Coffee in Cambodia from the street bag to the Mondulkiri farm

Cambodia's everyday coffee is street coffee: dark robusta filtered through a cloth or mesh net, poured over ice and usually sweetened with condensed milk. A Cambodian diplomat described it to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2021 as much stronger than a latte or cappuccino, and named the version with condensed milk and ice as the most famous.¹ The Cambodia Coffee Association estimates that Cambodians aged 20 to 69 drink about 1.5 million cups a day.¹⁵

Most of what goes into those cups is imported. Cambodia harvested 1,333 tonnes of coffee in 2025 and imported about 12,000 tonnes of green beans, and the local robusta is grown mainly in Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri in the northeast.¹⁶⁹ In Phnom Penh, street stalls now share the pavement with mobile carts and kiosk chains, many of them started by young women.⁹

Street coffee: the net filter, the bag and the condensed milk

Street vendors brew the old way. Ground coffee goes into a mesh net held open by a steel wire, hot water is poured through, and the grounds are used once or twice before being thrown out.¹ Coffee comes in a glass, or in a plastic bag with a straw, tied with a rubber band; some vendors fill a batch of bags and sell them to stallholders at the markets.¹ You can take it black, with crushed ice, or with condensed milk and ice.¹

The beans are roasted dark. A 2015 VICE report from Phnom Penh found vendors roasting them in vegetable or pork fat until black and grinding them to a fine powder; one Phnom Penh stall ran water from a charcoal-heated vat through several large drip filters, and another vendor used a cloth stocking.² The same report describes customers pouring jasmine tea over the spent grounds once the coffee is gone.²

Coffee is a morning habit first. In the WIPO interview, Ambassador Kemvichet Long paired it with Phnom Penh noodles at breakfast and recalled that people once avoided it after lunch for fear of losing sleep, and that in his father's day mostly men drank it. Now women and young people drink it at any hour.¹

Ordering in Khmer: កាហ្វេ, ទឹកកក and ទឹកដោះគោ

The word for coffee comes from French. កាហ្វេ (kaafee) is taken from café.³ Ice is ទឹកកក (tɨk kɑɑk), literally water that has hardened.⁴ Milk is ទឹកដោះគោ (tɨk dɑh koo), cow's milk.⁵ Hot is ក្ដៅ (kdaw) and sugar is ស្ករ (skɑɑ).⁶⁷

Put the words in the order you want them in the cup: coffee, then milk, then ice. At a street stall, the milk is sweetened condensed milk: the WIPO interview describes coffee with milk and ice as street coffee with condensed milk and ice.¹

Carts, kiosks and the café scene in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap

Mobile carts have multiplied. On the Siem Reap riverside near the Royal Residence, five vendors were brewing pour-over and drip coffee from camping-style gear in December 2023, setting out camping chairs and plastic tables and charging 3,000 to 3,500 riel a drink, less than the cafés nearby.⁸ In Phnom Penh, Alarm Clock Coffee began as a single mobile cart in 2017 and had nine outlets by October 2025; cheap carts, digital payments and low start-up costs have drawn many young women into the trade.⁹

Sit-down chains came earlier. Brown Coffee, the best-known Cambodian brand, opened in 2009 and became a place for young people to socialize, do assignments and play games from about 2012.¹ By 2025 pour-over, siphon and cold brew were turning up in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, and one Cambodian roaster told Seasia that customers were becoming more curious about where their coffee comes from.¹¹

In Siem Reap, a July 2024 SilverKris roundup of seven new cafés placed all of them in Wat Damnak and Wat Bo villages, several roasting their own beans, one modeled on a Japanese kissaten.¹⁰

Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri: robusta on red soil

The French brought coffee to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam during the protectorate, but modern planting only began around 2008, when the first company put in trees in Mondulkiri, a hilly province in the northeast.¹ Its red soil, a volcanic legacy, suits the crop better than the rice plains that cover most of the country, and in 2021 about half of Mondulkiri's 285 hectares of coffee belonged to Indigenous communities.¹

The area has grown since. Mondulkiri had 525 hectares in 2023, worked by 365 farming families, and harvests about 725 tonnes a year.¹² In August 2024 the Coffee Quality Institute rated the province's robusta Fine Robusta for the first time, after an assessment of beans processed by Kofi, which built a processing plant in Busra commune.¹²¹³ That year Kofi paid farmers about 3,000 riel a kilogram for top-grade fresh coffee.¹²

About 90% of Cambodia's roughly 600 coffee farmers grow robusta and the rest arabica.¹⁴ Coffee is also planted in Ratanakiri, Pursat, Pailin and Tboung Khmum.¹⁵ Weather is the risk: one Mondulkiri farmer lost about 30% of his newly planted trees in 2026, with an El Niño expected to peak that November.¹⁴

Where the beans come from

Local farms cover only a fraction of the demand. In 2025 Cambodia harvested 1,333 tonnes from 563 hectares, while the Cambodia Coffee Association put green-bean imports at 12,000 tonnes, at about US$6,000 a tonne, more than US$70 million in all.¹⁶ The agriculture ministry names Vietnam, Thailand and Laos first among the suppliers.¹⁶ Most of the local crop is exported, the ministry says: 601 tonnes in 2025, mainly to Estonia, China, Japan and Russia.¹⁵

Vietnam's share is rising. Vietnamese customs counted 2,231 tonnes of coffee shipped to Cambodia between January and July 2025, 78% more by volume than a year earlier, and pointed to supply disruptions in Cambodia as one reason.¹⁷

Paying in riel and US dollars

Cambodia runs on two currencies. The riel, reintroduced on 20 March 1980, is the national money, but US dollars still made up 88.8% of bank deposits in 2025.¹⁹ On 30 October 2026 the official rate was 4,081 riel to the dollar.¹⁸ Since late 2024 the government has pushed businesses to open riel accounts and to put riel on their price tags.²⁰

Street prices are often quoted in riel: the Siem Reap cart prices of 3,000 to 3,500 riel come to a little under a dollar at that rate.⁸¹⁸ Digital payment is spreading too, through the central bank's Bakong system, which handled 75.6 million riel transactions in the first half of 2024, 180% more than a year before.²⁰