Here's a small, inconvenient truth: your favourite coffee isn't always going to be sitting on our shelves. And that's not a flaw in the supply chain. That's the supply chain working exactly as it should.
Coffee is an agricultural crop. A fruit, technically – the bean is the seed at the centre of a cherry that grows on a tree, flowers after rain, and ripens on its own schedule. Like asparagus in spring or stone fruit in summer, it has a season. Sometimes two. And by the time a single bag of green coffee reaches our roastery in Auckland, it's travelled thousands of miles, crossed several borders, and weathered whatever the global shipping industry happens to be throwing at it that month.
Which, over the last five or so years, has been quite a lot.
This is a piece about that journey. When coffees arrive, why they arrive when they do, how long they take to get here, and why some years they don't arrive at all.
Why coffee has a season in the first place
Coffee has a very predictable rhythm, which starts after the first rain following a dry spell. Two weeks after that first rain, the buds of flowers will appear, opening into fragrant, beautiful white flowers. After the flowers are pollinated they dry up and cherries begin to grow, starting as pinheads where the flower was, then into green fruit, and finally ripening into (typically) red or yellow fruit. The ripening can take anything from 3 to 9 months depending on the length of the daylight, temperature, nutrition and other variables.
Historically, coffee was grown in well established producing countries and the weather was consistent from year to year – farmers would know to expect that first rain in a particular month and be surprised if it was a week or two later. Rain also tended to be quite heavy and you'd have more rain after the first rains, so all of the plants would have flowered within a short period of time. Climate change has shifted these factors – the rains are less consistent and sometimes you get a heavy rain before a long gap until more rain. That means when harvesting starts and how long the harvest season is – the time from the first fruits being ripe to the last ones being ripe – are more unpredictable than they used to be.
Traditionally, coffee is only grown near the equator and inside the tropics. This region only has two seasons – a wet and a dry, or summer and winter. South of the equator, that means that harvests fall during the southern winter: roughly May to September. Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Malawi and Burundi all sit in this group. North of the equator, the rhythm reverses: harvests run through the northern winter, roughly October to March. That's Central America, Mexico, Yemen, Thailand and most of Ethiopia.
However, microclimates and geography all play a big part too! Colombia, straddling the equator with three distinct Andean ranges, harvests all year round – although it's usually described as having two harvests a year in most regions – a main crop peak and a secondary "mitaca" crop peak – with timings that shift depending on whether you're in the north of the country or the south. Kenya, just south of the equator, has a main crop in late autumn and a smaller "fly crop" in early summer. Altitude complicates things further: higher farms ripen later than lower ones in the same country, which can stretch a harvest window by months – it's not uncommon to see low altitude farms flowering and with new green cherries whilst high altitude farms a short distance away still wait to be harvested.
Add in the fact that coffee needs to be processed – which can be anything from 5 days to 45 days after harvesting. Then collected, milled ready for transport, and sometimes rested again before it's shipped. It then must survive a long sea journey, clear customs, be trucked or railed to us... and you start to see why fresh-crop arrivals lag the harvest by three to five months at the very least.
The arrival calendar
Here's the rough rhythm of when coffees from our origins tend to land in Auckland. Consider it a guide rather than a timetable. Ships are late. Harvests shift. Weather has opinions.
One thing worth noting from the New Zealand end: because we're in the southern hemisphere ourselves, our seasons are flipped relative to our UK counterpart. A coffee that arrives into Auckland in "our autumn" lands during what feels like winding-down weather here – but it might be peak summer freshness at origin. That slight mental recalibration is worth keeping in mind as you read what follows.
Our autumn and winter (March to August)
This is when Central American and Mexican coffees begin arriving. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama were all picked between November and April, milled and rested through the northern late winter, and shipped from February onwards. Routing to New Zealand – typically via the Pacific, or sometimes via Singapore and Australian transshipment – adds a few days over the equivalent UK voyage, and coffees clear NZ Customs (usually at Auckland or Tauranga) before being freighted down to us. Ethiopian main-crop coffees, harvested from October to March, also tend to arrive from around June onwards, though the ongoing Red Sea disruptions (more on that below) have pushed some arrivals later than we'd like. Thailand's Chiang Rai-grown lots, picked November through March, land around the same time. Typically, farms at lower altitudes (for example Finca Argentina in El Salvador) arrive before the higher altitude farms (like Finca San Jose, also in El Salvador).
