Imagine that your business is to visualize and deal with “worst case” coffee logistic scenarios, matching ever-expanding cases of loss with coverage conditions, terms and, whenever possible, blending in loss prevention.
This business Is actually called “Coffee Insurance” and lately has required creative thinking far “outside the bag” because the perils and Issues are simply amazing:
1) Un-saponifiable (non-food grade) bagging – which contaminates green coffee beans.
2) Foreign soll lodged on the exterior of metal shipping containers – which may harbor insects etc.
3) Bags of sand Inside sealed metal containers – which are of the same weight of coffee that should have been inside.
4) Bogus low-grade Robusta coffee beans – which outturn at half the spot price of SHB Arabica.
5) Severe condensation of Asian coffee shipments – which arrive at US ports during the winter months.
6) Bankruptcy of Ocean Carriers and/or NVOCC – which globally abandons container loads of coffee helter-skelter.
7) Narcotics hidden among coffee bags – which cause the container to be detained.. or worse.
Moreover, with prices in a veritable free fall for so long, it Is difficult to be optimistic that margins will regain enough to warrant the first-class handling that great green coffee deserves.Nevertheless, each of the above ‘amazing’ perils does have a specific “loss preventer.”
So, what long-suffering coffee underwriters (whose market is also calling) want to know is – what merchants are doing lately to be on guard and prevent loss?
I mean – now, you change your passwords often – right?
My hunch Is that as a merchant struggling in a marketplace becoming ever more complex – that indeed there may be wackier cases of physical loss that I haven’t yet named.
We would Iike to hear of them… and help prevent their re-occurrence.
