Employment is a key challenge that we have. And this is a discussion that we also have with the decision-makers here as well, is if they're looking to apply stabilization, how do we make sure? Southization is a term where companies must stick with a specific percentage of Saudi employees, male and female. We have amoratization here as well.
Right. So how do we make sure that we can achieve this without impacting business? This episode is brought to you by Belco. Belco is above all the story of a journey that started in 2008 with a simple intuition.
To truly understand coffee, you have to be closer to the people who grow it. Today, that journey looks like a team of around 80 coffee professionals spread across France, Ethiopia, Colombia, and Guatemala. Agronomists, quality specialists, logistics experts, and buyers, all united around three core values, sustainability, quality, and transparency. Along the way, they realized something essential.
You can't really know coffee from a distance. So they took a bold step and became exporters at Origin on the ground year-round. In 2015, Belco opened its first origin office in Ethiopia, the birthplace of Arabia. From Gucci to Yoga Chefe, Sadama to Jima, they built a sourcing model rooted in presence, learning, and trust.
A few years later, they brought that same philosophy to Colombia, working from Quindiore, with producing communities in Calca, Wheeler, and Santander. Now, in 2026, Belco wants to open this journey to you. To celebrate 10 years in Ethiopia, they're launching a roasters camp in Addis Ababa. Two days of cuppings, conversations, and shared expertise, with a second camp in Colombia in June, 2026.
If you're curious, passionate, or simply wanted to deepen your understanding of origin work, they'd love to have you join. Check the show notes for contact details to be a part of these experiences. Welcome to the Map of Forward Middle East podcast, friends. I'm your host, Lee, so far, and this is episode three of a five-part series with Osama Al Awam from the roasting house in Saudi Arabia.
In this series, we're talking about the challenges of running a business in the Middle East. And in this episode, we're asking the question, what are the challenges in the Middle East business ecosystems? In this episode, I'm gonna kind of let Osama just tell us all the problems. I don't want to get in a way so that we can use every single second to explore this.
So Osama, we have a lot of problems that are being impacted, or are accelerating in this, all over the world, but particularly in the ecosystems that exist in the Middle East, and you have a lot of opinions about this. So what do you think some of the problems are, or the challenges are, for the business ecosystem here in the Middle East? I think with every problem, there are opportunities. And as a business owner, it's always smart to think where the opportunities are in anywhere, problems exist or arise.
And that makes successful businesses grow and be sustainable if they continue to develop and find solutions to problems that people face. And when I say problems that people face, whether it's political issues, problems, challenges, or just make today life challenges that people have, whether it's brewing coffee on the go or keeping their coffee hotter for longer or colder for longer, essentially. Right now, I think we live in an exciting, challenging, exciting, but I would say ever so. Energized.
Energized, yeah, energized approach to life. We have neighbors that are fighting. This could potentially, and I wish really peace for everybody because peace is imperative for us as humans to continue to be alive for sure and coexist. I think what we need to focus on at the moment is apart from being for peace and hopefully, inshallah.
inshallah. And love and, you know, you're early on that, but we'll take it anyway. I think with challenges, let me take you back to what happened in 2008 to 2019, the economic crisis. The global crisis.
What kind of crisis, yeah? What happened was fine dining restaurants and even not upscaled, but casual dining restaurants had problems where people do not want to eat outside. Is this in the UK, just for context in the UK or in Saudi? Yeah, right.
So people did not want to eat outside, but they didn't want to cook or didn't know how to cook. And they want to eat pre-packed meals from supermarkets, chilled frozen meats. So they had an opportunity to eat better, but not spend so much money. This was a case study that existed at the time.
And I think it still exists today, whether it's with the same players or not. But Domino's pizza made so much money out of this by providing for this category of people who did not want to eat outside and spend money or did not want to eat lower quality food or want to cook. But they wanted good pizzas, good brand, to the point where they actually financed their own staff to go and open franchise stores because they couldn't meet up with the demand. So wherever there is a problem, there's always an opportunity.
And I think this puts the Roasting House business model into a category where we're handling successful and scalable because despite any problems, where people want to save money, they want to go into our stores and buy coffee and save money, and if they wanted to spend money, they would go to cafes or lounges who use our coffee and equipment and we would spend sale. So yes, the awesome job to buy business goes to be, but we also provide for me to see through our website and branches and well, there's a decline here. It's somewhat balanced there, essentially. So the opportunity for any entrepreneur is how do I create a business that despite any issues, problems, and you cannot mitigate everything.
But how do I make sure that my business could continue to operate? And we saw this being tested to the extreme during COVID. COVID shut down everything except and we're lucky to be in Saudi Arabia with under the patronage and government of a government that is so understanding and enabling and worried about the security of not just health, but also food for people. So they enabled food traders to still continue to operate through specific licenses and I would go to the store, I would roast, and I would see the states are empty, but I would actually personally serve delivery apps and people who had permits to come back there.
