanding, and competitive as Ethiopia’s, we know that continuous improvement has more to do with sustaining focus than redirecting it.
With that said, in 2026 we’re aiming for:
— Even earlier shipments, with fewer springtime stragglers (more on that below)
— Continued diversification of top-lot supply chains, building upon last year’s successes while broadening the ways in which it can come to fruition to rebalance reliance on larger-scale suppliers.
Below, we’ll review the goals we had entering last year’s harvest, contextualize them against how the season unfolded, and finally resituate ourselves in the present tense.
Whether you read every word or just have time to skim, the important thing for roasters to know right now is that if you have not yet contacted your trader to express your interests for this season, now is the time to do so.
All things considered, the 24/25 season provided ample opportunity for both celebrations and wracking-of-brains. Our goals had been straightforward enough:
— Expedite shipping
— Increase volumes of single-producer washed coffees
— Ensure integrity and availability of representative samples from production through export
As for increasing volumes of single-producer washed coffees—this was largely a qualitative success, even if not to our target volume, in that many of our partners produced a greater quantity of non-naturals than in years past. A considerable share of these took the form of light-mucilage honey-processed coffees (“white honeys”), which proved a more practical middle ground between the sensory aims of a washed coffee and the realities of limited access to clean water. In practice, this meant highly demucilaged, low-water processes that—where they worked—produced some of the most compelling cups of the season. Several producers we had supported ahead of the harvest with pulpers and motors delivered these standouts, including successful small runs from partners like Bekele Kechara, Bekele Belacho, and Basha Bekele, among others. The limitation, however, was scale: many of these lots amounted to one or two-bag experiments rather than focal aspects of our programming. Taken on their own, they were compelling proofs-of-concept if not cumulatively viable offers—a meaningful step toward greater processing diversity and a stronger, more varied top-lot landscape that we aim to continue building upon in the season ahead.
The third of the core stated goals for last year—to preserve representative samples from the farm-level through export—cannot be regarded as successful. In some senses, the competing priorities of expediency and continuity bristled against each other, resulting in a much higher success rate among larger, full-container purchases requiring minimal consolidation, which logically produced cleaner handoffs and more dependable continuity between what we approved and what ultimately shipped. But within the more complex scenarios—consolidated shipments across the smallholder menu—sample flow simply couldn’t keep up with the pace of decision-making, and offer quality was too often an unreliable proxy for the exportable lot. The eventual net effect became predictable relatively early in the process: approvals slowed, selling sometimes ran ahead of verification, and a meaningful share of smallholder volume had to be reconsidered—underscoring why this year’s plan emphasizes earlier in-country approvals of verifiable, ready-to-ship lots.
Overall, what we’re foremost applying from the 24/25 import cycle are tactical adjustments to ease the inherent tension between our higher-level goals of supporting a diverse network of smallholder farmers while retaining the pace and quality that our roaster partners rely upon. We maintained that strong quality last year, through historically high pricing, with many producers faring very well in many respects, even as the systems to support smallholder exports proved increasingly brittle. The inevitable amplification of minor delays was not a surprise, but we’re committed this year to tightening up our on-the-ground efforts in order to more effectively offset them.
In some ways, the present moment (first week of January) is simultaneously showcasing a well-executed acceleration of our efforts while also evincing the slipperiness of striving for speed. This post, for example, is coming about two months later than its annual predecessor—but we’ve already had three North American team members in-country, with another departing next week and three more a month after that. The earliest of these visits was in October, when we hired and began to onboard a new team member, Tensay Melkie, based in the Co Qua lab in Addis. Fundamentally, Tensay was brought aboard to relieve the growing coordination bottleneck of handling sample movement, paperwork, and exporter consolidation toward the overall goal of getting coffees, approvals, and information moving more swiftly and in parallel.
In November, as was the case last year, our focus was on the West—booking washed coffees early and establishing the groundwork for rapid rolling approvals through the rest of the season, just as harvest activity there moved from a mid/late November start into an early December peak. December extended that momentum, with washed western approvals paired with first-round smallholder offer evaluations of both washed and natural processes, though under markedly different economic conditions than the prior cycle: the birr now trading around 155 to the dollar (with parallel rates higher), compared to black-market rates just over 114 during the 2023–24 harvest, alongside tighter bank financing, higher interest rates, and new collateral requirements. These pressures have translated directly to cherry prices—roughly 155–200 birr in the West and 175–250 birr in the South this season, compared to 70–75 birr/kg in the West and 65–68 birr/kg in the South at comparable points last year—altering buying behavior in both regions.
That backdrop is also important context for understanding a strategic wrinkle that inevitably emerged in November, as the spread between domestic minimum cherry prices for Grades 1 and 2 coffees from both the West and the South largely collapsed—a movement with scarce historical precedent. In effect, this erased much of the former value proposition for G2s altogether and brought long-economically disparate regions into near parity. Since then, as the broader “C” market has softened meaningfully (largely due to the eventual full tariff relief), most Ethiopian differentials have drifted lower in tandem—though not exactly in lockstep: top southern naturals and washed lots have retained relative strength even as mid-tier grades compressed. Overall, this leaves a narrower margin for error—reinforcing the need to cup decisively, lean into the most compelling southern offers, and be willing to leave behind coffees that no longer make sense.
