Instant coffee. It is gaining ground, and it is gaining it against the current.

According to the International Coffee Organization's market report of October 2025, instant coffee gained a place in world exports. Its share, all forms of coffee combined, went from 11.5% in 2023-2024 to 12.1% in 2024-2025. It rose while total volumes fell.

The next figure seems to contradict this gain, and does not. Monthly exports of instant coffee hover around one million bags: 1.01 million in September 2025, down 21% on a year. A share is a ratio, not a volume. It rises as soon as instant coffee falls less fast than the rest of coffee. Gaining ground, here, means falling less than the others.

Four countries concentrate most of this production: Brazil, Vietnam, India and Indonesia. The last two work mostly from canephora, which is no accident: instant coffee absorbs coffees that the bean market would pay poorly for.

Then come the market figures, and they must be taken with a grain of salt. Research firms value the whole at between 15 and 16 billion dollars in 2025, growing 4 to 5% a year, with atomized accounting for more than 70% of volumes and Europe nearly half of demand. These are figures of weak evidence: commercial pages, opaque methodologies. They give an order of magnitude, not a measurement.

Ukers 1922, ch. XVIII; professional training document, Caffeine and decaffeination processes, pp. 2-3; Wikipedia, Decaffeination; mpg.de; Coffee Intelligence 08/26/2025; Directive 2009/32/EC

The same caution applies to the national shares one reads everywhere, cited by the manufacturers' association and repeated in the training documents.

• United Kingdom80% of cups drunk are said to be instant coffee
• Japan and Russia90%
• France26%
• Spain21%

The problem is not that these figures are wrong, it is that they are old and undated. A market share with no vintage cannot be verified and compares to nothing: one does not know which year it speaks of, nor whether it has moved since.

The training document adds two orders of magnitude of the same kind: 21% of the world's green coffee used for instant coffee, and more than 30% of cups. They cannot be verified here.

When an industry accounts for a third of the world's cups and one has only unverifiable figures, that deserves to be said rather than copied.

ICO, Coffee Market Report, October 2025, ico.org/documents/cy2025-26/cmr-1025-e.pdf; market reports (Market.us, IMARC, Mordor Intelligence) 2025, weak evidence; professional training document, Instant coffee: atomization and freeze-drying, p. 2

Decaf. Long looked down on, it is growing, and for reasons that have changed.

The National Coffee Data Trends is the survey of the American National Coffee Association. In spring 2025, it gives 12% of Americans having drunk decaf the previous day, against 9% in 2024.

The question concerns the previous day, not the year. It thus avoids the flaw pointed out above: a number of cups reported from memory over twelve months is not a measurement.

The movement is not only American. According to Euromonitor, cited by Swiss Water, world consumption grew by 4.2% in 2024. In the United Kingdom, one drinker in five chooses it regularly. In Germany, decaf accounts for about 8% of consumption.

The most telling detail is elsewhere. The 18-40 year olds who drink it at least twice a week cite, in equal parts, sleep and anxiety. It is no longer a drink for the elderly person whom the doctor told to stop, it is a young adult's trade-off.

The sector has only one publicly listed company, Swiss Water Decaffeinated Coffee. It is our only window with figures on decaf. A listed company must publish audited accounts; its competitors, which are not listed, owe nothing to anyone.

On March 12, 2026, it published 2025 revenue of 258.7 million Canadian dollars, up 49%.

This rise is misleading, and its own report explains why: it comes from the price of green coffee, not from activity. The volumes processed rise only 2%, because its American customers cut their purchase commitments in the face of prices. For the record, its 2024 revenue was 173.1 million, up 4%, with 67.7 million in the second quarter of 2025 alone, up 56%.

Elsewhere, Descafecol is running at 75% of capacity, and Colombian export routes are congested.

Research firms value world decaf at around 3.2 billion dollars in 2025, growing 6 to 7% a year, with the same weakness of evidence as above. And a gap worth flagging: the respective share of the four decaffeination processes in world volumes is published nowhere. We know how coffee is decaffeinated, not in what proportions.

NCA, National Coffee Data Trends, spring 2025; Coffee Intelligence, What's happening with decaf?, 08/26/2025; Swiss Water, annual results 2024 (03/12/2025) and 2025 (03/12/2026), investor.swisswater.com; market reports 2025, weak evidence

The science. The 2015 EFSA opinion remains the European regulatory reference (400 mg per day, 200 mg per intake, 200 mg in pregnancy, 3 mg per kilo in children); IARC Monograph 116 (2016, published in 2018) has not been revised; the Gardiner meta-analysis (2023) supplied the first quantified delays before bedtime; the CYP1A2 and ADORA2A genetics have an established mechanism and debated clinical consequences. Two American patents of 2024-2025 concern beans enriched in paraxanthine, the main metabolite of caffeine, presented as a stimulant with a shorter half-life: the next commercial ground may not be less caffeine, but another xanthine. And in the United States, the fate of methylene chloride in decaffeination was still, in July 2026, in the hands of the FDA.

EFSA 2015; IARC, Monograph 116; Gardiner et al. 2023; US patents 12,178,820 and 12,310,971 (paraxanthine); Barista Magazine, 07/27/2026