This year’s Best of Panama coffee auction was the most expensive ever, and was once again dominated by the gesha variety that put Panamanian coffee on the map. Now, the country’s coffee association is seeking to brand and trademark its most valuable asset.
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This year’s Best of Panama coffee auction was the most expensive ever, and was once again dominated by the gesha variety that put Panamanian coffee on the map. Now, the country’s coffee association is seeking to brand and trademark its most valuable asset.
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The Best of Panama—a prestigious coffee competition and auction, held since 1996—is known for commanding high prices. At this year’s BoP auction in August 2025, the winning lot sold for a record $30,204 per kilo ($13,705 per pound). Collectively, the 50 lots involved brought in some $2.8 million, more than double last year’s total.
Forty of those 50 lots, including the winning coffee, were gesha, a prized arabica variety known for its complex flavour profile and delicate, floral aroma. Although gesha originated in Ethiopia, it has been cultivated in Panama for decades, and Panamanian gesha is its own distinct genetic variety.
The coffee’s popularity among specialty roasters and baristas has helped push BoP auction prices ever higher over the years. Now, the Specialty Coffee Association of Panama (SCAP) has begun the process of branding and trademarking the term “Panama Geisha” in jurisdictions around the world. While the process has been ongoing for a number of years, it has not been reported until now.
(A note: SCAP uses the term “geisha” to describe the coffee variety, and that is the spelling it is looking to trademark. This spelling, according to SCAP president Richardo Koyner, is “based on historical documentation and more than 80 years of continuous usage in agricultural and scientific contexts”. However, there remains debate and controversy surrounding this spelling, including the problematic use of Japanese geisha imagery to sell the coffee. Jenn Chen’s excellent 2018 piece in Sprudge delves into the issue in more detail. In this article, I will use the term “gesha” unless it is specifically referencing the trademark application.)
In September, SCAP applied for trademark protection of the term “Panama Geisha” as part of a figurative mark, or logo, in the United States and the United Kingdom. The organisation previously had applications accepted in the European Union and Japan in 2022, and some members are already using the logo on their bags and trade show booth displays.
“[We] pursued this trademark to protect the authenticity, identity, and origin-linked value of a product that Panama has uniquely developed over decades”, Koyner says in an email. “The Geisha variety expresses exceptional and highly differentiated flavour profiles in Panama due to a rare combination of volcanic soils, unique microclimates, altitude, biodiversity, and the artisanal expertise of Panamanian producers in harvesting and processing. This intersection of terroir and craftsmanship has created coffees that are globally recognized and highly valued”.
The gesha variety has increasingly driven interest in Panama’s relatively small coffee sector. SCAP and its members have been some of the biggest promoters—and beneficiaries—of gesha’s popularity. Moving to brand and trademark “Panama Geisha” is the latest step in this promotional effort.
For Jamison Savage of Finca Deborah, a “non-active member of SCAP”, trademarking the brand is a logical move. “This authenticates and protects our brand, ‘Panama Geisha’. We’ve worked very hard to develop our brand, collectively spent millions of dollars and countless hours in this effort. I expect the move will support, benefit, and protect all Panamanian coffee producers, regardless of their affiliation with SCAP”.
The gesha variety first made its way to Panama in the mid-20th century from Ethiopia via various research organisations. While it proved tolerant to the dreaded coffee leaf rust, it was considered hard to grow and thus not favoured by farmers for several decades.
That changed beginning in the early 2000s. In 2003, the Peterson family of Hacienda La Esmeralda separated the then-little-known variety into its own lot. In 2004, the Petersons submitted the gesha lot to the Best of Panama, where it won the top prize. It went on to set a record for the highest price in the auction’s history: a whopping $21 per pound.
Since then, the name “Panama Geisha” has become famous within and beyond the specialty coffee industry, earning rave reviews and the moniker “the Champagne of coffee” for its unique, delicately floral flavour profile.
Its popularity has directly fueled BoP auction price rises. In 2017, the top-scoring lot at the BoP sold for $601 per pound (also a record at the time), and the total auction earnings were $368,711. By 2024, the total had risen to $1.38 million, while the winning lot sold for $4,542 per pound. For comparison, as Nick Brown noted in his Daily Coffee News article on the subject, the commodity price for arabica coffee at the time was about $2.35 per pound.
