What Determines the Price of Kava? Can Good Kava Be Cheap?

Introduction: Understanding what you are really paying for

In recent months, you might have noticed media coverage about kava prices reaching new heights, with some outlets celebrating the benefits flowing to Pacific communities while others worry about affordability. We've been in this industry for nearly 15 years now, watching the ups and downs of kava markets, and we've noticed something interesting: while many people have strong opinions about kava prices, there's often limited understanding of what actually determines these prices and how the cost of raw material impacts what you pay for your final product. More importantly, there's confusion about what represents genuine value in kava.

Whether kava feels cheap or expensive is, to some degree, subjective. It depends on your circumstances, how it compares to other ways you might spend your money, and what you're getting for that price. But we're hoping to demonstrate that when you look at all the factors determining costs in this industry, kava is actually quite fairly priced. At no point in history has high-quality kava been more easily available and more affordable to customers around the globe. That doesn't mean it's dirt cheap – it's not your local fruit juice or beer. It's an exotic product that, as you'll see, is produced with immense effort, especially when it needs to be of good quality. And by good quality, we mean kava that offers a similar experience to freshly harvested green kava (within the limits imposed by the physical difference between fresh and dry), while meeting all standard food safety and hygiene requirements.

The Journey Begins: From Cutting to Harvest

To understand kava pricing, we need to start at the beginning. Kava doesn't grow from seeds – it must be propagated by human action, making every kava plant the result of deliberate cultivation. The plant requires significant work in its first months, especially weeding, but once established, the foliage reduces that need. Still, farmers face potential diseases, weather events, and sadly, the threat of theft.

Farmers must wait a minimum of two years until harvest, though most wisely prefer to wait longer. Every additional month yields more mass without much extra labour, unlike replanting. Most kava is harvested after 3-5 years – a remarkably long investment period. In Vanuatu, by law, it must be grown organically, which isn't necessarily a challenge due to the high fertility of volcanic soil and traditional methods of controlling pests. This means the need for chemical input costs is relatively small.

Most kava is grown in community gardens on relatively small farms, intercropped with other plants. There are no large kava monocultures, and mechanisation of harvest and planting is virtually absent in the South Pacific. Once harvested after 3-4 years, a single plant yields 6-8 kilograms of fresh roots. These roots must be carefully cleaned and peeled – and here's where the first quality decision appears. There's naturally a temptation not to clean them too thoroughly or peel them properly, because kava is sold by weight. Every bit of dirt adds to that weight.

The Price Foundation: Green Kava Costs

Not surprisingly, the cost of green kava itself is the major determinant of your final price. Green kava costs have historically fluctuated, but in recent years they've seen a significant uptick. As of 2025, green kava in Vanuatu sells for around 1000 vatu per kilogram, which translates to roughly $9 USD per kilogram or $15 NZD per kilogram. In nominal terms, these are the highest prices on record.

Since it takes 6-7kgs of green kava to produce 1kg of dry powder, this means the raw material cost alone at the farmgate is $54-63 USD ($90-105 NZD) per kilogram of dry kava – and that's before any processing, quality control, taxes, export fees, or logistics have even begun.

Interestingly, in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, kava prices haven't increased quite as dramatically. Ten years ago, 1kg of green kava cost about $4 USD versus today's $9 USD. When adjusted for inflation, the increase is far less significant. Still, even accounting for inflation, green kava today is perhaps the most valuable it's ever been. One could argue kava has been underpriced and is still recovering from the 2000s slump following the ban on kava extracts in Europe and beyond.

This high price reflects a fundamental challenge: kava has notoriously low elasticity of supply. Remember, it takes 3-5 years for new kava to mature. If demand doubles in a year, producers can't simply harvest double the amount without lowering quality, especially if demand has been steadily increasing for years and they have no reserve quantities growing in their gardens. High prices incentivise more planting, but the response takes years to materialise.

Unless one is willing to add fillers or buy very low-quality green kava (unfortunately quite common) – unhealthy rotten roots, wrong cultivars, sometimes even wrong plants – the price of the final product cannot possibly be lower than what it costs to buy quality raw material. If someone offers you 1kg of dry kava for less than what it would cost to buy the raw materials to produce it, you're likely being scammed.

The Processing Journey: Where Quality Meets Cost

Once green kava is harvested, that's just the beginning of the journey. Every processor, exporter and seller faces a long path punctuated by multiple decision trees. At each step, they can choose to maximise quality (but also add costs), or sacrifice quality and potentially reduce costs.

The Transformation Process

In Vanuatu, some farmers dry their own kava, but most sell it green to kava bar operators. For export, processors buy either village dry kava (which offers reduced opportunities for quality control) or green kava that needs to be washed, peeled and dried. The cleaning, peeling and drying process reduces weight by 85% or more. Remember, it takes 6-7kg of green kava to make 1kg of traditional grind powder, and 15kg for instant kava.

Here's another temptation – some processors prefer not to dry their powders thoroughly, as every gram of lost water costs them money when customers pay per gram. It's a tricky balance. Leave the kava too wet and it will rot. But there's a zone where microbes and mould won't actively grow, yet moisture could still be removed to give customers more actual kava for their money.