Our spring and summer (September to February)
The southern hemisphere origins take over – and this is where being based in the southern hemisphere ourselves creates an interesting rhythm. Brazilian coffees can arrive from November onwards, but many of the best lots won't arrive until January or February. Peruvian coffees, picked June through September, arrive in December. Kenya's main crop, harvested September to February, generally shows up at New Zealand ports the following February to May – but the fly crop arrives from November. Burundi, Malawi and Rwanda all sit in this window too, with Malawi's April-to-October harvest reaching us from November onwards.
Deeper into our summer, late-arriving southern hemisphere coffees catch up. Bolivia, which we'll get to in a moment, is almost always a late-year arrival. Later Colombian lots from the main November-to-January harvest also land here. And this is the window when the previous year's Brazil starts to feel its age, and we're looking eagerly at Central America on the horizon.
Yemen, as ever, is a category of its own. Harvested from October to February, the best lots reach New Zealand whenever the complicated logistics allow.
From tree to Auckland: the actual timeline
It's worth walking through what "from harvest to arrival" really involves. Picking the cherries is just the first step. After that, coffee is processed (washed, natural or one of the more inventive methods that have emerged in the last decade) and dried. Drying alone can take anything from 5 days to six weeks. Then the parchment-covered beans rest – usually for 30 to 60 days – to stabilise flavour before milling. Milling removes the parchment, sorts by size and density, and preps the coffee for export. Samples travel to buyers, approvals come back, shipping containers get booked, and finally the coffee is loaded.
So before a single bag leaves origin, you're looking at two to three months of post-harvest work.
Then the ocean leg begins. New Zealand's routing adds meaningful distance compared to European destinations – we're simply further from almost everywhere. From Brazil's port of Santos, a container service to Auckland or Tauranga runs around 25 to 35 days. From Central American ports it's four to five weeks, routing via the Panama Canal and across the Pacific. From Colombian ports (Buenaventura or Cartagena) it's similar. From East Africa – Mombasa for Kenyan coffee, Djibouti for Ethiopian – the pre-2023 norm was five to seven weeks via the Suez Canal and Indian Ocean; the Red Sea crisis has added significantly to that. From Thailand's Laem Chabang, four to five weeks direct. From Chile's port of Arica, where Bolivian coffee exits South America, the Pacific crossing to New Zealand takes around 25 to 30 days once loaded.
Once a container arrives in New Zealand, there's customs clearance and biosecurity inspection by MPI – New Zealand's border controls are among the most thorough in the world, which we respect entirely but which does add time. After release from the port, coffee is freighted to Auckland-based storage before the final leg to Auckland. That last stretch is the shortest. It's also, ironically, often the least predictable.
All in, from the moment a cherry is picked to the moment we open a bag on the roastery floor, you're looking at three to six months in a smooth year. Longer in a messy one. And the last few years have been very, very messy.
When the oceans got angry: the post-2020 shipping era
If you'd asked a coffee buyer in 2019 how shipping worked, they'd have shrugged and said: "fine, mostly". Containers were plentiful, freight rates were low, ships sailed roughly on time. However, all of this was built on a system that kept moving smoothly – "just-in-time" logistics and an always steady flow which kept the right things in the right place at the right time. Then 2020 happened, and we've been unpicking it ever since.
The first wave was the pandemic itself. Ports closed, reopened, closed again. Port workers got sick. Ships queued for weeks waiting to unload. Empty containers ended up stranded in the wrong hemisphere. Freight rates went, in the polite industry phrase, absolutely bananas: a single container from Brazil to the US East Coast, which would normally cost around $2,000, was hitting $4,000 by mid-2021. From Shanghai to Rotterdam, prices rose by more than 540%. It wasn't just the money. It was the unreliability. Shipments that should have taken 30 days were taking 60 or 90. Some just quietly vanished into the system for months.
