I started writing the Blueprints because Kuwait’s national plan is nowhere to be seen. Not delayed. Not underfunded. Just not there.

I will write about that properly later. Probably more than once.

But while I was reading what our neighbours publish, one thing stopped me. And it stopped me because it is about coffee.

Saudi Arabia has a national coffee strategy.

Not a campaign. Not a slogan. A proper sector plan, sitting inside Vision 2030 next to the giga-projects and the tourism targets. Somebody looked at a crop growing in a few mountain villages and said: this is a national economic sector, let us build it.

How it happened

It started with a company, not a ministry.

Aramco went into the mountains of Jazan around ten years ago and started helping the farmers who were already there. Better seedlings. Better irrigation. Help with drying the beans properly. And, crucially, somewhere to sell them.

Small and unglamorous. It worked. So they built a processing centre. Then they handed the whole thing over to the state.

Which is the right order. Prove it works small. Then scale it. Then give it to an institution built to keep it alive after the people who started it have moved on.

The state company that received it does everything from the tree to the cup. Farming, training, roasting, brands, export. It has a consumer coffee brand, a trading arm, and an academy that teaches farmers and baristas. It runs a national quality competition with an international coffee body. And it has agreements with Dunkin’, Costa, and the new national airline to serve Saudi coffee on flights.

Ten years, roughly, from a few farms to all of that.

And then the part I keep thinking about

While all of that was being built, the culture ministry did something separate.

They changed the name. Cafés and shops across the Kingdom stopped writing “Arabic coffee” on the menu and started writing “Saudi coffee.”

They declared a whole year the Year of Saudi Coffee.

And they got the knowledge of growing those particular beans onto UNESCO’s heritage list.

All in the same year.

So while one ministry was worrying about trees and another about factories, someone else was making sure the country had a story to tell about the thing being built.

That is not decoration. A sector with a story behind it sells at a different price to a sector without one. They understood that early.

Why this interests me

Not because Kuwait should grow coffee. We cannot and we do not need to.

What interests me is the thinking.

Somebody sat down and picked something the country already had. Not imported, not invented. A crop that had been growing in those mountains for generations, tended by farmers who already knew what they were doing. And then asked one question, what would it take to turn this into a sector?

Then they wrote it down. Who owns it. What the target is. What the money is. Who does which part. When the trees go in the ground.

That is the part we are missing. Not coffee. The habit of taking one real thing, naming it, funding it, giving it to somebody, and putting dates on it.

Because we do have things. Anyone who has eaten in Kuwait over the last five years knows the food scene has become genuinely good. And it happened without a plan, without a ministry, without anybody writing a single line down. It just happened, restaurant by restaurant, on its own.

Saudi took a crop from a handful of villages and built an institution around it.

We have a whole sector that built itself, and nobody has come to look at it.

And with all that coffee talk, it is that time of the month. New beans and new Xbloom recipes, up on The Brew.