Critical Processing Decisions

So what does it actually look like when processors choose quality over shortcuts? Let's walk through the real-world choices that separate premium kava from the rest.

The cleaning, peeling and drying are all labour or capital-intensive exercises. The more advanced the process, the more electricity it consumes – and Pacific island countries are among the most expensive places in the world for electricity, especially reliable electricity. The process also consumes vast amounts of water, and most Pacific places don't have reliable supplies of municipal water adequate for processing kava to food standards. Water ideally must be treated on site – itself a significant investment in developing countries.

Most exporters can't afford reliable electricity or treated water and rely on rainwater, sometimes streams, and sun drying. These are much cheaper techniques but naturally result in much lower quality end products, plus inevitably introduce significant risks to consumers. Roots dried on rooftops are exposed to bird droppings, pathogens, and the elements. Dirty water has been a notorious source of microbial contamination. Some enclosed solar dryers offer improvements but are still weather-dependent and harder to maintain hygienically.

At the quality end of the spectrum – where we've chosen to operate – the investment is substantial. Our partners at Root & Pestle run a HACCP-certified facility (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points – the gold standard in food safety management). This means every step has documented procedures, monitoring, and verification.

They maintain an in-house laboratory with UHPLC equipment (Ultra High Performance Liquid Chromatography, superior to standard HPLC) for real-time testing. They employ dedicated quality control personnel who monitor every batch at multiple stages. Perhaps most tellingly, they employ specialist staff whose sole job is cultivar identification. When specific cultivars cannot be reliably identified at harvest point, deliveries include parts of the plant used for cultivar verification (stems with nodes, leaves) – these identification materials are never processed into powder, they're solely for verification and are either discarded or returned for replanting. This adds significant cost and logistics complexity to transport, but it's the only way to guarantee single-cultivar purity. Only roots ever make it into your kava powder.

They use temperature-controlled dehydrators with precise moisture monitoring, UV-sterilised air handling systems with HEPA filtration, and food-grade stainless steel equipment that's sanitised between every batch. The water is filtered, tested, and treated on-site. Every surface that touches kava is food-grade.

Each decision point – from accepting only freshly harvested roots (never village-dried stock) to maintaining temperature-controlled environments – reflects investing in excellence rather than cutting corners.

Final Processing Steps

Once kava is dry, it must be powdered and packaged. If you want uniform particle size, if you want to ensure your powder is free from contaminants and processed hygienically, you must use advanced machines and operate in food-grade facilities – both requiring substantial investment. Hence many exporters rely on basic pounders operated in sheds, a cost-cutting approach but one likely to produce inferior and riskier products.

Once you have the powder, you should ideally run analysis to ensure your process of kava selection, cleaning and processing actually produced a safe and quality product. You can use an in-house lab (a major investment but best if you know what you're doing), send samples to a third-party lab (also costly, considering each sample must come from a relatively small representative batch), or you might choose, as many producers do, to ignore this step and simply hope for the best.

The final packaging stage presents yet more choices between quality and cost-cutting. At each decision point, producers face the same dilemma: invest in doing it right, or save money and compromise the product.

At the weighing stage, producers can invest in calibrated scales to ensure customers get what they pay for, or skip this expense – which is why you might order 1kg and receive 950g. For packaging, the choice is between low-permeability, food-grade bags with nitrogen-flushing and vacuum sealing that lock in freshness for years, or basic plastic bags that cost far less but let air and moisture degrade the kava within months. The nitrogen-flushing requires specialised equipment, so many skip it. Finally, there's traceability – lot number systems linking each package to specific batches, harvest dates, and test results enable quality control and problem-solving, but require sophisticated tracking infrastructure that many producers simply don't implement, making it impossible to track issues when they arise.

Each decision point from harvest to packaging represents a choice between quality and cost savings. In most cases, these more expensive choices aren't just nice-to-have features – they're the difference between safe kava with clean effects and contaminated powder that can make you sick.

The Hidden Costs: Taxes, Logistics, and Compliance

Once you've added all your processing costs, governments impose their taxes and fees. Vanuatu charges a 2% export tax on the value of kava – and that's on top of numerous other local taxes, fees and levies that accumulate throughout the supply chain. The more valuable the kava (the more actual value and quality has been added), the higher these taxes become. There are also biosecurity, customs and other fees.

Then your kava must be exported. You can try airfreight or courier, but that's a resource-intensive option out of the islands – it costs at least $20 NZD per kg just to air freight to New Zealand with all the paperwork and fees. Plus flights are constantly cancelled and airlines serving the Pacific frequently go bankrupt. Sea freight is cheaper if you can send goods at scale, but Pacific shipping is notoriously unreliable in its own way – constant delays, cancelled sailings, weather disruptions, and ships that only come every few weeks. It's quite common to experience 1-2 months of delays. If you haven't invested in proper packaging and warehousing, products deteriorate in quality as you wait.

