Philippines

Why this origin matters

The Philippines is where a learner can see four kinds of coffee counted side by side by a national statistics office. The Philippine Statistics Authority reports Robusta, Arabica, Excelsa and Liberica separately, by province, every quarter. That gives the two smaller cultivated kinds official numbers, and those numbers sit awkwardly beside a recent scientific estimate of how much of them the whole world grows. The second reason is the gap between cup and farm: on the USDA's figures the country consumes more than fourteen times what it produces, which makes it a large coffee market, one the USDA itemises among the bigger consuming countries, and a minor producer at once.

Where coffee grows

Coffee is grown across the archipelago and concentrated in the south. In 2024, on the Statistics Authority's table, the regions of Mindanao produced about 85 per cent of the country's 31,979 tonnes of green coffee, and one region, Soccsksargen, produced 46 per cent. A single province within it, Sultan Kudarat, accounted for about 43 per cent of the national crop, in both Robusta and Arabica. Davao Region, the Bangsamoro region and Northern Mindanao followed. In Luzon the Cordillera was the largest producer and grew mostly Arabica; Calabarzon, south of Manila, grew mostly Robusta. The roadmap describes the farms: most of one to two hectares, owned by the people who farm them, with coffee planted among coconut, fruit trees, vegetables and forest trees, and very few commercial plantations.

Two official figures for one crop

The Philippine Statistics Authority and the USDA both publish a production figure, and they are not close. The Authority's table gives 31,979 tonnes of green coffee for calendar year 2024 and 35,646 for 2025, which is about 533,000 and 594,000 bags. The USDA's estimate for the marketing year 2025/26 is 450,000 bags, and it has stayed between 450,000 and 475,000 for six seasons.

The two do not measure the same twelve months: a marketing year from July to June is not a calendar year, though that alone would not explain a gap of this size in a crop that changes little from year to year. Part may be the conversion. For 2019 to 2021 the Authority's green-bean figure is exactly half of its figure for dried berries, which is a fixed ratio applied to every kind of coffee, where a measured out-turn would vary. The roadmap itself notes that the Authority's data and the industry's differ.

CoffeeHQ does not choose between them. The USDA figure is used where countries are compared, because it is the one series that covers them all; the Authority's is used for everything within the Philippines, because only it divides the crop by kind and by place.

Species and varieties

Robusta is most of the crop: 72 per cent of production in 2024 on the Statistics Authority's figures, with Arabica at 21 per cent, Excelsa at about 5.5 per cent and Liberica at about 0.6 per cent. The roadmap says Robusta goes mainly into instant coffee and Arabica into brewing and blending. It names no varieties within any of the four, and says that the identity of planting material is often uncertain: buyers of seedlings rely on what the nursery tells them, and trees are still certified by their appearance. It adds that Excelsa and Liberica in particular lack true-to-type planting material, because both are cross-pollinated and are raised from seed.

Four kinds of coffee in one set of statistics

The Statistics Authority's coffee tables have a row for each of four kinds. For 2024 they read: Robusta 23,163 tonnes of green coffee, Arabica 6,836, Excelsa 1,774 and Liberica 207. The area table, whose title reads area planted or harvested, is reported the same way: about 92,500 hectares of Robusta, 14,900 of Arabica, 7,100 of Excelsa and 1,300 of Liberica. The roadmap calls them the four major types and describes Excelsa as having berries bigger than Arabica's and smaller than Liberica's.

These are the Authority's categories, and CoffeeHQ reports them as that. Botanically, excelsa was long treated as a variety of Liberica, and a genomic study published in 2025 proposes that it is a separate species, Coffea dewevrei, which is how CoffeeHQ's species pages treat it. The Philippine tables kept the two apart before that study and for their own reasons. Nothing in them says how the trees on a farm were told apart, and the roadmap's remark about uncertain planting material applies to these two kinds more than to any other. So the Excelsa row is linked here to the excelsa page as the nearest match, without a claim that every tree counted in it is that species.

There is a second difficulty, and it is a real disagreement between sources. The 2025 study estimates that the whole world produces probably less than 1,000 tonnes a year of Liberica and excelsa together, and calls that an estimate. The Philippine tables alone report about 1,980 tonnes of the two for 2024. Both cannot be right as they stand. Either the world estimate is too low, or the Philippine rows include coffee that the study's authors would not count, or the conversion from dried fruit to green beans flatters the figure. CoffeeHQ has read nothing that settles it, and gives both.

