The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) and Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) have mutually agreed not to host the World Coffee Championships at GulfHost in September 2018.
GulfHost was the host event for the World Brewers Cup, World Cup Tasters Championship and World Coffee Roasters Championship, in which Australia’s Heath Dalziel, Yama King and Ben Toovey were competing in respectively.
World Coffee Events will share more details about the location of these competitions on Friday 25 May.
Instead, the SCA has partnered with the DWTC to launch an annual World of Coffee Dubai trade show within the GulfHost Show, beginning March 2020. This event will run in addition to the SCA’s annual World of Coffee show in Europe.
The coffee show is designed to meet the specific needs and interests of the region’s coffee communities and will attract coffee producers, manufacturers, retailers, traders, baristas, roasters and the broader industry. The show will include the addition of SCA trade show features such as education from its Coffee Skills Program, Best New Product Awards, Design Lab Exhibits, lectures and workshops.
Coffee originated in Africa and spread to the rest of the world through the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As such, the SCA says hosting a World of Coffee show in Dubai, a common gateway to the Middle East and Africa, represents an exciting opportunity to engage a market that ranges from coffee producing countries like Kenya and Yemen, to the many Arab cities where coffee serves as a key social drink, evident in the presence of a dallah coffee brewer on the dirham coin in the United Arab Emirates.
In recent years, the MENA region has seen strong growth in specialty coffee, driven by a historic coffee culture that’s woven into everyday life, as well as a diverse and international community of consumers.
GulfHost has partnered with SCA on three occasions to host the Cezve/Ibrik Championships, and as part of SCA’s purpose to foster local coffee communities, launching World of Coffee Dubai represents a significant step towards increasing engagement in the region.
As a result of these new directions in partnership, the SCA, World Coffee Events, and DWTC have mutually agreed not to host any World Coffee Championships at GulfHost in September 2018.
