Most of you have probably already received an email about our price increase news; you may want to just skip to the dividing line in this post for miscellaneous info. Starting May 1 we will be raising our prices. Even though we’ve sold out each season, our sales still don’t match our expenses, and expenses have gone up and are continuing to rise. Last year Coffee Leaf Rust alarmingly came on the scene for the first time in Hawaii state further increasing our expenses. We have not yet found it on our trees, but many of our neighbors have, so we have to treat our farm as if we have it.
When we renovated the land in 2018 (check out these before and after photos) and started directly selling roasted coffee, we set prices lower than most estate Kona coffee because we were new to the business. The quality of our coffee has improved over the past couple of years. Our estate coffee contains only the top grades of our coffee such that we have certified No. 1 grade beans. The new prices are still competitive compared to other Kona coffee producers.
If you don’t already know the promotion code to enjoy the first prices a little longer, please contact us or join our blog/mailing list on the right side of this page before July. Alternatively, if you’d like to lock in current rates for longer, please consider starting a subscription prior to July 1. Minimal commitment is one pound every three months. Contact us and say what amount and what frequency you’d like your subscription to be.
The miscellaneous stuff …
(1) Big Joe added some interesting comments on last week’s post about adding salt or egg to coffee. If anyone else has experience/thoughts to share, please add your comments there, as well.
(2) I learned about a new company Boox that makes sturdy reusable and collapsible boxes for shipping retail products by mail. One coffee company is piloting using Boox for shipping roasted coffee. I emailed questions to Boox but never heard back. I’ll try and keep a pulse on what happens with this.
(3) There was a recent story about another Kona farm, Kokoleka Lani Farms, in the newspaper. Both Bea and I have bought bars of these soaps for years for our use and as consumable gifts. What resonated with me in this article was the goal of bio-diversity when they started their farm. They started in a much different place than us. However, like us and probably everyone new to a farm, they had to start with getting rid of (is that even possible?) the weeds and invasive plants. They wanted to integrate other plant species to reduce irrigation, fertilizer and pest control needs.
We’ve been weaving in more trees with edibles amongst the coffee. We can take better advantage of the ones we already have, too. I’m thinking about the mature macadamia nut trees we aren’t yet harvesting. A big key to successfully growing and harvesting edibles is timely pruning. We have a huge lychee tree, but we can probably only retrieve under 5% of the fruit. We’re buying more dwarf fruit trees, too. An update on trees planted in the last year will come in a future post.