Green beans leave Brazil. The cup, the machine and the brand are usually made somewhere else.
From 11 to 13 November 2026 Belo Horizonte hosted the 14th Semana Internacional do Café (SIC), the International Coffee Week, at the Expominas exhibition centre. The theme was "On the eve of 300 years of coffee in Brazil: building the next global agenda". Coffee arrived in Brazil in 1727, in the northern state of Pará. The anniversary falls next year, and the fair opened the celebrations.
Minas Gerais, the state that hosts the fair, is Brazil's largest coffee producer: a study by Sistema Faemg Senar, the state's farmers' federation and rural training service, projects a record 33.4 million bags of arabica in Minas this year (a bag, or saca, is the trade unit: 60 kilos of green coffee). From January to May 2026 Brazil sold coffee to 114 countries. Yet from January to August, roasted and ground coffee was 0.2% of Brazil's coffee exports. Almost everything leaves the country as green beans and is roasted somewhere else, much of it in Europe.
The full article explains why that figure is less of a scandal than it looks, what is changing in the coming months (the trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur, the European deforestation regulation, a free certification platform built by Minas Gerais), and what it means for European companies on both sides of the roaster.