Mexico

Why this origin matters

What stands out in Mexico's figures is what happens to coffee after it is grown. On the USDA attaché's estimates for 2025/26, charted below, it imported more than half as much coffee as it grew, and nearly half of what it exported left as soluble coffee, not as green beans. It is a manufacturer of instant coffee as much as a grower, and that fact now shapes the farms: robusta, 15 per cent of the crop on the attaché's account, is being planted for the factories. Coffee is grown by a very large number of producers, 481,000 in 2010 on a figure a 2021 review cites, and a Mexican study records that many were brought into coffee by a state institute that bought their harvest and was wound up in 1993. What happened to those growers and their land afterwards is a large part of the country's coffee story.

Where coffee grows

Three states grow most of Mexico's coffee. The attaché's report names Chiapas, Veracruz and Puebla as together more than 80 per cent of national production, with Chiapas the largest by volume, and gives no figure for any one of them. It forecasts that Puebla will have the highest yields in 2026/27, more than double the national average, which it attributes to favourable soils, investment in rust-resistant plants and infrastructure near major cities, and that Veracruz will come second. Oaxaca and Guerrero appear in the report only as states where a federal programme buys coffee, and Oaxaca as a robusta producer. A 2021 review of Latin American coffee landscapes puts the planted area at about 500,000 hectares of arabica and 80,000 of robusta in 2019; the attaché's table has 670,000 hectares planted in 2025/26. The two figures come from different sources and CoffeeHQ does not reconcile them.

Coffee land abandoned, and coffee land cleared

Mexican coffee land has been moving in two directions at once. A 2021 review of Latin American coffee landscapes cites a study of the Chinantla, part of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, in which 42 per cent of coffee farmers abandoned their coffee or converted it to another use between 1990 and 2010, because of low prices, low yields and other pressures. It cites another from a community in central Veracruz where growers turned part of their farms over to sugar cane and planted lime trees.

At the same time the review lists Chiapas and Oaxaca among the places where there is evidence of coffee expanding into forest. And it reports one measure on which Mexico moved against the regional trend: in a passage about traditional, diverse shade, it gives the share of Mexico's coffee area under shade as rising from 10 to 30 per cent between 1996 and 2012, while that shade was being lost in several Central American countries. The review does not say how shade was defined for that figure. Each of these is one study that the review cites. The review's own warning applies: across the region, figures on how much coffee has been abandoned or converted are generally lacking.

Species and varieties

Mexican production is about 85 per cent arabica and 15 per cent robusta, on the attaché's account. The report names no arabica variety. What it describes is a change of plants in progress: after years of widespread leaf rust, producers have been replanting with rust-resistant arabica, and those plants are for the most part young and not yet bearing. CoffeeHQ therefore names no variety as typical of Mexico, because it read no document that says which are grown or in what proportion.

Robusta, planted for the instant-coffee factories

Robusta is the part of Mexican coffee that is growing. The attaché's forecast of a larger crop in 2026/27 rests partly on it, and the report gives three reasons for the expansion: the plant resists disease, it thrives at lower altitudes, and large soluble-coffee processors want it. On the account of the attaché's industry contacts, those processors have made a priority of buying locally and offer robusta farmers contracts and a stable price. Chiapas grows the most robusta, followed by Veracruz, Puebla and Oaxaca.

It is not new to Mexico. The 2021 review notes that Mexico and Guatemala are the two countries of the region where robusta has been grown for decades, on a limited scale. What is new is the push. The review cites a 2018 study for government support for a further 20,000 hectares of robusta in Chiapas, Veracruz and Tabasco, mainly in lowlands where coffee had not been grown before, at the cost of forest, and reports that in some parts of Chiapas robusta is being planted where arabica used to be.

After the rust: new plants that have not yet fruited

The attaché's report describes two good years of prices being spent on the farm. Producers in Chiapas, Veracruz and Puebla have, on its account, raised planting density, applied more inputs and tightened quality control, and have gradually replanted with arabica varieties resistant to leaf rust. Those plants are in their early years and have yet to fruit. The report expects the sector to grow through them without the planted area expanding.

