At Monogram, you, our community is everything. We are thankful for each and every one of you that have stepped into our stores, ordered online, or have just felt a connection with our team. Because of the appreciation for this relationship, it is important to communicate any changes that would impact you all, like our upcoming price change.

We are sensitive to the fact that any price change has real impacts on all of you and do not take these decisions lightly. This is why, as a local small business and despite costs steadily increasing every single year, we have not changed our prices since 2016.

We want to provide some transparency to these changes.

We have always valued the community that a more inclusive experience helps to build. As costs have skyrocketed over the last 6 years, we feel that it is time for some small changes, in order to keep allowing Monogram to inspire wonder and warmth through coffee.

Our costs have increased everywhere, but mainly in the following three areas: costs of goods (like milk or packaging materials), costs of transportation, and coffee prices. Cost of goods are a bit easier to understand as we've all seen prices increase each year in almost everything at the grocery store. For example, in a cappuccino, costs have risen for the compostable cup, lid, milk, coffee and sugar - everything that makes a cappuccino a cappuccino. These costs also seem to be disproportionately high for us, due to our commitment to sourcing our products from local, high quality small producers like D Dutchmen Dairy, or Butterblock & Co pastries - something that we will never stray from.

Transportation costs have risen disproportionately as well. These are the costs associated with shipping our coffee from their countries of origin to our roastery in Calgary. Because we source more directly from our producing partners, we organize all shipping logistics and are more directly exposed to cost increases in real time. In fact, due to the pandemic and disruption in global supply chains, we have seen an over 200% increase in our shipping costs just the last two years alone. This has a pretty big impact on our overall coffee costs.

Finally, our raw coffee costs. Committing to Stewardship as one of our core values means an unwavering commitment to sustainable sourcing from our direct producer partner relationships, even when costs climb, or harvest production volumes become uncertain due to climate change. Just to give context, the C-Market commodity traded price of coffee has jumped almost 200% in just the last year alone. Although we operate well above the commodity market, and pay producers far above commodity prices, this price increase has rippling impacts in the specialty market. Sticking to our sustainable sourcing model means never sourcing a lower quality raw coffee product for better pricing, and committing to always paying our producers a profitable price, especially as their production costs rise.

At Monogram we have always prioritized using coffee to serve our community over turning a profit. Despite our costs, we have and will always give back to our community. Just this last (pandemic) year alone, we have donated over $60,000 to both local and producing country community organizations and initiatives. We are happiest seeing our community and relationships grow and thrive.

We hope that this gives some transparency into these changes. We are strongly committed to our 5 core values of Community, Serving Others, Quality, Stewardship and Wonder. We will never waiver from sourcing the best quality product and coffee, and use it to serve our community, bring people together and spark someone's imagination. We are so thankful and grateful for each of your support and look forward to serving you all.