The short version. In the 2004/05 crop year Zambia exported 6,654 tonnes of green coffee, on the Zambia Coffee Growers Association's own count. In 2015 it exported 180. That is a fall of ninety-seven per cent inside a decade, driven by a world price crash, interest rates that made irrigated estates impossible to finance, and the shutdown of the state plantation at Kasama that had grown a third of the crop. Then a Singapore agribusiness bought the dead estates, spent more than US$70 million replanting them, and by 2019 the country was shipping close to 2,000 tonnes again. We cannot think of another coffee origin that lost almost everything and rebuilt inside the specialty era, and here is what happened, including the reasons it might not hold.
Six thousand six hundred and fifty-four tonnes. One hundred and eighty tonnes. Those two numbers, ten years apart, are the whole story of Zambian coffee, and the second one is the reason almost nobody outside the country has tasted it.
A late start
Coffee is not old in Zambia. British settlers tried Bourbon seed from Kenya and Tanzania around Lusaka in the 1950s and the trees did poorly in the soil and climate there. After independence in 1964 the government moved its attention north, to the wetter, higher plateau of the Northern Province, and in the 1970s a World Bank-backed scheme planted the first commercial estates at Kateshi and Ngoli near Kasama, with a smallholder programme around them modelled on Kenya's grading and classification system.
The numbers from that period are small enough to fit in a sentence. Between 1982 and 1985 national production rose from 71 tonnes to 380 as the first plantings came into bearing. In 1984 the International Coffee Organization granted Zambia an export quota of 350 tonnes. In 1985 the country exported coffee for the first time.
The rise
From there the crop grew for twenty years. Private estates opened in the north and around Lusaka, Mazabuka and Serenje. By the early 2000s Zambia was producing just under 7,000 tonnes a year. The peak, by the ZCGA's count of exports, was the 2004/05 crop year at 6,654 tonnes of green coffee, almost all of it going to Europe, South Africa and the United States. The Kasama plantation, by then trading as the Kasama Coffee Company, was growing about one-third of the roughly 6,000 tonnes the country turned out in 2004, a production figure that sits a little below the export peak because the two are counted in different seasons by different bodies.
At that size Zambia was still a small origin, a rounding error next to Ethiopia or Uganda. But it was a real one, with an association, a grading system, a quota history and a reputation among the importers who bothered to look: a clean, full-bodied, mild-acidity East African cup that did not taste like Kenya.
The collapse
Three things hit at once, and the sources disagree about their weights, so we will give all three.
The first was price. Between 1998 and 2004 the world coffee market went through the worst crash in its modern history, driven by oversupply from Brazil and Vietnam. The International Coffee Organization's composite indicator price averaged 109 US cents a pound in 1998 and had fallen below 48 cents by 2002. That is under the cost of production for most growers on earth. A Zambian estate, irrigated and mechanised and carrying debt in a high-interest currency, could not survive several years of selling below cost the way a Ugandan smallholder with a few trees behind the house could.
The second was money. Every account of the period from inside the industry comes back to the same phrase: no affordable long-term finance. Teija Lublinkhof, then chair of the ZCGA and herself a grower, told a Lusaka interviewer in 2011 that farm closures caused by the lack of it had taken output from 1,643 tonnes in 2009 to 1,250 in 2010, and that the season just ended had delivered 736 tonnes of exportable coffee against a projection of 2,200. Estates with dams, canals and pivots need capital between harvests. Zambian lending rates in those years made that capital ruinous. Commercial bank lending rates peaked at 33 per cent in January 2006 on the Bank of Zambia's series and averaged around 25 per cent over the twelve years that followed.
The third was Kasama itself. The state coffee company, which had been privatised and renamed along the way, folded. NCCL's deputy general manager, who had worked the plantation for more than thirty years, later told the Times of Zambia that farming had been abandoned in the north when disease destroyed the crop. A University of Zambia history thesis on the two estates puts the failure down to management under state control. Both can be true. When the largest single grower stops picking, the national number falls off a cliff.
The bottom came in 2015. One hundred and eighty tonnes. In bags, the unit the trade counts in, about 3,000.
The comeback
The turn began before the bottom. In 2011 the Zambian government put US$4 million into the moribund plantation, rebranded as the Northern Coffee Corporation, with a plan to replant 500 hectares. In 2012 Olam International, the Singapore agribusiness, bought the estates outright and took the name with it.
What followed was replanting on a scale the country had never seen. By 2015 the company reported more than US$30 million invested and 1,300 hectares under coffee on four estates. By 2022 it reported more than US$70 million and about 2,171 hectares on five, with dams, canals and reservoirs to irrigate them. By 2023 ofi, the Olam food-ingredients arm that now runs the estates, was describing five and a half million trees, about 3,000 year-round staff and more than 15,000 people at harvest.
The exports followed the trees. Lublinkhof told Perfect Daily Grind that the country shipped almost 2,000 tonnes of green coffee in 2019, ten times the 2015 figure.