Then, in March 2021, the Ever Given – a 400-metre container ship the length of the Empire State Building laid on its side – wedged itself diagonally across the Suez Canal. For nearly a week, one of the world's most important shipping arteries was blocked. 369 other vessels queued up behind it. It cost the global economy an estimated $15 million a day, and it delayed coffee shipments that were still trying to recover from the pandemic.
You'd be forgiven for thinking things would settle down after that. They haven't.
The Red Sea problem
Since November 2023, attacks on commercial ships by Houthi forces in Yemen have made the Red Sea – the narrow corridor connecting the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean – essentially uninsurable for most carriers. Most major shipping lines have diverted their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope instead. That adds roughly 11,000 nautical miles, ten extra days at sea, and around $1 million in fuel to every single voyage.
For New Zealand, the impact on East African and Asian origins has been significant. Ethiopian coffee from Djibouti, and Kenyan coffee from Mombasa, used to route through Suez and into the Indian Ocean before heading south and east to us. With that corridor closed, carriers are now looping the long way around Africa before crossing the Indian Ocean – adding two to three weeks to what was already a long haul. Vietnamese and Indonesian coffees, major components of the blended-roast market, face similar delays. And with carriers applying emergency surcharges of up to $1,500 per 20-foot container on affected routes, the costs have been real and persistent.
A Gaza ceasefire in late 2025 briefly raised hopes of a return to normal Red Sea traffic. Those hopes were, at the time of writing, not looking great. Most carriers continue to route around the Cape, and industry analysts expect the diversions to continue well into 2027.
The Panama Canal problem
Just as the Red Sea was closing, the other major chokepoint in global shipping started running out of water. The Panama Canal relies on rainfall to fill Gatún Lake, the freshwater reservoir that powers the lock system. A severe drought that began in 2023, made worse by a strong El Niño event, dropped lake levels to historic lows. By early 2024, the canal authority had cut daily ship transits from the usual 36 to 38 down to 24, a 36% reduction. Vessels were also forced to carry less cargo to avoid running aground in shallower locks.
For New Zealand, this is acutely relevant: much of the coffee we receive from Central America and Colombia routes through Panama before crossing the Pacific to us. Disruptions there add directly to our lead times. Some carriers paid queue-jumping fees reported to be as high as $4 million to get through. Others simply rerouted around Cape Horn – adding further days on what is already a long Pacific crossing. Water levels have since recovered, but the disruption forced a rethink of which routes carry which cargoes, and the knock-on effects are still working through the system.
The port congestion problem
None of this helps at origin. Santos, the world's largest coffee port, had a 75% delay rate on coffee vessels in February 2024, with some ships leaving the port without their booked cargo because they couldn't wait any longer. A global shortage of 20-foot containers – the size most commonly used for coffee – compounded the problem through 2024. When containers are short, coffee either waits at origin or gets loaded into 40-foot boxes with other cargo, which brings its own scheduling complications.
On-time performance for container shipping, which used to sit comfortably above 80%, dropped to around 23% in Brazil in 2024. These are the kinds of numbers that turn a planned six-month lead time into a ten-month one. Which is why any specialty roaster worth their salt buys coverage well in advance, and why we'll sometimes flag a coffee as "coming soon" for what feels like an unreasonably long time.
Some origins come harder than others
Even in a good year, some countries are just more logistically complicated than others. A few of the origins we buy from sit firmly in that category.
Bolivia
Bolivia is the only landlocked coffee-producing country in South America. Which is a problem when your product needs to get on a boat. The best Bolivian specialty coffee comes from Caranaví, in the Yungas region, where farms sit at the point the Andes meet the Amazon basin – steep, cloud-covered, often reachable only by rough mountain roads. Getting cherry from farm to mill is already a challenge. Getting green coffee from the mill to an ocean port is something else entirely.
Bolivian coffee is trucked over the top of the Andes, climbing to elevations above 4,000 metres, before descending to the Chilean port of Arica on the Pacific coast. It's one of the most punishing overland transits in the coffee world. Border crossings add cost and time – three to four days of road travel, followed by waits for loading in Chile. From Arica, the Pacific crossing to New Zealand takes around 25 to 30 days – a route that actually gives us a slight geographic advantage over our European counterparts, for whom Bolivian coffee must then continue all the way around to the Atlantic. In 2025, they trucked the coffee to Arica whilst drivers across Bolivia were waiting over 24 hours at gas stations to fill up on diesel because of a national shortage. Every successful Bolivian arrival is, genuinely, something of a small miracle.
