Specialty Coffee Wiki

Green coffee trading

Properties3
descriptionThe merchant layer of coffee — the handful of global firms that buy, finance, hedge, ship and resell raw coffee by the container, what customs and world statistics actually see, and why published estimates of the market's size disagree so badly.
tagsconcept, trade, supply-chain, prices, export
aliasesCoffee trading, Green coffee trade, Coffee trader, Green coffee trader, Coffee trade house, Coffee merchant, World coffee trade, HS 0901.11, methods-and-concepts/green-coffee-trading

9 min read

Green coffee trading

Green coffee is the raw, unroasted seed. Trading it is the business of standing in the middle: buying coffee from thousands of sellers at origin, carrying it — financially and physically — for months, and selling it on to roasters who want it in small pieces at predictable times.

This note is about the merchants. Three neighbouring notes cover the other faces of the same trade, and it is worth being clear which is which:

  • Green coffee buying — the same transaction seen from the roaster’s side: spot, forward, auction, direct.
  • C-market — the futures contract the price is quoted against.
  • Coffee supply chain — the physical journey: exporter, container, ocean, warehouse.

Trading is what connects all three. A trader is simultaneously a buyer at origin, a hedger in New York, and the owner of a container at sea.

What a trader actually sells

Almost nothing a coffee trader sells is coffee. Roasters could, in principle, buy from farms. What they cannot easily do is the four things a trade house does instead:

  • Finance. Somebody has to pay for a crop months before anyone drinks it. The trader owns the coffee — and the debt — through milling, shipping, warehousing and sale.
  • Risk transfer. The trader buys physical coffee and offsets the price risk on the futures market, so a swing in New York does not destroy the business. See C-market for the contract that makes this possible.
  • Aggregation and breaking bulk. Smallholders cannot fill a container; a small roaster cannot empty one. The trader consolidates at one end and splits at the other.
  • Quality and paperwork. Grading, sampling, pre-shipment and arrival cupping, export licences, customs. See Green coffee grading and Coffee supply chain.

The trade houses describe themselves in exactly these terms. Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, the German group that owns this wiki’s Nordic Approach, calls itself “a globally operating green coffee service group” of “more than 40 companies in 28 countries” with “more than 3,300 highly skilled employees”, offering “export and milling, import, farm management, insurance, logistics, warehousing, financing and statistics”.1 Note the list: milling, insurance, financing, statistics. Only one of those is coffee.

Volcafe, the Swiss trader, describes itself as “one of the largest traders of Arabica and Robusta coffees”, says it supplies “the beans for 66 billion cups of coffee each year”, and claims a buying and selling network covering “over 90 percent of world production”.2

Other traders with notes here: Sucafina, ECOM, Falcon Coffees, Mercanta, Cafe Imports, Ally Coffee, Sustainable Harvest. The first two are global commodity houses; the rest sit at the specialty end, where the same functions are performed at much smaller volume and with the producer’s name kept attached.

How much coffee moves

The unit of the trade is a 60-kilogramme bag, and the International Coffee Organization is the body that counts them. In the twelve months to May 2026, world exports were 81.84 million bags of arabica and 59.28 million bags of robusta — arabica down from 84.84 million the year before, robusta up from 53.41 million.3 The single month of May 2026 saw 12.38 million bags exported, against 12.78 million in May 2025.3

Two things are visible in those numbers. The first is scale: roughly 141 million bags a year cross a border as raw coffee, which is about 8.5 million tonnes. The second is a shift — arabica shrinking while robusta grows — which is the trade’s blunt answer to price and to a warming climate, and the commercial backdrop to the Fine Robusta project.

What customs sees

Green coffee has a formal identity in world trade. Under the Harmonized System, the customs classification every country uses, heading 0901 covers coffee, and subheading 0901.11 is coffee “not roasted, not decaffeinated” — the technical name for green coffee.45 In the United States tariff schedule the duty rate on it is free, and the statistical breakdown below it splits the category into arabica, robusta and other, each further divided into “certified organic” and “other”.4

That is the entire vocabulary. A customs officer can tell whether a container holds arabica or robusta and whether it is certified organic. Farm, altitude, variety, process and cup score do not exist at this level — exactly the blindness described at C-market, written into law rather than into a contract. Every institution in this wiki that scores, grades or auctions coffee — Cupping, Coffee scoring, Cup of Excellence, Green coffee auctions — exists to carry information the trading system’s own paperwork cannot hold.

