Coffee production is the industrial process of converting the raw fruit (the coffee cherry) of the coffee plant into finished coffee beans. About eight months after coffee cherries appear on a coffee plant, the cherries are harvested either by hand or by machine. Then they are, depending on the method, pulped and then dried or simply set out to dry. After this, the beans are stripped of their remaining dry skin and fruit residue. Once they are cleaned, sorted, and graded, they are suitable for distribution. While all green coffee, produced from immature coffee beans, is processed, the method that is used to process coffee varies, and significantly affects the flavor of coffee once it is roasted and brewed. Coffee production is a major source of income for 12.5 million households, most in developing countries.
Producing countries
About 70 countries grow coffee. The two main species are not distributed evenly among them. Latin America produces most of the world's arabica; Asia produces most of its robusta. Africa grows both in roughly equal measure, arabica mainly in the east and robusta across east and west. Brazil, India, Indonesia, Uganda and Vietnam grow both. Most other producing countries grow only one. Arabica accounts for almost 60 per cent of world output, down from about 75 per cent in 1965. Brazil leads arabica production, followed by Colombia, Ethiopia and Honduras; Vietnam leads robusta, followed by Brazil, Indonesia, India and Uganda. Some arabica countries, including Mexico, Nicaragua and Guatemala, have begun growing robusta as well, while Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Madagascar are trying to revive abandoned robusta plantings.
Coffee is priced in categories that combine origin with processing method. The International Coffee Organization's daily indicator prices distinguish four groups: Colombian mild arabicas, other mild arabicas, Brazilian and other natural arabicas, and robustas. The first two are washed coffees, the second of them mainly from Central America.
Picking
A coffee plant usually starts to produce flowers three to four years after it is planted,Coffee Plant coffeeresearch.org Agriculture and it is from these flowers that the fruits of the plant (commonly known as coffee cherries) appear, with the first useful harvest possible around five years after planting. The cherries ripen around eight months after the emergence of the flower, by changing color from green to red, and it is at this time that they should be harvested. In most coffee-growing countries, there is one major harvest a year; though in countries like Colombia, where there are two flowerings a year, there is a main and secondary crop. The main Colombian harvest runs from October to December, and the secondary or mitaca crop from April to June.
In most countries, the coffee crop is picked by hand, a labor-intensive and difficult process, though in places like Brazil, where the landscape is relatively flat and the coffee fields are immense, the process has been mechanized. Whether picked by hand or by machine, all coffee is harvested in one of two ways:
Strip picked All coffee fruit is removed from the tree, regardless of maturation state. This can either be done by machine or by hand. In the first method, pickers generally place a canvas on the ground. They then grab the branch next to the trunk with their hands and pull outward, knocking all of the fruit onto the ground. After doing this with all branches and trees for the length of the canvas, the pickers then collect the coffee in bags. This process can be facilitated through the use of mechanical strippers.
Selectively picked Only the ripe cherries are harvested and they are picked individually by hand. Pickers rotate among the trees every eight to ten days, choosing only the cherries which are at the peak of ripeness. Because this kind of harvest is labor-intensive, and thus more costly, it is used primarily to harvest the finer arabica beans.
Pickers may be told to leave green cherries on the tree, since the seed inside is not yet fully formed. The International Trade Centre holds that the best quality comes from selective picking, taking only red, ripe cherries by hand over successive rounds until most of the crop is in. Stripping is faster — a picker can harvest three to four times as much in a day — but takes ripe and unripe fruit together. Workers who pick coffee by hand are generally paid a piece rate based on the weight or volume of cherries collected, or a daily wage.
Holdings of under two hectares make up about 80 per cent of the world's coffee farms and produce some 60 per cent of the crop; the rest comes in roughly equal parts from estates of more than fifty hectares and from medium-sized farms of five to fifty. Alongside the growers themselves, an estimated 100 million people are employed seasonally on coffee farms and in downstream processing and trade.
Piecework and daily payment predominate on Colombian farms. In a 2016 survey of 7,578 coffee pickers by the National Federation of Coffee Growers, half were paid by the kilogram collected, 37.5 percent received a daily wage, 11 percent were unpaid family workers and 1.5 percent were employees; piecework rates ranged from US$0.02 to US$0.21 per kilogram and the average daily wage was US$6.70, with men earning about 12 percent more than women.
