Brewing a Hot Coffee Trade: An Opportunity for Mexican Growers

I recently completed two years of living in the United Arab Emirates, specifically in the city of Dubai. During this time, I had the opportunity to observe and learn about the culture and way of doing business in the Arab region, the importance and economic impact that this hub generates for the entire area, including India. Perhaps you will be reading this article with a cup of coffee in your hand, and I am writing it with a cup by my side.

Coffee is the second-most exported product in the world, after oil, and it is also the second most consumed drink in the world after water.

How important is coffee in our lives, when has it been written about and how many discussions about which is the best coffee in the world have there been? In Mexico, the majority of us know and are proud of our coffee. We also recognize Colombian coffee as being famous, and not for nothing the second-most well-known Colombian character. I am referring, of course, to Juan Valdez, although Brazil is the king of world coffee production.

Regardless of the place of residence, in terms of coffee, we will all recognize the "Arabica," which is so called for having its commercial origin in the peninsula of the same name. A coffee bush of Ethiopian origin and of great commercial value since time immemorial, today, Arabica is the type of coffee with the highest average price worldwide. In 2022, its approximate annual production was 92.7 million bags, at 60 kg each.

You can easily order coffee anywhere in the world. However, the origin of the word comes from the Arabic qahwah, alluding to "grain wine." After this, it was mixed with the Turkish word kahve to finally adapt to different languages; for example, caffe in Italian, coffee in English, kaffee in German.

The Arab world loves coffee, as much or more than us, and there is a character who has become notorious as a server and whom today I can call a friend. I’m referring to Ahmed Bin Sulayem, president and CEO of DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodity Center). He is a real "coffee lover" who nurtured for many years a project that through the DMCC would come to fruition in 2019: the DMCC Coffee Center. At this 7,500-square-meter temperature-controlled site, the coffee industry was worth $4.4 billion in 2021, according to estimates by Euromonitor International.

I took on the task of visiting the DMCC Coffee Center to see this concept firsthand and to understand what it offers so that I could share it with you. Located in the Mina Jebel Ali area, Dubai, we find one of the most exquisite facilities I have ever seen, and when I refer to exquisite it is for the right balance of what it should be, without any ornamentation, perfectly practical and with an advanced degree of process where there is no physical contact with the process, industrialization is "perfect," a place immaculately clean, featuring an SCA coffee-certified training campus, plus a coffee quality lab; cupping laboratories; sampler roasters and small batch roasters from manufacturers like Probat, Ikawa, and Diedrich; and the industrial roasting torrefaction of production of 30 and 60 kg of the Italian manufacturer Brambati.

In this state-of-the-art coffee center, infrastructure and services are offered for the storage, processing, roasting, packaging and delivery of beans according to precise specifications and with  a fully dedicated, temperature-controlled coffee storage center. Located in the world's largest duty-free zone, Jafza, the facility is built to accommodate the transfer of up to 10,000 tons of green coffee per year.

“Dubai is uniquely positioned to serve the important trade corridor of the emerging markets of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and is well connected to the coffee producing regions of Africa, China, India, America Latin America and Southeast Asia,” bin Sulayem told us. “The DMCC Coffee Center connects international coffee merchants with sophisticated logistics and a wealth of value-added services, delivering operational excellence to meet growing global demand. Until relatively recently, the region simply did not have the capacity, equipment or experience to facilitate global coffee trade on this scale, and today we can see the impact of our Center on the global coffee industry.-

The DMCC Coffee Center has created an ecosystem based on coffee, where one of the fundamental pieces is marketing, since based on various initiatives, merchants from around the world come to this site in search of products, which allows members to offer their product efficiently. Sadly, I only saw one Mexican farm among hundreds of others from different countries, so I invite you to take a virtual tour through the DMCC website because Mexico is renowned for its coffee. For them, our country sounds exotic and interesting.Dear reader, if you or someone you know is in the coffee business, share this link. We need to increase the presence of the Mexican product on this side of the Hemisphere that daily demands more products and services. We must seek new paths for our national products and there are markets willing to pay for them.

Fun fact: In 1475, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), Kiva Han opened the world's first coffee shop. In Europe, the first coffee shop was opened in 1645 in Venice, and in 1650 in London.