The short version. Zambia counted 2,199,820 international arrivals in 2024, on the Ministry of Tourism's figures, against 1,392,153 the year before. A large share of the leisure travellers among them will have stood beside a Land Cruiser at sunrise holding a tin mug of coffee. That mug is the most photographed coffee moment on the continent, and for most of safari history it has been filled from a flask of instant. Lodges in Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana have spent the last decade fixing that with espresso machines and trained "bush baristas". In Zambia, whose lodge menus routinely say "locally sourced", we have yet to find one that names a Zambian coffee. The coffee grows 850 kilometres up the Great North Road.
The ritual is the same in every camp. The wake-up knock comes at five. There is a tray outside the tent: a flask, a tin of rusks, two mugs. Half an hour later you are in an open vehicle in the dark, under a blanket, and the guide is reading tracks in the headlights.
Somewhere around eight, when the light has gone gold and the cats have gone to ground, the vehicle stops in a dry riverbed or on a rise. The guide drops the tailgate. Out comes a second flask, the rusks again, a bottle of Amarula for the guests who take their coffee with a shot. You stand and stretch and drink, and you look at the country. It is, for a great many people, the best cup of coffee of their lives.
It is very often instant.
What is actually in the flask
This is not a secret in the trade. TripAdvisor's Botswana forum has a thread titled "Good coffee in safari camps?" and its Tanzania forum one titled "Why no good coffee?", and both have been running for years. One traveller described packing a plastic funnel, a box of filter papers, a vacuum bag of beans and a thermos so he could brew his own in the morning. Another was told, correctly, that instant is the norm and that the Tanzanian version was at least very good instant. A third reported the best coffee of the trip from a camp cook who roasted green beans in a frying pan, ground them, and perked them over the fire.
To be fair to the camps, the same threads carry the other side. One visitor who had packed sachets in case was served good coffee at every camp she visited in South Africa, Zambia and Botswana, and never opened them. The flask is the default rather than the rule.
The logistics explain the default. A camp in the Luangwa or the Okavango takes deliveries by charter aircraft or a weekly truck. Fresh milk is a problem, let alone freshly roasted beans, which peak four to fourteen days after roasting and fade after that. Instant keeps for years, weighs nothing and needs only hot water in a flask that was filled at four in the morning by someone with forty other things to do before the guests wake up. Nobody chose it for the taste.
The lodges that fixed it
The luxury end of the trade noticed. andBeyond, which runs camps across East and southern Africa, published a piece called "But First, Coffee" describing the programme it built with Bean There, a Johannesburg roaster. Bean There's baristas travel to the lodges on a rotation to train what andBeyond calls its bush baristas: espresso technique, milk steaming, latte art. The rebuilt Nxabega camp in the Okavango was given a full coffee bar as the hub of its guest area, overlooking a lagoon.
The interesting detail is where the beans come from. For its Kenyan and Tanzanian lodges, andBeyond buys from a cooperative growing organic arabica on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. Kenya and Tanzania are coffee countries, so their lodges pour their own country's coffee, and the bush baristas there have been trained through the whole espresso menu. The camp coffee stop in East Africa has, at the top end, become a small point of national pride. The guest goes home with a bag.
The Zambian gap
Now read Zambian lodge menus. Lion Camp in South Luangwa promises African-inspired meals made with locally sourced ingredients, bought from farmers in Mfuwe because cultivation inside the park is prohibited. Mukwa River Lodge on the Zambezi above the Falls describes its food as hyper-local, from the gardens and nearby farmers, with pumpkin leaves and sweet-potato leaves on the menu. Royal Zambezi took a Michelin Key in 2025, the only one in the country. Annabel Hughes Aston has built a genuine Zambian bush-gourmet cuisine out of foraged and home-grown ingredients since she introduced it at the Elephant Café in 2016.