What the tables do show plainly is where these two kinds are recorded. In 2024 the province with the most of each was Sulu, in the far south: 664 tonnes of Excelsa and 72 of Liberica. The study, for its part, lists the Philippines among the countries where production of both is now being increased.

What barako is officially a name for

Wherever the roadmap uses the word it means the same thing: Liberica, which it says is also known as kapeng barako and has a strong flavour and sharp aroma. In its list of opportunities it says the country has exported its Liberica and is known for the barako. That is as far as the government documents CoffeeHQ read go. The Statistics Authority does not use the word at all; its row is headed Liberica.

The statistics add a caution to the name. Liberica is the smallest of the four rows by a long way, about 0.6 per cent of the 2024 crop, and it fell to 84 tonnes in the Authority's 2025 figures. In Batangas, where the roadmap lists a brand called Batangas Brew and another named for the city of Lipa, the 2024 table records 10 tonnes of Liberica beside 103 tonnes of Excelsa and 132 of Robusta. CoffeeHQ has not read a document that says what coffee is sold under the name barako in shops, and does not assume it is all Liberica in the botanical sense, or all from Batangas.

The description of its taste is the roadmap's own and is given as that. It is a government planning document's one-line characterisation, not a sensory study.

Harvest

The Statistics Authority's quarterly table shows when the crop is recorded: in 2024 and again in 2025, more than four-fifths of the year's coffee fell in the quarters from October to December and January to March. The roadmap gives one statement of months, for one situation: where farms are planted with wildlings, as in Kalinga in northern Luzon, harvesting is usually from December to March. It also describes how the fruit is picked. Most areas strip the branch, taking red and green cherries together, which it says answers a fear of theft and gives very poor beans; other areas pick only the ripe fruit.

How the coffee is processed

The roadmap says three methods are in use and that the dry or natural process is the most common. Robusta is typically dried in the fruit, and the roadmap says Arabica growers use the same method because there is little good equipment for anything else; it gives no share. The wet process is usually applied to Arabica where it is used: the fruit is pulped, soaked overnight for eight to twelve hours, washed and dried. A semi-washed process is the third, and the roadmap describes both as uncommon but gaining ground. Drying is mostly in the sun, on pavement or on the ground on mats and nets, for anything from two days to two weeks, a practice the roadmap itself says harms the beans. With few pulpers and hullers of their own, farmers generally sun-dry whole cherries and have them milled by local millers.

How it is graded and sold

Very little Philippine coffee is exported, and the roadmap states that the country has been a net importer since 1997. Farmers sell to small processors, large manufacturers and specialty coffee shops. The roadmap names one company, Nestlé Philippines, with a factory in Cagayan de Oro, as the largest local processor of soluble coffee and credits it with 80 per cent of the instant coffee market; it names two other manufacturers after it. It reports imports of unroasted and roasted coffee of about 47,700 tonnes in 2020, up from about 37,200 in 2019, almost all of it unroasted. Those customs figures do not include coffee extracts, so they understate what the country buys. The roadmap gives no grading system for the domestic crop, and says that data from the Statistics Authority and from the industry differ.

Sachets, and a market supplied from abroad

The roadmap puts the country's self-sufficiency in coffee at 15 per cent as of December 2020, and in the same paragraph says about 81 per cent of what it needs is imported; the two do not add up to a hundred and the document does not reconcile them. The USDA's figures give a wider gap still: production of 450,000 bags in 2025/26 against consumption of 6.5 million, about 7 per cent.

What fills the gap is mostly instant coffee. The roadmap says consumption is dominated by soluble coffee, that an Indonesian brand has become a leading name in the single-serve sachet market, that another brand's sachets are made in Thailand, and that imported coffee from Indonesia and Vietnam is a threat to local growers. It records that during the pandemic of 2020 many buyers moved from fresh coffee to instant mixes.

It also gives the reason local supply has not kept up. Production fell from about 72,300 tonnes of dried cherries in 2015 to about 60,600 in 2020, which it puts down to growers moving to other crops, old trees that are not rejuvenated, ageing farmers, scarce certified planting material and limited credit. The Authority's later figures show green coffee production level from 2019 to 2023 and rising in 2024 and 2025.

