The appeal
While other customers at Slices in Abu Dhabi’s Al Mamoura order salads and cold drinks to ward off the heat, Meri Calderon from Little Rock, Arkansas, is looking forward to her next caffé latte. Calderon has been in the UAE for little more than a week but has already noticed a marked change in her drinking habits.
“I’ve been drinking more coffee here since I’ve been on this trip. When I’m at home I can drink a Starbucks in the morning and I’m good for half the day, but here I’ve been drinking four or five cups a day.”
In another departure from her usual drinking habits, Calderon adds sugar to her cup. “I usually don’t like sugar in my coffee but I’ve started adding it here because the coffee seems stronger and richer. It tastes good.”
The trend
Slices is among a growing number of specialist local coffee roasters and retailers, including Esquires, RAW Coffee and Coffee Planet, offering 100 per cent arabica – higher quality – beans that are also certified organic. The distinction is not just one that appeals from a marketing standpoint.
Even if she doesn’t know it, Calderon is being influenced by higher quality, says Slices’ general manager Darrell Guest, a straight-talking Yorkshireman who worked as a farmer and a chef before entering the catering industry. He says the changes in Calderon’s behaviour are a matter of ingredients.
“You’ll recognise the difference straight away,” says Guest, pointing to a cup of espresso. “Arabica beans don’t have that acidity, the coffee doesn’t hit the back of your throat.”
Certified organic...
As Rob Jones, the managing director of Dubai’s Coffee Planet, is keen to point out, the difference between organic and non-organic coffee is not as easy to define.
“The reality is that probably 98 per cent of the world’s coffee is actually organic, it’s just not certified organic. When you visit the plantations, they don’t use pesticides because they simply can’t afford it. However, they also can’t afford to be part of a certification body that would certify them as organic.”
Matt Toogood, the director of the Dubai-based boutique roastery RAW Coffee, agrees. However, he still believes organic certification makes a difference, particularly in terms of food safety.
“I watched a farmer in Yemen growing coffee next to some khat. He’d been given a black, unmarked drum of chemicals with a poison symbol on it and been told to use this on his khat before he harvested it. In theory he was growing organic coffee, but he didn’t because of the cross--contamination.”
In Toogood’s experience, organic certification not only goes some way to providing food safety but it also helps to ensure better beans. “Typically, organic is a higher grade of coffee to start off with,” he explains. “If a farmer is going to go to the trouble to get organic certification, he actually cares about the product he’s producing.”
...but also Fair Trade
Whether organic coffee actually tastes better or not, the demand for it is certainly increasing among local consumers. Coffee Planet has been running an organic coffee trial in Dubai service stations in response to customer demand, and its plan is to expand that offer to Abu Dhabi after Ramadan.
Whatever the reasons for organic coffee’s increasing popularity – and availability – all the local players in the UAE’s burgeoning boutique coffee industry urge consumers to consider themselves a little less and the source of their coffee a little more, especially the farmers who are almost certainly worse off than they are.
“We know that organic is a label that is better for our marketing engine,” explains Toogood, “but that’s a shame because what’s important is the fair trade. The difference that can make to a coffee farmer earning little more than US$300 [Dh1,100] a year is absolutely phenomenal. That’s why we want to see people buying more fair trade products, not just coffee, but any type of product.”
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