High bean costs hitting Bizzy’s Brooklyn Center coffee brewery at busy time

Welcome to “The last bite,” an end-of-week food and ag roundup from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Reach out to business reporter Brooks Johnson at brooks.johnson@startribune.com to share your news and favorite coffee-growing regions.

If Bizzy were a brewery, it would be one of Minnesota’s largest after producing 113,000 barrels of cold brew coffee last year.

A visitor could even mistake all those giant stainless-steel tanks at Bizzy’s Brooklyn Center operation for a beer instead of java brewery at first glance — if it weren’t for the aroma of thousands of pounds of coffee filling the air.

Production was in full swing last week as Bizzy’s busy season (hot weather means cold coffee) really kicks off. A strong summer would be welcome.

“Problem is, coffee prices are at record highs,” said co-founder Alex French. “So even though business is booming in revenue, we’re still losing money.”

Extreme weather has hurt coffee harvests in recent years while demand continues to soar globally; supply chain issues and tariffs also add costs. High coffee prices especially hurt Bizzy because the company uses way more coffee than competitors in their 18-hour cold brew extraction.

And it comes on the heels of the first profitable year for French and co-founder Andrew Healy.

“Years of losing money and stressing, and Andrew and I still work six days a week now, killing ourselves, and we’re like, we finally did it,” French said. “And then coffee prices triple.”

Bizzy will survive, they said, and the coffeemakers have some big plans for the rest of the year.

“People love the product. It’s working very well,” French said. “We’re just in this tough commodity cycle right now.”

There was some brouhaha after the latest ag trade forecast, which projected another record deficit this year: $49.5 billion.

The sheer volume of America’s agricultural exports should rise in 2025, but thanks to falling commodity prices, the value of our collective ag exports will be down slightly from last year. Then consider ag imports have simply grown way, way faster than exports since 2019. The U.S. has nearly doubled the amount of money it collectively spends on imported food while ag exports have risen 21% in that time.

Some of that import growth is inflation, so blame more expensive coffee, cocoa and fruits that can’t grow stateside. But there’s also more foreign beef and dairy landing on dinner tables. No easy answers here.

The Vanilla Bean Project already made history by sourcing the world’s first Regenerative Organic-Certified vanilla. Now the Minnesota-based company is bringing the world’s first such vanilla delivered via sailboat.

April marked the inaugural delivery of wind-blown vanilla beans shipped from France to New Jersey by sail. Soon the whole trip, from Madagascar to France to the U.S., will happen on sailboats.

Vanilla Bean Project co-founder Andy Kubiak is in France this week for a wind-cargo conference, where he’s unveiling the Wind-Powered-Shipping certification for vanilla extract and paste, reducing transportation emissions by 95% for a widely used ingredient grown thousands of miles away.

Minneapolis-based advisory firm Conlego has launched a new software system to make retail/supplier negotiations more streamlined.

“Portager eliminates the clunky spreadsheets, endless emails and opaque processes that have long frustrated merchants and their suppliers,” Daniel Duty, CEO of Conlego, said in a news release.

A former Target exec called it a “game changer,” per the release.

Brands increasingly need to be smart, or risk falling off the shelf, when it comes to negotiating prices and placements.

Plant-based meat still has some reputation building to do in order to reach a potentially massive consumer base.

A recent survey found 71% of Americans are at least “somewhat likely” to eat plant-based meat or plant-based dairy at some point, according to the Good Food Institute. But the largest group of those consumers are “value-driven skeptics.”

“Price- and taste-focused consumers who feel eating conventional meat is natural and part of their routine, although it can be expensive,” the group found. “They aren’t opposed to plant-based meat but aren’t convinced it’s a good choice for them, especially as long as it lags on price and taste.”