The Biggest Cocoa, Coffee and Sugar Companies

Published September 30, 2026 · Updated October 5, 2026 · 5 min read

Cocoa, coffee and sugar are grown by millions of farmers, many of them smallholders in the tropics, but processed by comparatively few companies: cocoa grinders turn beans into cocoa butter, powder and chocolate, coffee companies trade and roast green beans, and sugar mills extract sugar from cane or beets. These were the ten largest processors by revenue in their latest fiscal year:

Revenue in the latest fiscal year, converted to US dollars at average exchange rates where reported in other currencies ("c."). ofi also trades nuts, spices and dairy; Südzucker includes starch, fruit preparations and bioethanol; Wilmar: sugar merchandising, refining and milling only; AB Sugar: sugar segment of Associated British Foods. Barry Callebaut: year to August 2025; Südzucker and Nordzucker: to February 2026; Tereos: to March 2026; Cristal Union: to January 2025; AB Sugar: to September 2025. Not listed: Cargill and the green coffee traders ECOM, Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, Sucafina and Louis Dreyfus, which publish no separate figures, and food groups such as Nestlé, which report coffee together with other products. Sources: company annual results.

The ten companies in brief

ofi (Olam Food Ingredients)

ofi is the food-ingredients arm of Singapore's Olam Group, whose controlling shareholder is the state investor Temasek. It buys, processes and trades cocoa, coffee, nuts, spices and dairy and is one of the largest cocoa grinders; Olam has long planned to list ofi on the stock market.

Barry Callebaut

Formed in 1996 from the merger of France's Cacao Barry and Belgium's Callebaut, Barry Callebaut is based in Zurich and listed there; the Jacobs family holding is its largest shareholder. It is the world's largest maker of chocolate and cocoa products for food companies, bakers and chefs rather than for supermarket shelves.

JDE Peet's

Formed in 2015 from the coffee businesses of D.E Master Blenders and Mondelez and based in Amsterdam, JDE Peet's owns brands such as Jacobs, Douwe Egberts, L'OR, Senseo, Tassimo and Peet's. Keurig Dr Pepper bought 96% of it in April 2026 and plans to spin the combined coffee business off as a separate company, probably in early 2027.

Südzucker

Based in Mannheim and listed in Frankfurt, Südzucker is majority-owned by an association of sugar-beet growers in southern Germany. Besides sugar it makes bioethanol (CropEnergies), food ingredients (BENEO), starch and fruit preparations (Agrana).

Wilmar (sugar)

Wilmar's sugar business, part of the Singapore-listed group profiled in the article on grain traders, mills cane and refines sugar in Australia, Indonesia and India and trades raw and white sugar worldwide.

Tereos

Tereos is a French cooperative owned by about 10,300 beet growers. It processes beet into sugar, alcohol and ethanol in France and Central Europe, runs cane mills in Brazil and makes starch and sweeteners from wheat and corn.

Guan Chong

Listed in Kuala Lumpur, Guan Chong is one of the largest cocoa grinders in the world, with plants in Malaysia, Indonesia, Côte d'Ivoire and Germany, where it owns the chocolate maker Schokinag.

Cristal Union

Cristal Union is a French cooperative of about 9,000 beet growers in the Champagne and Picardy regions and elsewhere in France. It makes sugar, alcohol and bioethanol and sells sugar to consumers under the Daddy brand.

AB Sugar (ABF)

AB Sugar is the sugar business of Associated British Foods, the London-listed group controlled by the Weston family. It includes British Sugar, which processes the UK's entire beet crop, Azucarera in Spain and Illovo, a cane-sugar producer in southern Africa.

Nordzucker

Based in Braunschweig and majority-owned by beet growers, Nordzucker processes sugar beet in Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Slovakia and Lithuania and, through Mackay Sugar, sugar cane in Australia.

Record prices inflate the revenue

Processors pass the price of beans and raw sugar on to their customers, so their revenue rises and falls with the commodity. Cocoa futures climbed above US$12,000 per tonne in late 2024 after poor harvests in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, which together grow more than half of the world's cocoa, and arabica coffee hit a record in early 2025. As a result Barry Callebaut's revenue rose by 42% while the volume it sold fell by 7%, and ofi's revenue rose by 31%. The ranking therefore reflects prices as much as size. How coffee prices move over the years is explained in Why Coffee Prices Swing.

Sugar: beets and cane

About four fifths of the world's sugar comes from sugar cane, grown mainly in Brazil, India and Thailand; the rest comes from sugar beet, mostly in Europe. Several of Europe's large beet processors - Tereos, Cristal Union and, through majority shareholders, Südzucker and Nordzucker - are owned by the farmers who grow the beets. Since the EU abolished its sugar production quotas in 2017, European prices follow the world market more closely. After two large beet harvests and falling prices, Südzucker's sugar segment sales fell by 28% in 2025/26, Nordzucker reported an operating loss of €226 million and closed a factory in Denmark. Where sugar and ethanol compete for cane, see Sugar and Ethanol.

A few grinders, many growers

In cocoa the concentration is highest: a handful of grinders - Barry Callebaut, Cargill, ofi and Guan Chong - process a large share of the world's beans, while the beans come from several million small farms. Government marketing boards in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana set a fixed farm-gate price for each season, which shields farmers from sharp falls but also meant that they received only part of the 2024 price boom. New EU rules against deforestation, due to apply from the end of 2026, require traders to prove where their cocoa, coffee and palm oil were grown. The other links in the chain are covered in The Biggest Companies in Agribusiness.