Specialty Coffee Wiki

Saza Coffee

Properties3
descriptionThe family roastery in small-town Ibaraki, Japan that keeps buying the world's most expensive coffee — lead buyer on both the first $1,000-a-pound lot in 2019 and the $10,013-a-kilo record in 2024 — and that also grows its own Geisha on a Colombian farm.
tagsorganization, japan, roaster, geisha, prices
aliasesSaza, サザコーヒー, Saza Coffee Co., Ltd., SAZA COFFEE ROASTER INC., organizations/saza-coffee

10 min read

Saza Coffee

Saza Coffee (サザコーヒー) is a Japanese coffee company founded in 1942 and based in Hitachinaka, a seaside city in Ibaraki Prefecture about two hours north of Tokyo. It roasts, retails, and runs its own cafés, and it owns coffee farms in Colombia.12 Its registered English trading name is SAZA COFFEE ROASTER INC.

It matters to this wiki for one reason: when the world record price for coffee gets broken, Saza is very often the name at the top of the bid sheet. It led the buying group for the first lot ever to pass 1,000 a pound** at [[Best of Panama]] in 2019, and five years later it took the lot that reset the record again at **10,013 a kilogram.3 Both lots came from the same farm — Elida Estate, run by the Lamastus family in Boquete, Panama.4

That makes Saza the closest thing the ultra-premium market has to a habitual record-setter, in contrast to one-off headline buyers like Julith Coffee (Dubai, 2025) or JD.com (China, 2025).

The company

AttributeDetail
Founded1942 (12 October)
English trading nameSAZA COFFEE ROASTER INC.
Head office8-18 Kyoeichou, Hitachinaka-shi, Ibaraki-ken, Japan
President / representativeTaro Suzuki (Taroh Suzuki; president since June 2020)
Capital¥25.6 million
Revenue¥2.652 billion (year ending March 2022)
Employees262 (April 2023)
Stores18 — 11 in Ibaraki, 1 in Saitama, 6 in Tokyo
Own farmsColombia — Finca Saza, ~25 ha in Timbío, Cauca, acquired in stages from the late 1990s
Public contact0120-37-1151

The English trading name, street address, representative and phone number are confirmed by Ibaraki Prefecture’s own export-promotion register, a government listing independent of the company’s marketing. The financial and store figures come from the Japanese-language Wikipedia entry.

Owning farms as well as buying at auction is the unusual part. Most companies that chase record lots are pure roasters; Saza sits on both sides of the trade at once, growing its own coffee in Colombia while bidding for other people’s in Panama.

To verify

How many stores there actually are. Three sources give three answers: Saza’s own English site says 17 stores nationwide, the Japanese Wikipedia entry says 18, and an earlier engine report said “20+”. None is confirmed against corporate filings, and a store count goes stale within months. Treat the number as “roughly twenty, mostly Ibaraki and Tokyo” rather than a hard figure. The same report also dates the first Colombian farm to 1998 where Wikipedia says 1996.

The other half of the business — Finca Saza in Colombia

Saza does not only buy famous coffee; it grows some. Its Colombian estate is Finca Saza — roughly 25 hectares at about 1,950 m in Timbío, Cauca, planted with Typica, Bourbon and Geisha — and it has its own note with the full history, the 2010 replanting after Coffee leaf rust, and the several places where the published acreage and dates disagree. In short: the coffee it sends abroad under that name is Geisha, washed — the same variety that makes Elida Estate lots famous, planted on Saza’s own land rather than bought at auction. Ibaraki Prefecture’s export register lists the flagship export product as “Saza One Cup Drip Coffee; Finca Saza Colombia Geisha (Washed)”, describing beans “grown at Saza Coffee plantations in Colombia,” hand-picked at full ripeness and sun-dried, and packed in low-oxygen sachets that give the drip bags a three-year shelf life.

Two things are worth pulling out of that. First, “washed” and “sun-dried” are not in conflict: in the washed method the fruit is stripped off and the seed fermented clean before drying, so the drying still happens outdoors in the sun — it is the opposite of the Natural process, where the fruit stays on through drying. Second, the format is telling. Saza’s Geisha does not only exist as a ¥3,000 counter pour; it also ships as a single-serve drip bag engineered for a three-year shelf life, which is a supermarket-and-souvenir product, not an auction one.

So the company runs the full length of the chain: it grows Geisha in Colombia, buys other people’s Geisha at record prices in Panama, roasts both in Ibaraki, and sells the results across its own cafés and packaged goods.

To verify

Saza’s own site carries a page titled “We are coffee farm owners” which, per the engine report, states that Saza is the only Japanese company directly managing a coffee farm in Colombia. That is the company’s own marketing claim about itself, no third party confirms it in anything consulted here, and the page could not be fetched from this machine (TLS certificate error on saza.co.jp).5 Treat “only Japanese company” as a claim, not a fact. The farm ownership itself is separately supported by the prefectural export listing above.

