Coffee Holding's fiscal Q3 2026 sales fell 9.3% as it passed falling green coffee prices through to customers, but gross margin jumped from 9.4% to 25.0% on cheap inventory bought during the price crash, tariff refunds and a swing to futures-trading gains — producing $0.35 of EPS against a $0.21 loss a year earlier.
A 9% drop in sales produced Coffee Holding's most profitable quarter in years
Coffee Holding Co. (NYSE American: JVA) — a wholesaler and roaster that buys unroasted "green" coffee, then roasts, blends and packages it for other businesses — reported net sales of $21.69 million for its fiscal third quarter ended July 31, 2026, down 9.3% from $23.91 million a year earlier. Net income was $1.99 million, or $0.35 per share, against a loss of $1.21 million, or $0.21 per share, in the same quarter last year.
Those two facts point in opposite directions, and the same thing explains both: green coffee prices fell. Management attributes the sales decline to "the sustained decline in green coffee prices that began in late January and continued throughout most of the quarter," in response to which the company "reduced prices and continued promotional activity for its wholesale roasted coffee customers" and "charged lower prices to its wholesale green coffee customers." JVA passed the cheaper beans through — while selling inventory it had bought earlier, at costs that had fallen faster than its selling prices. That timing gap is most of the quarter's profit.
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+15.6 pts
Gross profit excl. futures trading
$4,803,448
$3,024,873
+58.8%
Gross margin excl. futures trading
22.2%
12.7%
+9.5 pts
Coffee futures/options trading result
+$620,683
−$769,845
+$1,390,528
Total operating expenses
$3,099,801
$3,350,179
−7.5%
Operating income (loss)
$2,324,330
−$1,095,151
+$3,419,481
Operating margin
10.7%
−4.6%
+15.3 pts
Net income (loss)
$1,993,438
−$1,205,413
+$3,198,851
EPS, basic and diluted
$0.35
−$0.21
+$0.56
Effective tax rate
12.8%
n/m (tax expense on a pre-tax loss)
—
Prior-year figures are as revised by the company; see "A note on the prior-year comparison" below. The ex-trading lines come from the company's own segment note, which separates trading profit from cost of goods sold. Gross margin is gross profit as a share of sales — what is left after the direct cost of the coffee and packaging sold, before overhead.
Where the $3.17 million of extra gross profit came from
Gross profit rose from $2.26 million to $5.42 million. The filing names three causes, and they are not equally durable.
1. Inventory bought during the price crash. Management cites "a favorable inventory position acquired during the first half of the fiscal year when coffee prices decline[d] significantly." This is inventory timing, not pricing power: JVA bought green coffee in the November–April window at prices well below where they had been, then sold product made from it in May–July at selling prices that had come down more slowly. It is the mirror image of the margin compression a roaster suffers when coffee spikes and it is still working through expensive lots — and it is self-limiting, because once the cheap coffee is sold and replaced at whatever the market charges next, the spread closes.
2. Tariff refunds. The filing says tariff refunds were "recognized during the current period," and on the nine-month comparison contrasts them against "tariff costs incurred during the prior-year period." It does not quantify them anywhere in the 10-Q — not in the MD&A, not in the notes. A refund of previously paid import duties is a one-time credit against cost of sales, so whatever the amount, it does not repeat.
3. Coffee futures and options swung from a loss to a gain. JVA holds coffee futures and options that are marked to market every quarter, with the gains and losses booked inside cost of sales rather than below the operating line. That activity contributed a $620,683 gain this quarter against a $769,845 loss a year ago — a $1.39 million swing, equal to 44% of the entire $3.17 million gross profit increase, with no coffee sold to produce it.
Strip the trading line out — the company's segment note does exactly this — and gross profit was $4.80 million, or 22.2% of sales, against $3.02 million, or 12.7%. That is still a 9.5-point improvement and a 58.8% increase, so the operating story is real. It is just a little over half of the headline rather than all of it.
Takeaway: The 25.0% gross margin is not a new operating level, it is what a roaster earns while it is still selling coffee it bought before the price crash. Forty-four percent of the gross-profit gain came from a mark-to-market swing on a futures book management says it is deliberately shrinking, and the rest rests on cheap inventory and unquantified tariff refunds — both of which expire as those lots are replaced at prevailing prices.
Nine months: the same story, without the trading noise
Over nine months the mix is cleaner. Net sales were $69.38 million, up 1.2%, which management attributes to "higher sales to legacy customers and incremental sales to new customers." Critically, the trading line was nearly flat year over year — $781,730 against $686,868 — so essentially the whole nine-month margin gain is operational rather than derivative-driven.
