Why your Favourite Mood Coffee Keeps Selling Out

The thing I hate doing most is marking a coffee as "sold out." I cringe every time I have to do it because I know what's going to happen. People start asking for the very thing I don't have anymore and I wish I could find a way to give it to them!

A couple months ago I sold out of decaf. And customers, old and new, started emailing me about it (as you should if you're looking for something that vanished out of thin air! Please ALWAYS email me!). "NEED. DECAF. NOW!!!" read one email, which gave me a good laugh.

Decaf coffees are especially tricky to source from women producers because they are rare. Read: super rare. So rare that I went ahead and signed a forward contract for decaf coffee spanning the next two years, from the amazing Francy Castillo of course.

You might be thinking, oh great, decaf will be well stocked for the next little while. But sadly, it is not. And this goes for any coffee, not just decaf.

Let's break this down.

The Harvest

The only comfort I get from signing a forward contract is that if, and that's a big if, and when a coffee is harvested, I will get first pick at the yield. But what if the yield is expected to be 100 bags and the harvest only produces 50? Well then we might as well throw that contract away unless I was the first business to sign and finalize.

It's so easy to forget that coffee is an agricultural product. Its yield is affected by climate, rain, drought, disease, soil conditions, and everything else nature decides to throw at it in a given season. Francy doesn't control the weather. Neither do I. And some years, a crop that looked beautiful in January looks very different by harvest time.

The Mountain

Let's say the yield this year met expectations and produced all 100 bags. Yay! No. We are NOT celebrating yet.

Great coffee is generally grown at higher altitudes. That means it takes a lot of logistics and patience to get the coffee from the farm, onto a truck, and to the nearest international port. Mudslides, dirt roads, and cartels become your biggest obstacles. I say cartels with zero exaggeration. In some of the regions where Mood sources coffee, armed groups control roads and movement. Getting a shipment out safely is not a given. It requires trust, local relationships, and sometimes just luck.

The Port

Once the coffee reaches the port, the local government can make or break your timelines entirely. This is where ground support and local connections play a massive role in whether a container sits for weeks, or months, waiting for paperwork to be approved. Customs, export certifications, inspections. Each step is its own waiting game.

And once the cargo ship has finally set sail for North America, you might think the hard part is over. But did you know pirates are a very real threat to cargo ships? Yes, I said pirates. Weather is another factor. The ocean has a mind of her own. Delays and reroutes happen, and there is nothing anyone on land can do about it.

Someone once asked me why I didn't just get the coffee air-lifted into Canada. Air freight can be double to triple the price of sea freight. Yes, it's faster. But it's expensive, and it's significantly more pollutive. That's not a trade-off I'm willing to make.

Canadian Soil

That decaf from Francy finally made it to the Port of Montreal earlier this year, after a month-long delay at sea. And then, for reasons unknown to me and my import partner, the container sat at the port for weeks without being stripped and moved to the warehouse just 45 minutes away.

Delays happen on Canadian soil too, and sometimes the reasons are completely elusive.

My Forecasts

And the last piece of this global puzzle is me. Sometimes I simply don't buy enough coffee to meet actual demand. If I dealt in blends, coffees pooled together from multiple farms and not traceable back to any specific source, I'd just swap one out for another and nobody would notice. I would never technically "sell out."

But Mood doesn't work that way. When the Marleyi Cordoba sells out, I can't replace it with another Colombian coffee and pretend nothing changed. Her name is on it. Her farm is the story. That kind of traceability comes with real constraints.

So when something sells out here, it means a real person's harvest ran short, or a container got delayed, or I misjudged how much my customers would love it. Usually some combination of all three.

But I wouldn't do it any other way. How cool is it to have tried something unique and only available for a limited time?

I'm working on getting better at anticipating demand and buying more. But in the meantime, if you see a coffee you love in the shop, trust your instincts. It might not be there the next time you look!