Why the “market size” numbers disagree

To verify

Published estimates of the global green coffee market contradict each other and none was verifiable here. The research behind this note produced three commercial market-research figures for essentially the same thing: USD 37.7 billion in 2023, rising to USD 59.7 billion by 2033;6 USD 39.7 billion in 2025;7 and USD 32.86 billion in 2025, rising to USD 44.39 billion by 2030.8 Two of those are 2025 estimates roughly 21% apart. These are paywalled commercial reports whose methodologies, base years and definitions of “market size” were not published on the pages consulted, and they are not independent of one another in any way that could be checked. Do not repeat any single figure as the size of the green coffee market. The volume figures from the International Coffee Organization above are the sourced alternative: they count bags, not dollars, and they are published openly.3

The deeper problem is definitional. “The green coffee market” can mean the value of coffee at farm gate, at FOB, at import, or at first sale to a roaster — four different numbers for the same beans, as Green coffee buying sets out. A report that does not say which one it measures is not measurable against a report that does.

To verify

Indonesia’s export forecast. The research report attributes to the USDA’s Coffee: World Markets and Trade circular a forecast that Indonesia will increase green coffee exports to 7.8 million bags, with major markets including the European Union, the United States and Egypt.5 The circular is the most authoritative source in this note’s bibliography — it is a US government trade publication — but the PDF could not be parsed when fetched here, and the USDA landing page refused the request. The figure is recorded as the report’s reading of the circular, not as a confirmed fact; the marketing year it applies to is also not established. Check the current edition before citing it.

Why it matters

Traders are the least visible actors in coffee and the most consequential. A bag on a café shelf names a farm and a roaster. Between them sat a firm that lent the money, took the price risk, filled the container, cleared the customs entry under a code that knows only “arabica, not organic”, and stored the coffee until the roaster wanted it.

That invisibility is also the argument. Direct trade is, at bottom, a claim about how much of the margin the middle should keep and how much information should survive the journey. Producer cooperatives are an attempt to move part of the trading function to origin. Green coffee auctions are an attempt to bypass the price-setting part of it entirely for a few thousand bags a year. All three are responses to the structure described on this page.

Footnotes

  1. Neumann Kaffee Gruppe — green coffee trading group; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the self-description, the 40 companies / 28 countries / 3,300 employees figures and the list of services ↩

  2. Volcafe — green coffee trading group; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the “one of the largest traders”, “66 billion cups” and “over 90 percent of world production” claims ↩

  3. International Coffee Organization — intergovernmental body; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the twelve-month arabica and robusta export totals to May 2026 and the May 2026 / May 2025 monthly comparison ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. United States International Trade Commission — Harmonized Tariff Schedule, heading 0901 — official US tariff schedule; confirmed via WebFetch of the HTS export list for heading 0901; source of subheading 0901.11.00 “not decaffeinated”, the free duty rate, and the arabica / robusta / other and certified-organic statistical breakdown ↩ ↩2

  5. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service — Coffee: World Markets and Trade — US government trade circular; the PDF could not be parsed when fetched and the USDA landing page returned HTTP 403, so cited via the research report only; source of the “coffee, green” commodity description and the flagged Indonesia export forecast ↩ ↩2

  6. Market.us — Green Coffee Market Size, Share — commercial market-research page; cited via the research report only; source of the USD 37.7bn (2023) / USD 59.7bn (2033) estimate ↩

  7. IMARC Group — Green Coffee Market Size, Share & Growth Forecast — commercial market-research page; cited via the research report only; source of the USD 39.7bn (2025) estimate ↩

  8. Mordor Intelligence — Green Coffee Market Size, Share & Growth Trends — commercial market-research page; cited via the research report only; source of the USD 32.86bn (2025) / USD 44.39bn (2030) estimate ↩

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