By: Shouq Bin Redha

Exhibition Manager at World of Coffee 2026

A Shift the Industry Can No Longer Ignore

The global coffee industry is no stranger to 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 more slowly than expected.

But the transformation taking place across the Middle East today is not another cycle of hype. It represents a fundamental shift in where global influence is coming from. If the industry continues to view the region merely as an emerging market, it will misread the scale and significance of what is unfolding.

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 is, in several ways, better positioned to shape 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 aspect 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 precisely the case. A generation raised with international cultural fluency approaches 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 doing so with remarkably few of the constraints that shaped earlier consumer markets.

Most Western coffee markets took decades to evolve from commodity to specialty. 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. This compression of time matters. 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 daily, and the Kingdom now has over 61,000 licensed cafés—figures 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 globally. Egypt has nearly doubled its annual coffee consumption in five years, rising from around 36,000 to over 70,000 tonnes, while Morocco recorded a 23% rise in coffee imports in 2024 alone.

This emerging baseline of expectation—quality, provenance, processing style, ethical value chains—is reshaping the industry’s economics. Coffee professionals often speak of “premiumisation” as something that gradually filters from niche cafés into the mainstream. In the Middle East, premiumisation did not filter. It arrived fully formed.

Where Demand and Capability Rise Together

The willingness to pay for quality is not a marginal behaviour in the region; it is central to how young, urban Middle Eastern consumers engage with food and beverage culture more broadly. Coffee simply happens to be the category where this shift is most visible because the market is evolving so rapidly.

As a result, influence follows. When premium expectations are normalised at scale, global suppliers take notice. Producers from East Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia increasingly describe the Middle East as a strategic market rather than a secondary one. Many now tailor fermentation styles, natural profiles, and processing innovations specifically for buyers in Riyadh, Dubai, or Kuwait City.

It is unusual for an emerging region to generate this level of pull so early in its development curve. Yet it is happening now—and quickly.

A second force behind the region’s rising relevance is economic cohesion. Consumption growth is occurring simultaneously across multiple layers of the value chain. Café culture is expanding, but so too are at-home brewing, specialty retail, roasting capacity, green coffee trade, logistics infrastructure, and the professional workforce required to sustain them.

In global coffee markets, it is rare to see demand and capability accelerate together. Often, consumption precedes supply-chain maturity, or vice versa. In the Middle East, both are evolving in parallel.

This is why the region’s impact will extend far beyond its borders. When a market becomes not only a high-value consumer but also a capable participant in sourcing, roasting, and trade, it does more than generate revenue—it shapes direction. It becomes a place where reputations are built, partnerships are formed, and new standards are tested.

Geography further amplifies this influence. The Middle East sits at a critical 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 assumes a greater role in shaping global trade patterns. That is what is happening now. Much of it has yet to be 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 is poised to define the next decade of coffee growth has less to do with economics and everything to do with culture. Unlike older markets, where coffee traditions are well-established and often rigid, the Middle East is characterised by cultural fluidity. Tradition and innovation coexist with ease.

A Yemeni jebena ceremony can sit comfortably alongside a carbonic maceration Gesha. Café formats evolve quickly. Entrepreneurs experiment freely. This openness—rare in more mature coffee geographies—creates ideal conditions for reinvention.

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

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

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