Cauca coffee sells for a record $400 a pound in Colombia

A 317-pound lot of washed Castillo coffee from a small farm in Cauca sold for US$400 a pound at a Bogotá auction this month, the highest price Colombia's coffee federation says has ever been paid for coffee at a domestic sale.

The lot came from Finca El Diviso, a family farm of about 7,000 coffee trees in the vereda of El Sauce, in the municipality of Rosas. Grower María Nilsa Garzón Díaz spent 12 years raising the coffee's quality, Forbes Colombia reported. At US$400 a pound, her 317.46-pound lot brought in US$126,984.

The sale closed on 16 October at Corferias in Bogotá, during the eleventh Concurso Nacional de Calidad Colombia, "Tierra de Diversidad," part of the Cafés de Colombia Expo run by the National Federation of Coffee Growers through its Craft by FNC programme. The buyer was Café 18, the specialty brand of exporter Banexport.

One Cauca lot just outsold the week's average price nearly sixfold.

Julián Ruiz, a partner at Banexport, told Colombia One that bids for competition lots usually open around US$100 a pound and stay close to that range. "But on this occasion, a record was set," he said of the US$400 bid.

Colombia's coffee record price, tested

Garzón's entry beat 1,048 lots submitted to the national contest; a jury narrowed the field to 55 finalists, then 25 reached the international auction. Those 25 lots, from eight departments, drew 657 bids worth US$685,539.73, a weighted average of US$68.19 a pound. Her lot sold for close to six times that average, to buyers from Japan, South Korea, Spain, the United States and Germany.

Getting to Bogotá was not guaranteed. A car bomb destroyed the El Bordo toll station in nearby Patía four days before the auction, injuring three civilians and disrupting travel on the Pan-American highway that links Rosas to the capital. A fire had already destroyed Garzón's house and her reserve coffee stock six weeks earlier. "The only resource I had left to get ahead was this coffee," she told Forbes Colombia.

A tough year for exports

The record comes in a difficult season: national output fell to its smallest harvest since 2022, down 15% in the 2025-26 coffee year to 12.65 million 60-kilogram bags, the federation reported. Exporters' group Asoexport said shipments between January and September dropped 13.8% from the same period in 2025.

At the same expo, Cenicafé, the federation's research arm, introduced Celestra, a new arabica variety bred from a cross with Ethiopian lineage ET42, aimed at the specialty buyers who pushed Garzón's lot to a record bid. Larger seed volumes won't reach growers until 2027. Exporters, meanwhile, are due to press the government on freight and port costs at Asoexport's Cumbre Cafetera summit in Cartagena on 5 and 6 November.