How many cups of coffee are drunk worldwide each day?

How to get close to this number

Work from drinkers and cups. Coffee drinkers number in the billions across the world, and a regular drinker has one to three cups a day while much of the world drinks none. A plausible average of well under one cup per person across the whole global population gives a total in the low billions, which is right.

The per-capita leader in the explanation is the genuinely surprising part: it is not a producing country, not a Mediterranean one, and not the country with the most famous coffee culture. It is a cold northern one, with consumption around four times the global average. Consumption habits track climate, work culture and price far more than they track proximity to production.

A note on units: "cups" is not a defined measure, and the conversion from tonnes of beans traded to cups consumed involves an assumption about how much coffee goes into one. Different sources assume different strengths, which is why cup-based figures vary more than the underlying trade data does. The bean-weight figure in the explanation is the harder number.