Latest update 13 April 2013
When sales and market shares of various certified coffees come out, I try to put them together in a post. Each certification scheme tends to announce them at different times of the year, and provides slightly different data. I’ve decided to put the most salient data together in a table for four of the main coffee certifications with environmental criteria, plus Starbucks CAFE Standards (a third-party verified set of supplier standards), with past data for reference. I’ve standardized the unit to metric tons for easy comparison. Links on the year go to source information, which usually has more detail.
For a little perspective, world production over the last several years has been around 8 million metric tons, and the U.S. imports around 1.5 to 1.6 million metric tons of coffee a year.
| Hectares certified |
Production (metric tons) |
Sales in metric tons (% of production)1 |
|
| Smithsonian Bird-Friendly | 2008: 5000 2010: 7600 2012: 8650 |
2006: 3600 2008: 2700 2010: 4400 2012: 4735 |
2006: 200 (5.5%) 2010: 206 (4.7%) |
| Rainforest Alliance | 2007: 200,000 2009: 305,383 2012: 323,500 |
2006: 27,152 2007: 41,494 2008: 62,296 2009: 168,114 2010: 219,337 2011: 263,000 2012: 375,000 |
2009: 87,583 (52%) 2010: 114,884 (52%) 2011: 129,864 (49%) |
| Organic2 | 2007: 546,541 2008: 463,500 2009: 560,368 2010: 642,833 |
2010: 135,000 | 2006: 30,000 2007: 38,000 2008: 40,000 2009: 42,185 2010: 105,000 |
| Starbucks CAFE Practices3 | 2010: ~435,000 | 2008: 134,000 2009: 136,000 2010: 103,000 2011: 166,468 |
|
| UTZ Certified4 | 2006: 163,300 | 2006: 108,500 2007: 218,358 2008: 308,464 2009: 365,010 2010: 394,003 2011: 476,903 |
2006: 36,000 (33%) 2007: 53,000 (24%) 2008: 77,500 (25%) 2009: 82,000 (22%) 2010: 121,000 (31%) 2011: 132,752 (28%) |
1 Not all coffee produced under certification criteria is sold as certified.
2Amount imported into North America only. The estimate of the amount of organic coffee produced worldwide (under various standards, not just USDA Organic, required for sale in the U.S.) is about 200,000 metric tons. 2010 figures are from the Coffee Barometer 2012 by the Tropical Commodity Coalition.
3 Land area is extrapolated from data in 2011 Ethical Sourcing Factsheet stating that at least 102,000 ha are set aside for conservation on Starbucks’ suppliers farms, and that represents about 23% of total area verified under CAFE Practices.
4 UTZ figures for sales are actually the amount of certified coffee purchased by the first buyer. The amount of coffee sold as UTZ certified is slightly lower, about 10-15% in the years where this data was provided.
Here is more detail on the data that is new to this compilation.
In reporting 2011 results, Rainforest Alliance showed that both sales and production of certified coffee increased, but as the table above shows, the percentage of RA-certified coffee produced that is sold as certified has remained steady at around 50% for several years (I used the larger of two numbers provided on the report for the production figure). The organization also states that RA-certified coffee represents approximately 3.3% of the global market share.
Organic coffee statistics are not centrally aggregated and notoriously hard to parse. Figures on total land in organic coffee come from The World of Organic Agriculture yearbooks (latest are 2010 stats from the 2012 yearbook) based on research by the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL. This report indicates that current land in organic coffee represents about 6.5% of the world’s harvested coffee area, with 93% of organic coffee grown in Peru, Ethiopia, and Mexico.
Starbucks regularly publishes updates to their ethical coffee sourcing program on their web site. Their goal is to source 100% of their coffee through their CAFE Practices supplier guidelines and/or some other third-party certification by 2015, and they are on track by increasing that proportion to 86% of their total purchases in 2011. Their latest coffee report can be downloaded here (PDF).
UTZ accomplishments and data are gleaned from past annual reports, which can be downloaded here.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Thank-you so much for the data and stats. I am impressed by Starbucks transparency in reporting.