Industrial instant coffee dates from the years 1935-1938, and it weighs far more than one imagines in France.

A professional training document puts it at about 21% of the green coffee used in the world, and at more than 30% of the cups drunk. The gap between the two figures reads itself: a cup of instant requires less green coffee than a cup made from ground coffee.

The geography is highly contrasted. Instant coffee reaches 80 to 90% penetration in the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia, against 26% in France. In other words, the product regarded here as a stopgap is elsewhere the ordinary coffee, the one the palate is used to.

So processed a product calls for a precise legal definition, without which anything can be called instant coffee. That is the object of Directive 1999/4/EC of February 22, 1999, and its thresholds are worth reading.

• Coffee extract in solid form must contain at least 95% by weight of dry matter from coffee;
• extract in paste form, from 70 to 85%;
• liquid extract, from 15 to 55%, the latter being allowed up to 12% sugars.

And a rule that closes the door to fillers: solid extract must contain nothing other than what comes from the extraction of coffee.

Chicory extracts follow the same thresholds, with their own margins: liquid from 25 to 55%, up to 35% sugars, and 1% foreign matter tolerated. The decaffeinated label, for its part, requires at most 0.3% anhydrous caffeine, by weight, of the dry matter from coffee.

Finally, Regulation 1169/2011, applicable since December 13, 2014, adds what protects the buyer day to day. It imposes three things, and each targets a process described above.

The list of ingredients requires naming the filler, which is enough to make the thousand-pound formula impossible. The quantitative declaration of highlighted ingredients forces a figure on what the front of the packet promises. The ban on misleading consumers covers the rest, that is, the name of the product and its presentation, where no line of ingredients is false but the whole lies.

Professional training document, Tout savoir sur le café soluble; eur-lex.europa.eu, Directive 1999/4/EC consolidated 2013 and Regulation 1169/2011, accessed September 7, 2026

Legal blends are distinguished from fraud by the label and by the threshold. Germany has applied since November 15, 2001 an ordinance that bans the sale of roasted coffee containing more than two grams per kilo of matter other than green coffee, unless labeled unsorted or low-quality coffee. Japan has reserved since November 1991 the word coffee for products made solely from green coffee, flavored products being sold as a blend of coffee and flavoring.

Colombia has banned since Law 126 of 1931 the name coffee for any product that is not pure coffee, a threshold lowered to 95% by Law 1589 of 2012. Brazil has set since Regulation 16 of 2010 a ceiling of 1% impurities and 5% moisture and a minimum cup score of four out of ten, and Article 43 of Portaria SDA 570 of May 9, 2022, in force January 1, 2023, bans the word coffee for any blend containing other genera or species of plants. Chicory is therefore no longer an adulterant: it is an ingredient, on condition of being named.

ICO, document ICC-134-1, Blends and substitutes, September 9, 2022