Now in January, with the harvest moving somewhat more slowly than initially envisioned due to producer hesitation at these still-elevated prices, attention is shifting toward pre-shipment approvals across the West alongside initial selections from the South, setting the stage for February and March to move to execution, with southern pre-ships and natural offers coming into view and early shipments beginning to move.
Speed is a complicated idea when it comes to Ethiopian exporting, and our key means of continuing to achieve our goals is to refine our understanding of it. Last year’s mixture of successes and shortcomings made clear that careful sequencing eclipses outright urgency: coffees that moved quickly did so because decisions were made and conveyed closer to the point of preparation, in practice often due to economies of scale. By contrast, coffees that remained undecided or caught amidst partially assembled boxes became disproportionately exposed to delay—particularly once container availability tightened in late spring. Heading into 2026, our emphasis is therefore on making moves sooner—not winning the race in an outright sprint, but blatantly angling for a head start wherever we can get it.
This shift is also informing how we approach sampling and commitments across the menu. One of the clearest takeaways from last season, as described above, was that offer quality—especially in more complex, consolidated smallholder scenarios—did not always translate cleanly to the exportable lot. In response, we are tightening the basis on which decisions are made, favoring coffees that are more fully prepared, more clearly separated, and more verifiable at the point of approval. This does not eliminate risk, nor does it solve the macro-structural challenges inherent to the system, but it does narrow the window in which trust can sneak away from verification. Practically speaking, this means fewer speculative commitments and a greater reliance on coffees that can be approved, milled, and shipped without prolonged handoffs or renegotiation.
The same pragmatism informs how we think about scale—particularly within the smallholder portion of the menu. For 2026, we don’t want to shrink away from processing diversity or smallholder engagement, but we need to be clearer-eyed about what it takes for those efforts to translate into dependable volume, which in turn yields dependable logistics: lot sizes that can survive milling, timelines that align with shipping constraints, and approvals that can be finalized before the inevitable seasonal bottlenecks set in. In some cases, that could mean allowing promising experiments to remain experimental until the surrounding infrastructure catches up.
Consolidation, too, is being approached with greater caution. The past season reinforced how quickly complexity compounds when multiple exporters, licenses, and lots converge on a single container. Even minor delays—an approval that slips, a lot that isn’t quite ready—can stall an entire shipment once container availability contracts. While consolidation writ large of course remains unavoidable, our posture this year is to reduce fragility wherever possible: fewer late-season decisions, clearer readiness requirements, and a greater willingness to accept that not every coffee can be rescued if deadlines pass.
Right now, having looked back, around, and ahead, we are firmly in the heads down stage of the cycle, and despite all of the stressors and stakes, it’s an invigorating place to be. When next we check on this Ethiopian season, we’ll sustain this gimmick of optical directionality, finally looking up, hopefully at first container ETA’s, stat-packed offer sheets, and a smarter, ever-more aligned team in the midst of a job well done.
Till then, the core thing for roasters to keep in mind is that Ethiopia’s pricing has shifted upwards. While individual lots and regions are at different levels outright, the historical differences between grades, regions, and processes have compressed, blurring conventional notions of value pockets. In that context, aligning expectations early around timing, pricing, and style will matter more than ever.
To close this piece out with some broadly sequenced producer callouts: western washed coffees are pacing toward April–June arrivals, generally landing in the mid-5s to low-6s, with lots from producers like Musa Abalulesa, Mustefa Abakeno, Sali Negash, and Habtamu Fikadu among the first dispatches. Western naturals follow shortly behind into late spring and early summer, with coffees from Abdulwahid Sheriff, Damitew Hailu, Abo Hussein, Reshad Ababulgu, and again Mustefa Abakeno showing strong continuity. Southern washed coffees should then shape up for May–July arrival windows at higher price bands, anchored by offerings from Getachew Zeleke, Tagel Alemayehu, Mullugeta Muntasha, Habtamu Fikado, and the Layo Teraga Cooperative. Southern naturals—particularly those sourced from smaller producers—will inevitably land last, stretching through the summer and into September, with coffees from Bensa-area partners such as Basha Bekele, Bekele Belaycho, Tuke Yute, Matte Mattios, Bekele Kachara, Belayneh Bariso, Tomas Genamo, and Nguisse Nare, as well as Yirgacheffe producers like Shibru Dube, Yohanis Dogoma, Mengeshe Gumi, and Fikadu Lege.
As you navigate Ethiopia this year—whether reassessing menu positions, adjusting aspired release timing, or simply recalibrating expectations—we encourage you to be in touch ASAP, and we will happily walk through what’s shaping up by region, process, and producer as the season unfolds.
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