And we would open separate channels of sales with bakers, with people who we didn't have any business in the past with, and because they had permits and they also wanted to sell. And we worked with bakers, we worked with other apps who had permits to sell. So it is your mandate as a business owner to find how can I make a sale where there is a challenge. At the same time, we also saw the weakest link in this.
The weakest links are the farmers that we worked with who could not get access to their farms in Panama or Puerto Mala or Costa Rica, maybe lost some of their crop. And we said, look, we will still continue to buy from you. We will still continue to support you. We will still honor the contracts that we had with you because we know that this is something that a cloud that will pass and we will still continue to do business until date we have to do business with them.
And it just showed us how really weak that sort of chain or fragile that part of the entire ecosystem. And today we're looking at challenges with regards to logistics. So if I'm your spend eight or nine months of the year producing the best quality coffee that they can and spend three, four months harvesting and then processing it and then shipping it to us, we would find difficulties into receiving it because of logistics issues or difficulties. How do you mitigate those?
This is something that you have to be on your toes, every single day, trying to find the best shipping ways, trying to find, to honor the farmer's hard work, to honor the brand standard that you put that you provide fresh harvest, fresh roast, better quality coffee, but also does well to the ecosystem of producer. So when we are looking at the ecosystem, we're not looking at just the ecosystem internally, we're also looking at the externally. And this includes farmers in Saudi Arabia as well. And this is I think one of the most underestimated aspects of our part, we are in a region, we are producers, coffee producers in Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
We are roasters, Saudi Arabia and all GCC. And I think, I don't think I know that we are the best roasters in the world who produce impeccable quality coffee, fully traceable, beautiful packaging, beautiful customer experience. But that is only seen and appreciated by people who come and see it and appreciate it. We used to be in the past screaming and say, look, we have this, we have that, we do our trade shows, exhibitions come and see us, but we don't do this anymore because we feel that we are acknowledged by people who really deserve what they are getting in terms of the quality because they made the effort to come and see what's going on.
And if you're behind offices somewhere abroad and you don't underestimate what's happening, then I think you will still continue to be where you are and feeling that the benchmark is where you are at, where the benchmark has exceeded by far what's happening globally. Roasters in GCC are doing impeccable one when it comes to traceability, when it comes to sustainability, when it comes to true and genuine impact and change. And it's our mandate to support this as one by running competitions, championships locally and representing those globally in the voice of specialty coffee. We gave out three Roasters to producers in Saudi Arabia.
So they can try what Roasters want in terms of coffee. And now they're doing end-roading fermentation, they're doing co-infusion, fruit infusing, they're doing better quality naturals, they're doing experimenting with honeys and washed. So not just the new experimental procedures, but better produce coffee that is, that you know the varieties of, in the past, they know the varieties of what coffee is being produced. It's just typical, it's just a low variety of things that they've inherited from depends now.
There is scientific research that's going into it by the Saudi Coffee Company, a public investment fund on by the government, but also targeting to enable coffee farmers in Saudi Arabia. And now they're seeing things like a typhros, typh is a city in the south that produces some of the best, the master's roles in the world. And it's accredited by the, or acknowledged by the United Nations UNESCO as an intangible asset of Saudi Arabia. And we did confusion with typhros to produce Saudi grown black roasted coffee in filters that are just elevating the coffee standard in the industry.
And we've seen acknowledgement why the Specialty Coffee Association in UAE, who acknowledge these filters as something unique and something amazing because they saw the value of this part of the world, and acknowledging this part of the world and the efforts that are happening in this part of the world. Right. So if we look at what the challenges are in this part of the world, specifically what do you think are some of the challenges that we need to start addressing as an ecosystem? One of the things for sure is, is I suppose employment and getting more, more locals engaged in employment.
In the past, we used to see people being scared of Barista's job as a secondary job. But we want people to know that Barista's is not a second job. I've seen in the past 15 years of the business, I've seen people start from Barista's to becoming CEOs of multi-million Saudi and selling companies. Company's worth hundreds of millions of reals or their homes or denars really being run by people who started as Barista's.
So yes, you can start as a barista, move upwards to head barista, move upwards in operations or finance or marketing or continue to be a barista that does competitions, that does consulting, that does new branch openings, that does, so employment is a key challenge that we have. And this is a discussion that we also have with the decision makers here as well, is if they are looking to apply salivisation, how do we make sure salivisation is a term where companies must stick with a specific percentage of Saudi employees mainly. We have immoratisation here as well. Right.
Well, how do we make sure that we can achieve this without impacting business? So how do we, one of the things that we have, to doing business, right? Of course, yeah. So how do we do this?
