Where does coffee come from?

Coffee grows in a band around the equator that the trade calls the bean belt. Arabica (Coffea arabica), the higher-value species, wants altitudes of roughly 800 to 2,000 meters, mild temperatures, a dry season to trigger flowering and no frost at all. Robusta (Coffea canephora) tolerates heat and humidity, grows at lower elevations and yields more per tree, but it tastes harsher and sells at a discount. Where a country sits on those two maps explains most of what it grows.

In 2024 Brazil produced 3.4 million tonnes of green coffee, 30% of the world's 11.1 million tonnes (FAOSTAT). Brazil's coffee belt in Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Espírito Santo and Bahia is unusual: much of it is flat enough to harvest by machine, farms are large by coffee standards, and irrigated plantings on the cerrado have pushed output away from the frost-prone south. Vietnam (18%) grows mostly robusta on smallholdings in its Central Highlands, an industry built almost from nothing since the 1980s. Colombia (7.5%) and Indonesia (7.3%) follow, and the top five producers together grew 68% of world output.

Outside Brazil, coffee is overwhelmingly a smallholder crop. Ethiopia, where arabica evolved in the forests of the southwest, harvests much of its crop from garden and semi-forest plots. Colombia's volcanic slopes give it washed arabica grown by hundreds of thousands of families. Central America, Peru, Uganda, India and Indonesia round out the picture, each with a local mix of species, altitude and processing tradition. 78 countries reported production in 2024, but the share outside the top ten was only 16%.

History set the map as much as climate did. Coffee reached Brazil in 1727 and dominated its export economy by the mid-1800s; the 1975 Black Frost pushed planting north into Minas Gerais; and coffee leaf rust, which destroyed Ceylon's plantations after 1869, is one reason so much of Asia grows robusta.

Trade and production rankings differ because coffee is exported in three forms: green (unroasted) beans, roasted coffee and soluble (instant) coffee. In 2024 the biggest exporter under HS 0901, which counts roasted beans as well as green, was Brazil with 35% of world export value (CEPII BACI). For green beans alone (HS 090111) the leading exporter was Brazil (35% of world export value in 2024), which is the ranking that says where coffee comes from.

The largest importer of coffee in 2024 was United States (18% of world import value), followed by Germany and Italy. Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium sit high on export tables without growing a single tree: they import green beans, roast or freeze-dry them, and re-export the result. The top exporter of roasted coffee (HS 090121) in 2024 was Switzerland, with 23% of that trade.

Two futures contracts set the reference prices. Arabica trades on ICE Futures US as the Coffee C contract (ticker KC), 37,500 lb per lot, quoted in US cents per pound, deliverable from a list of approved origins into licensed warehouses in the United States and Europe. Robusta trades on ICE Futures Europe as the Robusta Coffee contract (ticker RC), 10 tonnes per lot, quoted in US dollars per tonne. The World Bank series used on this page, Arabica (ICE New York, other milds), follows the arabica side: it stood at $7.97/kg in August 2026, down 1% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). The companion robusta series, Robusta (ICE London), was $3.98/kg in August 2026. The arabica series' highest month on record was $9.05/kg in February 2025; its lowest was $0.78/kg in July 1969.

Physical coffee is not sold at the futures price. Exporters quote a differential against the nearest contract month, positive or negative, that reflects origin, grade, screen size, defect count and cup quality. Colombian milds and other milds carry premiums over the C contract; Brazilian naturals usually trade at a discount; robustas are priced off London. Quotes are typically FOB (free on board) at the port of origin, so freight and insurance to Hamburg or New Orleans come on top. The International Coffee Organization's composite indicator blends the four groups (Colombian milds, other milds, Brazilian naturals, robustas) into a single daily reference.

Two ambiguities to keep in mind. First, coffee on this page means green beans, not roasted or soluble product. Second, arabica is quoted per pound in New York and robusta per tonne in London, so convert units before comparing the two.

Brazil grows about a third of the world's coffee and its arabica belt lies at the southern edge of where the tree can survive. A frost between June and August, as in 1975, 1994 and 2021, kills leaves and wood and cuts the following year's crop rather than the one being picked; a dry spell during the September to November flowering aborts fruit set. Because no other origin can replace Brazilian volume quickly, the market builds a weather risk premium into the C contract every southern winter.

Arabica trees bear heavily one year and rest the next while they recover, and Brazil's crop is large enough that its on-year and off-year pattern shows up in the world balance. Prices tend to soften into an on-year harvest and firm ahead of an off-year, and analysts adjust every Brazilian crop estimate for where the cycle stands. Irrigation and pruning have smoothed the swing but not removed it.

The ratio of ending stocks to consumption tells you how much cushion the market has against a bad harvest. USDA puts world coffee stocks-to-use at 12% for 2026/27, compared with 13% in 2025/26 (USDA PSD). Certified stocks in ICE warehouses are the visible slice; when they drain, the nearby contract moves to a premium over later months and price spikes become sharper because there is nothing to sell into them.

