Canadian Coffee Prices Will Stay High in 2026, Expert Warns

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is pushing back hard against the wave of optimistic headlines about falling coffee prices, warning that Canadian consumers should not expect major relief at the register in 2026. The food economist cites persistent supply issues as his reason for skepticism and takes direct aim at media forecasts he considers overly rosy, predicting only sporadic retail sales while coffee shops hold their prices steady.

His caution lands at a genuinely confusing moment in the market. On the commodity side, the numbers look encouraging: according to Trading Economics, coffee prices fell below US$308.13 per 100 pounds as of February 5, a drop of roughly 17 per cent over the prior month and 23 per cent compared to the same point a year earlier. An analysis by Tim Hortons last fall tracked how dramatically the commodity had surged in the years prior, rising from US$158 per 100 pounds in 2022 to US$390 per 100 pounds in 2025, a roughly 2.5-times increase that explains why Statistics Canada data shows the average retail price of coffee is now up 30 per cent year over year.

Mike von Massow, a food economist at the University of Guelph, sees those commodity declines as a genuine signal. Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, is forecasting a record crop this season, and von Massow estimates global coffee production will increase by four per cent. "Over the next few months, we should start seeing some price relief in the coffee market," he said. He expects the grocery store to be where consumers feel it first. "We're probably not going to recover the whole 30 per cent, but I think we should see substantial decreases in the price of coffee at the grocery store," he said.

Do not expect your café order to get cheaper, though. Von Massow is explicit that menu prices at coffee shops are unlikely to move much, because many operators absorbed the brunt of the cost increases rather than passing them fully to customers. "While we may see some price adjustments in those environments, what this will largely do is allow (coffee shops) to recover some of their margins and perhaps improve their viability," he said.

Devereaux Gatin, owner of Café Del Rey in downtown Saskatoon, has operated on exactly that logic since opening three years ago. "We have tried to absorb some of those costs ourselves versus passing them onto the consumer," Gatin said. That approach produces what he calls a 70/30 split: the café eats roughly 70 per cent of cost increases, passing only 30 per cent on to customers. The increases he has faced go well beyond green beans, encompassing milk, flour, sugar, cups, and packaging, with packaging costs being a particularly persistent driver.

Barry Prentice, a professor at the University of Manitoba, aligns with the cautious camp. Despite the recent commodity price decline and the cancellation of both Canada's countertariffs on U.S. imports and a 50 per cent U.S. tariff on Brazilian coffee that was scrapped in 2025, Prentice says consumers should not expect short-term price reductions to follow automatically.

The split between von Massow's near-term optimism and the Charlebois-Prentice caution ultimately comes down to how quickly and completely commodity savings travel through the supply chain to retail shelves and menus. Given that coffee prices have nearly doubled since 2020, even a partial recovery at the grocery level would matter to Canadian households. At the café counter, the math is more complicated, and the savings, if they come, are more likely to shore up a struggling independent's bottom line than to trim the price of your morning flat white.