The Egypt Coffee Festival is back this weekend, brewing up “Common Grounds” for the industry

☕ Ten years ago, if you were to ask the average Egyptian coffee fiend where they get their favorite cup of joe, the answers would likely have boiled down to just two or three places. If you ask the same question today, you probably won’t hear the same spot twice. Despite economic turbulence, currency fluctuations, and changing consumer habits, the coffee industry in Egypt refused to be watered down. In fact, coffee consumption per capita in Egypt doubled between 2017 and 2021, reaching 70k tons annually, Brown Nose founder Omar Abdalla previously told us. Specialty coffee in Egypt has been growing exponentially y-o-y.

The problem? “The people building it rarely share a room,” Hanan Abdel Meguid, founder of Kamelizer and co-founder of the Egypt Coffee Festival (ECF), tells EnterpriseAM — one the festival is out to fix with its second volume, running this weekend on the 16th and 17th at Kamelizer.

The first edition was a test of whether the demand was truly out there… it was. “We wanted to know whether there was enough curiosity around coffee for people to dedicate an entire day to it — to come, stay, explore, participate, and engage with the community,” Abdel Meguid tells us. “The first edition gave us a clear answer; we saw people spending time at the festival, joining workshops and talks, watching competitions, discovering new brands and, most importantly, interacting with each other.”

That’s why Vol. 2 is running for two days instead of just one. The festival expects some 10k visitors this time around — over double its 2025 turnout. Ticket sales, however, aren’t the main yardstick. The folks over at the festival will be watching whether roasters pick up new buyers, whether brands find partners to work with, and whether young people start treating coffee as a viable career path. “We want people to leave ECF having learned something,” Abdel Meguid tells us.

To ensure that happens, the festival has plenty of ground to cover. This year’s edition is organized into six themed areas, cleverly called “Common Grounds.” Each takes a different angle on the trade, from coffee rituals and craft to brands, community, and plain fun, spread across Kamelizer Spaces, allowing visitors to move through the festival deliberately, putting the coffee trade front and center. The “Roasting Area” explores coffee rituals, the “Discovery Lab” showcases brewing expertise, and the “Competition Area” sees some of the country’s most talented brewers put on their best shows. The remaining grounds cover talks, workshops, and exhibitions — essentially creating a “meeting point for the people, businesses, ideas and culture around [coffee],” as Abdel Meguid puts it.

Vol. 2 will also see lots of returning names, as well as new entrants, such as Mestila, La Cimbali, and Brown Nose, to name a few — each representing a different coffee culture. Then there’s the speaker line-up, which includes: ReQaf founder Aly Khattab, Gameball head of loyalty solutions Moataz Morsi, Lento Specialty Coffee co-founder Shahenda El Garhy, Stay Coffee co-founder Sarah Hany, F&B consultant and founder of Everything Restaurants Engy Radwan, and Cimbali Group product sales specialist Aleksa Novicic.

“The Egyptian coffee scene has grown significantly over the past few years, with a more knowledgeable consumer base, a growing number of local roasters and cafés, and a community of coffee professionals who are increasingly pushing the craft forward,” Abdel Meguid says. “At the same time, we’re still in the process of defining what it can become. For us, ECF is a way of giving that movement a platform.” Tickets for The Egypt Coffee Festival this weekend are available through TicketsMarché. Workshops and masterclasses require pre-registration, so keep an eye out.

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