Zurich sues over missing Community Coffee shipment, seeks $132,000 recovery

A missing trailer full of coffee is exactly the kind of break in the chain that turns logistics into a balance-sheet problem. In Zurich American Insurance Company’s suit, a Community Coffee load allegedly disappeared after leaving New Orleans for Knoxville on a clean bill of lading, and the insurer is now trying to recover the payout from the trucking side of the deal.

Zurich filed the case May 21, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The complaint says Community Coffee hired Capital Logistics Group, LLC on or about May 28, 2025 to move sacks of coffee on a single trailer. Zurich says the shipment never arrived and was never returned, and that the loss was not less than $132,029.87.

The insurer says it paid $127,029.87 on the claim and is also seeking Community Coffee’s $5,000 deductible from Capital Logistics, which is based in Jacksonville, Florida. The complaint says Capital Logistics then handed the job to Big Show Logistics, LLC, adding another layer to a move that should have been simple: one pickup, one linehaul, one delivery. That extra handoff is where freight cases like this tend to get messy, because every additional link widens the room for theft, diversion, and finger-pointing over who actually controlled the cargo.

Zurich’s lawsuit does not just ask who lost the coffee. It also asks what Capital Logistics was in the chain, a carrier or a broker, and pleads Carmack Amendment liability, breach of contract, negligence, vicarious liability, and bailment. That mix matters because the answer can determine who pays when a load vanishes between warehouse and retailer, and whether the loss sits with the trucking company, an intermediary, or an insurer that has already written the check.

The stakes are bigger than one missing load. Community Coffee was founded in 1919 by Henry Norman “Cap” Saurage and says it remains family-owned through five generations. The Baton Rouge headquarters is still its main headquarters, even after the company opened a Frisco, Texas administrative office on May 31, 2023. It also bills itself as the largest family-owned retail coffee brand in America, which makes a stolen shipment more than a nuisance, it is a direct hit to a legacy brand’s supply reliability.

That risk is showing up across the freight world. The U.S. Department of Transportation has called cargo theft a growing concern and is seeking input on how to reduce it, while Verisk CargoNet reported 3,625 cargo theft incidents in 2024 and estimated nearly $725 million in losses in 2025. With 884 supply chain theft events in the second quarter of 2025 alone, coffee’s vulnerability is hard to miss. When a truckload disappears, the damage does not stop at the dock.