Coffee is priced in dollars but Brazilian costs are in reais. A weaker real raises the local price a grower receives for the same New York quote, so farmers sell more of what they hold and spend more on fertilizer, which pushes dollar prices down over the following months. A stronger real does the opposite. The Colombian peso and Vietnamese dong work the same way for their exporters, but the real matters most because Brazil's volume is largest.

Robusta substitutes for arabica in blends and instant coffee, so the two prices are linked. When Vietnam's harvest is short or its farmers hold beans back, roasters move some volume to arabica and the arabica-robusta spread narrows; when robusta is plentiful the spread widens. The dry season and reservoir levels in Vietnam's Central Highlands are watched as closely as Brazilian frost forecasts.

Coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix) defoliates arabica in warm, wet years, and the outbreak that swept Central America in 2012 and 2013 cut regional output and farm employment for several seasons. The coffee berry borer bores into beans in every origin. Warmer temperatures at altitude let both move uphill into areas that used to be safe, which is why rust-resistant cultivars are spreading.

Consumption grows slowly in Europe and North America and faster in producing countries and Asia, so demand rarely moves prices within a month, but it sets the level around which supply shocks swing. Roasters also time their purchases: when prices spike they run down inventories and buy hand to mouth, thinning demand at the top; when prices fall they cover forward. Regulation such as the EU's deforestation rules adds traceability costs at the margin.

Coffee is a fruit. The tree flowers after the first rains and cherries ripen seven to nine months later, so harvest runs from roughly May to September in Brazil, October to February in Central America and Ethiopia, and November to February in Vietnam. Each cherry holds two seeds, the beans. Arabica accounts for most of the value in trade and robusta for a large share of the volume. Within arabica, cultivars such as Typica, Bourbon, Caturra and Catuaí, and rust-resistant hybrids such as Castillo, decide yield and cup quality.

Processing removes the fruit. In the washed method, cherries are pulped, fermented to loosen the sticky mucilage, washed and dried on patios or raised beds; it gives cleaner, brighter coffee and needs water. In the natural method, used for most of Brazil and much of Ethiopia, whole cherries dry in the sun before hulling; it gives heavier body and fruit. Honey and pulped-natural methods sit between. The dried product, parchment (washed) or dried cherry (natural), is milled to strip the husk, then graded by screen size, density and defect count, and bagged as green coffee, traditionally in 60 kg jute sacks or loaded loose into container liners.

By-products include pulp (composted or dried as cascara), parchment husk burned as boiler fuel, and silverskin shed during roasting. Yields differ enormously: irrigated, mechanized Brazilian farms produce several times more green coffee per hectare than rain-fed smallholder plots in East Africa. Roasting happens close to the drinker, usually weeks before sale, because roasted coffee stales within months while green coffee keeps for a year or more.

Almost all coffee is drunk. Green beans are roasted for ground and whole-bean retail and food service, or extracted and dried into soluble coffee, which absorbs a large share of the world's robusta. Smaller volumes go to decaffeination, flavor extracts and ready-to-drink beverages, and the caffeine recovered during decaffeination is sold to the soft-drink and pharmaceutical industries.

Non-beverage uses of the bean are negligible; the meaningful by-products are agricultural. Consumption is concentrated in the European Union, the United States, Brazil and Japan, with the fastest growth in producing countries and in Asia, according to the International Coffee Organization's consumption statistics. The World Bank's coffee series and the ICO composite both refer to green coffee, so consumption is usually counted in green bean equivalent rather than cups.

Green coffee moves from farm to a wet mill or dry mill, then to an exporter's warehouse and a port: Santos and Rio de Janeiro for Brazil, Ho Chi Minh City for Vietnam, Buenaventura and Cartagena for Colombia, Djibouti for landlocked Ethiopia, Mombasa for Uganda and Kenya. Nearly all of it ships in containers, bagged or in bulk liners. The main destinations are Hamburg, Antwerp, Genoa, Trieste, New Orleans and New York, where ICE-licensed warehouses hold certified stocks. Germany, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland are pivots in the chain rather than end markets, roasting and re-exporting much of what they land.

Concentration is at the trading and roasting stages, not the farm. A handful of merchants (Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Ecom, ofi, Louis Dreyfus, Sucafina, Volcafe) handle a large share of exports, and a few roasters (Nestlé, JDE Peet's, Starbucks, Lavazza) buy a large share of what they ship. Both sides hedge on ICE, so a sudden price spike raises margin calls along the whole chain and can squeeze the smallest exporters out of the market.

Single points of failure: Brazil's weather, because no other origin has spare volume; the Suez route that carries Asian robusta to Europe, which adds weeks when ships divert around the Cape of Good Hope; container availability, since coffee competes for boxes with every other export; and for Ethiopia the road and rail corridor to Djibouti. Price discovery itself is concentrated in two contracts on one exchange group.