And the quality followed the exports. A naturally processed lot from the Ngoli estate won Zambia's Taste of Harvest competition in 2019 and placed second at the African regional round against the best lots from every other producing country on the continent. A year earlier, on 28 May 2018, Starbucks had launched a Zambia Isanya Estate coffee at its Reserve Roastery in Seattle, the first time most American coffee drinkers who saw it had encountered the country's name on a bag. A sun-dried Ngoli lot followed onto the Reserve menu in August 2022.
Why this story is rare
Coffee origins decline all the time. Yemen, Haiti, Jamaica beyond its Blue Mountain brand, Cuba, Angola once among the largest producers in Africa: the list of countries that used to matter more is long. What almost never happens is the reverse. A tree takes three to four years to bear and a decade to pay back, so a country that has lost its estates, its finance and its growers usually stays lost.
Zambia lost ninety-seven per cent of its exports between 2004 and 2015 and had them back to a third of the peak within four years. We have not found another origin that has done that in the specialty era, and we would be interested to hear of one.
Why it is also fragile
The honest version includes the other side. The comeback is almost entirely one company. NCCL grows about 97 per cent of Zambia's exportable coffee, and the ZCGA counts only a handful of commercial growers in the whole country. A national origin that rests on five estates and one balance sheet is a national origin that could disappear again on a boardroom decision in Singapore.
The finance problem that killed the first crop has not gone away for anyone smaller than ofi. Climate is doing what it does everywhere in the coffee belt. And the production numbers themselves are slippery: the ZCGA's counts and ofi's stated ambitions differ by an order of magnitude, depending on what is counted and when, which is why we have quoted exports rather than production throughout, and why we will not print a single tonnage figure as “Zambia's crop” until the two series can be made to agree.
Our part in it
Imvelo did not plant a tree at Kasama and we make no claim to the comeback. What we do is the part that was missing even at the peak: almost all Zambian coffee, in 2004 and today, leaves the country as green beans and is roasted somewhere else. We roast it in Lusaka and sell it in the country that grew it, and abroad under a Zambian name.
The origin died once because nobody in Zambia had enough stake in it. That is the part we can do something about.
The comeback, in a bag.
Shop the Zambian single origin
More from this series: Kasama, where the coffee grows and why we joined the Specialty Coffee Association.
Frequently asked questions
When did Zambian coffee peak? Exports peaked in the 2004/05 crop year at 6,654 tonnes of green coffee, according to the Zambia Coffee Growers Association.
Why did Zambian coffee production collapse? A combination of the 1998 to 2004 world price crash, a lack of affordable long-term finance for capital-intensive irrigated estates, and the failure of the state-founded Kasama plantation that grew about a third of the crop. Exports bottomed at 180 tonnes in 2015, about 3,000 bags.
Who revived Zambian coffee? Olam International bought the Kasama estates in 2012 and, through Northern Coffee Corporation Limited, now part of ofi, replanted them with more than five and a half million trees. By 2019 exports were back near 2,000 tonnes, ten times the 2015 low.
Is Zambian coffee sold by Starbucks? Starbucks Reserve launched a Zambia Isanya Estate coffee at its Seattle Roastery on 28 May 2018 and listed a sun-dried Ngoli Estate lot in August 2022.
Sources
Perfect Daily Grind, “Exploring Zambia as a coffee origin,” 2021 (ZCGA export figures via Teija Lublinkhof). How We Made It In Africa, “Better times ahead for Zambian coffee industry,” June 2011. Covoya Coffee, “History of Zambian Green Coffee,” December 2022 (1982 to 1985 production, 1984 ICO quota). Andytown Coffee Roasters, “The Return of Zambian Coffee and the Kateshi Estate,” May 2025. Times of Zambia, “Northern Province: Zambia's leading coffee producer,” August 2022. Lusaka Times, “Northern Coffee Corporation works impress PS,” March 2015. Global Coffee Report, interview with ofi's Zambia coffee leadership (gcrmag.com), July 2023. University of Zambia, “A history of coffee growing in Zambia: the case of Kateshi and Ngoli estates in Kasama district, 1967 to 2012.” Covoya Coffee, “Zambia Estate RFA Natural Top Lot” product page (Taste of Harvest 2019). Discover Starbucks Reserve, “Zambia Isanya Estate Coffee,” June 2018; Starbucks menu listing for Sun-Dried Zambia Ngoli Estate; Nkwazi Magazine, “Zambia's Coffee Renaissance,” December 2023 (over US$70 million of foreign investment across the decade, about 2,000 hectares). International Coffee Organization, “The Global Coffee Crisis: a threat to sustainable development,” 2002 (composite indicator 109 cents in 1998, below 48 cents by 2002). Bank of Zambia commercial bank lending rate series via CEIC (33 per cent peak, January 2006). Discover Starbucks Reserve, “Sun Dried Zambia Ngoli Estate Coffee,” August 2022.