Tonkpi (Man)

Tonkpi is where Côte d’Ivoire’s coffee is strongest. In the forested mountains of the far west, around the city of Man, smallholders grow more coffee than in any other Ivorian region, mostly robusta. Tonkpi is also the home of arabusta, the arabica–robusta hybrid once known as “presidential coffee”, and of the Café des Montagnes label, part of an effort to revive the country’s coffee.

The short version

• Côte d’Ivoire’s biggest coffee region: 13,665 tonnes in 2023, about 29% of the crop.
• Mountains over a third of the region, sometimes above 1,000 metres.
• Arabusta, a hybrid first grown in the 1960s for President Houphouët-Boigny.
• Café des Montagnes, a regional label since 2024.
• One of four robusta terroirs identified by an ICO project.
• CNRA’s coffee collections at its Man research station.

What does Tonkpi coffee taste like?

Like most Ivorian coffee, most of Tonkpi’s is robusta. Arabusta, grown in the mountains around Man, combines the strength of robusta with floral flavours, CNN reported, and sells for three or four times the price of robusta in Ivorian supermarkets. Promoters of Tonkpi coffee describe the Gbatongoin arabusta and the robusta of Bofesso, planted at the foot of the Dent de Man, as rich in natural plant and clove aromas, Pouvoirs Magazine reported. Two official descriptions now exist:

Source	Description
Geographical indication Café des Montagnes de Man, as described by OIPI, Côte d’Ivoire’s intellectual property office	A pleasant, slightly sweet taste with an intense aroma and little bitterness; robusta and arabusta beans, oval, mostly khaki, but a bright green when grown higher up; grades 0 to 3
Cafés-terroirs study of the Coffee and Cocoa Inter-professional Organisation (OIAC, 2010), as reported by CIRAD	“Good quality, with an intense aroma, full-bodied, balanced odour” for dry-processed coffee, the method Man’s growers use

The two disagree on processing: OIPI says the beans are washed, dried in the sun and sorted by hand, while the 2010 study and CIRAD’s 2018 review describe dry processing as the growers’ method. The same study found bigger beans in Man: 29.3% were above screen 16, against 18 to 25% in the other regions studied. OLAM’s national coffee buyer told CIRAD that in Man the cherries are not always picked fully red, but drying, sorting and cleaning are more careful than elsewhere.

How much coffee does Tonkpi grow?

Region	2022	2023
Tonkpi (Man)	27,195 t	13,665 t
Haut-Sassandra (Daloa)	20,409 t	10,464 t
Guémon (Duékoué)	20,163 t	9,468 t
Cavally (Guiglo)	10,150 t	4,332 t
Côte d’Ivoire	95,520 t	46,932 t

Source: Coffee-Cocoa Council, via the government’s open-data portal, data.gouv.ci.

Tonkpi grew about 28% of the national crop in 2022 and 29% in 2023, by our calculation; in 2005 the ICO’s terroir project put the Man region’s share at 25%, on mountainous land with granitic soils. Output halved almost everywhere between the two years, but the order of the regions held, the portal notes. The western regions, Tonkpi, Guémon and Cavally, depend most on coffee. Tonkpi also grew 200,108 tonnes of cocoa in 2022, more than seven times its coffee.

The land

The 2010 terroir study set Man apart from the other coffee regions it compared:

Region	Altitude	Rainfall	Mean temperature	Production
Man	500 m	1,618 mm	24.3 °C	44,000 t
Divo	210 m	1,300 mm	25.7 °C	21,000 t
Abengourou	196 m	1,250 mm	26.4 °C	13,000 t
Aboisso	76 m	1,600 mm	27 °C	16,000 t

Source: OIAC-CCC (2010), via CIRAD (2018).

Man’s combination of altitude above 500 metres and rainfall above 1,600 mm is unique in Côte d’Ivoire, CIRAD says, and its soils, weathered from basic rocks, are rich in exchangeable bases. Biankouma is the Tonkpi department most devoted to coffee: the 990 members of its Camobian co-operative farm 1 to 3 hectares each. Coffee is harvested from November to January, there was no roasting plant in the region in 2018, and the national revival programme planned 10,000 hectares of new planting in Biankouma alone that year.

About a third of the area covered by CNRA’s Man directorate is mountainous and very rugged, with altitudes sometimes above 1,000 metres in the north, and large rocks at the surface that limit farmland, CNRA says. Rainfall is 1,300 to 2,400 mm a year, falling from west to east and south to north. CNRA’s Man station keeps important coffee collections, at Zélé and Mont Tonkpi, and runs seed fields and trials; its director said in 2021 that it had developed improved coffee varieties yielding more than 3.5 tonnes a hectare a year, aimed especially at the mountains.

Arabusta and the Café des Montagnes

Arabusta was first grown in the 1960s because President Félix Houphouët-Boigny wanted a coffee sweeter and milder than robusta. Few farmers grow it: a new tree takes up to two years to bear, and the beans are crushed and dried by hand, CNN reported. In 2021 the economic forum of the Tonkpi Nihidaley festival chose to promote the mountain coffee, arabusta. In June 2024 the label for the Café des Montagnes de Man, now listed by OIPI as a protected geographical indication, was handed over in Man, with the Coffee-Cocoa Council pledging to support coffee through reforestation, Xinhua reported. The Gbatongoin arabusta, developed by CNRA researchers, is described as the first labelled coffee in Côte d’Ivoire.

Tonkpi and other origins

• Coffee in Côte d’Ivoire: the whole country, its prices and its history.
• Coffee in Uganda: Africa’s biggest robusta producer today.
• Coffee in Vietnam: the world’s biggest robusta grower.