Ecuador

Why this origin matters

Ecuador is worth reading about because it turns the usual picture of a coffee origin inside out. On the governed USDA estimate it grew 350,000 bags in 2025/26, which places it among the smallest producers the USDA itemises. Yet in the attaché's last full table its exports were larger than its crop, because nine tenths of what it ships is instant coffee, much of it made from beans grown in Vietnam, Brazil and Colombia. It grows arabica and robusta side by side, which its own sources call rare, and the official figures for its crop differ several-fold.

Where coffee grows

Coffee grows in all four of Ecuador's natural regions: the Pacific coast, the Andean highlands, the Amazon lowlands and the Galápagos Islands. A university review says it is planted in 23 of the 24 provinces. The two species divide the country between them. The attaché's report of 2022 says 86 per cent of the robusta is planted in the Amazon region, with arabica along the coast and in the highlands, and that Manabí, on the coast, is overwhelmingly arabica. In the statistics institute's agricultural survey of 2022, four provinces stand out: Manabí with about 10,900 hectares planted, Sucumbíos and Orellana in the northern Amazon with about 7,500 and 7,300, and Loja in the southern highlands with about 5,000. That survey makes the Amazon the largest producing region, with 44 per cent of the tonnage, which a 2025 article on the survey notes is not where the country's coffee was traditionally thought to come from. The attaché's report names Loja, Pichincha including the district of Quito, Imbabura and, more recently, Azuay as the areas where specialty arabica is grown, with some farms in Manabí.

The attaché's report sets out a three-step classification by elevation that it says is used in Ecuador: standard coffee below 800 metres, high-altitude coffee from 800 to 1,200, and very-high-altitude coffee above 1,200. It is a trade classification as the report gives it, and the report cites no rule behind it. What is unusual is how low arabica is grown. The university review attributes arabica at around 600 metres in Manabí, and lower still in Galápagos, to cool air from the Humboldt Current; that is its explanation, and CoffeeHQ has read no study testing it.

Counts of one crop, several-fold apart

How much coffee Ecuador grows depends on whom you ask, and the answers are not close. The USDA's estimate for 2025/26 is 350,000 bags, which is 21,000 tonnes. The statistics institute's agricultural survey, a sample survey whose tables are headed green coffee, found 7,966 tonnes on about 29,900 hectares harvested in 2022, and 5,465 tonnes in 2024. The figure Ecuador reported to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization for 2024 is also 5,465 tonnes: it is the survey's number, so the two are one count and not two. And a news report of 2024 gave the exporters' association's estimate that production had averaged about 150,000 bags a year over the previous three years, or 9,000 tonnes, remarking that there are no reliable figures.

The gap is not an artefact of comparing different years. For 2021, the one year where CoffeeHQ has read both, the ministry's information system gives 4,917 tonnes for the calendar year, as a 2025 article transcribes it, and the attaché's table gives 261,000 bags, or 15,660 tonnes, for the marketing year that began that April: more than three times as much. The area figures differ in the same direction. The attaché's report puts planted area at 60,000 hectares; the 2022 survey found about 36,400. A further series, the International Coffee Organization's historical table, stops at crop year 2019/20 with 559,000 bags, or 33,540 tonnes, which is higher than any of the others; the ministry's system has 8,141 tonnes for the calendar year 2019.

None of the documents explains the difference. It is not a matter of cherries or parchment being weighed against beans: the attaché's bags are green-bean equivalent, and the survey's own tables say green coffee. The attaché's report remarks that the ministry's system records only arabica area, but the survey figures include the robusta provinces of the Amazon, so that does not account for it either. CoffeeHQ shows each figure with its source and does not choose between them. What they agree on is the direction: every source describes a crop far smaller than it was, and smaller than what the country drinks and processes.

Species and varieties

Both species are grown commercially. In the attaché's table for 2021/22, robusta was 170,000 bags and arabica 91,000, nearly two bags of robusta for each of arabica. For varieties the best evidence CoffeeHQ could reach is second-hand: a 2025 article reporting a ministry yield survey of 2018. On that account, which gives the figures as shares of national production, the arabica crop was led by Catucaí (23 per cent), Sarchimor (20), Acawa (19) and Caturra (10), with Bourbon at 1 per cent and Typica, Paraíso and Castillo among the remainder, and the canephora crop was divided between plants the survey calls Robusta (40 per cent), Conilón (31) and Napo Payamino (29). The survey itself was not opened, and shares of a sampled crop in 2018 are not shares of what is planted today. A university review adds Geisha and Sidra to the arabicas grown, and says Sidra was found in Ecuador; it gives a parentage for it that CoffeeHQ could not check against any genetic study and does not repeat.

