Nepalese coffee takes over the domestic market

It is always great to find those alternative coffee stories amongst your morning pile of news. Whilst the big chains of Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and Costa, and the major coffee producing nations such as Brazil and Ethiopia get the majority of the press coverage from an industry perspective, it is the little stories from the little players that often stand out from the congested crowd.

One such story is the dramatic rise of Nepalese coffee and how it’s finally usurping foreign imports.

The shift has been put down to an improvement in the process, packaging and marketing of the home-grown coffee and that has coincided with the emergence of a bustling coffee scene in the mountainous Asian nation.

According to statistics released by the National Tea and Coffee Development Board, 55% of domestically produced coffee is now being used within Nepal with an increasing amount of coffee being ordered by local five-star hotels, cafes and restaurants.

“Within a few years, we have witness a jump in demand from hotels, coffee shops and restaurants,” explains Krishna Ghimire, the chairman of Highland Coffee. He added that his company expects to see a 25% increase in sales this year.

“We used to sell 10 tonnes of coffee two decades ago,” he said. That number has boomed into the near 125 tonne amount that they are planning to retail in the coming months.

Also the vice-president of the Coffee Producers Association Nepal, Ghimire also claims that several companies had switched their focus onto rebranding Nepalese coffee in the relatively recent past, with around 40 now entities involved in the coffee business.

It is a marked improvement. Coffee is cultivated in 25 Nepalese districts, exporting around 400 tonnes annually – 30 times more than what was produced twenty years ago.