Tabasco coffee grows on 357.5 hectares in three municipalities

SABy Sander · October 10, 2026 · 4 min read

Mexico's twelfth coffee state fits into three municipalities and 357.5 hectares, and one of them out-yields the national average while its neighbour sits near the bottom of the table.

The national production file for Mexico lists fifteen coffee states, and one of them fits on three lines. Tabasco planted 357.5 hectares in 2025 and picked 414.82 tonnes of coffee cherry from them. Set against the rest of Mexican coffee that is 0.05% of the planted ground and 0.04% of the crop, a rounding error in a country that harvested more than a million tonnes. It is also small enough to read line by line, which almost no origin is.

Tabasco sits 12th of the 15 states that grow coffee

SIAP, the statistics service of Mexico's agriculture ministry, closes every crop year with a municipal file. For 2025 it records 700,953 planted hectares nationally and 1,069,464 tonnes of cherry. Tabasco's 357.5 hectares and 414.82 tonnes put the state twelfth on both lists, out of the fifteen that register a single hectare of it. Three states come in under that: Queretaro at 199 hectares, Morelos at 24.8, and Michoacan at 13, which returned 7.74 tonnes for the whole year. Every number below comes out of the file SIAP publishes for the 2025 crop year.

Where the coffee yield triples between two municipalities

Three municipalities carry the entire state. Huimanguillo has 151 planted hectares and brought in 283.1 tonnes. Tacotalpa has more ground, 175 hectares, and brought in 110.72. Teapa, the smallest of them, has 31.5 hectares and 21 tonnes. Huimanguillo therefore holds 42% of the planted area and delivers 68% of the crop.

Per hectare that reads 1.9 tonnes in Huimanguillo against 0.64 in Tacotalpa and 0.7 in Teapa. The national coffee yield for 2025 is 1.61 tonnes a hectare, so one municipality in Tabasco sits above the Mexican coffee average while the two beside it sit near the bottom of the whole table. The file does not say why. It records rain-fed coffee for all three and not one irrigated hectare anywhere in the state, which closes off the easiest explanation and leaves the rest open. Jalisco, where nearly one hectare in ten is irrigated, is the state that reads the other way.

Folk art illustration of three unequal groups of coffee trees showing three municipalities with very different coffee yield

A decade of decline that happened in one municipality

In 2015 Tabasco had 950.5 planted hectares and 872.44 tonnes. Ten years on it has 357.5 and 414.82. That is 62% off the ground and 52% off the crop, in a decade when the country's planted hectares slipped from 734,291 to 700,953, down 4.5%, and the national coffee harvest rose 4.2%.

All of the loss sits in Tacotalpa. The municipality is recorded at 768 hectares in 2015 and again in 2016, then at 175 in 2017 and in every file since. Huimanguillo's 151 hectares and Teapa's 31.5 are identical in 2015 and in 2025. Nothing else in the state moved.

Since 2019 the state comes back as exactly 357.5 hectares every single year, and for six of those years the harvested area matched it to the hectare. That stopped in 2025, when 352 of the 357.5 were picked and 5.5 were not, the first gap since 2018. Nayarit, where 2,164 hectares stayed planted and unpicked, shows what that gap looks like once it widens.

The rural price that barely moved in ten years

SIAP also publishes a precio medio rural, the value of a state's cherry crop divided by its volume. For Tabasco it was 7,484 pesos a tonne in 2015 and 7,773 in 2025, a rise of 3.9% across ten years. The national average over the same stretch went from 5,204 to 8,161, up 57%. Tabasco never left a band between 7,164 and 7,776 in any year of the decade.

That figure is not what a grower is handed for green coffee and it is not a farmgate quote. It is one state's cherry revenue divided by one state's cherry tonnage, a blunt instrument by any measure. Blunt or not, a line that flat beside a national line that steep is worth a second look. The coffee yield went the other way over the same decade, 0.92 tonnes a hectare in 2015 against 1.18 in 2025.

Folk art illustration contrasting a flat line of dots with a rising staircase of dots on a plain ledger

SIAP lists every coffee municipality in the country, not only the famous ones, and the three-line states are where the national averages quietly come from. Open the file on a state small enough to read in full and an origin claim can be checked end to end before a cup goes cold.

So what does any of this change in a kitchen?

A Santo Cafe pouch of Mexican arabica standing on a cream enamelled kitchen table in late afternoon light

A state with three lines in the file is a reminder that an origin is a stack of very specific places, not a flag on a map. Santo Cafe sells one Mexican arabica and says so plainly on the pack, without borrowing the romance of a region the coffee has nothing to do with. That is a low bar. Plenty of bags on plenty of shelves still do not clear it.