Trase brings greater transparency to global coffee supply chains

The coffee industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually and supports the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, including farmers working across 12.5 million coffee farms worldwide. Aside from a minority of some certified and specialty coffees, supply chains remain very opaque. This means consumers and companies have limited visibility of where their supply comes from and therefore struggle to assess their links to widespread human rights violations (such as child and forced labour), deforestation and forest degradation.

For coffee, these challenges have received less attention compared to other internationally traded commodities such as beef, soy and palm oil. Improving transparency and sustainability is complicated by the prevalence of smallholder farmers and farmer poverty. Some 60% of global coffee supplies are produced on farms smaller than five hectares (smaller than farms used for many other commodities). Of these smallholders, 44% live below the poverty line, while the average coffee-farming household fails to earn a living income in eight out of ten of the biggest coffee-producing countries, with the greatest income gaps in Africa.

The coffee sector also faces a particularly uncertain future. On the production side, coffee cultivation is highly vulnerable to weather extremes and longer term climate change, and significant areas of Arabica coffee-producing regions are projected to become unsuitable for the crop in coming decades.

The demand-side picture is rapidly changing too: the coffee sector is highly dependent on the European market where consumer habits are shifting, as evidenced by growing demand for sustainable, healthy, high-quality and convenient products. Meanwhile, legislation such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is emerging alongside new reporting requirements (CSRD), due-diligence requirements (CSDDD), anti-greenwashing measures (EmpCo) and existing voluntary certification schemes. Given this uncertain and rapidly changing picture, it is therefore more important than ever to shed light on where coffee comes from and which companies control that sourcing, to understand their exposure to supply chain risks, and identify those with the greatest agency to drive change.

So far, efforts to understand the trade flows of coffee have tended to feature narrow investigations into specific companies’ supply chains (which provide useful detail, but lack broader coverage across the sector), or make use of global-scale trade analyses that provide helpful breadth at the expense of company-level detail and subnational sourcing patterns. By developing a new approach to mapping global supply chains by company and region we attempt to bridge this gap with a dataset that builds a uniquely detailed, yet global, picture of coffee supply.

Building a global coffee supply chain dataset

We obtained per-shipment trade data for coffee exports from ten key producer countries representing 78% of global production and 81% of global exports. To complete the global picture, we combined this with national-level trade statistics from UN Comtrade. For six of the ten countries with per-shipment data (representing 54% of global production and 55% of exports), we went a step further: using subnational production data and a simple, scalable supply chain modelling approach to identify the most likely subnational sourcing regions for particular destination markets and trading companies. The levels of detail available in the resulting dataset therefore vary between producer countries, depending on data availability (see map below), providing a baseline that can be continuously improved as more data becomes available.

This new Trase dataset represents a hybrid between available global datasets and the more detailed subnational mapping that Trase is primarily known for (such as our more in-depth supply chain maps for Brazilian soy or Indonesian palm oil). We compiled data for the year 2020, but the approach could be applied to more recent years depending on availability and cost of per-shipment trade data. The approach could equally be applied to other commodity sectors and integrate other kinds of data, such as risk metrics on deforestation and human rights.

The coffee supply chain methodology and the open-access dataset are available to view and download here.

Linking the largest producers and consumers of coffee

The EU and US are by far the two largest import markets for coffee. The EU bought 40% and the US bought 18% of global imports from producer countries in 2020. On the export side, half of the global supply is provided by two producing countries: Brazil (32%) and Vietnam (18%), followed by Colombia (9%) and Indonesia (7%).

Brazil is the most important country of origin for both the EU and US, supplying 38% and 32% of their coffee, respectively (Figure 2). EU supply has relatively higher representation from Asian and African origins than the US. Vietnam is its second most important supplier, accounting for 21% of EU supply, and mostly supplying the Robusta variety which is used to make lower cost blends and instant coffee. US sourcing is more focused in the Americas; Colombia is the second most important source at 21% of supply.

Within the EU, the majority of coffee (71%) is imported into only three member states: Germany (35% of EU imports), Italy (19%) and Belgium (17%), though much of this is re-exported and consumed in other countries, including countries outside of the EU.

While the overall EU market share was 40%, a few major coffee producers are particularly dependent on EU demand, notably Uganda (57%), Honduras (58%) and India (58%), suggesting these countries may be particularly impacted by incoming EU regulations. However, the EU and US are not the most important markets for all producer countries. For Indonesia, which produces around 7% of the world’s coffee, the most important export market was the Philippines, accounting for 28% of Indonesian exports – almost double the EU market share of 15%.

The ten largest coffee exporter companies identified

Across the top producing countries for which we obtained per-shipment trade data, ten companies accounted for 35% of exports. Some of these are major international traders that source from multiple countries, such as Olam (accounting for 7.6% of assessed supply), Louis Dreyfus (4.1%), Neumann Gruppe (3.4%) and Sucafina (3.0%). Others are country-specific exporters, such as Cooxupe (Brazil) or Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia, representing national federations of farmers or cooperatives, while others are companies that specialise in specific export markets (e.g. Intimex in Vietnam).

Across the countries for which per-shipment data was available, the largest importer companies were Neumann Gruppe (6.8% of trade volume with known importers), Nestlé (5.5%) and Olam (4.6%). While big coffee roasters and more familiar downstream brands rank highly in the data – such as Nestlé (2nd) Starbucks (8th), and Lavazza (11th) – much of the global trade is handled by less well-known companies such as Neumann Gruppe (1st), Olam (3rd) and Sucafina (5th).

