good article on the effect this is having.
Article goes on to say that this particular company hasn't raised prices yet but after going from $1000 per container to $3500 not sure how much longer they will be able to hold off
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When he woke on March 26 to the news that Baltimore’s Key Bridge had collapsed, Michael Haft, co-founder of Compass Coffee, dialed his chief operating officer.
“You have to reroute all of our coffee immediately,” Haft recalled saying.
The collapse upended the supply chain for the D.C.-based roaster, which imports most of its beans through the Port of Baltimore. The crash is expected to cause delays and extra costs for many other businesses that rely on the port, which is responsible for about 52 million tons of imports and exports annually. The U.S. Small Business Administration has received more than 1,000 loan applications in response to the upheaval.
With the port closed to most vessel traffic, hundreds of products,
including coffee, tofu and cars, now have to be rerouted to different parts of the country. Three temporary channels provide limited access to the Baltimore port.
To show how the supply chain has been disrupted, The Washington Post looked at the shipping process for some of the products that come from overseas to serve Compass customers.
Compass gets its coffee beans from Kenya, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala and Colombia. Those beans get loaded into shipping containers — 42,000 pounds in each — and sent out to sea.
They arrive at the Port of Baltimore, which receives more than 8 percent of the nation’s coffee beans. Only the ports in Newark, New Orleans, Charleston, Oakland and Houston imported more beans annually before the bridge collapse.
In addition to the beans, Compass uses imported sugar to make simple syrups. Their 12-ounce coffee bean cans are made by a company that imports its steel through the port.
At any given time, Compass typically has six to eight containers of coffee and other products in transit.
Once Compass’s beans are unloaded at the Port of Baltimore, they get trucked to a warehouse about 12 miles northeast of the city. That facility also stores beans for other coffee companies, ranging from behemoths like Starbucks to small businesses like D.C.-based subscription service Cam’s Kettle. Inside, 150-pound bags of coffee are stacked on wood pallets.
Then, the beans wind their way to Compass’s 18 D.C.-area cafes. Others go to wholesale and grocery customers, and some are sold to customers to brew at home.
The bridge collapse disrupted this process, and the coffee, sugar and tins — among other items — needed somewhere new to go.
Some vessels carrying beans were already at sea when the bridge collapsed, and shipping companies rerouted them to the Port of New York and New Jersey in the Newark area. That port typically handles about seven times as much cargo as Baltimore, a Port Authority spokeswoman said, and has been accepting many other shipments originally intended for Baltimore.
Then Compass had to decide where to route the beans that hadn’t yet shipped. The company considered things like the size of each port, its availability to accept cargo, the cost of transporting products from there to D.C. and the timing of it all, said Matt Brown, who works with Compass as an outside sales manager at the importer Cafe Imports.
Haft decided to send that coffee to Newark. That solved the immediate issue, but also caused a domino effect.
Now that the beans are entering the country through New Jersey, what used to be a 30-minute trip to truck them to the Maryland warehouse is now a five-day journey. Plus, Compass has to return the empty containers to Newark. Sugar will also be expensive to transport from New Jersey because of its density, said Chas Newman, Compass’s chief operating officer.
The roaster’s next order of raw materials for their bulk coffee bags is expected to take 12 weeks — twice the usual time — and other shipments are also running behind schedule. Empty bottles for simple syrup have been delayed by six weeks. One of Compass’s main packaging suppliers, based in Maryland, also expects delays.................
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-m...7e8a6816fb1940/25/53/66292f29e0481704072ce83b