Classroom lesson · Coffee · 🇧🇷 Brazil

Brazilian coffee

The world's biggest coffee grower - one in three cups starts in Brazil

Rows of coffee plants growing on a Brazilian coffee farm

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Brazil grows more coffee than any other country in the world - by a long way. About one in every three cups of coffee that adults drink anywhere on Earth started life as a small red fruit on a bush in Brazil. The country has been the world's top coffee grower for over 150 years.

Tell me more

Coffee 'beans' aren't actually beans. They are the seeds inside a small red fruit called a coffee cherry. Each cherry has two seeds. To make a cup of coffee, the cherries are picked, the seeds are taken out, washed, dried, and finally roasted in big ovens until they turn dark brown.

Most Brazilian coffee grows in a region called Minas Gerais. The land there is gently hilly, the weather is warm but not too hot, and there are months of sunshine and months of rain - perfect conditions for coffee plants. Some farms stretch as far as you can see, with millions of bushes lined up in neat rows.

Coffee likes to grow slowly. When the weather is right and the soil is good, the cherries take eight to nine months to ripen from green to bright red. Farmers walk along the rows checking by hand which cherries are ready, because they don't all ripen at the same time.

Brazil became the world's biggest coffee grower partly because of its huge size and partly because the climate is just right. Today coffee is one of Brazil's most important exports - meaning it sells huge amounts of it to other countries. Next time you walk past a café, there is a good chance the beans inside started life on a hill in Brazil.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01What is something you eat or drink that probably grew in another country before reaching you?
  2. 02Coffee plants take 8 to 9 months to ripen. What other foods can you think of that take a long time to grow?
  3. 03Why might it matter to a farmer in Brazil that people in your country drink lots of coffee?
Try this

Classroom activity

Bring in (or draw) the labels from packets of food in your kitchen. Look at where each one says it came from. Mark the countries on a world map. Which travelled furthest? Which travelled the shortest distance?