In USDA’s annual coffee report the whole US crop is Hawaii’s: 20.2 million pounds of cherry, about 3.9 million pounds green, from 6,500 bearing acres in 2025-26. Hawaii’s state law lets a blend carry the Kona name with as little as 10 percent Kona coffee if the label says so; the state minimum becomes 51 percent on 1 July 2027.
The National Coffee Association puts it this way: the United States “produces less than 1% of all coffee consumed domestically, with farmers in Hawaii and Puerto Rico growing coffee in America” (NCA). USDA’s annual coffee report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service counts Hawaii only (table below); Puerto Rico’s crop is recorded separately, in the Census of Agriculture. What makes American coffee interesting is not its volume but the legal protection Hawaii gives its place names, which is about to get stricter.
Table of Contents
Hawaii coffee, as USDA counts it
| Season | Bearing acres | Utilized production, cherry basis | Green basis | Value of utilized production |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-2024 | 7,400 | 19.21 million lb | 3.44 million lb | $48.2 million |
| 2024-2025 | 7,000 | 22.37 million lb | 4.21 million lb | $53.0 million |
| 2025-2026 | 6,500 | 20.19 million lb | 3.93 million lb | $46.4 million |
From NASS Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts 2025 Summary, May 2026, which replaced the January forecast (NASS Coffee, 23 January 2026). The direction of travel is down: bearing acreage has fallen 900 acres in two seasons, and 2025-2026 utilized production is about 10 percent below the previous season, on a yield of 3,190 pounds of cherry per acre, 420 pounds lower than the year before. Green coffee prices rose from $19.50 a pound in 2023-2024 to $25.40 in 2024-2025, then fell back to $19.60 in 2025-2026.
Before the table’s first season, the green series was 5.120 million pounds in 2019-2020, 4.312 million in 2020-2021, 5.208 million in 2021-2022 (later revised to 5.191 million) and 4.144 million in 2022-2023, as published or revised in the January 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions of NASS Coffee and the May 2026 NASS summary. NASS publishes Hawaii coffee on cherry, parchment and green bases; the parchment basis in 2021-2022 was 6.510 million pounds, a different measure.
What a Kona label has to say
Hawaii regulates coffee origin claims by statute, at section 486-120.6 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes. The Hawaii Department of Agriculture summarises the current rule this way: “Hawaiian coffee product blends with non-Hawaiian coffee must be made from at least ten percent Hawaiʻi-grown” coffee to carry a Hawaii geographic origin. A bag labelled Kona can therefore be nine parts something else — which is precisely why the label has to say so.
The Hawaiian Coffee Labeling Act, Act 211 of 2023, took effect on 1 July 2024 and, in the department’s words, “will apply to all coffee product inventory sold to the public or displayed at retail stores in Hawaiʻi”. Its requirements, in the department’s own list:
- The front label identity statement must disclose “the location source and weight percentage for all coffee beans contained in the product”, for beans, roasted coffee and instant coffee.
- “Percentage weight of foreign coffee content may be aggregated. e.g: 10% Hawaiʻi coffee blend and contains 90% foreign-grown coffee.”
- Ready-to-drink coffee beverages, single-serve packaging and bulk packaging all have to carry origin and percentage information.
- “Origin and percentage information shall be displayed on the front label in a font size at least half of the font size of the identity statement.”
From 1 July 2027 a fifty-one per cent floor applies. That later threshold comes from Act 198 of 2024, not from Act 211 of 2023 which set the labelling rules above, and it governs what a blend may claim on its label rather than dictating a recipe. The statutory language is that roasted coffee, instant coffee and ready-to-drink coffee beverages containing Hawaiʻi-grown and Hawaiʻi-processed coffee blended with coffee of another regional origin may not be labelled with the Hawaiʻi geographic origin unless at least fifty-one per cent by weight comes from it, with an exemption for retailers who do not package the product themselves. That wording is in the statute as amended, not in the department’s news release on the 2023 labelling rules: we checked, and the release does not carry the fifty-one percent figure or the 2027 date. That is a five-fold increase in the minimum, and it is the single most consequential fact about buying Hawaiian coffee in the next two years.
