Coffee, which won over large portions of the planet in centuries past has now cast its spell over that huge part of the world where it never really managed to gain a foothold until recent decades: Asia. Though a big producer of the bean (it grows in Vietnam, Indonesia and India, especially the Robusta variety), the continent has always consumed very little, with the virtuous exception of Japan. Asia produces 29% of the world’s coffee beans but consumes just 22% of them (and this includes Oceania, and thus also coffee-loving Australia).

But now all that is changing: in the last five years, according to ICO, consumption of coffee on the continent has grown by 1.5% (as compared with 0.5% in Europe and 1.2% in the USA). Something of an eastward shift in the centre of gravity, then, towards a part of the world where tea has traditionally always been preferred.

There are various reasons why this has happened but one of the main explanations is the huge Chinese market, where the burgeoning middle class has been welcoming western trends such as wine-, and now coffee-drinking. Many picked up the habit while studying abroad.

The website Nikkei Asia even ran a feature on the phenomenon of “Asia’s coffee revolution”.

The trend has of course involved Chinese teenagers’ beloved TikTok, where all manner of strange (but highly instagrammable) posts have been appearing with everything from exaggerated foam toppings to extraction methods like Cold Brew, Nitro and Syphon.

Not that coffee-drinking did not exist here before: often it was a legacy of the colonial era. One example is the rather odd Vietnamese coffee, a filter coffee made from Robusta with ice and condensed milk that has set something of a trend and is becoming popular even in the USA.

The opportunity has already been seized on by western coffee chains, from Starbucks (which has 5,400 outlets in China in over 200 cities) to Costa Coffee (which in addition to its over 450 sales outlets also offers so-called Costa Express: vending machines that dispense high-quality coffee). They have increased the popularity of espresso in all its many forms, such as cappuccino, caffé-latte or macchiato (with a shot of milk added to it).

The IMT forecasts that the market for foreign coffee brands in China will grow by 11% between 2020 and 2025.

Many local entrepreneurs are now trying to get onto the market with their own café chains, which would be something of a first if we consider that producer countries are rarely also in the forefront of retailing the product. Certainly, even more interesting opportunities will open up for manufacturers of coffee-making machinery and equipment, who have been showing an interest in this part of the world for some time.