The United States “produces less than 1% of all coffee consumed domestically, with farmers in Hawaii and Puerto Rico growing coffee in America” — that is the National Coffee Association’s own wording. The whole US crop is the Hawaii crop as far as federal statistics go: USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service forecast 17.8 million pounds on a cherry basis for the 2025-2026 season, equal to 3.28 million pounds of green coffee, from 6,500 bearing acres. The interesting thing about American coffee is not its volume. It is that Hawaii has real, enforceable legal protection for its place names, which almost no other origin does — and that protection is about to get much stricter.
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.
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The economic figures on this page were wrong, and here is exactly how
An earlier version of this page carried this breakdown:
- Direct impact (Sales): $225 billion
- Indirect impact (Supply Chain): $28 billion
- Induced impact (Spending by Industry Employees): $64 billion
It then said “that’s a staggering $317 billion”, and attributed the underlying research to “a 2015 study by the Specialty Coffee Association of America” showing the coffee industry “was responsible for approximately 1.6% of the U.S. gross domestic product”. Four things are wrong there.
One: the $225 billion is a total, not a direct impact. The National Coffee Association states that “the total economic impact of the coffee industry in the United States in 2022 was $343.2 billion, up 52.4% since 2015”. Divide 343.2 by 1.524 and the 2015 total comes out at $225.2 billion. That is where the number came from. Stacking $28 billion and $64 billion on top of a figure that already includes indirect and induced effects counts the same activity two and three times.
Two: the page’s own numbers were mutually inconsistent. Take its 1.6 per cent of GDP at face value and work backwards. If $225 billion is 1.6 per cent, US GDP would be $14.1 trillion. If $317 billion is 1.6 per cent, US GDP would be $19.8 trillion. The page’s two headline figures imply two American economies $5.7 trillion apart, which is a way of saying that at least one of them does not belong to the same study as the percentage.
Three: it was not an SCAA study. The NCA says plainly that “in 2023, the National Coffee Association published its first update since 2015 to the NCA U.S. Coffee Economic Impact Report (independently produced by Technomic)”. The 2015 research and the 2023 update are both the NCA’s, carried out by the consultancy Technomic.
Four: 1.6 per cent is superseded. The NCA’s own U.S. Coffee Impact Report highlights sheet, dated October 2023, gives the current figure as “Overall, 1.3% of the U.S. economy”.
The figures that survive scrutiny, all from that sheet and the NCA’s economic impact page, are these: $343 billion in economic output in 2022, 2.2 million-plus US jobs, $101.2 billion in wages, $38 billion in federal, state and local taxes, 1.3 per cent of the US economy, 8 per cent of the US food service sector, and consumer spending of “nearly $301 million on coffee and related goods every day, that’s $110 billion per year”.
Three more corrections
“Over 6.8 million pounds of green coffee in 2021” is not in the USDA record. NASS publishes Hawaii coffee on three bases — cherry, parchment and green — and the green series for every season we could open runs well below that: 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), 4.144 million in 2022-2023, 3.440 million in 2023-2024, 4.208 million in 2024-2025 and 3.280 million forecast for 2025-2026 — as published or revised in the January 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions of the report. The nearest figure of any kind to 6.8 million is the parchment basis in 2021-2022, at 6.510 million pounds — a different measure of a different thing.
The regional flavour table is gone. It gave Hawaii “smooth, sweet, slightly fruity”, California “fruity, nutty, chocolaty”, Puerto Rico “full-bodied, subtly sweet” and Florida, which it admitted was a new entrant, “still exploring flavor possibilities” — a tasting note for coffee the page had just said barely exists. Nobody at this site has tasted any of them.
Florida and California are not in the federal production record. USDA’s coffee report covers Hawaii, and its “United States” row is identical to its “Hawaii” row in every column of every edition we opened — bearing acreage, yield, production, price and value. The NCA names Hawaii and Puerto Rico as the places “growing coffee in America”. Small plantings elsewhere may well exist; what does not exist is a federal series recording them, so this page no longer describes a Californian or Floridian coffee industry as though one had been measured.
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 forecast | 6,500 | 17.85 million lb | 3.28 million lb | $41.6 million |
From NASS Coffee, released 23 January 2026. The direction of travel is down: bearing acreage has fallen 900 acres in two seasons, and the 2025-2026 crop is “down 20 percent from the previous season” on a yield of 2,800 pounds of cherry per acre, 810 pounds lower than the year before. Green coffee prices moved the other way, from $19.50 a pound in 2023-2024 to $25.40 in 2024-2025 and $24.00 forecast for 2025-2026.
Why the word Kona is legally different from the word Colombian
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 about the 2023 labelling rules — we checked, and the release does not carry the fifty-one per cent figure or the 2027 date at all. 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.
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 growing districts the old page struggled to list are enumerated by the state itself, in a rule about what you may not print on a sack.
Species grown, and what is worth reading next
The old page claimed Liberica and Excelsa were “being experimented with in some farms” in the US. Neither USDA’s Hawaii coffee reports nor Hawaii’s own grade rules mention either species, and the naming is out of date in any case: 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.
