BY AHMED BIN SULAYEM – EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER – DMCC
Dubai has become synonymous with trade, from the trade of commodities, food and other resources with the Emirate’s key trade partners, to acting as a transhipment hub that connects East and West, North and South.
Over the years, DMCC has played a crucial role in promoting, attracting, and driving trade through Dubai. This holds particularly true for the trade of two of the world’s most popular soft commodities – tea and coffee. Through the DMCC Tea Centre and the DMCC Coffee Centre, both located at JAFZA, DMCC has helped position Dubai as the world’s largest re-exporter of tea, and as a new global hub for the coffee industry.
Ahmed Bin Sulayem
The DMCC Tea Centre was established to create a unique tea trading hub and over a decade and a half later, the Tea Centre has well and truly put Dubai on the map as a destination for the tea industry. We process tea from the most important producing countries, and via the world- class logistical infrastructure that Dubai and JAFZA have to offer, the DMCC Tea Centre serves a link between the producing countries in Southeast Asia (India and Sri Lanka) and Africa and the consuming countries in Europe and beyond.
The abundant space at JAFZA means that the DMCC Tea Centre is able to hold up to 5,000 tonnes in its warehouse – equivalent to the annual consumption of tea in Saudi Arabia – at any one time. The Tea Centre’s services also include blending and packaging solutions, with the ability to produce 10 million tea bags per month, as well as member benefits such as tea tasting.
Following on from the success of the Tea Centre, the DMCC Coffee Centre was launched in 2019. The state-of-the-art facility is the first of its kind in the Middle East and it encompasses the entire coffee industry, from crop to cup, to benefit a wide range of coffee professionals from across the world. It connects the fast growing and high value consumer markets in the Middle East and Europe to some of the world’s major coffee producing nations such as Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Uganda and Vietnam. As with the Tea Centre, the Coffee Centre benefits from the advanced infrastructure at JAFZA, offering cost-efficient logistical support and services that connect coffee producers to buyers from all around the globe.
The DMCC Coffee Centre’s core services include warehousing, roasting and packaging. Able to handle up to 20,000 tonnes of green coffee beans annually, the Coffee Centre creates new trading opportunities and will become the preferred hub for specialty coffee traders and producers across the region. The Coffee Centre also boasts a range of specialised offers, including coffee tasting and auctioning as well as barista training at a Speciality Coffee Association accredited training facility. At the end of 2019, the Centre hosted over 100 representatives of the nation’s coffee industry to taste and bid for some of the most exclusive and highest quality coffee in existence, including the world’s most expensive coffee, Panama Geisha.
And in July last year, following a visit to both the Tea and Coffee Centres from His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, DMCC announced that the output of both centres will be tripled to keep up with increasing market demand and to support Dubai’s strategic economic diversification. With the help of JAFZA, DMCC continues to drive trade flows through Dubai, positioning the emirate as the global trading hub for both tea and coffee.