We look at training, we look at opportunities, we look at classification of jobs in the coffee industry, in the FMB industry at Lao. Because someone could start as a barista and become FMB manager in hotel or in a, everything is a home or is a local business. So we're looking at multi-coattends who are being run by people who started as juniors in restaurants or cafes. And we saw a success story with the Saudi chefs association where chefs are highly paid, it's a very respected career to go into.
And we want this to be applied to coffee industry too. Well, and for anyone out there that's thinking about becoming a barista and is a Saudi or isn't a Marathi. And thinking that it's, you know, they're worried about whether they should do that. I have been a genetic scientist.
I didn't like it. I have been a project manager and senior business analyst for IBM. I didn't like it. Being a barista, I did that for 15 years.
Wow. And it was the best job that I've ever had. I left my corporate job to get into coffee right at the beginning of specialty coffee. And I could not believe, I would have done it for free.
That's how credible it was. And it took me all over the world. I have been a barista in Australia. I have been a barista in America.
I have been a barista in the UK. And the gifts that it brings you in your heart and in your mind and in your soul as the relationships that you make and the things that you learn about yourself and the way you learn to do hospitality. And at the time I became a barista in Australia, it was a really, really great paying profession. Like I was earning 100 grand a year.
Wow. As a full-time barista. So it was, I mean, now I think I've got the best job in coffee and there's nobody else who's got the job that I've got in coffee. It's a very unique position that I have, I'm not aware.
But easily, being a barista is something that will enrich your life. It will completely change the way that you see the world. You will get to learn about people. You will get to make relationships in your local, in your local business place that you will make friends for life.
You will also start to understand people very differently. You will look at your coworkers in a very different way. You will learn about different cultures in such a beautiful way. It's amazing, it's amazing.
Being a barista is amazing. And if you get the opportunity to do it, do it with the expectation that you're there to learn about things that you didn't ever expect, it could teach you. And it will take you one to bigger things, 100%, 100%. But don't be scared of doing this.
It is the biggest gift you could give yourself, in my opinion. That's just what I experienced being a barista. Well done, thank you so much, Lee. That is absolutely heart-blowing.
That's me, because I genuinely feel the same. Yes, Lee, you can easily stand up without sitting for four hours, you don't know it. Yeah, yeah, it's four hours, we were doing 12-hour shifts. And we got to sit down for 20 minutes to get you the sandwich and that was it.
But eating that sandwich was a great reward. You know, my family are farmers in Syria. And I remember my uncle saying, there's no meal that tastes better than the meal that you have at the end of the day working on a farm. Absolutely.
I never understood this sandwich that you sit down to eat. I exactly understood what he meant when I had to quickly inhale the sandwich after having been standing on my feet for eight hours. I love it, I love it. When I used to close shop at around 11 o'clock or 10.30, 10 p.m., 10.
Wow. We would have to suggest the anime again. Yeah, nice. Sit up, here we sit on the floor and eat folks.
So for those who don't know. Yeah, so we used to mop the floor and then... Put down a carpet. Put down a carpet and then just eat with our hands, whatever you think.
But really mean from the shop next door or... And it's don't talk to me. I don't want to speak to anyone. I just want to eat.
We eat and go home. And go home. And at the same time, it's getting that meal. That's amazing.
There would be laughs, they would be maybe tears sometimes, but it was just really, really nice and rewarding to shut close down for the day or for the night and just sit down and eat. But being a sales person in the East End and the Roadster and meeting people every day, really sculpted or sculpted how I have confidence in working to people. Yeah, me too. And the ability to sell, but sell consultatively because I know that the person right there could come back tomorrow and say, you didn't do good for me.
I bought this. You have to place that same person the next day, right? Also, that person is you. You have to face that person.
Did I give them something that they appreciate? Is it something that they really helped make them enjoy what you sold to them? And I've had people come back to me without interrupting. I've had people come back to me four years, three years after, and I say, look, Osama, you did something that I would never forget.
It was something that I don't know. You don't even remember. But you bring up something really interesting there because I think that that's another challenge that we have in this region, which is when a barista is also a sales person, look, how do I say this gently? Which is very out of character for me, but I'll try.
So we have a challenge here where people don't sell the way that they're meant to sell in a cafe. They are a little bit reserved, the baristas and the people who are facing the customer are more reserved. And not that they need to be aggressive, but there is a kind of shyness towards suggesting to a customer, do you need an extra bag of coffee? Or if you are, and a lot of the time, the problem is having the conversation.
Yes. Yes. And I guess that that really leads us into our next episode. We're going to talk about cultural limitations and what the cultural limitations in this region enable, what challenges they enable.
So join us for the next episode, folks. So we're going to deep dive into what I was just talking about. It's a really fascinating thing for us to unpack. Peace, love, and paint up, but I have an amazing rest of your day.
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