Who decaffeinates, and where: a handful of plants worldwide
Coffee grows in some sixty countries and is roasted in all of them. It is decaffeinated in about ten places. It is the tightest bottleneck of the whole supply chain, and almost nobody knows it, because it is invisible from the counter.
The reason is first physical. A supercritical CO₂ decaffeination workshop is an installation at three hundred atmospheres: thick steel vessels, an operating permit, pressure-equipment maintenance. You do not set that up in a shed. Even the water or solvent processes require tanks, an effluent treatment station and permanent analytical control, since each lot must be proven to be under the threshold. The entry ticket is counted in tens of millions.
| Site | Where | Process |
|---|---|---|
| Descafecol | Manizales, Colombia | Ethyl acetate (sugarcane process), the “sugarcane” of specialty coffee |
| Swiss Water | Burnaby and Delta, British Columbia | Water and saturated coffee extract |
| Descamex | Córdoba, Veracruz, Mexico | Water, marketed as Mountain Water |
| CR3 | Bremen, Germany | Solvents and steam, contract processor for third parties |
| Coffein Compagnie | Bremen, Germany | Supercritical CO₂ and solvents |
The consequence shows in the order books. Descafecol, which processes most of the specialty decaf made with ethyl acetate, was running at about 75% of its nominal capacity in the summer of 2025, and hesitated to finance the remaining 25%: the last quarter of a plant is always the most expensive to install. As a result, roasters who cannot get a slot send their Colombian coffee to Mexico, to Descamex, or ship it to Germany to have it come back afterwards.
A lot of Huila that crosses the Atlantic round trip to have one molecule removed, then goes off to a roaster who will talk about direct sourcing: that is a good picture of what coffee logistics has become.
Coffee Intelligence, What's happening with decaf?, 08/26/2025; Interamerican Coffee, Descafecol EA decaf from Cauca; CR3-Kaffeeveredelung, Decaffeination and steaming, accessed on 09/18/2026In this plateThe 14 sections
- 01The problem comes down to one sentence of chemistry
- 02Decaf: from Bremen to Sanka
- 03What caffeine-free coffee built in Bremen
- 04Why decaf coffeepots are orange
- 05The processes, one by one
- 06The processes specialty coffee is inventing
- 07The methylene chloride quarrel
- 08What the bean really loses, and what is attributed to it
- 09Roasting it: three landmarks that jump all at once
- 10Who decaffeinates, and where: a handful of plants worldwide
- 11What it costs, and why decaf is more expensive
- 12The extracted caffeine: which of the two is the by-product?
- 13The other route: coffee plants that make none
- 14The questions people ask most often
The table of contents, with the first sentence of each section