Harvest

The attaché's report says the harvest of domestically grown beans falls between April and October, and that those beans are exported mainly between July and October, while the instant-coffee trade runs all year. It gives one window for the whole country and does not separate the species or the regions. A trade history of 1922 said the trees blossomed in December and were picked through April, May and June. The report also says coffee is largely picked by hand, robusta included, on more than 90 per cent of farms.

Small farms, and few of them organised

The attaché's report says 96 per cent of Ecuador's coffee farmers hold less than five hectares, 3 per cent between five and ten, and 1 per cent more. It counts about 70,000 coffee farmers and describes most as relying on family labour, with coffee intercropped among other plants in the highlands. Fewer than half used fertiliser when it was written: 45 per cent of arabica growers and 20 per cent of robusta growers.

The agriculture ministry's page on its 2011 project estimated that about 10 per cent of the country's growers belonged to an organisation. A university review of 2022 puts it lower still, saying that 95 per cent of producers belong to no association, which it attributes to farms being remote and poorly connected, and that the average grower is about 50 years old as younger people leave for the cities. Both list the organisations that do exist, among them a federation of small organic growers in Loja, El Oro and Zamora Chinchipe, the Río Íntag association in Imbabura and Pichincha, federations in Manabí, and an association in Sucumbíos and Orellana. The review's percentages are its citations of studies CoffeeHQ did not open; the ministry's is its own estimate, undated.

How the coffee is processed

All three of the main methods are in use. The attaché's report lists natural, washed and semi-washed or honey coffee as the methods by which Ecuadorian coffee is classified, and notes that washing is now also done with mechanical demucilagers. Two reviews describe how the methods are divided, and they put it differently: one says dry processing is generally applied to robusta and wet processing to arabica, the other that washed coffee is the most common method among producers overall. Neither gives a share. The report's table of types pairs washed arabica with El Oro, Manabí, Loja, Guayas and Zamora Chinchipe, and natural arabica with Loja, Manabí, El Oro, Los Ríos, Guayas and Pichincha.

What the name Café de Galápagos legally requires

Café de Galápagos is a protected designation of origin, and CoffeeHQ has read the specification as registered in the United Kingdom in July 2024. It covers arabica only, of eight named varieties (Typica, Bourbon, Caturra, Villalobos, San Salvador, Sarchimor, Catimor and Catuaí), grown, harvested and processed in the farming zones of four islands: San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz, Isabela and Floreana. It places the plantations between 130 and 600 metres above sea level, on about 750 hectares in all.

The rules are specific. Cherries are to be picked ripe, with pickers trying not to exceed 20 per cent partly ripe and 3 per cent green, and must be processed the day they are picked: floated, pulped, fermented or mechanically demucilaged, washed and dried to between 10 and 11 per cent moisture. Green coffee must weigh at least 675 grams a litre, with three quarters of it retained on a size 15 screen, no primary defects and no more than 21 secondary defects in 350 grams, and each lot must cup clean at 80 points or more. Only certified lots of the current harvest may be roasted under the name.

The specification also describes the cup, in the applicant's words: strong acidity and a peat- or ash-like aroma, fruitier from the higher farms. That is a claim made in support of a registration, not a tasting result, and the same is true of its statements that the coffee is native to the islands and that nowhere else grows coffee of this quality so low. Ecuador's second protected coffee name, Lojano Café de Origen, was registered in the United Kingdom on the same day. Its specification covers arabica from 15 of the 16 cantons of Loja province, grown between 600 and 2,200 metres, and allows washed, natural and honey coffee. It is a looser document than the Galápagos one: it lists twenty varieties and hybrids, and gives the minimum cupping score as 80 in its description of the coffee and as 83 in its inspection rules.