Our long-term suppliers in Bolivia, Los Rodriguez, have been navigating logistics like this for years. Which might be why they now feel like one of the least impacted by more recent global issues – which is, frankly, incredible.
Yemen
Yemen is where coffee trading began, and where coffee exporting began – the word "mocha" comes from the port of Mokha on the Red Sea, from where Yemeni beans first reached Europe in the 1600s. It's also a country in the middle of a humanitarian crisis. A civil war that started in 2015 has damaged agricultural infrastructure, displaced farmers, and made export logistics extraordinarily difficult. The infrastructure to move specialty coffee from remote highland farms to any functioning port is, in large parts of the country, barely there.
The Yemeni coffee that does reach specialty roasters in New Zealand typically comes through a handful of specialist importers with longstanding relationships in specific highland communities. It's rare, it's expensive, and the cost reflects the real difficulty of getting it out. When we have it, we have it. When we don't, we don't.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia is landlocked too, though less dramatically than Bolivia. Almost all Ethiopian coffee exits through the Red Sea port of Djibouti, which means the route to New Zealand has been caught squarely in the Red Sea crisis since late 2023. When the Djibouti-to-Suez route was working, Ethiopian coffee could reach us in around seven to eight weeks. With diversions around the Cape of Good Hope now standard, that's closer to ten to twelve weeks – a significant stretch on what is already a long voyage to the South Pacific. There are no straightforward alternatives; Ethiopia's road and rail infrastructure makes the Djibouti corridor effectively the only option for large volumes.
The smaller origins
Panama, Burundi, Malawi, Thailand: all produce comparatively small volumes, and that volume itself is part of the challenge. A country that exports a million bags a year has dozens of shipping options. A country that exports 50,000 bags gets whatever schedule the carriers happen to offer, which usually means transshipment in a larger hub port – often Singapore or Sydney for origins heading to New Zealand – extra handling, and longer total transit times. Burundi and Rwanda, both landlocked, send their coffee overland to Mombasa in Kenya or Dar es Salaam in Tanzania before it ever sees the sea. MPI biosecurity requirements at the New Zealand border add a further step that doesn't exist for many other destinations, though it's a step we wouldn't trade away.
When coffee tastes good
On top of all these logistical considerations, coffee's flavour is heavily impacted by the processing, drying and all that time spent in a shipping container (particularly if that's sitting in the sun somewhere hot!). Often, freshly landed coffee isn't ready for release straight away because it's got to us so quickly, the flavours aren't vibrant yet – it needs a little time with us to stabilise. On the other hand, if the coffee's late, or had a bad journey, it can quickly become flat, woody and lacking the sweetness we enjoy in speciality coffee. Unroasted coffee ages and changes, in a process which is not well understood or fully predictable. This is why you'll see some origins represented in our offering for maybe 9 months of the year, whereas others will only be there for 4 months.
What this all means at the roastery
All of which is a long way of explaining why our offer list looks the way it does through the year. Why Kenyan coffees tend to be at their best in our autumn. Why our Bolivian lands in the height of our summer. Why Central America fills out the menu in our cooler months. Why a coffee you loved last April might not reappear until next April – or next July.
It's also why we plan our buying six to twelve to eighteen months ahead, hold coffee at origin and in bonded warehouses, and work with a small group of importers and producers we've known for years. Specialty coffee doesn't run on just-in-time logistics, and it never really has. Every lot we roast has a timeline behind it that started with a tree flowering in a specific week, in a specific country, after a specific rain.
Seasonality isn't a marketing concept. It's just what coffee is. The bag in front of you on the shelf is the end point of a long, convoluted and improbable chain of events that had to go right at every stage – including the bits involving container ships, canals, MPI inspections, and geopolitics – for it to be there at all.
Which, when you think about it, makes that first sip of a fresh-crop arrival taste even better.
