Bangladesh's Coffee Culture: Where We Are, Where We're Going

Bangladesh is a nation of tea. Always has been. The morning cup of cha milky, sweet, brewed in a blackened pot on a roadside stall is as embedded in daily life here as anything can be. So when the coffee industry started quietly growing roots in this country, most people didn't notice for a while.

They're noticing now.

Something has shifted in the last decade, and it has shifted fast. The numbers, the cafés, the farmers in the hills, the festivals in Bashundhara all of it points toward the same conclusion: Bangladesh is in the early stages of a genuine coffee culture, and the trajectory is steeper than almost anyone expected.

Where We Started: A Market That Didn't Exist

Nestle introduced Nescafé to Bangladesh in 1998 and for a full decade after that, almost nothing happened. Coffee remained a curiosity, a foreign novelty, something you might encounter in an upscale hotel lobby or at a meeting in a corporate office. The idea of going out specifically to buy a cup of coffee, the way you'd go out for tea, simply didn't exist yet for most Bangladeshis.

The shift came in the following decade. Coffee imports, which stood at just 264 tonnes in 2012, climbed to 1,745 tonnes by 2022 a nearly sevenfold increase in ten years.¹ That is not gentle growth. That is a market discovering itself.

The Size of the Market Today

Bangladesh now imports coffee from approximately 40 countries, with India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Vietnam together accounting for around 88% of total volume.¹ More than 250 companies import and market coffee in the country, including three major conglomerates PRAN-RFL, Abul Khair Group, and BEXIMCO alongside hundreds of smaller importers and entrepreneurs.¹

The coffee market is growing at approximately 56% per year eleven times faster than the tea market, which itself grows at a respectable 5% annually.¹ The tea market is still 53 times larger by volume,¹ which puts the scale of what's happening into perspective: coffee is not overtaking tea. It is building something new alongside it, in a demographic that didn't have a defined beverage identity before.

The at-home segment of the Bangladeshi coffee market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 8.83% between 2024 and 2028, according to Statista.² Instant coffee convenient, affordable, and familiar to first-time coffee drinkers currently dominates the market, but roast and ground coffee is gaining ground in urban centres, driven by the rise of specialty cafés and a more discerning customer base.

The projected market revenue for Bangladesh's coffee segment stands at approximately $25.98 million in 2024 and is forecast to reach $48.97 million by 2029, at an annual growth rate of 13.52%.³

The Café Scene: From Zero to Everywhere

Walk through Banani, Dhanmondi, or Gulshan today, and you'll notice something that would have been impossible to imagine fifteen years ago: the smell of fresh espresso competing with roadside tea.⁴ Coffee shops have become a fixture of urban Dhaka and more importantly, they have become a social infrastructure for a generation that has redefined what going out means.

The café scene has grown from a handful of international-style outlets to a dense network of spaces serving every mood, budget, and occasion. North End Coffee Roasters, widely credited as the pioneer of specialty coffee in Dhaka, set the standard with locally roasted beans and a consistent product that gave the market a reference point. Gloria Jean's (Australia), The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (US), and several other international chains have established multiple locations across the capital.⁵ But the most important part of the story is not the international names it is the Bangladeshi entrepreneurs who followed.

Tabaq, Nerdy Bean Coffee Haus, Doppio Coffee, Brew Buddies, White Canary, Beans & Aroma, Java House: these are home-grown ventures that built their own identities, their own customer bases, and their own ideas about what coffee culture means in this city.⁵ For many young Dhakans, a café is not just a place to drink coffee. It is a "third space"  between home and office  where the work gets done, the conversations happen, and, increasingly, the photographs get taken.⁴

The café scene has also expanded well beyond Dhaka. Coffeeta Shop, a café brand from Khulna that started in 2019, appeared at the 9th Food Bangladesh International Expo in May 2026 — a signal that coffee culture is no longer a capital-city phenomenon.⁶

The Festival Effect

Perhaps the clearest measure of how far the culture has come is the Dhaka Coffee Festival, now in its third edition in 2026  billed as the first and only B2B specialty coffee event in Bangladesh.⁷

The festival began in 2024 as a quiet experiment with six participants. In 2026, it has become a three-day event at the International Convention City Bashundhara, bringing together roasters, baristas, café owners, equipment suppliers, and enthusiasts from across the country and beyond with exhibitions, espresso masterclasses, barista championships, and panel discussions.⁷ The founder, Samit Bin Salam, described the shift plainly: "At the time, specialty coffee was a whisper; today, it is a roar."⁷

That trajectory six participants to a national event in three years is not marketing language. It is a measurement of how quickly a professional community can form once the commercial conditions exist to support it.

The Growing Story: Coffee Is Being Farmed Here Too

Here is the part most people in Dhaka's café circuit don't know: Bangladesh is beginning to grow its own coffee.