How coffee is drunk in Philippines

The Philippines drinks far more coffee than it grows, and drinks most of it as instant. The Department of Agriculture's roadmap says Filipinos of every income group are regular coffee drinkers, that the kind most consumed is soluble coffee and single-serve mixes sold in sachets of three, five or seven ingredients at 5 to 12 pesos each, and that these reach buyers through neighbourhood sari-sari stores, small eateries, convenience stores and supermarkets. It describes this as a shift away from nilaga, coffee boiled in the pot, and reports a more recent return of roasted and ground coffee alongside a growing number of coffee shops. On the USDA's estimate for 2025/26 the country consumed 6.5 million bags and produced 450,000.

The description of how coffee is drunk is the Department of Agriculture's, written in 2021 from industry consultations and market research it cites. The two quantities are USDA estimates in 60-kilogram bags for the marketing year from July 2025 to June 2026.

History

The only history CoffeeHQ has read is a trade history of 1922, and it contradicts itself on the beginning. In one place it says Spanish missionaries introduced coffee from Java in 1740; in another, that Spanish missionaries from Mexico are said to have brought it in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It agrees with itself on the rest: cultivation began in Laguna and spread to Batangas and Cavite, the coffee was arabica, and the Philippines became an exporter with buyers in Spain, Britain and Hong Kong. The roadmap adds only that coffee has been grown in the country for four centuries and that the Philippines was once a leading exporter, and gives no dates.

From sixteen million pounds to three thousand

The 1922 trade history gives the size of what was lost. Exports reached their highest point in 1883, at 16,805,000 pounds; a second passage in the same book rounds the figure to 16 million for 1883 and 1884. Then, in its words, the leaf blight appeared about 1889 and caused destruction from which there had been no complete recovery. Exports in 1917 were 3,086 pounds, and the author states elsewhere that the islands had not figured in the international trade since 1892 and had become importers.

He records what followed. The Bureau of Agriculture announced in 1915 that it would try to rebuild the industry, and nothing came of it; later attempts to introduce disease-resisting varieties from Java failed, which he attributes to a lack of interest among growers, a judgement that is his and of its time. In 1920 the area under coffee was 2,700 acres and production 2,710,000 pounds, grown for the home market.

Two limits apply. The history says the blight appeared on the island about 1889 and does not itself tie it to a town; the trading centre it names is printed as Yipa. And it is one book, written by a trade journalist in New York from sources he does not give. CoffeeHQ found no second account of the outbreak in the sources it opened, so it is recorded here on this one. The account is consistent with the shape of the crop today, an arabica export trade then and mostly other kinds of coffee now, and the sources read do not trace the steps between.

Pressures on the sector

• Supply. The country grows a small fraction of what it drinks, and the roadmap records production falling from 2015 to 2020.
• Old trees and ageing farmers, limited rejuvenation, and growers moving to other crops, on the roadmap's account.
• Planting material. The identity of seedlings is often uncertain, and Excelsa and Liberica lack true-to-type stock.
• Harvest and drying practice. Stripping unripe fruit and drying on the ground are both named by the roadmap as causes of poor beans.
• Data. The roadmap says official and industry figures differ, which makes planning difficult.

Institutions worth knowing

• Philippine Statistics Authority: publishes production, area and bearing trees for coffee as a whole and for Arabica, Excelsa, Liberica and Robusta separately, by region and province
• Department of Agriculture, High Value Crops Development Program: the coordinating office of the coffee industry roadmap for 2021 to 2025
• Bureau of Plant Industry: the body the roadmap names as accrediting coffee nurseries, 40 of them in September 2021
• Cavite State University and Benguet State University: named by the roadmap as holding coffee nurseries, and represented on its development team

Explore Philippines'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 1LibericaThe species the name barako is officially attached to, and why its classification changed in 2025.
2. Step 2ExcelsaThe species nearest to the Philippine statistics' Excelsa row, long sold and classified as a kind of Liberica.
3. Step 3RobustaNearly three-quarters of the Philippine crop, and the coffee instant factories buy.
4. Step 4Natural processingThe method the roadmap says is most common in the Philippines, and what drying in the fruit does and does not do.
5. Step 5Coffee pests and diseasesWhat leaf rust is and how it spread through Asia's coffee lands. The 1922 history calls what struck the Philippines about 1889 a leaf blight, does not name the disease, and blames it only in part.
6. Step 6IndonesiaA neighbour whose own entry documents a turn from arabica to robusta after leaf rust, and which the roadmap names as a source of the instant coffee sold in the Philippine market.
7. Step 7VietnamThe other supplier the roadmap names, and the region's largest robusta grower.