Coffee Facts Worth Knowing: Where Your Coffee Comes From and Who Drinks It

The first time I understood that coffee was a global agricultural commodity rather than just something you ordered at a café, I was twenty-three and standing in a small market in Trieste with a friend who’d grown up there. She was buying coffee from a vendor whose family had imported from the same Brazilian farm for sixty years. He weighed the beans on a brass scale that looked older than both of us combined. She paid in cash. The whole transaction took four minutes. And as we walked out, she said, “This is one of about a hundred places in this city you can do exactly that.”

Coffee is grown across the belt between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, in roughly fifty countries, and consumed pretty much everywhere on Earth. Below are the facts about that supply chain that I think are most worth knowing, the ones that change how you think about the cup in front of you.

Where the coffee actually comes from

Brazil grows about a third of the world’s coffee. One country, one third of global supply. The state of Minas Gerais alone produces more coffee than most countries on Earth. When you drink a generic blend or an instant coffee at a hotel breakfast, you are almost certainly drinking some percentage of Brazilian coffee whether the label says so or not.

Vietnam is second. Vietnam grows mostly robusta, the heartier and more bitter species of coffee that’s used for instant, blended canned coffee, and the punchy espresso roasts of Italian-style cafés. Roughly 40 percent of the world’s robusta comes from Vietnam. The Vietnamese themselves prefer their own coffee strong, sweet, and slow, brewed through a small metal filter called a phin that drips into a glass of condensed milk. If you’ve ever had a properly made cà phê s?a ?á, you understand why robusta has a place in the world.

Colombia is third. The arabica from Colombia’s mountain regions (Antioquia, Caldas, Quindío, Risaralda, the famous “Coffee Axis”) is what most North American specialty coffee enthusiasts cut their teeth on. The Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia has been promoting Colombian coffee internationally since 1958 with the fictional character Juan Valdez. It worked.

About 11 million tonnes of green coffee leave farms each year. Most of it is bought, shipped, roasted, and consumed within twelve months of harvest. A small portion is held in long-term storage. None of it stays fresh forever, which is why specialty coffee operations have moved toward shorter and more direct supply chains.

Who drinks the most

Finland leads the world in per-capita consumption. The average Finn drinks roughly four cups of coffee per day, and the country consumes about 12 kilograms of coffee per person per year. Finnish labor law actually requires two coffee breaks during a working day. The light, smooth Nordic roast style that dominates Scandinavian coffee culture exists partly because Finns drink so much of it that they need a coffee that can be consumed in volume without becoming overwhelming.

The United States imports more coffee than any country in the world, but isn’t even in the top ten per capita. Americans drink a lot of coffee in aggregate (because there are a lot of Americans) but on average, an individual American is a moderate coffee drinker compared to a Finn, a Norwegian, or a Luxembourger.

Germany is the second-largest coffee consumer overall. Walk into a German bakery at any time of day and someone is drinking coffee. German coffee culture leans toward filter coffee served alongside cake (the famous “Kaffee und Kuchen” mid-afternoon ritual) rather than the espresso-and-stand format of Italy.

The trade itself

Coffee is the second most-traded commodity by value on global markets after oil. The futures contract for arabica coffee is traded on the Intercontinental Exchange in New York, and the price moves daily based on weather in Brazil, political stability in Ethiopia, currency fluctuations, and speculation. The global coffee economy is enormous. The amount of that economy that reaches the actual farmer is, historically, very small.

Most coffee farmers receive less than $1 per pound for their unroasted coffee. The exact number varies by year and origin, but for ordinary commercial-grade coffee, the producer’s share is usually between 30 cents and a dollar per pound. A specialty coffee that retails for $20 a pound roasted might have paid the farmer $3 to $4. Direct trade and fair trade programs exist to push that share higher. They work imperfectly. They’re better than nothing.

Most coffee in the world is still picked by hand. A skilled picker on a steep mountain slope can pick perhaps 50 kilograms of cherries in a day during harvest. Each kilogram of cherries makes roughly 200 grams of dried green coffee. The labor that goes into a pound of coffee, from picking to processing to drying to sorting, is enormous. The price the picker is paid for that labor is, in most origin countries, low.

The only US-grown coffee

Coffee is grown commercially in two places under the US flag: Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Hawaii’s most famous origin is Kona on the Big Island, where the volcanic soil, the high elevation, and the protected Pacific microclimate produce a coffee that retails for some of the highest prices of any US-produced agricultural product. Puerto Rican coffee, particularly from the central mountain region of Yauco and the western highlands, has a centuries-long tradition that was nearly wiped out by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and is slowly rebuilding.

California has experimented with coffee growing at the very northern edge of where it’s possible, mostly as a luxury crop at farms like Frinj Coffee in Goleta. The results are interesting and expensive. They are not going to feed the American coffee habit.

Processing and roasting

Robusta destined for instant coffee is processed differently from specialty arabica. Most instant coffee is made by brewing a strong batch of coffee and then freeze-drying or spray-drying it into the granules you reconstitute at home. The flavor loss is significant. The convenience explains everything.

Home roasting was the norm until the late 1800s. Most households bought green coffee beans and roasted them in a frying pan over an open flame, smelled the slightly-burnt result, and ground it fresh. The United States was the first country to industrialize coffee roasting at commercial scale, partly to supply the Union army during the Civil War. In parts of Europe, particularly Germany and Italy, home roasting persisted into the 1940s. It’s now a small but growing hobby among specialty coffee enthusiasts.

Why any of this matters when you make a cup

The cup of coffee in front of you traveled. From a hillside in Antioquia or Yirgacheffe or Minas Gerais or the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Through a sorting station and a drying patio and a wet mill or a sun-drying patio. Onto a truck and then a ship and then another truck and then a roaster’s loading dock. Then into a small bag with a name on it, sometimes the name of a single farmer.

The trade is enormous and most of the money does not reach the people who grow the coffee. The cup is delicious because of decisions made by individuals at every step of that chain. The vendor in Trieste who weighed beans on a brass scale was selling, in the end, the same coffee his great-grandfather had sold. Different hillside, different farmer, different decade. Same trade.

Knowing where the coffee comes from doesn’t make it taste different. It changes what you notice while you drink it. That seems worth knowing.

Related reading

• The world's most expensive coffees
• Fair trade coffee: what it really means
• Grow your own coffee plant