The 2021 review records what the change can cost. It cites a study in Chiapas of smallholders who had grown organic coffee under dense, varied shade and who switched to resistant varieties and began applying synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. The review's general observation is that new varieties are often planted under little or no shade.

Harvest

No document of this century that CoffeeHQ read gives harvest months for Mexico. The USDA counts Mexico's marketing year from October to September, and its attaché's report mentions selective picking for quality without saying when the picking happens. The only harvest statement read is a century old: a trade history of 1922 says coffee in Mexico was harvested from November to January. The table below shows that and nothing else, and it should be read as a description of 1922.

How the coffee is processed

CoffeeHQ has read no present-day account of how Mexican coffee is processed. The 1922 trade history says that large quantities were then prepared by both the dry and the wet methods, the wet on the larger estates that had the water and could afford the machinery, and that some coffee was still cleaned with a hand mortar and winnowed in the wind. The attaché's report of 2026 speaks only of improved practices before and after harvest. For that reason the two methods CoffeeHQ lists against Mexico, washed and natural, are listed as historical statements from 1922 and not as a description of present practice.

How it is graded and sold

The United States is the main market for Mexican coffee in every form, and Mexico sells it mostly green beans and soluble coffee. On the attaché's estimates for 2025/26, charted below, green beans were a little over half of all exports and soluble coffee nearly all the rest, and four fifths of imports were green beans. A Cup of Excellence competition and auction was held in Mexico in 2012. CoffeeHQ has read no document describing how Mexican coffee is graded for export.

Green coffee in, instant coffee out

The table of one season's coffee shows the shape of the industry. In 2025/26, on the attaché's estimates, Mexico grew about 4.1 million bags, imported about 2 million bags of green coffee and exported 1.6 million bags' worth of soluble coffee. It also imported 400,000 bags' worth of soluble and drank 1.8 million. The United States alone took 2.6 million bags of Mexican coffee in all forms in 2025.

The report expects imports to fall. It forecasts a four per cent decline in 2026/27 as home-grown robusta replaces some imported green coffee, and says that after private investment announced in 2025 Mexico is replacing imported soluble coffee with its own manufacture.

A payment per grower, and coffee in the state's own shops

The federal government supports coffee growers directly. One programme of the agriculture ministry pays 388 US dollars a year to each participating producer; in 2026, on the attaché's figures, 181,364 producers took part, with 216,306 hectares between them. A second delivered 53,542 tonnes of fertiliser to 151,253 producers. Set against each other, the first two numbers work out at a little over one hectare covered for each producer.

A third programme, run by the welfare ministry, buys coffee from growers in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla, Veracruz and Guerrero, processes it and sells it cheaply through the state's network of shops. The attaché estimates it at three to four per cent of the soluble coffee market.

How coffee is drunk in Mexico

Mexico drinks the equivalent of about three quarters of the coffee it grows, and drinks it mainly as instant. The USDA's attaché estimates consumption at about 3.2 million bags in the 2025/26 season, against a crop of about 4.1 million, and puts soluble coffee at approximately 60 per cent of what is drunk, calling it the preferred choice at home and on the go because it is more practical and cheaper. Around that base the report describes growth at both ends of the market: convenience stores selling ready-to-drink coffee, one coffee-shop chain opening about seventy outlets a year, and, in the large cities, demand for single-origin coffee, capsules and cold brew. It also describes the coffee tricycle, a street stall common in Mexico City and other cities that sells café de olla, soluble coffee, hot chocolate and bread in the mornings. Café de olla, coffee prepared with cinnamon and sweetened, has its own entry in CoffeeHQ's preparation atlas; it is a way of making coffee and says nothing about where the coffee was grown.

Consumption figures are the USDA attaché's estimates in green-bean equivalent for the marketing year beginning October 2025. The report gives no per-person figure.

