How hard is it to run a coffee business in Dubai?

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Burn the MBA textbooks. They are of no use here. As the first coffee roasting company in Dubai, it sincerely took them to war-torn Yemen to bring back only two bags of coffee beans at a time; it was the moral heart that made them support 70 women to produce products; and it was the courage to let them go to the World Coffee Championships and get the results tattooed on their buttocks.

Naivety has never been a bad thing for IT and telecom expert Matt Tugard. When he moved to Dubai from New Zealand with his family five years ago, he had "no idea about starting a coffee business". However, when his wife worked as an air traffic controller in Dubai and he was bored with household chores, he found himself "under a bunch of strange coincidences" to join the business of RAW Coffee, another Native New Zealand aboriginal company that has been running RAW Coffee for a decade.

"instead of worrying about becoming a great company every day, 'why don't we get the product in place first,'" said Tugard, who recently traveled as far away as Myanmar with Thompson. Together, they traded with local farmers who turned their cash crops into RAW's first special coffee orders in the Gulf states. This will lead to 23 new rare coffees, and customers can find 200 cafes and restaurants in the United Arab Emirates that serve RAW beans on an app called RAW Refuel.

This is really a rare and delicious coffee that can be tasted on a first-come-first-served basis. "these coffees are limited editions. Once they are sold out, they are gone," Thompson said. "We hope to sell each kind of coffee on the market for two weeks, but if we sell out in two days, then we will replace it."

But before glossy technology and global travel, they had a lot of difficulties having to go to customer service. There are still a lot of challenges, Thompson said. these include how to secure business licenses and work visas, attracting a small group of special consumers to abandon Starbucks-style large-scale baking, to building reverse osmosis devices to deal with desalinized water in Dubai, and finding dairy farms lacking in the United Arab Emirates. But it's not an impossible task, she says. "you need to know where the boundaries are and make the best coffee you can. We didn't know the difficulties at first, but that would be better. If we had known, we wouldn't have started at all. "

Although business growth is slow, the founders continue to acquire first-hand knowledge. "We grow slowly, but in essence, people think we can actually do more and faster, but then when we learn new knowledge, we can use them," Thompson said. "at the beginning, we didn't have the confidence to expand our business directly to other countries. Now, every year we go to a new country. And we know exactly what we're looking for. "

△ pictures are from the Internet.

When it comes to finding coffee in Burma's rich land dotted with pagodas, it all depends on instinct and confidence. Although Southeast Asian countries have produced commodity-grade Arabica coffee for more than 170 years, they are almost commercial C-grade coffee, Thompson said. Most of them are grown in small houses at the back of the house. People there don't have access to information and don't know how to get the product to market, so coffee is bought by local buyers as cash crops. So despite its altitude, climate, land, agronomy, everything points out that coffee there can become very valuable, this potential is grossly underestimated.

The business partners were used to traveling around the world, following coffee beans all the way to Colombia, South America and beyond. Thompson even has a piece of land in Bali, even though she laughs at herself as "very stupid" about growing her own coffee. 'We didn't know Myanmar had such potential, but they trusted Andrew Hazel of the Coffee quality Research Institute, who invited them to see the results of a $27 million project set up in 2014 by the American Association for International Aid and the Winrock International Development nonprofit, which helped five small agricultural institutions improve their systems for growing, processing and grading coffee, 'she said.

"every time we go, we marvel at the purity of the coffee," Thompson said. "they pick the beans and dry them, and the fruit and sugar are concentrated in it, producing a very different flavor. We tried to do this in Ethiopia nine years ago, but it was not pure enough, but these farmers imported the materials they needed to dry and treated the coffee with very good agronomy. "

Traditional techniques are romantic and mysterious, but they have their own limitations. "these skills are handed down from generation to generation, and they are not spread out, so if a farmer's grandfather uses some kind of drying method," Thompson continued, "We want them to maintain a standard process, but there are too many factors that affect flavor. Cleaning procedures, screening procedures, drying procedures, but also depends on rain, moisture and whether it is the right season. For example, in Southeast Asia, if the weather is very humid, drying beans will become more difficult, or you have the right sun, altitude, minerals in the land, and the right variety of coffee trees, but without proper treatment, the flavor will still be lost. "

With the help of various institutions, including RAW, Myanmar has risen by 15 points in the International Coffee Institute rating system to a high score of 88.5 points, indicating that the coffee grade has reached super grade. "in order to do market research, we brought back 30kg for baking two days ago, and the coffee score was 88, which was amazing," Thompson said. "We were very excited by the quality assurance of water and baking. We have bought more back, and we will reach an agreement with 50 small local farms to buy there every year, if they can maintain this quality. "

△ pictures are from the Internet.

RAW's relentless pursuit of quality is the same as Tugard himself. Five years ago, he set a goal for himself to participate in the World Coffee Championships. He "spent three months practicing making a coffee perfectly. To get the right product, the first thing is to learn how to do it right."

"until you get a tattoo, you're not really a barista. I already have several: a company's logo, a 38, is my place in the World Championships. I was actually very disappointed because it reminded me that I had thought of everything at that time, that is, I forgot to consider the most important point. I will never forget the fact that I see it every day now. "

For those who do not often practice seasoning, cup filling and heart-shaped painting, it is too complicated to take a coffee to the extreme in the competition, and Tugard no longer takes part in the competition, although this is not a bad thing for guests at the Al Quoz Coffee Bar. "I can't compete anymore, the level of the competition is much higher than I was then, and the quality of the coffee people use is amazing."

But before retiring from a coffee showdown that sounds promising to compete with the British roasting contest on televised Reality Show, he won the United Arab Emirates baristas Championship before heading to Austria for an international tournament. And "learned the most important lesson in coffee."

△ pictures are from the Internet.

"that is, water plays a key role in the taste of the coffee you eventually taste. I took the coffee that tasted very delicious in the United Arab Emirates and went to Austria. Because the water was different, the lively taste completely disappeared. "

Taste and intuition are everything, he says, and there are more than 800 different flavors from coffee. Yes, 800. The expert who had to drink four or five times as much concentrated before lunch and two cups of freshly brewed coffee in the afternoon poetically described that my coffee today "smells like sandalwood and four-leaf clover, while tastes like blueberries and jam. Add a touch of Earl black tea will have Bergamo aroma, wonderful." So RAW's philosophy is: tasting coffee is to awaken your senses.

RAW coffee company Cafe

In the Al quoz Art District, there is a coffee shop in RAW coffee company, where coffee beans are roasted on the spot to make a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Of course, you can also taste the different flavors of special coffee beans, which is suitable for experienced coffee lovers.