In the first draft of this piece I wrote that no Zambian lodge serves Zambian coffee. I cannot prove a negative, so here is what I can say. In everything we read, and we read a lot of lodge websites for this piece, we did not find one Zambian camp that names a Zambian coffee on its menu, its sustainability page or its breakfast card. If one exists, we would very much like to hear from it, and we will correct this paragraph.
That absence is strange, because the coffee is here. About 97 per cent of Zambia's exportable coffee grows on five estates in the Northern Province around Kasama and to its north: five and a half million trees, picked from May to September by a workforce that swells past 15,000 at harvest. It is arabica, Rainforest Alliance certified, and a lot from it won Taste of Harvest and placed second at the African regional round in 2019. It is, by any reasonable standard, a lodge's "locally sourced" dream ingredient. Most of it leaves the country green, is roasted in Europe or America, and comes back, if it comes back at all, as somebody else's brand.
Why the gap exists
Three reasons, and none of them is that the lodges do not care.
First, supply. My read is that until recently there was almost nobody roasting Zambian coffee in Zambia at a quality and consistency a lodge could put on a breakfast table every morning of a six-month season.
Second, freshness logistics. A roaster in Lusaka can put coffee on the same supply run the camp already receives, roasted within the week. A roaster in Cape Town or Nairobi cannot.
Third, the machine and the person. Beans alone do not fix the flask. The East African lodges that got this right paid for espresso machines and for someone to train the staff who use them, then kept training them each season. The andBeyond model is a package: beans, machine, barista training, a rotation of visits. The beans are the cheapest part.
What it would take
Not much, which is the point. Roasted-to-order beans from Lusaka, timed to the camp's own delivery schedule. A morning's training for the person who fills the flask, so that the flask holds properly brewed filter coffee rather than granules, and a second morning for whoever runs the espresso machine at the lodge. A card on the breakfast table that says where the coffee grew, in a province most guests will never visit. And a bag in the gift shop, because the guest who drank it at sunrise will want to drink it at home.
We roast Zambia's coffee in Zambia. If you run a camp in the Luangwa, the Lower Zambezi or the Kafue and want to be the first to pour it at the coffee stop, write to us; we would like the first Zambian lodge that does to be able to say so.
For lodges and hotels: talk to us about wholesale
For everyone who has stood beside the Land Cruiser: the coffee from the plateau
More from this series: Kasama, where the coffee grows and coffee in the miombo woodland.
Frequently asked questions
What is the coffee stop on a game drive? A pause midway through the morning drive, usually two to three hours in, when the guide stops at a safe spot and serves coffee, tea and rusks from the vehicle. It is a fixture of safaris across southern and East Africa.
Is safari coffee usually instant? Often, though the top lodges have moved to filter and espresso in the last decade. It varies by camp, and it is a fair question to ask when booking.
Do Zambian safari lodges serve Zambian coffee? We could not find one that says so publicly. Zambia grows a small, high-quality arabica crop in the Northern Province, most of which is exported green.
Can I take Zambian coffee home on a plane? Yes. Roasted coffee beans are allowed in luggage into the United States for personal use, provided you declare them, and into the United Kingdom and the European Union in personal quantities. A sealed 250-gram bag with a one-way valve travels well.
Sources
Zambia Ministry of Tourism, "Ministry of Tourism announces a record breaking of over 2 million international tourists' arrivals for 2024", February 2025 (2,199,820 arrivals; 1,392,153 in 2023). andBeyond, "But First, Coffee | The Luxury of Great Coffee on Safari". TripAdvisor forums: "Good coffee in safari camps?" (Botswana) and "Why no good coffee?" (Tanzania). Lion Camp, "Food and cuisine"; Discover Africa, "Zambian Cuisine: An Eating Safari in Zambia" (Mukwa River Lodge); Zambia Tourism, "Michelin Award for Lower Zambezi Lodge"; SavannaBel, about Annabel Hughes Aston. Global Coffee Report, July 2023; Covoya Coffee, Zambia estate product pages. US Department of Agriculture APHIS, "International Traveler: Coffee, Teas, Honey, Nuts, and Spices".