Following her recent appearance at the Hotel & Hospitality Expo Saudi Arabia, where she hosted a discussion on building sustainable café businesses, Barbara Kardos explores what the next chapter of Saudi Arabia's coffee industry could look like.
Saudi Arabia probably doesn’t need another article telling us its coffee scene is booming.
We know.
Riyadh has enough beautiful coffee counters to make you wonder if there is any marble left.
The more interesting question now is: what happens after the boom?
Recently, Saudi Coffee Company signed an MoU with Mumtalakat, the Saudi Korean Company for Maintenance and Property Management, to explore opportunities across hospitality and food and expand Saudi Coffee Company products and brands across its projects. Mumtalakat operates across property and facilities management, including hospitality, catering and workplace services - so this is potentially about putting Saudi coffee into many more environments than a traditional café. Saudi Press Agency
On its own, it is another partnership announcement.
In context, I think it says something much more interesting about where Saudi coffee is heading.
The next phase may be less about opening more cafés, and more about building the infrastructure around coffee.
And that shift is already happening at both ends of the value chain.
In Al Baha, Saudi Arabia’s first “coffee city” is being developed across 170 hectares, with more than 527,000 seedlings planted and expected production of around 2,000 tonnes annually once complete. It is part of a wider push that goes beyond growing beans into processing, logistics, employment and ultimately building a more commercially viable domestic coffee industry. Arab News
Saudi Coffee Company itself was established with an ambition to develop the sector across the entire value chain, from bean to cup, while increasing national production capacity from around 300 tonnes to 2,500 tonnes annually. Public Investment Fund
That is no longer simply “coffee culture.”
That is an industry being built.
And in some ways, we have seen a version of this story before.
European coffee brands have spent years finding ways to extend themselves beyond the traditional café.
Lavazza’s business in Italy, for example, now stretches across HoReCa and workplace coffee solutions, combining the product with equipment, training, technical support and tools designed to shape the overall coffee experience. In other words, the brand doesn't need a Lavazza café on the door to be part of your coffee moment. Lavazza
Costa has taken the same logic even further through Costa Coffee Professional. Today its coffee solutions sit in hotels, workplaces, petrol stations, convenience stores, travel environments, healthcare, education and restaurants - supported by machines, training, operations and maintenance rather than relying solely on a conventional Costa store. Costa Coffee
So the idea of a coffee brand becoming an ecosystem rather than simply a café network is not new.
But Saudi Arabia has one potentially powerful difference.
It grows the coffee too.
And that changes the conversation.
Italy can turn coffee into an extraordinary part of national culture and export that expertise around the world. Costa can take a recognisable coffee experience and distribute it through hundreds of different consumption occasions.
Saudi Arabia potentially has the opportunity to connect those downstream experiences all the way back to the place where the coffee was grown.
Farm.
Processing.
Roasting.
Brand.
Hospitality.
Retail.
The cup.
That creates an interesting opportunity around provenance, traceability and storytelling - particularly if the industry can maintain quality and consistency as production scales.
Saudi Coffee Company is already framing its ambition in exactly those terms: developing local production, supporting farmers and building the Saudi coffee sector from cultivation through to the consumer. saudicoffee.com
Of course, having that story doesn't automatically make the businesses built around it sustainable.
Which brings us to the slightly uncomfortable bit.
Growth is not the same thing as sustainability.
A queue during opening month isn’t customer loyalty.
A beautiful brand isn’t a business model.
And excellent coffee, increasingly, is the price of entry rather than the entire proposition.
That was exactly the territory I got to explore in Riyadh last month at the Hotel & Hospitality Expo Saudi Arabia, when I hosted Beyond the Coffee Boom: Building Café Businesses That Last alongside Ali Safa of Costa Coffee Professional and Osamah Mohamed Ali Alawwam of Roasting House.
Rather than simply celebrating how fast the market is growing, we talked about the less glamorous things that determine whether those businesses actually survive: operations, loyalty, innovation and consistent execution.
And we asked some questions that now feel even more relevant.
Does partnering with a global coffee brand give an operator differentiation, or make the business less distinctive?
Are roasters helping cafés build stronger businesses - or inadvertently fuelling an oversupplied market?
And if everyone can access good beans, good machines and increasingly capable baristas…
Is good coffee actually enough to win anymore?
My wider takeaway is that Saudi coffee may be beginning to move from concept proliferation to business discipline - and from café growth to ecosystem building.
That means thinking about what happens long before the cup reaches the guest: agriculture, processing, roasting, training, procurement and supply-chain resilience.
It means thinking about what happens after the guest finishes it: Did they come back? Do they know why they chose you? Can you deliver the same experience across ten locations? Do the economics still work when the launch hype disappears?
And increasingly, it means questioning whether coffee needs to live inside a coffee shop at all.
Hotels. Workplaces. Airports. Restaurants. Retail. Mixed-use developments. Even employee beverage programmes.
Europe has already shown how powerful those routes to market can become.
Saudi Arabia now has the opportunity to build on that model - but potentially connect the experience all the way from a coffee tree in the south of the Kingdom to the cup in a hotel, workplace or café in Riyadh.
That, to me, is where the story gets really interesting.
Saudi Arabia has already proved it can create demand, attract investment and build an extraordinarily energetic café culture.
The harder - and much more interesting - phase is building businesses, brands and a value chain that can still be there when “coffee boom” is no longer the headline.
Our panel happened to be called Beyond the Coffee Boom.
A couple of weeks later, that sounds less like a conference title and more like the brief for the entire sector.
At Keane, we know that great hospitality is about more than what’s on the menu.
From understanding guest behaviours and market dynamics to optimising operations and commercial performance, we combine hands-on hospitality experience with strategic thinking to help businesses work smarter, perform better and stay relevant in an ever-changing industry.