Coffee is the most popular beverage in the world, with more than 400 billion cups consumed each year. More than 450 million cups of coffee are consumed in the United States every day.

Coffee beans
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The word coffee comes from Kaffa, a region in Ethiopia where coffee beans may have been discovered.

  • About half of the people in the United States over the age of 18 (that's 107 million) drink coffee every day. On average, each coffee drinker consumes three and a half cups each day.

  • As early as the ninth century, people in the Ethiopian highlands were making a stout drink from ground coffee beans boiled in water.

  • Coffee is grown in more than 50 countries in South America, Central America, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

  • In 1971, a group of Seattle-based entrepreneurs opened a coffee shop called Starbucks. Today there are more than 6,000 Starbucks outlets in the United States. The chain also operates stores in 36 other countries.

  • Nearly 25 million farmers worldwide depend on coffee crops for their economic livelihood.

  • Coffee contains caffeine, the stimulant that gives you that "lift." Caffeine is the most popular drug in the world, and 90 percent of people in the United States consume it in some form every day.

  • Despite what you may believe, dark-roast coffee has less caffeine than coffee that's been lightly roasted.

  • Scandinavia boasts the highest per-capita coffee consumption in the world. On average, people in Finland drink more than four cups of coffee a day.

  • After oil, coffee is the world's second-most-valuable commodity exported by developing countries. The global coffee industry earns an estimated $60 billion annually.
This article was adapted from "The Book of Incredible Information," published by West Side Publishing, a division of Publications International, Ltd.