Cafés in South Africa Cape Town and Johannesburg

Natal's coffee estates and the second attempt

Coffee reached Natal in 1854, when a mission station received plants from Bourbon, now Réunion; more came later from Ceylon.² Nearly 2,000 hectares on the coast were under coffee by 1870. Frost caused heavy losses in 1869, a disease that had ruined plantations in India and Ceylon arrived in 1874, and by 1879 many estates were destroyed; most growers turned to sugar cane or tea.²

When sugar quotas were cut by 25% in the 1960s, farmers tried again. Commercial planting began on the Grenshoek tea estate near Tzaneen in 1963, and the country produced 1,800 tons of green coffee in 1987.² High labor costs, the white coffee stemborer in Mpumalanga and low world prices closed many farms, and by 2001 no more than 100 hectares were still in production.² Pilot programs now run in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo.¹

Moer koffie, Ricoffy and the chicory habit

The old farm method is moer koffie, from the Afrikaans moer (dregs) and koffie (coffee): coffee made by boiling the grounds.³ Chicory goes back further still; Nestlé credits the French Huguenots with bringing chicory-based coffee to South Africa.⁴ The best-known chicory blend launched as Ricory in 1952, was renamed Ricoffy in the early 1970s and joined the Nescafé range in 2002.⁴

Rooibos, the red bush

The country's home-grown hot drink is rooibos. The botanist Carl Thunberg reported on the plant and the drink brewed from it when he visited the Cape in 1772, and in 1904 the Russian immigrant Benjamin Ginsberg began trading it as "mountain tea", becoming its first exporter; commercial growing started in the 1930s.⁵ It grows in the deep sands of the Sandveld, the Cederberg, the Gifberg and the Suid Bokkeveld, where summer temperatures can pass 40 °C and winter nights freeze.⁶

In 2023 the industry produced about 22,600 tons, enough for just over 10 billion cups, and exported to more than 50 countries; Japan, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom bought the most.⁷ Rooibos reached the espresso machine in 2006, when the first tisane-based espresso went into coffee shops.⁵

From the café de move-on to counter service

South African English has its own words for coffee sold on the move. A café de move-on was a mobile canteen that fed workers where they worked and could shift quickly to escape officials; in 1952 the journalist Basil Davidson reported that municipal authorities had declared war on these coffee carts and were prosecuting owners who failed to move on.⁸ In township English a koffie kar (coffee cart) is a small stall, usually on wheels, serving hot snacks and drinks.⁹

The counter-service chain started in Cape Town. In 1997 Pete Howie and Barry Parker opened South Africa's first Seattle Coffee Company store in Claremont, the first café chain in the country to offer counter service, custom orders and paper cups, and to ban smoking.¹⁰ Food Lover's Market bought it in 2015; by 2025 it had around 300 stores in South Africa and Namibia.¹⁰

Cape Town and Johannesburg

Cape Town holds both ends of the story. Seattle's first store was in Claremont and the chain still roasts its beans in Muizenberg, while the rooibos farms of the Cederberg and the Olifants River Valley lie more than 200 km north of the city.¹⁰⁶

Johannesburg got the country's first Starbucks, which was also the chain's first café in sub-Saharan Africa. It opened in Rosebank at 07:30 on April 21, 2016, after hundreds had queued, some for 12 hours; a caffè latte cost R27–33, priced for the local market rather than at the exchange rate.¹¹

The city's roasting runs along fair-trade lines as well. Bean There, founded in 2005 and roasting on Stanley Avenue in Milpark, calls itself South Africa's first roaster of Fairtrade-certified coffee.¹² In Braamfontein, Juta Street has specialty roasters and the weekly Neighbourgoods Market.¹³