A year on a coffee tree. And still not a kilo.
Pick up a 1 kg bag and it feels like nothing much. A tree spent a year on this. Then most of the weight disappeared before it ever reached a roaster.
How many coffee plants does it take to make 1 kg of roasted coffee? A useful benchmark is about 1.3 mature trees’ annual production. Think one to two trees for a year. A poorer year, or a lighter-cropping tree, can push it past two.
Start with the tree, not the bag
The National Coffee Association puts an average tree at 10 lb of cherries a year, which becomes 2 lb of green beans. In metric, that is about 4.54 kg of fruit and 907 g of unroasted coffee.
Green is the important word. That coffee has not been roasted yet.
The maths behind a kilo
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization puts average roasting weight loss at 16%. Apply that to the tree above:
- 907 g green coffee × 0.84 ≈ 762 g roasted coffee per tree per year.
- 1,000 g ÷ 762 g ≈ 1.3 trees’ annual production.
Farms differ. This is a yardstick from those two sources, not a count of the trees behind any one FARCOFF bag.
Why does so much fruit become so little coffee?
Coffee beans are seeds inside a fruit called a coffee cherry. Processing strips the fruit and the skins. Drying takes the water. Roasting takes still more weight.
The FAO’s processing example converts 249.5 kg of fresh cherries into 45.4 kg of dry polished beans: roughly 5.5 kg of cherries for 1 kg of green coffee. Add the roast loss and you need about 6.5 kg of fresh cherries for 1 kg of roasted coffee. Darker roasts lose a little more. Wet and dry processing don’t land on the same number either.
That familiar bag on the kitchen bench started as a lot more fruit than it looks.
Why there isn’t one answer for every farm
Variety matters. World Coffee Research’s variety catalogue rates yield as low, medium, high or very high, and notes that pruning to multiple stems changes how much a tree can carry. Weather, soil, water and how the farm is run matter too.
A tree yielding 500 g roasted in a year would take two tree-years to supply a kilo. At 750 g, it is about 1.3. At 1 kg, it is one. That is the shape of the sum — not a promise that a pot on the patio will fill a bag.
And the tree needs years to get started
The National Coffee Association places first fruit at around three years and full production at around five. A seedling is a long-term project, not next month’s coffee supply.
The bag we open in seconds is growing seasons, and the work of people who turn a fruit into something we look forward to every morning.
Next time you fill the grinder, take a second to picture the tree.
Want that in a cup? Explore FARCOFF coffees, or see how many coffees a 1 kg bag makes.