IN the coffee trading world, a ship steaming across the Atlantic Ocean is garnering a lot of attention.

A break-bulk vessel named Eagle has wound its way from Lampung in Sumatra, through the Mediterranean and is now headed for New Orleans. Transporting robusta coffee bags stacked in its hold to the United States—where roasters are starved of supply—it’s one of the first shipments of this kind in over 20 years.

The ship is part of a burgeoning experiment in the industry where producers, roasters and traders are looking to leapfrog a global container shortage that’s causing an unprecedented backlog of shipments.

“At the point when we were seeing shipments getting delayed, customers really struggling to get their supplies in time and getting access to coffee, that’s when we started to look at it,” Manish Dhawan, senior vice president for coffee at trading company Olam Food Ingredients, which chartered Eagle, said in an interview. “If you speak to some of the…



News Source