History

Accounts of when coffee reached Mexico differ, and the 1922 trade history that CoffeeHQ read says so. It reports that the plant is said to have come from the West Indies near the end of the eighteenth century, and elsewhere gives 1790. Its firmer evidence is from Veracruz: the port's custom house recorded 1,101 quintals of coffee exported in 1802, 1803 and 1805; trees were planted in the Coatepec district about 1808, on local history's account from seed brought from Cuba; and the plant reached the neighbourhood of Córdoba about 1816 or 1818. For many years nearly all commercial coffee came from that one state. It then spread into the mountains of Oaxaca and Puebla, where, the same history says, it was taken up almost entirely by indigenous growers on a small scale. Mexico became a notable exporter only from about 1870. In the years before 1922 its exports averaged about 50 million pounds, though only 30 million in 1918, and went mostly to the United States, with German capital and German planters prominent in the trade before the First World War.

The institute that bought the crop, 1958 to 1993

For a generation the Mexican state was the coffee buyer. A Mexican study of coffee cooperatives, summarising other authors, records that the federal government created the Instituto Mexicano del Café in 1958 to strengthen the country's place in the international coffee market, and that the institute collected, processed and sold coffee, encouraging small and medium producers to grow it by guaranteeing to buy their harvest. Between 1973 and 1989 it organised producers into local production and marketing units, and in doing so, the study says, doubled the number of coffee growers in the country, most of them holders of very small plots and most of them indigenous.

It ended in two steps. On the study's account, hyperinflation and economic crisis at the end of the 1980s led to the breaking, in July 1989, of the agreements Mexico had with the International Coffee Organization, and the institute was liquidated in 1993. A period of unstable prices followed; the study names 1988 to 1994 and 2000 to 2005 as the worst, years in which growers did not recover their costs. Small producers answered by forming their own organisations, which the study says worked in Oaxaca, Chiapas and Puebla and not fully in Veracruz, Guerrero or San Luis Potosí.

Pressures on the sector

• Heat. The attaché attributes part of the 2025/26 recovery to robusta fields coming back from heat waves in 2024/25.
• Heavy rain. Rains in 2025 damaged robusta production in Veracruz, on the same account.
• Leaf rust, which a 2021 review dates in Central America and Mexico from 2012 onwards and which the attaché describes as years of widespread infection now being answered by replanting.
• Loss of land suitable for arabica. The review cites climate models suggesting that the area suitable for arabica in Latin America as a whole could fall by 73 to 88 per cent by 2050 unless growers adapt; it gives no figure for Mexico.
• Scale. The area covered by the federal cash programme works out at a little over one hectare for each producer in it.
• Prices. A Mexican study names two long periods since 1988 in which growers did not recover their costs.
• Replanting. Rust-resistant plants are in the ground and not yet bearing.
• Land use. Coffee is being abandoned in some places and pushed into forest in others, on studies a 2021 review cites.

The 2050 projection is a study the review cites, for the whole region and across several climate scenarios; CoffeeHQ has not read the study. No Mexican plant-health or climate document was read.

Institutions worth knowing

• Secretaría de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural (SADER) — the federal agriculture ministry, which runs the two support programmes for coffee growers described below
• Secretaría de Bienestar — the welfare ministry, which runs Café Bienestar, buying coffee from growers to sell through the state's own shops
• Instituto Mexicano del Café (INMECAFÉ) — the state coffee institute created in 1958 and liquidated in 1993; it no longer exists

Explore Mexico'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 1RobustaThe species Mexico is planting more of, and why a soluble-coffee industry wants it.
2. Step 2ArabicaStill about 85 per cent of the Mexican crop on the attaché's account.
3. Step 3Café de ollaCoffee prepared with cinnamon and sweetened: a way of making coffee, not a kind of bean.
4. Step 4The history of instant coffeeThe product Mexico both drinks most and exports in quantity.
5. Step 5NicaraguaA Central American producer that first opened land to robusta in 2013, with a different result.
6. Step 6ColombiaAnother exporter that imports coffee, and one that answered leaf rust through a single institution.
7. Step 7VietnamThe country whose robusta supplies much of the world's instant coffee.
8. Step 8Coffee Expert: the coffee industryThe lesson on who handles coffee between the farm and the cup, soluble manufacturers included.
9. Step 9Coffee Expert: world coffeeWhere Mexico sits among the producing countries, and how to read production figures.
10. Step 10Tasting LabTaste two Mexican coffees side by side and record what differs, without a national flavour note to steer you.