The Kona Coffee Lawsuit: How Farmers Fought Fake Kona

The most important legal fight over a coffee origin name in recent years was not about Jamaica Blue Mountain but about Kona, Hawaii's best-known coffee. In 2019 a group of Kona farmers sued some of the biggest retailers in the United States, arguing that much of the coffee sold as Kona was nothing of the kind. Nearly five years later the case had produced settlements of more than US$41 million and changed how some companies label their coffee. This page explains the case and what it means for buyers of any premium origin.

The case

The lawsuit, Corker et al. v. Costco Wholesale Corporation et al., was filed on February 27, 2019 in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, according to the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology's digest. The lead plaintiff, Bruce Corker, owns a coffee farm in the Kona district, and the suit was brought as a class action on behalf of Kona growers. The defendants named in the original complaint included Costco, Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, Bed Bath and Beyond, Sprouts, Marmaxx Operating Corp. and a number of coffee companies and distributors, among them Mulvadi, Hawaiian Isles Kona Coffee and MNS, which operates ABC Stores.

The legal basis was the federal Lanham Act, which covers false designations of origin and false advertising. The plaintiffs relied on Hawaii's rule that only coffee grown in the Kona district may be sold as Kona coffee.

The numbers behind the complaint

The complaint's core argument was arithmetic. It estimated that 600 to 1,000 growers in the Kona district produce about 2.7 million pounds of green Kona coffee a year, while more than 20 million pounds of coffee labeled Kona was sold at retail. If both figures are even roughly right, most coffee sold under the name cannot have come from Kona. Our Kona coffee guide covers the district and its production.

The chemical fingerprint

The plaintiffs needed more than arithmetic; they needed evidence about specific products. University of Utah biologist James Ehleringer ran the analysis at a private laboratory in Salt Lake City. Standard tests depend on a sample's water content, which changes in roasting, so he measured ratios of rare inorganic elements that stay roughly constant through roasting. His team compared more than 150 samples from Kona farms with coffee from elsewhere and identified ratios, among them strontium to zinc and barium to nickel, that separated Kona from non-Kona coffee. Those signatures were largely absent from the products labeled Kona that the defendants sold, according to the University of Utah and the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. Each test cost about US$50. Our page on coffee origin testing explains this and other methods.

Some defendants challenged the testing, arguing that it had not been replicated by other laboratories. The case was settled before the court ruled on that challenge, so the method was never fully tested in court.

How it ended

Over nearly five years, defendants settled one by one. By January 2024 the farmers had won settlements totaling more than US$41 million, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported. The largest was US$12 million from MNS, the operator of ABC Stores, and Mulvadi offered US$7.775 million. Neither of those two companies admitted wrongdoing. The lawsuit also prompted some companies to state the percentage of genuine Kona coffee on their labels.

What the case did not decide

Because the defendants settled, no court issued a final ruling that any particular product was not Kona coffee, and no judge decided whether the trace-element method was reliable enough to be decisive on its own. The settlements also did not create a new legal definition: the meaning of Kona still comes from Hawaii's rules on coffee origin labeling. What the case did show is that growers of a small origin can organise, gather scientific evidence and bring very large retailers to the table. For other premium origins, including those compared on our coffee geographical indications page, it has become a reference point for how a protected name can be enforced in practice rather than only on paper.

The labeling law caught up

The lawsuit ran alongside a long campaign to change Hawaii's own rules. For decades a blend could carry a Hawaii regional name with as little as 10% of that coffee, as long as the percentage was disclosed. Act 198, signed on July 3, 2024, raises the minimum to 51%, with enforcement from July 1, 2027, Daily Coffee News reported. Our Hawaiian coffee page covers what that means for Ka'u, Maui and Kauai.

Lessons for Blue Mountain buyers

• Scarce names attract imitation. Kona and Jamaica Blue Mountain share the same economics: a small, defined growing area and a name worth a premium. The checklist on our fake Blue Mountain coffee page exists for the same reason.
• Read the percentage. A "Kona blend" could legally contain mostly other coffee; a Jamaica Blue Mountain Blend may contain as little as 30% Blue Mountain under Jamaican rules, as explained on our Blue Mountain blend page.
• Big retailers are not a guarantee. The Kona defendants included some of the largest stores in the country. The seller's size says nothing about the origin of a particular bag.
• Rights holders can act. In Jamaica, the regulator JACRA and its trademark company control the Blue Mountain name and have run enforcement drives; see JACRA certification.

Disclosure: this site is published by Mamre Blue Coffee, a Jamaica Blue Mountain estate (see about us), so we rely on official and independent sources for the facts on this page.