And then there are the wild cards. The Pacific is notoriously exposed to natural disasters, especially cyclones and volcanoes, with Vanuatu being the world's most exposed country. Since we started trading kava, there have been at least three massive cyclones that devastated supply and affected processing facilities, and two major volcanic eruptions that affected both supply and logistics. These unpredictable events can suddenly spike prices and create shortages that ripple through the market for years.

Once your kava arrives at its destination, there's another round of fees and inspection charges. If you operate legally as an importer, you must pay import taxes or tariffs, and you must add sales tax or GST (in New Zealand's case, 15%) to your final price. You need to pay GST and tariffs upfront when you import, so you must operate with enough capital to do so.

Once the kava is in the country and you try to sell it, like sellers of all other goods, you face payment processing fees (which tend to be hostile towards kava vendors!), costs of fulfilment, insurance, costs of products lost in transit, staff errors, customer service requirements, website maintenance, warehousing costs, and margins for damaged items. If you want to do things right, you must register for tax, use MPI-registered facilities for storage, and maintain all the infrastructure of a legitimate e-commerce business.

The Real Cost of Quality: A Session-by-Session Analysis

Adding all this up, if you've taken all the right turns and always chosen quality, compliance and the customer's best experience as key guiding principles, you end up with fine quality kava that, when consumed at our suggested ratios, costs between $5 and $20 NZD per session in New Zealand. This depends on the bag size, whether you qualify for free shipping, how much you need to consume, how you prepare it, and whether you go for instant or traditional grind.

While this is more expensive than what you'd pay to drink tea or fruit juice, we think this represents a fairly affordable option, especially as a weekend or occasional experience. Above all, it represents remarkable value for money considering the whole journey and all the taxes involved. If you're in Europe or some remote location, local taxes and extra shipping charges might push this figure higher, but for buyers in most OECD countries, a pleasant session with kava can realistically always cost less than the equivalent of one hour of work earning minimum wage.

The Consumer's Challenge: Identifying Real Value

The real challenge for consumers is understanding that while $5-10 NZD is likely the bottom cost of what a high-quality kava session can cost you in a distant land, much of the kava on the market is priced at this level despite taking all the shortcuts we've mentioned. So for you as a consumer, the real challenge isn't trying to find kava cheaper than what it reasonably costs to deliver it, but ensuring the kava you drink represents the very best value.

Every kava vendor claims to be selling premium kava, and most will insist they always chose the right "turn" at every step of the journey. However, we know very few actually do. As a consumer, you should scrutinise every claim. Don't go for slogans or feelings alone. If someone claims their kava is lab tested, they should post the results on their website – and the results should be for every batch, not one test done ages ago or testing something of little relevance to current microbiological safety and quality indicators.

If someone claims they source their kava "ethically", that's wonderful, but kava is a seller's market, so what does it really mean? They should back this up with specifics. If they claim they sell single cultivars, how do they verify their plants? If they claim their kava is processed hygienically, again, where's the evidence?

Transparency is the hallmark of quality. If a vendor is proud of their process, they'll be happy to share the details.

Our Commitment: Quality at Every Step

At the Kava Society, in partnership with our friends at Root & Pestle, we've decided to only sell kava made by always choosing quality at every single step of the journey. This isn't because we're snobbish, but because we genuinely believe this is the only approach that makes the end product and experience closely resemble the original quality of freshly harvested green kava plants.

If you're in Vanuatu and can participate in a traditional kava ceremony in a village and drink freshly harvested and cleaned kava right there, that's the golden standard experience. Beyond the time and effort, most traditional drinkers don't pay money for this experience (though they do pay to drink kava in urban kava bars, noting this kava is often of far lesser quality than freshly harvested plants). But if you're not there and still want to experience real kava, we believe you can with our kava precisely because of all the choices we've made.

The proof is in the pudding – or rather, in the shell. Our kava tastes, smells and feels the way it should. Our regular buyers know this. But if you're new to kava, you may not know what to look for, hence we invite you to always ask critical questions on your journey. We don't have a monopoly on quality kava – it's entirely possible others are also making similar efforts, though we personally haven't seen evidence to support it at the same level of transparency and consistency.

The Bottom Line

When you understand the journey from a kava cutting planted in volcanic soil to the powder in your strainer bag, the price begins to make sense. Quality kava will never be dirt cheap because it shouldn't be. It represents years of patient farming, careful harvesting, meticulous processing, complex logistics, and significant investment in quality control. The farmers who grow it deserve fair compensation for their expertise and patience. The processors who maintain food-grade facilities deserve recognition for their investment in safety.

Kava now accounts for one-half of all exports from Vanuatu (49.1% in 2020, equalling 774 tonnes), demonstrating its economic importance to Pacific communities. When you purchase quality kava at a fair price, you're not just getting a product – you're supporting an entire ecosystem of traditional knowledge, sustainable agriculture, and economic development in the Pacific.

The next time you prepare a shell of kava, remember: you're experiencing the culmination of thousands of years of Pacific tradition, years of patient cultivation, and a complex global journey that brings this remarkable plant from remote volcanic islands to your home. At $5-20 NZD per session for the highest quality, we think that's remarkable value for what you're getting.

Interested in learning more about what makes quality kava? Read our detailed article about kava processing standards and discover what sets our kava apart.