The price of coffee is on the rise – and it could affect your own cuppa Joe depending on what you drink.

Kraft Foods, Inc. the world's second-largest food company, raised Maxwell House and Yuban coffee prices by about 7 percent Tuesday as bean costs climbed.

That's 20 cents more for an 11-ounce to 13-ounce container of the Kraft brand coffees.

You can blame the beans.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the price of coffee itself rose 7.7 percent last year. Now spurred by tight supplies of coffee beans and investors looking for the next commodity run-up, prices are boiling over.

The price of green coffee beans has risen 22 percent since the beginning of the year in trading on ICE Futures U.S., the journal reports.

"The prices go up and down, but it's been on a more upward trend pretty recently," said A.J. Anderson, master roaster and owner of Tacoma-based Vahalla Coffee Company.

His low overhead costs – Anderson is a one-man operation – has helped keep Vahalla's prices to customers steady.

Brad Carpenter, chief executive officer of Pierce County’s Forza Coffee Co., too, has escaped the high cost of beans.

“With 20 stores now, we are able to stay where we’re at,” he said Tuesday. “We’ve have already purchased most of our coffee – we’re four or five years out.”

But Carpenter has noticed “a huge increase” in the cost of milk, up 24 percent last year, and paper products.

“We’ve negotiated a better deal for napkins and cups,” he said.

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Starbucks Corp. boosted prices of its lattes, cappuccinos and other coffee drinks in September by an average of 1.9 percent. The chain hasn’t lifted prices since then, partially because 94 percent of its coffee supplies come through fixed-price contracts. Still, it mentioned commodity-price risk “generated by ... green coffee and dairy products” as the “primary market risk” in its latest earnings report.

Starbucks boosted the prices of its lattes, cappuccinos and other coffee drinks in September by an average of 1.9 percent, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The chain hasn’t lifted prices since then, partially because 94 percent of its coffee supplies come through fixed-price contracts.

Still, it mentioned commodity-price risk “generated by ... green coffee and dairy products” as the “primary market risk” in its latest earnings report.

According to the WSJ:

Coffee is considered price inelastic, meaning changes have little effect on consumption.

Even if the coffee price doubles, drinkers still must have their cup in the morning; on the other hand, if prices drop, coffee drinkers don’t typically start downing two espressos instead of one.

Coffee isn’t the only hot food item these days. The whole sector of soft commodities — products that are grown instead of mined — has been heating up recently, with cocoa and sugar up 35 percent and 32 percent, respectively, since the beginning of the year.

Unlike the big increases in demand for commodities like copper or oil, coffee consumption will rise 1.6 percent this year to 125 million bags, according to the International Coffee Organization in London. One bag equals 132 pounds.

The coffee price run-up is being driven by a potentially temporary period of tight supplies and by speculators.

Coffee stocks have fallen to 18.3 million bags, the lowest since 1961, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, due to a 7.3 percent decline in last year’s world production.

That is largely because coffee production in Brazil, which accounts for 30 percent of world output, often has high-production years followed by low-production years.

Last year, it was down 21 percent.

Brazil’s output this year — estimated to be up as much as 31 percent — will “serve only to replenish low stocks,” said Gil Carlos Barabach, an analyst with Safras & Mercado, a Brazilian agricultural business consultancy.

Just as in the oil and metals markets, investment funds have played a big role in the coffee run-up. On IntercontinentalExchange Inc.’s ICE Futures U.S., the world’s main coffee-trading arena — formerly known as the New York Board of Trade — coffee’s open interests, the number of unclosed positions, has shot up 50 percent over the past year.

It is now at an all-time high of 191,977 contracts, according to the Commitments of Traders Report, published by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The increase in trading is widely attributed to investment funds.

United Kingdom hedge fund Armajaro Asset Management in October launched a commodities fund, called CC+, to focus on cocoa and coffee, and the fund expects to amass $500 million in assets.

In February, it reopened another commodity fund, which was closed to investors in November. A new exchange-traded fund — GreenHaven Continuous Commodity Index Fund — was launched by GreenHaven Commodity Service LLC, of Atlanta, on the American Stock Exchange in January.

It allocates 59 percent of its $16 million in assets to agricultural-related commodities, including 5.9 percent in coffee.