Saudi Arabia Has Built a Coffee Culture. It Is Still Building a Coffee Country.

A national drink that mostly comes from somewhere else

Walk into almost any specialty café in Riyadh and the menu reads like an atlas. Ethiopia, Colombia, Panama, Kenya. The barista can tell you the altitude of the farm and the fermentation time of the lot. What the menu rarely offers is coffee grown two hours' flight to the south, in the terraced mountains of Jazan.

That gap is the most revealing fact about Saudi coffee today. The country has built one of the most active coffee markets in the region. Research firm Ken Research estimates the Kingdom had about 5,130 branded coffee-shop outlets in 2025, close to half of all branded outlets in the Middle East. The same firm puts the Saudi café market at roughly USD 6.6 billion in 2025. Coffee imports reached about USD 602 million in 2024, by its count.

Domestic production is a fraction of that. The Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture reports more than 1.3 million productive coffee trees across Jazan, Asir, Al-Baha, Makkah, and Najran, yielding over 870 tons of coffee a year. Euromonitor, cited by the Public Investment Fund in 2022, forecast Saudi consumption would reach 28,700 tons a year by 2026. Put those two figures side by side and local farms supply roughly 3 percent of what the country drinks.

Saudi Arabia, in other words, is a coffee superpower as a buyer. As a grower, it is still a village.

The bean behind the pride

The village matters more than its size suggests. Khawlani coffee, named for the tribes of the Jazan highlands, has been grown in the Kingdom's south for centuries. In 2022 UNESCO added Khawlani coffee, and the knowledge and skills associated with growing it, to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO's listing describes the process in detail: seedlings raised in shade for three to four months, moved to stone terraces that conserve water and soil, harvested by hand, dried, and hulled on flat stone mills.

The state has made this bean a symbol. 2022 was named the Year of Saudi Coffee, and cafés were instructed to use the term "Saudi coffee" instead of "Arabic coffee." In May of the same year, PIF launched the Saudi Coffee Company with a plan to invest about SAR 1.2 billion over ten years and raise national output from 300 to 2,500 tons a year. The company later set up a model farm of one million square meters in Jazan and, according to its own announcement, aims to grow five million coffee trees there by 2030.

The people at the center of this story are not executives, though. They are families like that of Farah al-Malki, a 90-year-old Jazan farmer whom AFP photographed in 2022 harvesting with his son and grandson. Three generations on one terrace. His farm reported about 2.5 tons a year, sold at USD 27 to 40 per kilogram. For comparison, Ken Research estimates the average Saudi import price for green coffee at USD 6.34 per kilogram in 2025. Saudi beans already sell as a premium product. The question is whether that premium reflects taste, scarcity, or identity.

What "the world's finest" actually measures

At a coffee exhibition in Jazan in February 2024, Deputy Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture Mansour Al-Mushaiti spoke of a significant improvement in Saudi coffee quality over the past decade and said it had come to be recognized as "the world's finest," according to Arab News. It is a striking claim, and a sincere one. It is also the kind of claim this publication cannot simply repeat.

Coffee quality has a vocabulary. Specialty coffee is graded by cuppers who score lots on fixed protocols. Origins earn their reputations at international auctions and competitions, where buyers from Tokyo, Oslo, and Melbourne bid against each other. Panama's Geisha lots became famous that way. So did Ethiopian washed coffees and certain Kenyan farms. We found no public record of Saudi Khawlani lots competing in that open international arena at scale. The main structured quality event we identified is the Saudi Coffee Company's own Saudi Sip of Excellence competition, held in Jazan in January 2025.

That absence is not a verdict against the bean. A crop this small, mostly consumed at home and often brewed light with cardamom and saffron in the traditional style, has had little reason to enter foreign auctions. But it means "highest quality in the world" is, for now, a statement of pride rather than a measured result.

There is a more defensible version of the claim, and it is about the cup rather than the farm. Saudi cafés have spent a decade importing some of the most expensive and carefully processed coffees available, then investing in equipment, training, and design to serve them. A Riyadh customer in 2026 can drink a competition-grade Panamanian lot on an ordinary weekday. That is a real achievement. It is just a different one. It is the quality of a sophisticated buyer, not yet the quality of a producer.

The arithmetic of ambition

The production numbers themselves deserve a careful reading, because they do not agree. PIF's 2022 launch cited about 300 tons a year. The ministry has reported figures of 800 and then 870 tons nationally. A 2024 Saudi Press Agency report, cited by AGBI, put 2023 output at almost 1,500 tons, against a rural development program target of 7,000 tons by 2026. Tree counts move in the same way, from 400,000 trees to more than 1.3 million productive ones, depending on the year and the source.

Some of this reflects real growth. Some reflects different definitions: productive trees versus planted ones, green beans versus dried cherries, Jazan alone versus the whole southwest. For an industry trying to sell itself to the world, the inconsistency is a small but telling problem. Specialty coffee is a business built on traceability. Buyers want to know exactly what a lot is and where it came from.

Water is the larger constraint. When the Saudi Coffee Company launched, independent coffee consultant Christopher Feran told AGBI that large-scale commercial coffee is extremely water-intensive, and asked where a 2,500-ton harvest would even be sold. Jazan's farmers also face steep mountain roads and, as regional reporting has noted, waning interest among younger generations. Even the full PIF target of 2,500 tons would cover under a tenth of projected national demand.

A different kind of growth

None of this makes the Saudi coffee story smaller. It makes it more honest, and arguably more interesting.

The Kingdom is running two coffee industries at once. One is a fast, import-fed café economy that has made Saudi consumers among the most discerning in the region. The other is a slow, mountain-grown heritage crop that the state is trying to turn into a premium export. The first is measured in outlets and market share. The second will be measured in something harder to manufacture: a reputation earned in rooms where Saudi Arabia does not set the rules.

That may be the real test of the next decade. Saudi coffee does not need to be the most produced coffee in the world. It probably never will be. The question is whether it is willing to be judged by strangers, scored blind, and priced by buyers who have never heard of Khawlan bin Amir.

Pride can declare a coffee the finest. Only a cupping table can prove it.

Calculation note: The share of national consumption met by local production (about 3 percent) is Arabian Growth's own calculation, dividing the ministry's reported 870 tons by Euromonitor's 2026 forecast of 28,700 tons. Using the higher 2023 estimate of about 1,500 tons gives roughly 5 percent. The comparison of 2,500 tons to national demand (under 10 percent) uses the same forecast. These figures come from different years and sources and are indicative only. Market size, outlet count, import value, and import price figures are estimates from Ken Research, a commercial research firm, and have not been independently verified. The farm price of USD 27 to 40 per kilogram was reported by AFP in 2022 and may not refer to the same processing stage as green import prices.