Brazil’s Coffee Exports: How Data Reveals New Opportunities

For anyone tracking Brazil coffee exports, the opening months of 2026 delivered both a warning and a clue about where the market may be heading next. Datamar’s DataLiner shows coffee bean shipments fell 33.2% year on year in January and February, to 14,886 TEUs. Yet the more revealing story sits inside the breakdown: Germany displaced the United States as the top destination, Santos still handled nearly 80% of outbound cargo, and soluble coffee remained strategically relevant despite a weaker start to the year. Rather than signaling a simple downturn, the data points to a market being reshaped by trade policy, logistics constraints and a growing search for higher-value export strategies.

Chart 1 – Coffee Beans Exports | Jan 2023 – Feb 2026 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

Data shows Brazil’s coffee market is shifting

The first message in the DataLiner figures is that Brazil’s export slowdown is far from uniform. Germany imported 2,197 TEUs of Brazilian coffee beans in January-February 2026, down just 0.2% from a year earlier. The United States, by contrast, imported 1,777 TEUs, a drop of 50.1%. Italy fell 9.8% to 1,438 TEUs, while Japan, Belgium, Turkey, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and the United Kingdom all remained important destinations, though with steeper declines. That pattern matters because it suggests Brazil’s coffee trade is being redistributed across markets, not weakening at the same pace everywhere.

Table 1 – Top Coffee Export Destinations

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

That reading fits the broader supply backdrop. USDA’s Brasília office projected Brazil’s 2025/26 coffee crop at 65 million 60-kilogram bags, with arabica facing pressure from drought, irregular rainfall and high temperatures, while robusta/conilon output was expected to improve. Conab, in turn, said Brazil exported coffee to 156 countries in 2025 and that Germany had already overtaken the United States as the leading destination that year. In other words, the country entered 2026 with both a different crop profile and a changing trade map.

Even so, the United States remains too important to ignore. USDA data show that Brazil accounted for 35% of U.S. unroasted coffee imports in 2023, making it the largest single supplier to the American market. USDA also describes the United States as the world’s largest single-country coffee-consuming market. That helps answer one of the most common questions around the sector: roughly a third of U.S. unroasted coffee imports come from Brazil, which is precisely why trade-policy shocks there ripple so quickly through Brazil’s export mix.

A close look at today's data suggests that, while the United States remains a key trading partner, Brazil’s coffee trade is increasingly shifting toward more resilient buyers, especially in Europe. Germany’s near-stable performance at the start of 2026 is the clearest sign of that adjustment.

Santos still dominates the trade, and that concentration carries a cost

The second major message derived from DataLiner data is the cost of logistical concentration. Santos handled 11,881 TEUs of Brazilian coffee bean exports in January-February 2026, equivalent to 79.81% of the total. Rio de Janeiro came a distant second with 2,451 TEUs, or 16.46%, followed by Itaguaí with 451 TEUs, or 3.03%. All other ports were marginal by comparison. For Brazil’s coffee exporters, that means a single gateway still carries most of the trade.

Table 2 – Coffee Export Ports by Market Share

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

That concentration matters because delays at Santos quickly become a sector-wide problem. Cecafé says the industry incurred R$66.1 million in additional logistics costs in 2025, driven by factors such as extra warehousing, pre-stacking and detentions. The association also says 55% of vessels faced delays or schedule changes during the year, while an average of 1,824 stuffed coffee containers per month failed to ship, equal to roughly 602,000 bags. For an export chain that depends heavily on container logistics, those disruptions are no longer a side issue. They are part of the competitiveness equation.

The good news is that the public-sector response is becoming more concrete. In March 2026, the Ministry of Ports and Airports opened a public consultation on the concession of the Santos access channel, a 25-year project that foresees R$688 million in investments. The plan includes deepening the channel to 16 meters within three years and to 17 meters within six, along with maintenance dredging, upgraded nautical signaling and a vessel traffic management system. Months earlier, in August 2025, the ministry and the Santos Port Authority launched rock-removal works in the navigation channel, the first step toward deeper draft and larger-vessel access. On the container side, the federal government also advanced STS 10, a terminal project designed to add four berths and raise Santos’s installed container capacity by about 50%, to 9 million containers per year.

