Is Coffee Really the World's Second Most Traded Commodity?

You've heard it a hundred times: "Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil." It appears in books, documentaries, café chalkboards, and even U.S. Senate testimony. It's also false — and the real story is more interesting.

Most Traded Commodities by Trading Volume

Measured by futures contract volume on global exchanges, the most actively traded commodities are:

1. Crude Oil (Brent & WTI) — the undisputed global leader in contract liquidity
2. Natural Gas — heavily traded on North American and European energy exchanges
3. Gold — the top precious metal contract for financial hedging
4. Soybeans — the most actively traded agricultural futures contract
5. Corn — a close second in grain volume, driven by industrial and livestock demand
6. Wheat — a foundational staple with massive, volatile volumes
7. Copper — the primary liquid benchmark for industrial metals
8. Silver — highly liquid due to its dual investment/industrial role
9. Sugar — the highest-volume "soft" commodity
10. Coffee — consistently in or near the top ten softs, but nowhere near second overall

Even by futures volume, coffee doesn't crack the top 20 agricultural contracts in some analyses (PolitiFact, 2017).

Most Valuable Commodities by Global Trade Value

Sorted by actual money spent on physical exports per year, the picture shifts toward heavy industry:

1. Crude Oil — roughly US$1.26 trillion in global exports in 2024, the world's single most valuable traded product (World's Top Exports, 2024 data)
2. Refined petroleum & natural gas — each in the hundreds of billions
3. Iron Ore & Steel — the backbone of global infrastructure, in the US$200–400B+ range combined
4. Gold — US$100B+ in physical trade, rising with central bank demand
5. Copper & Aluminum — roughly US$100B each
6. Soybeans — the most valuable agricultural export, on the order of US$90–100B globally
7. Wheat — the top food staple, roughly US$50–60B in export value

So Where Does Coffee Actually Sit?

The numbers (updated for the 2024–25 price surge):

• Global coffee exports were worth about US$42 billion in 2023 (ITC trade data). After coffee prices more than doubled in 2024 amid Brazilian drought and record-low inventories, total global coffee trade in 2025 approached US$70 billion — though that figure includes re-exports from processing hubs like Switzerland and Germany, so origin-country export value is lower.
• On MIT's Observatory of Economic Complexity rankings, coffee has historically placed around the 98th most traded product globally — behind soybeans (~54th) and wheat (~70th). So coffee isn't even the second most traded agricultural product.
• The myth has been formally debunked: PolitiFact, with World Bank senior economist John Baffes, confirmed coffee was second to oil back in 1970, but grains and metals overtook it long ago. By 2000, coffee ranked roughly 15th among commodities. Coffee historian Mark Pendergrast, who repeated the claim in Uncommon Grounds, published a correction in 2009: the myth was wrong, and he said so plainly.

Where coffee genuinely leads:

• #1 tropical product traded worldwide
• #1 beverage commodity, comfortably ahead of tea and cocoa
• Top agricultural export for more than a dozen developing nations across Latin America and Africa — in Colombia, coffee has accounted for around 7% of national exports
• Livelihood for roughly 25 million farming families worldwide

The Beverage League Table (Including Water)

So how do all beverages stack up against each other? Here is the global export value of every major beverage, using 2024–25 trade data:

Three things worth noticing:

• Water is the perfect inversion of the coffee myth. It is by far the most consumed beverage on earth, yet it barely registers in global trade — because nobody ships water across oceans. It's sourced locally. Consumption and trade are not the same thing, which is the same lesson the coffee myth teaches, just from the opposite direction.
• Commodity vs. manufactured beverage. Coffee, cocoa, and tea are the three true beverage commodities — raw crops traded on futures exchanges and classified by the FAO as beverage crops. Wine, spirits, beer, soft drinks, and bottled water are manufactured products. Coffee leads the commodities by a wide margin — and after the 2024–25 price surge, it tops even wine across all beverages.
• Cocoa just lived coffee's story. Cocoa prices roughly doubled in 2024 on West African supply shocks — the same climate-driven volatility pattern coffee experienced. For anyone in the trade, these two markets are worth watching together.

"Aren't There Already Too Many Coffee Businesses?"

In our classes, one question comes up again and again: Is there actually room for me to open a coffee shop or roastery?

Our answer has always started the same way: coffee is a drug few can go without. Then we tell students to look up where coffee actually sits on the global commodity list — and even with the myth stripped away, the honest numbers are remarkable. The world's #1 beverage commodity. A top-ten futures contract. Tens of billions of dollars in trade every year, sustained by a habit that billions of people repeat daily.

To be clear, that's not an answer to whether you should open a business — viability comes down to location, concept, execution, and capital. But it does answer the saturation question. Coffee is consumed, traded, drunk, and talked about at a scale almost no other product matches. It holds a special place in the home and at work. Meeting someone at a favourite café is a tradition in nearly every culture on earth. Demand of that depth and persistence doesn't disappear — it rewards the businesses that serve it well.

Why the Truth Matters More Than the Myth

The myth doesn't flatter coffee — it cheapens it. If we inflate coffee's financial footprint, we undermine our credibility when we talk about the things that are actually true and actually urgent: chronically low producer prices, climate vulnerability, and coffee's outsized role in developing economies. Coffee doesn't need to outrank steel to matter. It needs fair prices, resilient supply chains, and an industry that gets its facts right.

Ready to build a business backed by real industry knowledge? Explore our business and barista courses today.

References

1. PolitiFact (2017). No, coffee is not the second-most traded commodity after oil. Fact-check incorporating World Bank economist John Baffes. politifact.com
2. MIT Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC). Coffee product profile and global trade rankings. oec.world
3. UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Commodities overview: Coffee. fao.org
4. International Coffee Organization (ICO). Trade statistics and Coffee Market Reports. ico.org
5. Perfect Daily Grind (2017). Coffee isn't the world's 2nd-most traded commodity (but it is important). perfectdailygrind.com
6. World's Top Exports (2024–25). Coffee, crude oil, beer, soft drinks, tea, and water exports by country. Coffee exports · Crude oil exports
7. Vinetur (2025). Wine exports generate $40.66 billion in 2024, third highest on record. vinetur.com
8. Carbon Brief. Commodity profile: Coffee. Climate and trade analysis. carbonbrief.org
9. Pendergrast, M. (2009). Coffee second only to oil? Tea & Coffee Trade Journal — the author's published correction to the claim in Uncommon Grounds (corrected in the book's 2nd edition).

Last updated: June 2026. Figures reflect the 2024–25 coffee price surge; trade values fluctuate with market prices and should be reviewed annually.