Bangladesh Bank’s Import Data: A Decade of Coffee Consumption Growth
Walk into almost any café in Dhaka these days whether a polished chain outlet in Gulshan or a modest corner shop near a university and the aroma of coffee greets you before the menu does. For a country long defined by its deep attachment to tea, this feels like a quiet but unmistakable shift. Official import figures, drawn from Bangladesh Bank’s trade statistics and the underlying National Board of Revenue (NBR) customs records, reveal just how rapidly that change has unfolded over the past decade. In 2012, Bangladesh imported roughly 264 tonnes of coffee. By 2022 the volume had risen to about 1,745 tonnes. The average annual growth rate works out to around 56 percent. In practical terms, coffee demand has been expanding roughly eleven times faster than tea, which has grown at a steadier 5 percent a year over the same period. Even so, tea still dominates: its market remains more than fifty times larger than coffee’s. These numbers track a genuine change in everyday habits. Nestlé first...