The downside of this popularity is that—much like other high-value, low-supply coffees, such as Hawaii Kona or Jamaica Blue Mountain—Panama gesha is often counterfeited. To protect its coffee, the state of Hawaii owns the trademark for “100% Kona Coffee”, while “Jamaica Blue Mountain” is registered by that country’s agricultural regulator.
Part of the motivation for pursuing a trademark, Konyer says, is to try and counteract the counterfeiters. “As demand increased, we began seeing the term used in ways that could confuse consumers or dilute the meaning built by Panama’s producers”, Koyner says. “The trademark ensures that ‘Panama Geisha’ continues to signify coffee that is truly from Panama and reflects these authentic conditions”.
The association has been working on establishing the brand for many years, according to Gissell Garrido, a SCAP member and CEO of Garrido Specialty Coffee. Members were informed about the plans at the association’s annual general assembly in 2023, she says. During the assembly, they were told that use of the logo would only be available to SCAP members who participated in BoP. Membership, Garrido says, costs $1,000 per year.
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The trademark that SCAP is pursuing is for a specific stylised representation, rather than the term “Panama Geisha” on its own. This approach, says intellectual property solicitor Oliver Tidman from the firm Tidman Legal, is often easier than registering a term that is “descriptive, geographical, or widely used in the industry. A figurative mark allows protection for the logo as a badge of origin, even where the wording itself may not qualify for word-mark protection”, he says.
While SCAP took the branding and trademark route, other coffee-producing countries and associations have pursued different protections. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) offers a number of ways to protect origin-specific products. Geographical indications (GI), as the name suggests, designate particular regions that are recognisably tied to a product, in this case coffee production. For example, Colombia’s National Federation of Coffee Growers registered “Café de Colombia” as a protected geographical indication in 2007, while Mexico registered “Café Veracruz” and “Café Chiapas” as appellations of origin a few years prior. (According to WIPO, an appellation of origin is more specific than a GI, as “the link with the place of origin must be stronger”.)
One of the requirements for GI protection is that the product must “possess qualities or a reputation that are due to that origin”. Gesha grown in Panama happens to possess such a quality: As well as benefiting from what Koyner calls Panama’s “rare combination of volcanic soils, unique microclimates, [and] altitude”, the Panamanian descendent of gesha is “distinct and uniform”, as found by the World Coffee Research’s analysis on genetic diversity.
While laws covering geographical indications vary by territory, explains Irene Calboli, Regents Professor of Law at Texas A&M University School of Law, nearly every country has laws enforcing trademarks. And while gaining GI status or similar can be a complex and prolonged process, applying for trademarks is relatively easy. “It’s much simpler; you just get it, and then you can license it”, she says. “If you go for a geographic indication, it’s unique, so the association has to be more involved”.
Koyner says that SCAP discussed the various options, but “we looked at the fact that there are many appellations or geographical indications and many have not been able to achieve real value for the producers”.
As well as offering protection from fraud, trademarks and other forms of market-based regulation like certifications can be useful marketing tools. They also provide consumer confidence.
“Coffee buyers, both throughout the supply chain and eventually the consumer, might care where products are made, where they’re coming from”, Calboli says. “Now the question is, why do [sellers] want to have it? Because if I am able to identify my products, I can legally prevent others from using something which is the same or similar, because that could create confusion in the marketplace”.
However, those who stand to benefit from the branding are a select group. Currently, SCAP says it has “more than 89 members” while, according to the most recently available data from Panama’s Ministry of Agricultural Development, the country had 8,287 coffee producers as of 2021. Koyner says that “the trademark applies solely to the combined term ‘Panama Geisha’, which can only be used by SCAP members”.
Garrido advocates for a GI or similar designation, pointing out that many Panamanian producers grow gesha, despite only a select few being members of SCAP, and thus able to command the highest prices at auction. “There should be a protection for [gesha] from Panama, and it should be available to any Panamanian producer”, she says.
Use of the logo remains relatively limited, possibly because the trademark process in the U.S. and U.K. is still pending and can take months to be accepted. But branding “Panama Geisha”, and explicitly associating it with SCAP and its famous competition and auction, will likely continue to cement the coffee’s prestige—and further inflate its astonishing prices.
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Header image “Panama August 2016” by KBM2008, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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