Screenshot from Futures.Coffee taken on June 10.
The coffee “C market” and “passion” are not phrases that typically go hand in hand. Yet for the past six months, a Bay Area couple has been spending nights and weekends readying Futures.Coffee, a free website for quick-reference commodity coffee price info.
Created by web developer Tom Schluep and longtime coffee pro Sandra Elisa Loofbourow, Futures.Coffee was designed to give coffee-interested people of all professional levels and backgrounds “a little more insight into the base price that inevitably impacts their daily cup.”
Looking more like a video game than a spreadsheet, the website offers a visually engaging, more interactive and more immediately informative tool for people seeking coffee price and currency conversion info. The site also features sections for green coffee financial news, benchmarks for futures contracts (updated every 30 minutes), and historical price charts.
“The last couple of months have seen huge swings in the global price of coffee, which was a big topic of conversation in our household and with our friends,” Schluep told DCN via email. “The problem was that most websites are too complicated to understand the pricing of coffee contracts. We wanted a simple aggregate website with a minimal layout and easy to remember name — something anyone could access and get an easy snapshot of the world and how the price of coffee is affected.”
Schluep and Loofbourow — the latter being the recent co-founder of the green coffee connections company Openflor — are quick to note that Futures.Coffee is not technically a trading platform, and that price quotes are delayed by 10 minutes. However, they said the site has already gotten positive feedback from traders and laypeople alike.
“We’ve received tons of great ideas to implement and are balancing our time as best as we can to implement them,” Schluep said. “First we want to add native Spanish language support, and we’re working on a big-picture ‘Dashboard’ mode so users can see all of the info at once on one big screen they could easily hang up in an office, lab or roasting place.”
The launch comes at an interesting time for the “C Price” of coffee, which is planned to be converted from U.S. cents per pound to dollars per metric ton within three years. Some organizations — such as the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide — have attempted to distance the specialty coffee market from the C price, which is technically established by the New York-based for-profit firm Intercontinental Exchange (ICE).
Schluep said that Futures.Coffee is designed to de-mystify the C market for working coffee folks who may not have access to advanced trading tools.
Said Schluep, “Our aggregate site puts news, historical data and currency exchange in the picture to create an easily digestible snapshot of market trends to give everyone equitable access to the same data.”
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