Consumers complaining about being charged the same amount for smaller takeaway coffee cups don’t know the half of it – the price of coffee has been plunging for two years without a drop of the fall touching Australian sippers’ lips.

And if that’s not bad enough, the price of chocolate is on the rise again with cocoa beans up 25 per cent from their low earlier this year. What you don’t win on the coffee, you lose on the chocolate hit.

A very hot topic: We really should be paying less for coffee. Credit:Rohan Thomson

Coffee prices peaked in 2011 and have been cooling ever since. In 1946 Frank Sinatra sang they’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil – right now they’re expecting an awful lot more and that’s after filling US warehouses with beans. US coffee futures are down by a third on this time last year and are about half of their September 2011 level.

Yet at 114 US cents a pound, coffee isn’t far off its 40-year average of 123.3 cents. According to Trading Economics, coffee peaked at 339.9 cents in 1977. (Just as well Australia didn’t have its current barista culture then or the nation would have been bankrupt.) Coffee saw a record low of 42.5 cents in 2001 from which it was a slow recovery to the 2011 high.