Guest Blog: Why the Middle East Is Emerging as a Defining Force in the Global Coffee Industry

The global coffee industry is not short of confident predictions. Every few years, a new region is crowned the “next big growth market,” only to plateau as structural limits reveal themselves, income ceilings, demographic stagnation, infrastructure gaps or cultural preferences that evolve slower than expected. But the transformation taking place across the Middle East today is not another cycle of hype. It is a fundamental shift in where global influence is coming from, and if the industry continues to see the region as merely an emerging market, it will misinterpret the scale of what is happening.

The Middle East is not simply consuming more coffee. It is reshaping the conditions under which coffee is produced, traded and valued. Unless the industry recalibrates its assumptions, it will underestimate a region that, in several ways, is more primed to drive the next decade of global coffee direction than many of the markets that once dominated the narrative.

A New Generation, A New Market Logic

The most misunderstood part of this shift is demographic. The region’s youthfulness is often cited as a headline statistic but rarely interpreted correctly. A young population does not automatically create a high-value coffee market; what does is a young population with access, aspiration and global exposure. Across the Gulf, where more than 60% of the population is under 35, and increasingly in North Africa, this is exactly what we see. A generation raised with international cultural fluency is approaching coffee as an extension of taste, identity and self-expression, more akin to fashion, music or design than to a morning utility. They are not inheriting a coffee culture; they are creating one. And they are doing so with remarkably few of the constraints that shaped earlier consumer markets.

Most Western coffee markets took decades to evolve from commodity to speciality. The Middle East did not. It moved from instant coffee to single-origin pour-overs in what feels like the span of a single generation. The compression of time matters. Entire behaviours that took other regions twenty years to develop have materialised here almost overnight. In Saudi Arabia, for example, more than 36 million cups of coffee are consumed every day, and the Kingdom now has over 61,000 licensed cafés, numbers that would be extraordinary in any context. In the UAE, more than 90% of coffee spending occurs outside the home, one of the highest café-driven consumption ratios in the world. Egypt has nearly doubled its annual coffee consumption in five years, rising from around 36,000 to over 70,000 tons, while Morocco recorded a 23 percent rise in coffee imports in 2024 alone.

This emerging baseline of expectation, quality, provenance, processing style, and ethical value chains is reshaping the economics of the industry. Coffee professionals often talk about “premiumisation” as something that gradually seeps upward from niche cafés into mainstream consumption. In the Middle East, premiumisation did not seep. It arrived fully formed.

Where Demand and Capability Rise Together

The willingness to pay for quality is not a marginal behaviour here; it is core to how the young, urban Middle Eastern consumer thinks about food and beverage culture in general. Coffee happens to be the category where we see it most clearly because the market is evolving the fastest. What follows is a shift in influence. When consumers normalise premium expectations at scale, global suppliers take notice.

Producers from East Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia increasingly describe the region as a strategic market, not a secondary one. Many now tailor fermentation styles, natural profiles or processing innovations specifically for buyers in Riyadh, Dubai or Kuwait City. It is unusual for an emerging region to generate this kind of pull so early in its development curve, and yet; here it is happening now and happening quickly.

The second force behind the region’s rising relevance is economic cohesion. The Middle East is one of the few regions where consumption growth is happening simultaneously across multiple layers of the value chain. Café culture is expanding, yes, but so too is at-home brewing, specialty retail, roasting capacity, green coffee trade, logistics infrastructure and the professional workforce needed to sustain them. It is rare in global coffee markets to see both demand and capability accelerate at the same time. In many regions, consumption appears long before supply-chain maturity, or vice versa. Here, they are growing together.

This parallel development is why the region’s impact will be felt far beyond its borders. When a market becomes not just a high-value consumer but a capable participant in sourcing, roasting and trade, it does something more powerful than generate revenue, it shapes direction. It becomes a place where reputations are made, partnerships are formed and new standards are tested.

Geography and connectivity amplify this further. The Middle East sits at an increasingly significant intersection between producing and consuming nations. For East African producers, the GCC is closer, more accessible and often more commercially reliable than European destinations. For Asian producers, supply routes to the region are efficient and cost stable. Much of the coffee entering North Africa and South Asia already routes through the Gulf, with Dubai serving as a key re-export hub. In recent years, the city’s coffee re-export activity has exceeded AED 3.5 billion in cumulative trade value, with 2024 alone seeing a 20% increase in green coffee re-exports as the UAE strengthens its role as a global logistics and distribution centre.

When a region becomes a corridor, a bridge rather than an endpoint, it naturally takes on a greater role in shaping global patterns of trade. That is what is happening now. Much of it is not yet captured in macroeconomic reporting, but it is visible in behaviour, and behaviour almost always precedes data.

A Culture Positioned for Reinvention

The final reason the Middle East will define the next decade of coffee growth has less to do with economics and everything to do with culture. Unlike older markets where coffee culture is well-established and somewhat rigid, the Middle East is defined by cultural fluidity. Tradition and innovation coexist easily. A Yemeni jebena ceremony can sit comfortably alongside a carbonic maceration Gesha. Café formats evolve quickly. Entrepreneurs experiment freely. This openness, rare in older coffee geographies, creates the conditions for reinvention.

By 2030, I believe the global industry will look back at this moment and recognise it as an inflection point: the period when influence began to shift meaningfully toward a region often viewed through outdated assumptions. The Middle East does not need validation from legacy markets to shape the industry. It is doing so already, through the expectations of its consumers, the confidence of its entrepreneurs, the evolution of its supply chain and the growing attention of producers who understand where the future lies.

The story of global coffee is not static. It is shifting. And the shift is taking place here.

Shouq BinRedha is exhibition manager at World of Coffee Dubai 2026.