Inside Saudi Arabia’s coffee shop boom

Drawing from centuries-old coffee traditions and boosted by one of the largest state-backed economic programmes on the planet, Saudi Arabia’s coffee shop market is booming. Tobias Pearce speaks to some of the operators riding high in the Kingdom’s rapidly growing branded café segment to find out why coffee has become Saudi Arabia’s new black gold

Saudi Arabia is a story of remarkable growth. A young nation steeped in tradition, the modern Kingdom was founded in 1932 by Arab political and religious leader Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman, known in the West as Ibn Saud.

The discovery of oil on 3 March 1938 would catapult the fledgling nation from a largely subsistence-based economy into the world’s second-largest oil producer after the United States. In May 2022 alone, the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Company (ARAMCO) pulled in $1bn a week, with the Saudi government currently boasting a $163bn budget surplus, up from $44bn in 2021.