The plant ranks as one of the world's most valuable and widely traded commodity crops and is an important export product of several countries, including those in Central and South America, the Caribbean and Africa.

C. arabica has its origins in the highlands of Ethiopia and the Boma Plateau of Sudan, and came about as the result of a hybrid between C. canephora and C.

The caffeine in coffee beans serves as a toxic substance that protects against insects and other pests, a form of natural plant defense against herbivory.

Caffeine simultaneously attracts pollinators, specifically honeybees, by creating an olfactory memory that signals bees to return to the plant's flowers.

[12] Caffeine has also evolved independently in the more distantly related genera Theobroma (cacao) and Camellia (tea).

In 2008 and 2009, researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, named seven from the mountains of northern Madagascar, including C. ambongensis, C. boinensis, C. labatii, C. pterocarpa, C. bissetiae, and C.

In 2011, Coffea absorbed the twenty species of the former genus Psilanthus due to the morphological and genetic similarities between the two genera.

However, these characteristics were not present in all species of either respective genus, making the two genera overwhelmingly similar in both morphology and genetic sequence.

This transfer expanded Coffea from 104 species to 124, and extended its native distribution to tropical Asia and Australasia.