India as an origin
India's 2025/26 Crop and What It Means for Contracts
The headline is a record crop. The caveat is that the same rain that produced the estimate also raised disease pressure, and post-blossom estimates in India have missed before.
This page is updated each season. The figures below are for 2025/26.
The headline
The Coffee Board of India's post-blossom estimate for 2025/26 puts production at roughly 403,000 tonnes — about 6.72 million bags — with gains expected across Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
By species:
| Estimate | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Robusta | ~284,000 t | ~70% |
| Arabica | ~118,000 t | ~30% |
Karnataka retained its position as the largest producing and exporting state, at close to 69% of the national crop.
The caveat that matters
A post-blossom estimate is made shortly after flowering, roughly eight months before the harvest is complete. It measures how much fruit set, not how much fruit is picked.
The 2025/26 monsoon was heavy. Chikmagalur received about 28% above average rainfall; Hassan was below average. Excess and continuous rain has raised disease pressure — black rot in arabica, fruit rot in robusta — and that pressure is exactly what converts an optimistic post-blossom number into a smaller actual harvest.
The honest position in August is that the crop looks large and the estimate may not fully materialise. Anyone telling you with confidence which way it lands is guessing.
What it means for a buyer
Volume is unlikely to be the constraint. Even discounted for disease, this is not a short crop. If you have been told Indian coffee is unavailable, that is about a particular quality or certification, not about the origin's total.
Quality differentiation matters more in a big crop. When there is plenty of coffee, the gap between carefully picked, well-dried lots and stripped commodity widens — because in a large crop there is more incentive to pick fast and less to pick well. Buy on specification and a pre-shipment sample, not on the headline.
Wet years favour farms with drying capacity. A grower with covered drying, raised beds and space to spread thin loses far less to a wet December than one drying on an open patio. This is a fair question to ask directly: what drying infrastructure do you have, and what did you lose to rain this season?
Disease pressure shows up in defect counts. Black rot and fruit rot produce damaged beans that should be removed in sorting. In a high-pressure year the difference between a lot that was properly colour-sorted and hand-garbled and one that was not is larger than usual. See defect counting.
Exports
The value picture has moved faster than the volume picture. National coffee exports rose to about USD 2.08 billion in 2025-26 from roughly USD 1.29 billion two years earlier, with Karnataka at about USD 1.4 billion. Exports over April–September 2025 were up 15.5% year on year.
Much of that increase is price rather than volume, which is worth remembering when reading growth figures as evidence of expanding supply.
What to do about it
If you are contracting Indian coffee for the coming year:
- Ask what the farm actually harvested against what it expected.
- Ask what was lost to rot, and how it was sorted out.
- Ask for moisture at shipment in writing, because a wet drying season is precisely when that number drifts.
- Approve a pre-shipment sample. In a difficult year this stops being optional.
Hoysala lost nothing to rain this season.
The harvest calendar sets out when in the year each of these questions is answerable.