Geographical indications applications for “Coffee” are now accepted in Singapore

Effective 1 August 2026, Singapore’s Schedule of the Geographical Indications Act 2014 will be amended to include “coffee” as a category of goods under which a geographical indication (“GI”) may be registered. Other existing goods available for registration as a GI in Singapore include wines, spirits, beers, cheese, meat and meat products, seafood, edible oils, non-edible oils, fruits, vegetables, spices and condiments, confectionery and baked goods, flowers and parts of flowers, as well as natural gum.  

To-date, coffee remains to be one of the most traded commodities worldwide, and one of the top countries producing coffee is Colombia. In the early 2000s, the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (“FNC”) first filed a GI for “Café de Colombia” in their home country. Subsequently, FNC also applied for the same GI in the European Union (“EU”), when EU started allowing for registration of GIs for non-European GI products. This was highly important to protect the distributors and producers of Colombian coffee, and to ensure that any coffee products bearing that GI guaranteed origin from Colombia, as well as authenticity and compliance with quality standards. This stopped some coffee roasters from indicating their coffee products as “Colombian”, when those products in fact do not contain any Colombian coffee. Protecting “Café de Colombia” as a trade mark would have proven challenging, given that “Café de Colombia” was inherently descriptive, and inherently descriptive signs are generally not registrable.  

With the latest development to Singapore’s GI registration system, it will be interesting to see whether any coffee-related GIs will be filed in the coming days. 

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