How it is graded and sold

Very little Ecuadorian coffee leaves as beans. In the attaché's table for 2021/22 the country exported 30,000 bags of green coffee and 413,000 bags of soluble coffee in green-bean equivalent: 93 per cent of the total. By value, in the calendar year 2021, Germany took 32 per cent of coffee exports, Poland 12, Russia and Colombia 10 each and Belgium 5, on figures the report credits to the central bank; the total was 78 million dollars. Growers' prices in 2021, on the same report, averaged 220 dollars for a 60-kilogram bag of special-quality arabica, 126 for commercial arabica and 69 for robusta. It says specialty lots are often negotiated with little reference to the futures price, and that competitions run by the exporters' and specialty associations bring buyers to deal with producers directly. No coffee-specific export tax or levy was in force when it was written.

An instant-coffee industry that outgrew its own farms

Ecuador's soluble-coffee factories can process more than a million bags a year, the attaché's report says: several times the national crop on any of the figures above. The largest of them accounts for 70 per cent of all the country's coffee exports and, on the report's account, once supplied a tenth of the world's freeze-dried coffee. The industry once drew its beans from the old coffee district of Jipijapa, in Manabí. When Ecuadorian growing lost competitiveness in the 1990s as new producing countries entered the market, and again when the economy adopted the US dollar in 2000 and costs rose, the factories replaced local beans with imports from Vietnam and Brazil, and later from Colombia and Peru.

The arrangement shows in the attaché's supply table. In 2021/22 the country grew 261,000 bags, imported 330,000 bags of beans and exported 413,000 bags of soluble coffee. The imported beans come in under a customs regime for temporary admission, to be processed and shipped out again; beans imported for sale at home would pay a 25 per cent import tax, which together with the cost of shipping the report calls prohibitive. So the three companies the report names buy the country's entire robusta crop, mainly for the instant coffee Ecuadorians drink, and use foreign beans for what they export.

The report does not present this as a success. It says the industry has lost ground to competitors, citing the cost of electricity and of water, which it prices in Guayaquil, freight between Manta and Guayaquil and a higher minimum wage than the neighbours', and that the largest company was running only one of its two plants. That is the state of things in May 2022; CoffeeHQ has read nothing later from the same source.

How coffee is drunk in Ecuador

Ecuadorians mostly drink instant coffee. In the USDA attaché's table for the marketing year 2021/22, soluble coffee made up 200,000 of the 245,000 bags consumed, in green-bean equivalent, and the forecast for the following year raised consumption to 328,000 bags, all of the increase soluble. The report put consumption at about 1.05 kilograms a person, up from 0.80, a figure it credits to the exporters' association, and said a taste for roast and ground coffee was developing, with the trade ministry, the city of Quito and the specialty coffee association all promoting it. A 2024 news report, giving the same association's estimates, put national demand above 300,000 bags a year and growing by 5 to 10 per cent annually, with the country's own crop covering roughly half of it. A university review, from visits to farms in the Andes, describes growers themselves as people who produce coffee without drinking it.

The bag figures are the USDA attaché's estimates and forecast of May 2022, in green-bean equivalent, for marketing years running from April to March. The 2024 figures are the exporters' association's estimates as a news report gave them.

History

Planters began to give coffee some attention in the middle of the nineteenth century, on the account of a 1922 trade history, which records exports of about 87,000 pounds in 1855 and nearly a million by 1877, and an area it put at 32,000 acres with eight million trees. Most of the crop then went to Chile, through Guayaquil. Its author thought little of the coffee, describing it as a filler equal to low-grade Brazil: a merchant's verdict of a century ago, recorded as that. The registered specification for Galápagos coffee dates cultivation on the islands from 1879. The decades in between are a gap in what CoffeeHQ has read. By the early 1980s, on the attaché's account, 347,000 hectares were planted; the story since then is the fall described below.

Forty years of decline, and the programmes that did not reverse it

The International Coffee Organization's table gives the shape of the fall in its own figures: 2,376,000 bags in crop year 1994/95, 854,000 in 2000/01 and 582,000 in 2002/03. The agriculture ministry's own page on the subject gives national production as 71,000 tonnes in 1999, quotes the coffee council's figure of 52,250 tonnes for 2008, and the FAO's estimate of 31,347 tonnes for 2010. It lists the causes as it saw them: ageing plantations, poor agronomic management, coffee planted on marginal land, no money for better production and processing, and too little technical help. It says 85 per cent of the coffee area was managed in a traditional way, with yields of about five quintals of green coffee a hectare.