Metric (nine months ended July 31)
FY2026
FY2025
YoY change
Net sales
$69,378,258
$68,535,860
+1.2%
Gross profit
$15,036,136
$11,089,615
+35.6%
Gross margin
21.7%
16.2%
+5.5 pts
Gross margin excl. futures trading
20.5%
15.2%
+5.4 pts
Coffee futures/options trading result
+$781,730
+$686,868
+$94,862
Operating income
$5,043,567
$1,384,495
+264.3%
Net income
$3,904,247
$591,898
+$3,312,349
EPS, basic and diluted
$0.68
$0.10
+$0.58
Cash from operating activities
+$7,795,367
−$5,396,716
+$13,192,083
(The MD&A states the prior-year nine-month gross margin as 16.0%; the same paragraph's cost-of-sales ratio of 83.8% and the statements themselves both give 16.2%. The discrepancy is immaterial but it is in the filing.)
A note on the prior-year comparison
The year-ago figures in this filing are revised. While preparing the April 2026 quarter, management identified a classification error and moved certain costs out of selling and administrative expenses into cost of sales — roughly $658,000 for the July 2025 quarter and $2.19 million for the nine months. The reclassification changed no operating income, net income, EPS, assets, liabilities, equity or cash flow; it only moved costs between two lines above operating income.
It does move the margin optics, though. The year-ago third-quarter gross margin was 12.2% as originally filed and is 9.4% as presented here. The comparison inside this 10-Q is internally consistent — both periods use the new presentation — but a reader measuring this quarter against JVA's originally filed FY2025 numbers will see a margin improvement about 2.8 points smaller than the 15.6 points shown above.
Revenue: price certainly, volume probably
The MD&A attributes the 9.3% sales decline entirely to lower selling prices. Two paragraphs later, the cost-of-sales discussion says cost of sales "decreased due to lower sales volume." The filing discloses no pounds shipped for either period, so the split between a price effect and a volume effect cannot be measured from it — but management's own two sentences imply both moved down.
This matters because the company states the general rule in the other direction in its Overview: "because we generally have been able to pass green coffee price increases through to customers, increased prices of green coffee generally result in increased net sales, irrespective of sales volume." Run in reverse, falling coffee prices mechanically shrink JVA's reported revenue even if it ships exactly as much coffee. Sales dollars are a poor read on demand at this company, in either direction.
Below the line
Operating expenses fell $250,378 to $3.10 million, with selling and administrative expenses down to $2.90 million from $3.17 million; management describes them as "generally consistent with historical levels." Interest expense fell to $37,816 from $92,683 on lower borrowings under the credit line.
The tax line deserves a flag. The $293,083 provision on $2.29 million of pre-tax income is an effective tax rate — tax as a share of pre-tax profit — of 12.8%, well below the 20.3% recorded for the nine months and the 26.9% implied for the first six months alone. Interim taxes are booked using an estimate of the full-year rate, so an unusually low quarterly rate typically means that estimate was revised down and an earlier over-accrual was released into this quarter. Had Q3 been taxed at the nine-month rate, net income would have been roughly $1.82 million and EPS about $0.32 — so about $0.03 of the reported $0.35 is a tax true-up rather than operations.
Balance sheet: the cycle turned into cash
Falling coffee prices shrink both receivables and inventory, and for a company that funds both with a revolving credit line, that releases cash. Operating activities generated $7.80 million over nine months against a $5.40 million use a year earlier, driven by a $3.06 million decline in receivables and a $0.97 million decline in inventories — versus a $5.71 million inventory build in the prior-year period.
Balance-sheet item
July 31, 2026
Oct 31, 2025
Change
Cash and cash equivalents
$2,915,888
$701,872
+$2,214,016
Accounts receivable, net
$8,985,454
$12,093,251
−$3,107,797
Green coffee inventory
$13,752,345
$16,551,660
−16.9%
Packed (finished) coffee inventory
$3,646,249
$1,767,614
+106.3%
Total inventories
$19,480,689
$20,446,481
−4.7%
Line of credit drawn
$2,150,000
$6,050,000
−$3,900,000
Total liabilities
$9,167,199
$14,467,366
−36.6%
Working capital
$25,536,749
$22,633,292
+$2,903,457
The cash went to debt. The credit line fell from $6.05 million at fiscal year-end to $2.15 million at July 31, and a subsequent-events note discloses it was fully repaid in August, leaving $0 outstanding at August 31, 2026. Working capital — current assets minus current liabilities, the cushion available to run day-to-day operations — was $25.54 million, with current assets covering current liabilities 4.1 times versus 2.8 times at October 31. Shareholders' equity stands at $31.02 million, or $5.43 per share across 5,708,599 shares outstanding.
