Tanzania Cinnamon: Sourcing Guide

Overview

Cinnamon is a real, if minor and volatile, part of Tanzania’s spice export portfolio, grown alongside cloves and pepper in Tanga and Morogoro regions on the mainland, and in Zanzibar/Pemba. Unlike nutmeg and turmeric, cinnamon has a genuine multi-year, disaggregated trade record, though two independent data sources disagree sharply on its recent scale.

Growing Regions & Processing

Cinnamon is grown in Tanga and Morogoro regions on the mainland, and in Zanzibar/Pemba, typically alongside cloves, pepper and other spices rather than as a monocrop. A Pemba-based processor, the Clove Stem Oil Distillery (CSOD), is documented distilling cinnamon leaf oil alongside its core clove-stem-oil business — evidence of a real, if small, value-addition chain rather than raw-bark export alone.

Trade Data — A Genuine but Disputed Record

ITC Trade Map data (HS 0906) reported to a 2018 EU-ACP TradeCom research brief shows Tanzania’s world cinnamon exports as small and essentially flat through the mid-2010s: $31,000 (2012), $34,000 (2013), $7,000 (2014), effectively zero (2015), and $31,000 (2016). A separate commercial aggregator (Selina Wamucii, citing UN Comtrade) shows a much larger and rapidly growing figure by the end of the decade: $591,000 in 2018 and $1,168,000 in 2019 on 403 tonnes (implying roughly $2.90/kg), with the Netherlands, Kenya, UK, Spain and Italy as leading destinations. These two pictures — near-zero and then a jump to over a million dollars within two to three years — are not necessarily contradictory (real growth is plausible) but we cannot reconcile them from the sources available, and we present both rather than picking one.

Current retail/wholesale pricing (Selina Wamucii, September 2026, methodology not fully disclosed): retail roughly $7.42–12.36/kg (TZS 17,657–29,429/kg) in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza; wholesale roughly $5.19–8.65/kg.

What We Don’t Know

We found no production volume, area, or yield figure for Tanzanian cinnamon from any government or FAO source, and no cinnamon-specific quality/grading standard. This profile is published because the trade data — while disputed — is genuinely disaggregated and multi-year, unlike nutmeg or turmeric; we will update it if a reconciling source or production figure emerges.