In 2011 the ministry launched a ten-year reactivation project costing 60.5 million dollars. Its stated aims were to reach 67,500 families through 88 growers' organisations in 10 provinces, to renovate 135,000 hectares, and to be producing about two million quintals of arabica and nearly one and a half million of robusta by its tenth year. The 2025 article sets that target, which it converts to more than 200,000 tonnes, beside the 7,966 tonnes the 2022 survey found, and concludes that no significant change took place. The attaché's report describes the effort under two other names: a coffee and cacao reactivation programme of 2012 to 2016, which it credits with better yields, mainly in robusta, and a ministry project to renew coffee and cacao plantings that ended in 2017, whose success it calls limited in most areas while allowing that better pruning was starting to show in the yields.

The institutions changed in the same years. The public-private coffee council was wound up in 2015, and the ministry took over policy and technical assistance. A further plan, public and private, was presented in 2021 with a target of three million quintals a year; the attaché's report of 2022 says the government then in office had not implemented it, and puts that down to turnover at the ministry and its preoccupation with a banana disease.

Pressures on the sector

• Water. The attaché's report, citing a ministry survey of 2020, calls lack of water the third most important problem in coffee growing and says it affects 8 per cent of the planted area; its chart, which is an image, is labelled with pests and diseases and prices before it, and weeds after; it describes highland farmers in Loja turning to irrigation.
• El Niño. The agriculture ministry's own account of the decline lists the phenomenon among the causes of falling national production, beside low prices, a shrinking area and old trees.
• Scale. On every figure read, the country grows less coffee than it drinks and far less than its factories can process.
• Low yields. The attaché's report put Ecuador's field productivity 45 per cent below Peru's and Colombia's and 78 per cent below Brazil's.
• Cost. Dollarisation, wages, water, electricity and freight are the reasons the report gives for both farms and factories losing ground.
• Policy that does not last. A ten-year project ended far short of its targets, the coffee council was dissolved in 2015, and the 2021 plan had not been implemented a year later.
• Ageing growers and little organisation, on a university review's account.
• No agreed statistics. A 2024 news report giving the exporters' association's estimate of the crop remarks that there are no reliable figures.

Two statements, one from a survey CoffeeHQ did not open and one from a ministry page. No climate study of Ecuadorian coffee was read, and nothing here is a projection.

Institutions worth knowing

• Asociación Nacional de Exportadores de Café (ANECAFÉ) — the exporters' association; the source of many of the attaché's figures, and the body the sector's 2021 reactivation plan was presented with
• Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería — the ministry that has run coffee policy and technical assistance since 2015, and whose statistics give the crop by province
• Consejo Cafetalero Nacional (COFENAC) — the public-private coffee council, which the attaché's report says was fully disbanded in February 2015, after the 2008 constitution reserved the collection of fees to public bodies
• Asociación de Cafés Especiales del Ecuador (ACEDE) — the specialty coffee association the attaché's report credits with a competition begun in 2021
• Servicio Nacional de Derechos Intelectuales (SENADI) — the intellectual-property service named as the inspection body for the Café de Galápagos denomination

Explore Ecuador's coffee from here

A reading order, not a list of everything related: each step picks up something this page raised and takes it further.

1. Step 1Instant coffee explainedHow soluble coffee is made, including the freeze-drying Ecuador's largest factory was built for.
2. Step 2RobustaThe species the instant-coffee industry runs on, and the larger part of Ecuador's own crop.
3. Step 3VietnamThe largest robusta grower, and the first place Ecuador's factories turned when local beans ran short.
4. Step 4ColombiaThe northern neighbour: a supplier of beans to Ecuador's factories, and a buyer of a tenth of its coffee exports.
5. Step 5PeruThe southern neighbour, whose crop is many times larger on similar Andean and Amazonian ground.
6. Step 6SarchimorThe rust-resistant group that a 2018 ministry survey, as a later article reports it, put at a fifth of Ecuador's arabica production.
7. Step 7Coffee certifications explainedHow a protected origin name differs from the certification marks on a bag of coffee.