In November 2025 Congress added a federal provision. Section 778 of Public Law 119-37, approved on 12 November 2025, reads: “For purposes of applying the Federal Food Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 301 et seq.), Hawaii grown or produced coffee shall contain at least 51 percent of coffee grown in Kona, Kau, Maui, Oahu, Kauai, or other areas of the State of Hawaii”, and it sets the common names by region as “Kona Coffee, Kau Coffee, Maui Coffee, Oahu Coffee, Kauai Coffee, or Hawaii Coffee”. It sits in the fiscal year 2026 agriculture and FDA appropriations act (Division B, Title VII), and we have found no source that says how long it applies, so this page quotes it and stops there.
Enforcement is the honest caveat. Announcing the 2024 rules, department chairperson Sharon Hurd said: “Unfortunately, the law did not provide for additional inspection staff so enforcement of the new law will be a challenge given the other statutory responsibilities of the branch,” and added: “However, the department will increase inspection of retail shelves statewide and may have to rely on complaint-driven enforcement for the immediate future.” A strong law with thin inspection is still better than no law, but a label is not a laboratory result.
Kona Extra Fancy is a size, not a score
Hawaii’s green coffee grades are set in Hawaii Administrative Rules chapter 4-143, and the department’s summary table makes the basis of the grades explicit. Every grade name exists in parallel for each origin — Hawaii, Hawaii Island, Kauai, Kona, Maui, Molokai and Oahu — and the criteria are physical.
| Grade | Minimum size, Type I | Minimum size, Type II | Full imperfections per 300 g |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kona Extra Fancy | Size 19 | Size 13 | 8 |
| Kona Fancy | Size 18 | Size 12 | 12 |
| Kona No. 1 | Size 16 | Size 10 | 18 |
| Kona Select | optional | optional | 5% defective beans |
| Kona Prime | optional | optional | 15% defective beans |
Moisture must be 9 to 12 per cent for all five, cleanliness must be “clean”, and the top three grades additionally require “uniformly good green” colour and “good” roasting quality. That is the whole basis of the grade: screen size, defect count, moisture, colour and a pass on roast. There is no cup score anywhere in the table, and no grade in it means “tastes better” — the same point our page on Kenyan coffee grading makes about letter grades.
Two footnotes on that table are worth knowing as a buyer. “Offgrade” means quality lower than Hawaii No. 3, and “Use of the term Hawaii in conjunction with the term Offgrade is prohibited”. Likewise the place names — Hamakua, Kau, Kauai, Kona, Maui, Molokai and Oahu — may not be used together with “No. 3” or “Off Grade”. So the state itself lists the growing districts, in a rule about what you may not print on a sack.
Species grown, and what is worth reading next
Neither USDA’s Hawaii coffee reports nor Hawaii’s own grade rules mention Liberica or Excelsa, and the naming is also out of date: Davis and colleagues split Coffea liberica into three species in 2025, so excelsa is properly C. dewevrei and is Central African rather than American. Our pages on liberica and excelsa cover that split. What Hawaii demonstrably grows is arabica, and the state’s grade rules are written for it.
Coffee beyond Hawaii
Hawaii’s 3.93 million pounds of green coffee is a rounding error against the world’s major producing regions: in South America, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador together produce 47.7 percent of the world’s coffee, led by Brazil; Central America is mostly arabica, with washed processing usual in several of its countries, and led by Honduras; and Asia is 89 per cent robusta, grown mostly in Vietnam and Indonesia.
The US as a roasting market
Growing is not the same as roasting, and the United States has been a large roasting and packaging market for far longer than it has been a growing one. Arbuckle Bros. of Brooklyn was running a plant with capacity for 8,000 to 9,000 bags a day when William H. Ukers wrote All About Coffee in 1922, and its high-grade packaged brand, Yuban, launched in 1913 and is still on supermarket shelves today under different ownership.
The National Coffee Association’s U.S. Coffee Impact Report highlights sheet, dated October 2023, puts the industry’s economic output at $343 billion in 2022, with 2.2 million-plus US jobs, $101.2 billion in wages, $38 billion in federal, state and local taxes, and 1.3 per cent of the US economy and 8 per cent of the US food service sector. On the NCA’s economic impact page, consumer spending is “nearly $301 million on coffee and related goods every day, that’s $110 billion per year”.
Corrections: This page overstated Hawaii’s green coffee output and double-counted the industry’s economic impact. It also described Californian and Floridian coffee industries that no federal series records, and gave South America a share that belongs to four countries.