Santos remains indispensable to Brazil’s coffee exports, but the official project pipeline now reflects an understanding that congestion is no longer just an operational headache. It is a structural constraint on trade growth. When nearly four out of every five coffee-export TEUs move through one port, infrastructure policy becomes export policy.

Soluble coffee may be smaller, but it points to a higher-value path

DataLiner shows Brazil exported 1,754 TEUs of soluble coffee in January-February 2026, down 21.6% year on year. The same Datamar brief shows 2025 soluble coffee exports at 11,225 TEUs, down 16.1% from the previous year. On the surface, those numbers do not look like a growth story. But they become more meaningful when read alongside the wider industry picture.

Chart 3 – Soluble Coffee Exports | Jan 2023 – Fev 2026 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

ABICS said Brazilian soluble coffee exports rose 1.3% in volume and 45.2% in value in the first half of 2025. The Agriculture Ministry’s latest coffee trade report said Brazil’s soluble coffee exports reached a record US$1.09 billion in 2025. DatamarNews also reported that Nestlé Brasil expects soluble coffee shipments from Brazil to rise 27% in 2026, supported by lower green coffee prices and firmer demand abroad. Those developments do not erase the weaker TEU performance at the start of 2026, but they do reinforce the segment’s strategic importance.

That matters because soluble coffee gives Brazil a clearer route to value-added growth. In a market where green-coffee margins can narrow quickly and logistics risks remain high, a stronger processed-coffee export base helps the country capture more value beyond the farm gate. The immediate volumes may still be smaller than green coffee, but the commercial logic is stronger than ever: product upgrading is becoming one of the most plausible ways to grow export earnings without depending solely on raw-volume expansion.

Why Brazil exports so much coffee

Brazil exports so much coffee because its leadership is structural, not cyclical. Federal government sources say the country has been the world’s largest coffee producer and exporter for nearly two centuries. USDA’s latest outlook likewise keeps Brazil comfortably ahead of rivals in global output. That scale is reinforced by geographic diversity, a sophisticated commercial network and the ability to serve different quality profiles and product categories.

Datamar’s own figures show how deep that export structure runs. In the 12-month real cargo owner ranking, Cooxupé leads with 14,562 TEUs, followed by Louis Dreyfus Company Brasil with 10,840, Olam Agri with 10,054, EISA with 5,989 and NKG Stockler with 5,415. That is more than a list of major shippers. It hints at a mature export ecosystem that combines cooperatives, multinational traders and specialized merchants, helping explain why Brazil remains one of the leading coffee exporters in the world year after year.

Coffee’s importance to Brazil goes far beyond trade volumes

Coffee is also far more important to Brazil’s economy than export tonnage alone would suggest. Conab says the country’s coffee exports generated a record US$16.1 billion in 2025. Government materials also say the coffee chain supports around 8 million jobs and that 72% of coffee producers are smallholders and family farmers. That makes coffee not only a major source of foreign exchange, but also a broad-based source of employment, income and rural economic activity.

Its historical role is just as significant. Brazil has been the world’s largest coffee producer and exporter for almost two centuries. That is one of the clearest answers to another common reader question: Brazil helped expand the modern world coffee economy by making large-scale, reliable coffee supply a permanent feature of global trade. Coffee was not just one of Brazil’s major exports; it was one of the commodities through which the country helped shape the global market itself.

What trade data says about the next phase of growth

Taken together, the DataLiner figures point to three strategic conclusions. First, destination diversification matters more when the U.S. market is still essential but more volatile. Second, logistics resilience can no longer be treated as a back-office matter when Santos handles nearly 80% of Brazil’s coffee-export TEUs. Third, value-added segments such as soluble coffee are likely to become more important as exporters look for ways to defend margins and expand earnings.

That is the real opportunity hidden inside a weaker start to 2026. Brazil’s coffee export market is not simply losing momentum. It is revealing where the next openings are likely to emerge: in a more balanced destination mix, in a less fragile logistics chain and in a stronger industrial strategy built around higher-value products. That is also why proprietary trade intelligence matters. It does not just show where the market has been. It helps show where the market is moving next.

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