From December 30, 2026, a large or medium-sized company can only sell coffee in the EU if it can show the coffee wasn’t grown on land deforested after 2020. That’s the heart of the EU Deforestation Regulation, or EUDR, and for coffee it’s a big change in how the trade works. Here’s what it asks for and what it means for the coffee in your cup.
What the Law Covers
The regulation covers seven commodities: cattle, wood, cocoa, soy, palm oil, coffee and rubber, along with products made from them, from leather and chocolate to tyres and furniture. Any of them sold in the EU, or exported from it, has to be deforestation-free, meaning it wasn’t produced on land deforested after December 31, 2020. It also has to be produced legally under the laws of the country it came from.
What Importers Have to Do
The company placing the coffee on the EU market has to carry out due diligence and file a due diligence statement. For coffee, that means knowing exactly where it was grown: the geolocation of every plot, as a single point for small plots and as a mapped outline for plots over four hectares. The company then has to assess the risk that the coffee is linked to deforestation or illegal production, and reduce that risk before it sells.
Countries are sorted into three risk tiers, low, standard and high, and the tier decides how closely authorities check. In the list adopted in May 2025, only four countries were rated high risk: Belarus, Myanmar, North Korea and Russia. For serious breaches, maximum fines have to reach at least 4% of a company’s annual EU turnover.
A Rule That Kept Moving
The EUDR was adopted in 2023 and was meant to apply from December 30, 2024. It has been pushed back twice. The first delay moved it a year, to the end of 2025. In December 2025 the EU agreed a second delay and another round of simplification, which set the current dates:
- Large and medium companies: December 30, 2026
- Micro and small companies: June 30, 2027, or December 30, 2026 for those already covered by the EU Timber Regulation
- Soluble coffee: added to the rules later, from December 30, 2027
What It Means for Growers and Prices
For farmers, the burden lands on proving where their coffee grew. Big estates with mapped land can do that easily. Smallholders, who grow much of the world’s coffee, often don’t have precise plot records, so exporters have had to collect that data themselves. In Vietnam, around 40% of the coffee area already carries a sustainability certification, and traceability has become a selling point.
Traceable, deforestation-free coffee costs more to handle, and some of that cost will reach roasters and, in the end, drinkers. There’s also a risk that hard-to-trace coffee gets sold outside the EU instead, splitting the trade in two. The EU is the world’s biggest coffee market, so what happens after December 30 will be felt in prices well beyond Europe. For where prices stand now, see our September 2026 price update.