Two smaller uses of cash: $850,000 in December 2025 for a passive, non-controlling stake in The Ryl Company LLC, and $467,813 of dividends paid, following the $0.08 per share payout the board approved in January 2026 on a stated basis of one-third of net income.
The green coffee inventory figure needs a caveat: that 16.9% decline is measured in dollars, and with green coffee itself cheaper, the filing offers no way to separate fewer pounds from cheaper pounds. The doubling of packed coffee to $3.65 million is the more informative movement, and is consistent with the company converting green coffee into finished goods rather than simply running stock down — though the filing does not say so directly.
Internal controls: still not clean
Management concluded that disclosure controls and procedures "were not effective" as of July 31, 2026, because of two material weaknesses — a material weakness being a control gap severe enough that a significant misstatement could go undetected. The first is "inappropriate system access controls over the financial reporting system," which were not designed to prevent unauthorized changes to source information or to enforce an appropriate segregation of duties. The second is inadequate control over recording year-end accruals for vendor liabilities. Management states it nonetheless believes the financial information presented is materially correct.
This is not a footnote to skip in a quarter where most of the profit improvement came from inventory valuation, tariff refunds and derivative marks — all estimate-heavy areas that sit close to the weaknesses described. The prior-period cost reclassification discussed above is a concrete instance of this reporting process producing something that later needed correcting.
The CEO pay round trip
In February 2026 the company amended the employment agreement of Andrew Gordon — who is simultaneously President, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer and a director — cutting his base salary from $325,000 to $80,000 and making him eligible for a $1.6 million cash incentive bonus payable no later than March 2030 if he remained employed through January 1, 2030. The company was recognizing that bonus over the service period and had accrued $204,256 by July 31.
On August 31, 2026, after quarter-end, the company reversed it: base salary restored to $450,000 — retroactive to February 1, 2026 — and the $1.6 million bonus eliminated. The 10-Q does not quantify the net effect, but the mechanics are visible: the fourth quarter absorbs a retroactive salary catch-up covering six months already reported at the $80,000 rate, while the $204,256 accrued for a bonus that no longer exists comes back. That one officer holds the CEO, CFO and director roles at once is the same concentration the segregation-of-duties material weakness describes.
Outlook
The filing contains no revenue or earnings guidance — Coffee Holding forecasts no numbers. What management does commit to:
Liquidity. The company expects to fund operations, capital expenditures and debt payments "through at least the next twelve months" from operating cash flow and its credit facility, noting that higher eligible receivables and inventory would expand what it can borrow.
Less trading. "As a result of the volatile nature of the commodities markets, we have and are continuing to scale back our use of hedging and short-term trading of coffee futures and options contracts, and intend to continue to use these practices in a limited capacity going forward."
Facility maturity. The March 2026 Twelfth Loan Modification extended the Webster revolver to December 28, 2026, roughly three months after this filing. With nothing drawn, refinancing is low-stakes today — but this is a seasonal working-capital line, and it matters again if coffee prices turn up and inventory has to be rebuilt at higher cost.
Our read. All three drivers of this quarter decay. Cheap inventory sells through and is replaced at prevailing prices. Tariff refunds are one-time credits, not a revenue stream. And the trading gain comes from a book management is explicitly shrinking, which will cut both the earnings volatility and the contribution. The 25.0% gross margin should not be extrapolated; the 20.5% nine-month margin excluding trading is the better base, and even that is lifted by the same inventory timing.
Revenue should keep deflating in dollar terms as long as green coffee stays cheap, because JVA prices off its own cost — so a further sales decline in the fourth quarter would not by itself signal lost business. Unit volumes would, and this filing does not disclose them, which is the single most useful number missing from it.
What has durably improved is the balance sheet. JVA converted a price collapse into $7.8 million of nine-month operating cash flow, went from $6.05 million drawn to zero, and holds $25.5 million of working capital against $9.2 million of total liabilities. That is a materially stronger position entering the next upcycle than it held entering this one, and it is the part of the quarter that does not reverse. The open questions are whether the control weaknesses get remediated and what a normalized margin looks like once the cheap coffee is gone.
Source: Coffee Holding Co., Inc. Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended July 31, 2026, filed with the SEC on September 11, 2026 (accession no. 0001493152-26-042313). All figures are as reported; prior-year amounts are as revised in the filing.