Season
No season. Vessels arrive all year and roasters run to a retail schedule, not a harvest.
Commodity playbook
Who ships coffee
| Shipper | Town | County |
|---|---|---|
| J.M. Smucker | New Orleans, LA | Orleans |
| Dupuy Storage and Forwarding | New Orleans, LA | Orleans |
| Community Coffee | Baton Rouge, LA | East Baton Rouge |
| Starbucks | Kent, WA | King |
| Get the full list with contacts in your inbox → breadd.ai | ||
Roasters and green coffee handlers. Smucker's New Orleans silo operation is the largest facility of its kind in the world and Dupuy the largest storage and forwarding operation in the US.
Ask the warehouse operator about green, and the roaster about finished goods. The green side is handled by specialist storage and forwarding companies who move bags between terminal, warehouse and roaster, and it is short-haul, high-frequency and much less contested. The roasted side is conventional CPG distribution on annual bids.
Where it hauls
Two maps that meet at the ports. Green coffee arrives in containers, overwhelmingly through New Orleans, with New York, Houston, Oakland and the Virginia ports handling the rest, and sits in bonded and dry warehouses until a roaster calls for it. Roasted coffee leaves plants across the country: New Orleans itself, the Pacific Northwest, the northeast and Texas. The green leg is drayage and warehouse transfer; the roasted leg is national consumer freight. The companies to know:
How to open
"Do you need capacity on the green side, terminal to warehouse to roaster? I'm not just after the finished goods."
To warehouses and roasters, January into FebruaryKnowing that green coffee moves several times before it is roasted is the credential. Most callers only know the branded end exists.
Qualifying questions
- Green or roasted? Green coffee moves in 60-kilo bags or bulk liners, dense and heavy, on short port-area hauls. Roasted product is packaged consumer goods on long lanes. Two entirely different jobs.
- Is the trailer clean and odour-free? Coffee absorbs odour aggressively, green beans especially. Prior-load history matters more here than on most dry freight, and a tainted load is unsellable rather than merely damaged.
- What does a green load scale? Bagged green coffee is dense and loads to weight quickly. Get the bag count and target gross rather than assuming an agricultural import will cube out.
- Is it in bond? Green coffee sitting in a bonded warehouse carries customs requirements on movement. Confirm the status and whether a bonded carrier or specific paperwork is needed.
- When does the vessel actually discharge? Arrival dates move, and the drayage window moves with them. Ask how much notice they can give, because flexible short-notice capacity is what the green side actually needs.
When to call
January and February, as annual arrangements are set. There is no harvest to time from the US end, because the crops that matter are in the southern hemisphere and the tropics and the buffer stock in warehouses smooths it out. What varies is vessel arrival, which is unpredictable in a way that creates short-notice drayage work.
Sources
- US coffee handling and import data: the US importing over 25 million 60-kilo bags annually; New Orleans as the nation's premier coffee-handling port with 14 coffee warehouses holding more than 5.5 million square feet of storage and six roasting facilities within a 20 mile radius; Smucker Coffee Silo Operations as the largest facility of its kind in the world and Dupuy Storage and Forwarding the largest in the United States; Folgers roasting all of its coffee in New Orleans. jmsmucker.com
- The January to February call window and the green-side entry advice. Reasoned from how imported commodities are contracted rather than a published schedule.