A Raajje Solutions estimate · 2023 baseline
How much coffee do Maldivians drink in a year?
There is no official meter counting every sai hotaa mug, office Nescafé, iced latte or resort espresso. But Maldives imports almost everything it drinks. That gives us a trail.
01
First, define the question
“Coffee consumed in Maldives” is not the same as “coffee drunk by Maldivians.” Imports serve resident Maldivians, foreign residents and millions of short-stay tourists. Some coffee expires, spills or remains in stock. And customs records coffee in kilograms, not cups.
So this article estimates cups consumed by resident Maldivians. It does not count every cup served inside the country as Maldivian consumption.
02
The evidence trail
Think of this as a national coffee receipt.
Beans, roasted coffee and closely related coffee products reported by Maldives to UN Comtrade/WITS.
The 2022 Census baseline. It is the cleanest official nationality denominator available for this exercise.
Tourism creates a second, unusually large coffee-drinking population that appears and disappears each week.
That is why assumptions must be visible, adjustable and treated as a range.
03
Turn kilograms into cups
Our central scenario starts with 998,577 kg, removes 8% for stock changes and waste, assigns 59% of the remaining conventional coffee to Maldivians, and uses 10 grams per brewed cup. That gives roughly 54.2 million cups.
This is deliberately conservative about instant coffee. Coffee extracts, concentrates and preparations sit under HS 2101, a separate trade family worth US$8.31 million in 2024. Its gross weight cannot safely be poured straight into the calculation: a sachet may contain coffee, sugar and creamer, while concentrated soluble coffee produces more cups per kilogram than beans.
04
Build your own estimate
Move the controls. The cup fills as your estimate rises.
142 cups per Maldivian
≈ 2.7 cups a week
05
Do not trust one number
Changing reasonable assumptions produces a range, not a scandal.
More coffee allocated to tourists and foreign residents, more loss, and a stronger brew.
The best single number for discussion—not a claim of exact measurement.
More household and office consumption, less waste, and a smaller average dose.
06
So where would Maldives rank?
The honest answer is nowhere near the viral ranking.
among roughly 175 countries and territories with a reported comparison value
Plausible range: approximately 90th–130th. The position changes with the assumptions, missing values and ties.Comparator values are 2023 coffee-supply rates reproduced in a published FAOSTAT-based country table. They include green, roasted and extract coffee. Maldives is inserted at our modelled 1.42 kg of coffee equivalent per resident Maldivian, so the ranking is an estimated placement, not an official league-table result.
Why we reject that as a measure of Maldivian drinking. The same 2023 table assigns Maldives 11,000 tonnes of coffee consumption. That is about eleven times the 998.6 tonnes recorded under HS 0901 imports. It may reflect a food-supply series, extracts, tourism, a denominator problem, or another data anomaly—but it cannot be silently interpreted as coffee personally drunk by Maldivian citizens.
07
Does 54 million pass the common-sense test?
It equals about 142 cups for each resident Maldivian per year, or 2.7 cups a week when spread across everyone—including children and people who never drink coffee.
If roughly half the Maldivian population are actual coffee drinkers, the result becomes about 5.4 cups per drinker per week. That is less than one a day. In a country of office coffee, cafés, sai hotaa conversations and growing specialty-coffee culture, it is believable.
It also leaves room for the obvious: tea remains important, consumption varies sharply by age and island, and the café habits of Greater Malé should not be projected onto every atoll.
08
What could move the estimate?
HS 2101 needs product-level net weights and coffee-content factors.
Resort staff and guests may drink very different quantities and styles.
Imports in December may be consumed the following year.
Any outward movement should be deducted, although Maldives is not a coffee producer.
An espresso, filter mug and instant cup do not use the same grams.
Customs records where goods enter, not who drinks them.
09
How Maldives could measure it properly
- Release detailed annual weights for HS 0901, 210111 and 210112, separating pure extracts from premixes.
- Add three questions to HIES: coffee-drinking frequency, cups yesterday and where the coffee was obtained.
- Survey cafés and resorts using weekly bean purchases and cups sold, without collecting customer identities.
- Publish a coffee balance: imports minus re-exports, stock change and waste, split among households, workplaces and tourism.
Until then, the honest answer is not “we do not know.” It is: we can estimate it, show our work, and improve the number.