Smallholders in Ethiopia and Uganda mostly hire casual labor paid by task or piece rate during the harvest peak, and what a picker earns in a day depends not only on the rate but on how much ripe fruit the trees carry. Harvesters at sites dominated by Fairtrade-certified producers in those two countries received piece rates about 20 percent lower than elsewhere and earned less per day. On farms in Latin America, piece rates are often combined with production quotas for tasks such as weeding and fertilizing. Hired labor is needed across the season rather than only at harvest, for pruning and weeding as well as picking, and it has to be paid before the crop is sold; growers without access to credit are correspondingly constrained in how much help they can take on, and families short of labor tend to use herbicides and pesticides in place of hand weeding. The labor-rights organization Verité has argued that piece-rate pay does not guarantee the legal minimum wage, and that where controls are weak it goes together with unpaid overtime and with child labor, as families bring children to the fields to meet quotas.
The United States Department of Labor's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, in its edition of 5 September 2024, lists coffee from seventeen countries; Brazilian and Ivorian coffee are listed for forced labor as well as child labor. The International Labour Organization and UNICEF estimated that about 138 million children were in child labor worldwide in 2024, 61 per cent of them in agriculture. A social life cycle assessment of primary coffee production in Brazil identified child labor as one of the sector's principal social risks, alongside low trade union density, long working hours and wages close to the cost of living. Its authors treated their estimate as an indicator of structural risk, derived from national employment statistics, and not as a count of children working in coffee. In June 2024 the ILO, with the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Trade Centre and UNICEF, launched an EU-funded project, CLEAR Supply Chains, which addresses the causes of child labor in the coffee supply chains of Honduras, Uganda and Vietnam through area-based interventions rather than farm-level auditing alone.
A 2020 International Labour Organization study of five major producing countries found that coffee workers earned less than the national average wage, and less than the average agricultural wage, in every country examined. Median monthly earnings for employees were roughly US$20 in Ethiopia, $76 in Indonesia, $110 in India, $116 in Vietnam and $350 in Costa Rica, in 2020 dollars. An estimated 45 percent of coffee employees in Costa Rica and 91 percent in Indonesia earned less than the legal minimum wage; Ethiopia has no minimum wage. Women earned substantially less than men. In a 2025 focus-group study of workers on specialty coffee farms in Honduras and El Salvador, participants said their daily wages were no higher, and sometimes lower, than on conventional farms, though longer periods of employment could raise their annual income. Several complained that the price premiums growers received for specialty coffee were not passed on to workers.
The seed inside an unripe cherry is not fully formed, so lots that include unripe fruit yield more defective beans. Immature or drought-affected coffee produces quakers, pale yellow beans with little or no grain, which affect the quality of the cup. Most can be removed in the washing channel. Modern equipment can separate ripe, unripe and overripe cherries reasonably well, so that each can be processed separately.
Wet process
In the "wet process", the fruit covering the coffee beans is removed before they are dried. It is one of the three traditional processing methods, alongside the natural or dry process and the pulped natural or honey process, and the coffee it yields is called washed. The International Trade Centre describes the washed method as the most common of the three and as often producing the highest quality, while noting that it demands considerable skill and a great deal of water.
Before pulping, the fruit is cleaned and graded. Winnowing removes dust, leaves and stems by airflow, perforated screens sift out material larger or smaller than the cherries, and hydraulic separation in water divides the crop by density. Flotation sorts by weight rather than by ripeness. What rises is light material: leaves and twigs, cherries that dried on the tree, some overripe fruit, and fruit of any ripeness left underweight by pests, disease or poor development of the bean. Unripe and semi-ripe cherries generally sink, along with stones. Pulping then separates the pulp from the parchment coffee, using disc, drum or screen pulpers, some of which also sort out unripe cherries.
The bean still carries a good deal of pulp. This is removed either by the classic ferment-and-wash method or by mechanical demucilaging, also called machine-assisted wet processing or aquapulping. Mechanical demucilators work by friction, between the beans and against the metal parts of the machine, with a little water added to lubricate and carry the mucilage away; they need less labor and less water than washing in tanks or channels.
In the ferment-and-wash method of wet processing, the remainder of the pulp is removed by breaking down the cellulose by fermenting the beans with microbes and then washing them with large amounts of water. Fermentation can be done with extra water or, in "dry fermentation", in the fruit's own juices only. The two give noticeably different results, underwater fermentation being said to emphasize acidity and aroma and to suppress some astringency.
How much oxygen the fermentation gets is a further variable. In the Indonesian Labu method the pulped fruit is sealed into polypropylene bags with as much air as possible expelled, so that anaerobic organisms dominate and produce secondary metabolites unlike those of an open tank; fermentation takes correspondingly longer and the bags must be turned. The cup is described as tasting of wild red fruit, with a sharp acidity. The authors of The Craft and Science of Coffee draw an explicit parallel with winemaking, where fermentation is likewise decisive, and suggest coffee has yet to follow it in replacing simple tanks with vessels in which temperature, pH, oxygen and microbiota are all controlled.