Commercial cultivation started quietly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts  Bandarban, Khagrachari, and Rangamati  where hilly terrain and suitable soil conditions turned out to support both Arabica and Robusta. In FY 2019–20, the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) recorded 55.75 tonnes of production from 118.3 hectares across seven upazilas in Bandarban.⁸ By 2023–24, that figure had grown to 67 tonnes.⁸

The government has launched a Tk 2 billion joint initiative by the DAE and Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) targeting 10,000 hectares of cultivation by 2025, with a production target of 4,000–5,000 tonnes annually once the plantations mature.³ Initial commercial production at scale is expected around 2026–27, with an estimated 1,000 tonnes as the starting point.³

A coffee lot from a farm near Boga Lake in Bandarban was reportedly evaluated by the Food and Agriculture Organization and recognized as among the second most highly rated coffees in the world during testing.⁸ That finding, if it holds under further scrutiny, would make Bangladeshi coffee an extraordinary development story not just a domestic crop, but a potential export.

North End Coffee Roasters has already begun sourcing from the Hill Tracts and marketing it as "Hill Tracts Blend," creating the first commercial link between Bangladeshi-grown coffee and Dhaka's café market.⁹ Local entrepreneurs like Tulip Coffee Farming and Roastery have built networks of 250–300 smallholder farmers cultivating across an estimated 300–400 acres.⁶

Currently, total domestic production is around 60–70 tonnes per year⁸ a fraction of national demand, with 95% of consumption still met through imports.² But this is the beginning of something, not a ceiling.

What's Holding It Back

Honesty matters here, so let's say it clearly: Bangladesh's coffee market is growing fast, but it is growing from a very small base, with structural constraints that are real.

Import complexity and cost. Green coffee beans imported into Bangladesh carry a total tax incidence that can approach 60% of the import value under the existing NBR tariff structure for HS 0901.11.¹⁰ This is a meaningful cost that shapes what gets imported, how it's priced, and who can afford to experiment with premium origins. It also narrows the margin for direct-trade sourcing and discourages the kind of origin-focused procurement that defines specialty coffee markets globally.

A market still dominated by instant. Instant coffee accounts for the majority of coffee consumed in Bangladesh. Nescafé and a handful of other brands  MacCoffee, ToraBika define the category for most households. The roasted and ground segment, while growing, remains small by volume, concentrated in urban areas, and largely unknown to the 90%+ of the population outside major cities.

No origin culture yet. Bangladeshi coffee drinkers even sophisticated ones are rarely in the habit of asking where their coffee comes from. Menus in most Dhaka cafés describe a "café latte" or a "cold brew" without specifying origin, variety, or processing method. The education gap between what specialty coffee could mean in Bangladesh and what most customers currently experience is wide.

Limited domestic roasting infrastructure. With a small number of local roasters and no established specialty green coffee import ecosystem, the supply chain for high-quality single-origin coffee in Bangladesh is still being built from scratch.

Where We're Going

The fundamentals are strong, even if the infrastructure isn't there yet.

Bangladesh has a population of over 170 million, a fast-growing urban middle class, a young demographic that has already demonstrated it will spend on lifestyle beverages, and a café sector that is expanding in both depth and geography. The Coffee Festival's trajectory from six to a national B2B event in three years tells you something real about the momentum. So does the fact that major conglomerates PRAN-RFL, Abul Khair, BEXIMCO have all entered the coffee market and are scaling.¹

The shift that needs to happen — and that is beginning to happen — is from volume to quality. The first phase of Bangladesh's coffee growth was about access: getting coffee into the country, getting it affordable, getting it into enough cups that people developed a habit. That phase is largely done.

The next phase is about identity: what kind of coffee culture does Bangladesh want to build? What does it mean for a Bangladeshi café to have a sourcing story? What role does local production play? Who supplies the roasters that are beginning to emerge? How does a country with 95% import dependence build traceability into its supply chain?

These are not hypothetical questions. They are the questions that specialty coffee markets answer in their second decade, and Bangladesh is entering its second decade right now.

The country is not going to become an origin like Ethiopia or Uganda. But it does not need to. It can become something rarer and more interesting: a specialty consuming market with its own café identity, its own local growing story from the Hill Tracts, and its own direct relationships with the origins it imports from built on traceability, transparency, and the honest question of where the coffee actually came from.

That market is not fully formed yet. But it is forming. Anyone who wants to understand where Bangladesh coffee goes next should be paying attention right now because the window between "early" and "obvious" closes faster than it looks.

References

Prothom Alo, "Coffee market brews strong in Bangladesh," June 2023. en.prothomalo.com

Statista Market Forecast — Coffee, Bangladesh. statista.com/outlook/cmo/hot-drinks/coffee/bangladesh

Environmentalists Warn Against Monoculture Coffee Growth in Bangladesh, Daily Coffee News, July 2024. dailycoffeenews.com

"Best Coffee Shops in Dhaka 2026: Top Cafes for Work & Adda," Hungry Bangla, February 2026. hungrybangla.com

Wanderlog — The 50 Best Coffee Shops and Cafes in Dhaka City. wanderlog.com

"Bangladesh's Coffee Industry Showcased at Food Expo," New Age Bangladesh, May 2026. newagebd.net

Dhaka Coffee Festival 2026 — Official Website. dhakacoffeefestival.com

"Ctg Farmers Achieve Landmark Coffee Harvest, Eyes Set on Export Potential," The Business Standard, December 2024. tbsnews.net

"Coffee from the Hill Tracts," Dhaka Tribune. dhakatribune.com

Bangladesh National Board of Revenue (NBR) — Customs Tariff, Chapter 9 (HS 0901). nbr.gov.bd