Cairo’s restaurant and hotel sector is large, fragmented, and famously price-sensitive, which makes any shift away from cheap, familiar materials like plastic straws harder to generalize about than in smaller Gulf markets. To understand how the transition is actually playing out on the ground, we spoke with a procurement manager overseeing food and beverage supply for a group of hotels and restaurants across Cairo’s Zamalek, Maadi, and New Cairo districts. Below is an edited version of that conversation.
From upscale Nile-side terraces to bustling neighborhood spots, Cairo’s hospitality sector is navigating a gradual, multi-speed transition from plastic to paper straws.
Q: Let’s start simply — how far along is Cairo’s food-service industry in moving away from plastic straws?
Honestly, it’s uneven. Some of our properties switched to paper straws two or three years ago, mostly because our international hotel partners required it as part of a broader sustainability commitment. But if you walk into a typical neighborhood cafe or a smaller independent restaurant, plastic is still very much the default. Cairo doesn’t have the kind of strict, city-wide plastic policy you’d find in some Gulf capitals, so a lot of the movement so far has been driven by individual business choices rather than regulation.
Q: What’s driving those individual choices, if it’s not regulation?
A mix of things. For hotels connected to international chains, it’s often a corporate mandate — sustainability targets set at a global level that local properties in Cairo have to meet regardless of local law. For independent restaurants, especially the newer, design-conscious spots opening in areas like Zamalek, it’s more about brand image. Customers, particularly younger ones and international visitors, notice these details, and owners know it.
Q: What’s been the biggest obstacle to wider adoption?
Cost, without question — but maybe not in the way people assume. It’s not that quality paper straws are dramatically more expensive at scale; the gap has actually narrowed a lot over the past few years. The issue is that a huge share of Cairo’s food-service market operates on extremely thin margins, so even a small per-unit cost increase gets scrutinized heavily by owners who are already stretched. For a high-volume, low-margin operation, switching straw suppliers isn’t a five-minute decision — it gets weighed against a dozen other cost pressures.
Q: How do you evaluate paper straw suppliers before committing to an order?
Durability testing is the first filter. Cairo serves a huge volume of cold beverages — juices, iced tea, cold coffee — especially given the climate for most of the year, so a straw that goes soft in fifteen minutes is a non-starter. We test samples from multiple suppliers in our actual drink menu before committing to anything beyond a trial order. Documentation matters too — we need suppliers who can provide proper food-safety certification for import, since that’s come up as a bottleneck with a couple of suppliers who couldn’t produce the right paperwork when we needed it.
Conducting rigorous durability testing and verifying food-safety documentation are vital steps for Cairo procurement teams evaluating new paper straw suppliers.
Q: Do you see this shift accelerating or staying gradual?
I’d guess gradual, at least in the near term, simply because Cairo’s food-service market is so large and varied. There’s no single moment where “Cairo” switches — it’s thousands of individual businesses making their own calls at their own pace. But the direction is clearly toward more paper straws, not fewer. Every year, more of our peers in the industry mention they’ve made the switch, and the supplier options available to us now are considerably better — both in price and quality — than what was available when we first started looking a few years back.
Q: Any advice for other procurement teams in Cairo considering the switch?
Don’t assume the first quote you get reflects the real market. Prices and quality vary a lot between suppliers, and it’s worth the extra week or two it takes to test a few options properly. A bad first experience with a low-quality paper straw can convince an entire management team that “paper straws don’t work here,” when really it just means that particular supplier wasn’t good enough. Test thoroughly, and don’t judge the whole category by one disappointing batch.
This interview reflects the perspective of one hospitality procurement professional and is intended to illustrate common industry experiences in Cairo; individual results and supplier relationships will vary.