Can the EU drive global improvements in coffee sustainability?

Many importers serve multiple destination markets. Significant company overlap across destination markets means demand-side regulations – such as the EUDR – could have impacts well-beyond individual markets. The fact that many companies involved in global coffee trade ship to both the EU and other major markets suggests that similar standards may be more easily adopted by those companies beyond the EU, contributing to a so-called 'Brussels effect’.

The potential for this effect depends on a number of factors, one being the degree of this company-level overlap in trade. We assessed the extent to which global coffee trade is handled by companies that are likely to be preparing to comply with EU regulation, but also export to other markets. Across shipments with importer records from the nine countries for which we had data, 79% of global coffee supply was handled by importers that ship to the EU. This suggests that if importers that supply the EU were to standardise traceability and deforestation-free requirements across their supply chains, then the benefits of traceability could be shared by the majority of coffee consumers too.

We found less overlap with EU importers for the major Asian coffee markets such as South Korea (30% overlap), the Philippines (41%) and Japan (59%). These results suggest that these are the markets where additional demand-side regulation could bring the most additional and complementary benefit to EU regulations in the coffee sector.

Many factors will determine whether traders choose to standardise strong traceability requirements across their wider non-European supply, and this may depend particularly on whether the costs of extending traceability standards exceed the costs of segregating EU-compliant supply. This will in turn depend on the importance of the EU market to those particular companies.

We find that for many of the top ten coffee importers, EU demand accounts for roughly half or more of their trade volume, the largest being JDE Peets (84%), Louis Dreyfus (63%) and Neumann Gruppe (53%). For such companies, extending traceability requirements more widely across their supply may be most feasible and cost effective. For others, such as Japanese importer Mitsui & Co, for whom the EU is a minority market, supply segregation may be a more likely response.

These results also have implications for markets that have proposed due diligence legislation similar to the EUDR, such as the US and UK. The UK regulation is by far the most advanced of the two, and the UK Government recently signalled its intention to include coffee, the commodity being a relatively important source of deforestation exposure. Should coffee be included, the results presented here support the case for regulatory alignment with the EU, due to the high degree of importer overlap and the fact that both the EU and UK are important markets for many of these companies.

Closer alignment on commodity scope and documentation requirements, and the inclusion of all deforestation rather than only illegal deforestation, would likely reduce compliance costs for the many companies that serve both markets, establish a more level playing field across the coffee sector, and reduce potential trade friction generated by diverging requirements. Given the UK’s relatively small market share from a global perspective, aligning with EUDR may also help reduce the risk of UK supply segregation and instead help to drive more systemic, sector-wide change.

Mapping subnational sourcing at scale

Our simple, but scalable, subnational supply chain mapping approach indicates that, for some producer countries, major coffee markets like the EU and US could have different subnational sourcing patterns. For instance, in Indonesia, both the EU and US source most coffee from Sumatra, but the US imported coffee mostly from the northern part of the island, particularly Aceh, known for growing Arabica coffee. The EU, in contrast, sourced coffee predominantly from the Robusta-growing southern end of Sumatra, especially Lampung province, and a smaller share from northern Sumatra. This information can help with more informed risk assessments and detailed investigations in the absence of transparency through corporate disclosure.

In other producer countries, such as Brazil and Colombia, our data shows that the EU and US import coffee from a similar mix of ports (echoing the similarity in importer companies involved), and therefore had similar sourcing regions. More detailed supply chain mapping, for example incorporating the locations of cooperatives or other aggregation facilities with known links to specific traders, may be needed to detect more granular differences in sourcing patterns.

Towards a more sustainable coffee sector

A key area for future work is the integration of this global data with sustainability metrics. Currently, the options for high-quality, openly accessible data with broad geographic coverage on such metrics are limited. Recent reports from watchdog Coffee Watch have revealed the important role of coffee in driving historical deforestation in Vietnam and Brazil, but linking more recent deforestation to coffee remains tricky, especially since it may not be planted until many years after forests are cleared or degraded, and because coffee farms remain difficult to identify in satellite imagery. Trase will explore new data products that offer hope for improvement, such as coffee probability maps from the Forest Data Partnership and high-resolution coffee maps being developed by the sector.

More broadly, this data is intended to bring greater transparency to the global trade of coffee, better understand the implications of incoming demand-side regulation, and help inform supply chain risk assessments at a broad geographic scale not otherwise possible to date. The analysis underscores the particularly important role EUDR will play in shaping the coffee sector in coming years, and – if carefully implemented alongside engagement with the key supply chain companies – the potential for this regulation to facilitate significant spill-over benefits to traceability in the coffee sector more widely. It also supports the case for regulatory alignment in other markets, such as the UK, where there is significant overlap in companies involved.

While this work offers a pragmatic and scalable approach that makes use of available data, there remains a clear need for greater transparency and disclosure across coffee supply chains. This is essential to strengthen accountability, enable effective implementation and monitoring of demand-side regulation, and build a more resilient coffee sector – benefitting both the millions who consume coffee and the millions whose livelihoods depend on its sustainable production.

Download the coffee supply chain dataset

Download the coffee supply chain methodology

To reference this explainer, use the following citation: Titley, M., Cook, J., Croft, S., Lathuillière, M., Martín, N., & Biddle, H. (2026). Trase brings greater transparency to global coffee supply chains. Trase. https://doi.org/10.48650/A1HY-XD68