Earlier this month, a single lot of Panamanian Geisha coffee sold for US$30,204 per kilogram at the Best of Panama auction – a new world record.
For perspective: once roasted, that’s about 50 cups of coffee. Meaning you wouldn’t get change from $1,000 a cup at your local café.
Before you start calling BS, yes, the coffee is that good. Geisha has a flavour profile that makes coffee graders swoon and casual drinkers wonder if they’ve been lied to their whole lives about what coffee can taste like. At this year’s auction, the international judging panel gave the highest scores ever (by a solid margin). But the big price tag wasn’t just about flavour.
It was about marketing and luxury branding.
How to Make the World Talk About You
Within the industry, this result wasn’t a shock. It’s the payoff from decades of careful brand building and premiumisation. And there are very specific tactics at play:
Scarcity is used as a sales tool.
This winning batch was basically haute couture coffee: one-off and unrepeatable. Geisha is rare, but there was only 20kg in the winning lot from Hacienda La Esmeralda.
They attract prestige markets.
These auctions aren’t about your neighbourhood café. They’re aimed at buyers in places where exclusivity is currency. In this case, the winning lot went to buyers from the Gulf States where alcohol is less present in social culture, leaving room for prestige coffee to step in as the luxury drink of choice.
Everyone wants a story that sells
…and the Best of Panama is part auction, part theatre. It works because every single touchpoint, from the farm to the gavel, reinforces the ultra-premium positioning. The auction is a deliberate effort to set (and reset) the ceiling on what’s possible in coffee pricing. And when you smash a record, you create a news cycle.
Turning Geisha into a Premium Brand
While Geisha itself originates in Ethiopia, Panama has so effectively repositioned and branded it that the two are now inseparable.
The country re-established Geisha as a premium variety, building the market almost to the point of mythology. That work has elevated specialty coffee worldwide, proving coffee could sit alongside fine wine and whisky as an ultra-premium product.
But it’s important to keep perspective, and most coffee farmers aren’t touching $30k/kg. They’re wrestling with rising production costs, climate change and volatile commodity prices. These splashy auction numbers risk skewing perception and from the outside, it can look like coffee is a goldmine for producers everywhere.
In reality, it’s more like champagne. The top houses thrive, but plenty of growers are barely breaking even.
The $30,000 Question
Once you make ‘record-breaking’ part of your brand narrative, you have to keep breaking records. If next year’s Geisha only sells for $20,000/kg, does that read as success… or failure? If the market loses interest in record-breaking numbers, we might remember this as the year coffee marketing hit its dizzying peak.
The rising tide lifts all boats. But the $30,000 question is whether or not a flash flood does the same.
