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DMCC in talks for new coffee centre

The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) said on Monday it was in talks with more than one major coffee trading house to bring their business to its newly opened Coffee Centre.
The Coffee Centre near Dubai's Jebel Ali port is a temperature-controlled facility offering infrastructure and services for processing and delivery of coffee, and the only location in the Middle East that offers green bean storage and processing.
The centre, which officially opened on Monday after a soft opening in November, can accommodate both speciality and bulk coffee, and is seeking "small and medium players" in the coffee market, and also bigger firms, said DMCC's executive chairman Ahmed bin Sulayem.
Rather than being locked into long-term bulk deals with major retailers, coffee traders could use Dubai as a distribution hub for the region - "the advantage (they have in trading) from Dubai is to redistribute these products and get a bigger margin," he said.
The facility will attempt to imitate the success of the DMCC's Tea Centre; Dubai now imports tea from around 13 origins, and estimates about 60 per cent of the world's tea re-exports go through the emirate.
"There are pretty much six big traders that control around 45 percent of global imports and we are talking to maybe one or more of them," said Vaughn Marles, product development manager at DMCC. "We would need to get their buy in for this place to be a volume play," he said.
The coffee centre can handle up to 20,000 tonnes annually of coffee, equivalent to $100 million, said Sanjeev Dutta, executive director for commodities at DMCC.
The "bulk" of the coffee that has already gone through the centre since its soft opening has been from South America, as well as East Africa, but it is also well-positioned for Asian business, Marles said.
Dubai MultiCommodities Centre (DMCC) newly-opened 7,500m² coffee centre is located in Jebel Ali Free Zone.It houses a laboratory, cupping labs and a Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) Premier Training Campus, in addition to a range of commercial office space. Projected to handle up to 20,000 tonnes of green coffee bean annually - with an estimated annual trade value of around Dh367 million.
Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, group chairman and CEO of DP World; Hamad Buamim, President and CEO Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry; Ahmed Mahboob Musabih, Director of Dubai Customs; Salem Rashid Al Owais, Ambassador of the UAE to Columbia; Eduardo Fonseca, Ambassador of Panama to the UAE; and Ridwan Hassan, Consul General of Indonesia to the UAE attended the official launch in Dubai.
"Dubai is uniquely positioned to serve the significant emerging markets trade corridor of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and well connected to the coffee-producing regions of Africa, China, India, Latin America and South East Asia. The DMCC Coffee Centre will connect international coffee traders with sophisticated logistics, and a host of value-add services, providing operational excellence to meet growing global demand. Until now, the region simply did not have the capacity, equipment or expertise to facilitate global coffee trade on this scale, and we look forward to seeing the impact of our Centre on the industry going forward," said Ahmed bin Sulayem, executive chairman, DMCC.
Coffee is the one of the world's most widely consumed hot beverages. The global coffee industry is worth an estimated Dh367.3 billion, with the industry in the Middle East expected to climb to Dh16.2 billion by 2021, according to Euromonitor. - waheedabbas@khaleejtimes.com