Which country consumes the most coffee? | Hacker News Reader

Which country consumes the most coffee?

cafely.com

The math is silly, these numbers are made up. Says the average American drinks 28K cups and spends $120K in their lifetime. That’s 1.5 cups daily at $4/cup for 50 years.

That would average to a Starbucks “Tall” each day, costing $6.

The volume seems plausible. The cost seems a bit steep.

Luxembourg with an average (!) of over 5 cups a day per person also seems extremely high. That’s over 10 cups of coffee a day for every person that doesn’t drink coffee over there.

Also, seems like different types of coffee have different amounts of caffeine, which I would say is important.

It's a very strange price point - "Utility Coffee" like Dunkin or Tim's is usually around $2 for a medium, but "Specialty Coffee" like Starbucks or local cafes is $5 to $8. I'm not sure where they got their data, or what they qualified as "coffee" for this. The omission of the UK in their data is also quite strange.

I suspect based on the graphics that they're orienting this more towards the "specialty coffee" subtype, and getting this information from a supplier network rather than any sort of broad data "census".

Hi im blitzar and I am a caffeine addict. It has been 45 minutes since my last coffee.

Update: It has been 3 minutes since my last coffee.

Ha! I only drink one caffeinated beverage per day, I'm not an addict!! (one can contains 180mg of caffeine...)

Snort coffee grounds for the rest of the day as well? I could quit anytime, I just dont want to.

https://youtu.be/L49lxNLoCeA?si=Hzv-zYiW_iZh-JlF

Do you, like me, ever feel judged by the lines on the carafe indicating 12 cups, and how your favourite mug is apparently six cups of coffee?

I switched to pure uncut espresso for this reason - you can fit half a dozen doses into a "standard" coffee cup, problem solved.

Other sources always seem to suggest that Finland comes top, for example:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coffee-co...

All a bit random and unscientific to have these statistics, I guess.

The article seems a bit off. The first heading says

> Coffee Consumption by Country 2024

But then the subsequent heading is

> Top 10 Countries that Drink the Most Coffee Per Person (kg/lbs per year) (International Coffee Organization 2016)

So which is it, 2024 or 2016?

I will say the 2016 data does agree with my roughly decade-old recollection that Finns drink a lot of coffee.

United Kingdom just doesn't drink coffee? I don't think so... according to this we manage 98M cups of coffee a day https://balancecoffee.co.uk/blogs/blog/coffee-consumption-st...

I suspect they got their European source data from Eurostat, and since Brexit Meant Brexit, Eurostat hasn't covered the UK for most datasets. You see this shape of map (Europe minus some Balkans and the UK) a fair bit, for that reason.

Kinda sorta related: chart of coffee vs tea drinkers around the world:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/12/20/chart-of-...

Whenever I see outliers like Luxembourg in these stats, I wonder if there's something fishy with taxes and/or accounting going on there. Or may be just citizens of neighboring countries going shopping to Luxembourg for tax-related reasons?

Lots of residents of nearby countries _work_ in Luxembourg, AIUI. Not a tax thing; it's just very small.

This seems to assume everyone drinks every cup of coffee in a cafe every time?

Yeah. The per-cup prices seem to assume that. They might be somewhere in the right ballpark for that, although even for cafes, the price actually varies a lot depending on whether it's a speciality coffee.

Correspondingly, the total lifetime spending figures can't be even close to right in lots of the listed countries.

New Zealand's missing from the map so I automatically distrust it...

Greece made it into the top 10, I would have expected it further up. Where I grew up, there were a lot of people from Greece and they loved their coffee cafes.

My surprise is Turkiye (Turkey), I would have expected it would also be in the top 10.

But what is defined as a cup ? What a cup would be considered in the US ? I would think what people they drink in Turkiye would be considered 2 or 3 cups of US Coffee. Doesn't it have a much higher Caffeine than in US Coffee ?

> Due to the moderately strong correlation, performing RA on those metrics suggests that each additional kilogram of coffee consumed per person annually could potentially raise life expectancy by 1.22%.

What? Do you really think it's the coffee and not the relation between GDP per capita (and ergo better healthcare and overall life expectancy) and number of cups per coffee? This hilarious implied causation tells me I should drink 100 cups a day and live forever.

Asia is growing in coffee consumption, and this will be detrimental to forests around the equator.

i'm sure the earth manages do to well enough in terms of damaging nature without having to account for asians consuming coffee.

It's not that Asians are to be blamed, but coffee beans simply don't grow well in other regions than the "coffee belt" which is around the equator.

If we want to protect this area from collapsing, coffee may become of limited availability (which I'm sure many people would find unacceptable).

As a phd student in robotics I drink a lof of coffee. Unfortunately, as always, the title was waaaay bigger than the content. Missing clear sources and got mad about the regression analysis part *where's my p-value?.

A cup of coffee costs $1.99 in Vietnam? That's higher than the cost of an average meal to begin with. Most local shops (i.e. not Starbucks) top out at $1.

I'd love to see caffeine consumption by profession and demographic within a country.

Also by age and over time.

I've seen small children begging their mom to go into Starbucks, something that was unthinkable a few decades ago.

Is this article correct?

> Interestingly, the list also includes non-traditional coffee-consuming countries such as Lebanon and Brazil, which could be attributed to the global spread of coffee-related business and culture

Really? Both Brazil and Lebanon are traditional coffee consuming countries. Brazil in particular is the largest producer of coffee in the world and coffee is everywhere, since pretty much forever.

It is a content marketing post, so I don’t expect it to be correct, even if I couldn’t find anything blatantly wrong from my knowledge.

This just made me think am I missing something? Brazil is a huge coffee producer and Lebanon as an Arab country must have been exposed to coffee ages ago.

Also, I don't see any questioning of Luxembourg stats. Almost six cups per capita cannot sound right, the country size must have skewed the results.

All in all, casts doubt on the rest of the article.

This doesn't seem right, I've never heard about Luxembourgers drinking a lot of coffee.

Per-capita values of countries with low population tend to be vulnerable to high variance

Yeah I was kind of trying to hint at that.

They have tons of commuters and business travelers. Didn't look into the methodology, but my first guess would be that those are included in the numerator, but not in the denominator.

Luxembourg has a _lot_ of non-residents who commute there for work, and possibly drink coffee, which is inclined to mess up statistics like this.

> An analysis of the correlation between per capita coffee consumption and life expectancy across countries indicates a moderately positive correlation of around 0.577, suggesting there exists a slightly strong correlation between the two metrics.

I would imagine this to be a "correlation is not causation" situation. Countries with high coffee consumption per capita are generally developed countries.

Come on. People in Luxembourg average 5.31 cups of coffee per day? Yes, my experience is anecdotal, but I'm not even sure that the self-described "coffee addicts" who I know are averaging that much, let alone an entire population.

> 5.31 cups of coffee per day

Those are rookie numbers in this racket.

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