The record purchases

2019 — the first coffee over $1,000 a pound

At the 2019 Best of Panama auction, an Elida Geisha Green Tip Natural ASD lot from Elida Estate scored 95.25 and sold for $1,029 per pound — the first time any coffee had crossed four figures a pound at public auction. Saza Coffee was credited by the producers for leading the buying consortium; the rest of the group included Klatch Coffee (California), Willoughbys Coffee & Tea (Connecticut), and Dragonfly Coffee Roasters (Colorado).67

“ASD” is the producer’s own processing code for that lot; “green tip” describes a Geisha plant selection whose new leaf shoots come out green rather than bronze.

2024 — $10,013 a kilogram

At the 2024 Best of Panama auction on 7 August, Saza was the primary buyer of Elida Geisha Natural “Torre” — 20 kg for 200,260**, or **10,013 per kilogram, a new world record at the time. As in 2019 the purchase was shared: named co-buyers included Grand Cru Coffee (China), OKLAO Specialty Coffee, BREW BOYY CREW, Ruber.Roastery (Korea), Pebble Coffee buying for Simple Kaffa, Paradise Coffee Roasters, and Ruliweb (South Korea).89

YearLotScorePriceSaza’s role
12019Elida Geisha Green Tip Natural ASD95.25$1,029/lbLead buyer of the consortium
22024Elida Geisha Natural “Torre” (20 kg)—10,013/kg (~4,542/lb)Primary buyer, shared with 7 others

Both entries also appear on the Elida Estate and Best of Panama results archive notes.

2024 — a share of the record Ethiopian lot

Saza also turns up in the other record of that year, outside Panama. At the 2024 Ethiopia Cup of Excellence, the winning coffee from smallholder Basha Bekele was split into two auction lots. Angelino’s Coffee took 1A at the record 445/lb; **1B — 105 kg (231.49 lb) at 350.10/lb, $81,044.65** — is listed by ACE against “Orsir International Co. Ltd., SAZA COFFEE”.10

To verify

What Saza’s role in that lot actually was. ACE names it alongside Taiwan’s Orsir International as buyer; trade reporting credits the bid itself to Orsir. Whether Saza co-bid as part of a consortium — its usual pattern — or bought a share afterwards is not stated in any source consulted here.

To verify

The claim that anchors this topic — that Saza has won or co-won top Best of Panama lots nearly every year since 2008, missing only 2014 — rests on a single marketing blog, which could not be fetched (rate-limited).11 Only 2019 and 2024 are independently documented here. Do not describe Saza as an “every year since 2008” buyer until the intervening years are checked against official results.

To verify

A separate frequently repeated claim is that Saza took the top lot at the inaugural 2020 Ethiopia Cup of Excellence at $185/lb. That figure is single-sourced to roaster blogs and is already flagged as unconfirmed on Cup of Excellence records by country. If true it would show Saza’s record-buying reaches beyond Panama — which is exactly why it needs a real source.

Buying the whole group in

The pattern in both records is the same and worth understanding, because it is how most modern record lots are actually paid for.

A winning lot is often only 20 kg — roughly a single bag. One buyer paying $200,000 for it would have almost nothing left to sell after a few hundred cups. So a buying consortium forms: several roasters, usually across several countries, agree in advance to split the lot and the bill, and one of them places the bid. Saza’s distinguishing habit is being the one who organises and fronts the group rather than joining someone else’s.

For the roasters involved, the appeal is a few kilograms of the most talked-about coffee on earth plus a share of the announcement. For Elida Estate, it means the entire lot clears at one price. For the market, it means a headline number that reflects eight buyers’ combined willingness to pay, not one — a caveat worth remembering whenever a record price is quoted as evidence of what “the market” will bear. See Premiumisation.

What it does with the coffee

Saza pours it. Panama Geisha is sold by the cup at ¥3,000 (roughly $20) at the Hitachinaka flagship and at the company’s Marunouchi KITTE store in Tokyo.1

That is the strategic point. A twenty-dollar cup is expensive but not unreachable — a train ride and a splurge, not an event. Where Julith Coffee turned its record lot into ~$980 servings for a handful of people and JD.com turned its lot into a national advertising campaign, Saza’s version is a small chain of ordinary Japanese cafés that happen to serve the world’s most expensive coffee at the counter.

Footnotes

  1. Wikipedia (Japanese) — サザコーヒー ↩ ↩2

  2. Ibaraki Prefecture export register — SAZA COFFEE ROASTER INC. company and product listing ↩

  3. Best of Panama — official auction site ↩

  4. Lamastus Family Estates Auction — Elida Estate’s own site ↩

  5. Saza Coffee — official site (サザコーヒー) ↩

  6. AgroNosotros — Elida Estate Gesha earns $1,029 per pound ↩

  7. Global Coffee Report — Elida Estate Natural ASD Geisha makes Best of Panama auction history ↩

  8. Casa Solution — $4,500 a pound for Boquete coffee? Yes, really ↩

  9. LatAm Reports — Geisha: Panama’s luxury coffee sets new price record ↩

  10. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2024 results and auction ↩

  11. Japanese Coffee Co. — Saza Coffee: everything you need to know ↩

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