How many tons of coffee are produced worldwide each year?
Guess before you scroll — the answer is below
The answer
10,500,000 tons
Roughly 10.5M.
World coffee production is around 10.5 million tonnes a year — roughly 175 million sacks of 60 kg. Brazil grows about a third of it. Some 25 million smallholder families depend on the crop for a living.
How to get close to this number
Work back from cups. This site's companion question puts global consumption at a couple of billion cups a day, and a cup uses around ten grams of ground coffee. Billions of cups times ten grams times 365 days gives millions of tonnes.
The sack unit in the explanation is the trade convention worth knowing: production is quoted in sixty-kilogram sacks, which is why coffee statistics use a number in the hundreds of millions rather than in tonnes. Commodity markets each have their own traditional unit, and reading a figure requires knowing which one is in play.
The smallholder figure is the structural fact: some twenty-five million families depend on this crop. Coffee is grown overwhelmingly on very small plots rather than on plantations, which means global price movements transmit almost immediately into the household income of millions of people with no capacity to absorb them.
Where this number comes from
| Source | International Coffee Organization |
|---|---|
| Figure refers to | 2023 |
| Last checked | |
| Unit | tons |
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