THE Tourism Enhancement Fund and the annual Jamaica Food and Drink Festival (JFDF) have joined forces to host this year’s Blue Mountain Coffee Festival as a subsumed event to bolster engagement with the island’s gastronomy industry.

“Hurricane Melissa [which hit Jamaica on October 28, 2025] happened and it interfered with our staging of our festival [which was scheduled for November 2025]. So our 11th staging is now going to be on March 7, at Hope Gardens, from 4:00 pm to 11:00 pm, where we will be having ‘Meet Street and Market’, which is one of our four Jamaica Food and Drink Festival events, in collaboration with the coffee festival,” explained JFDF director Nicole Pandohie.

She was participating in the launch of National Blue Mountain Coffee Day at the Jamaica Observer last Friday.

National Blue Mountain Coffee Day is celebrated annually on January 9 to honour Jamaica’s first large shipment of coffee to Japan in 1953 and highlight the strong trade partnership between the two nations.

According to Pandohie, this year’s edition of the festival is expected to host more than 100 vendors and will include activities designed for children to transform the occasion into a family affair.

“It’s a pay-as-you-go event, and so typically you pay a nominal fee for entrance. There’s a stage show, so lots of families, and lots of friends and groups of people come to hang out. There’s also a kiddies village, and it’s just everything needed for families on a Saturday evening. This is interspersed in that Meet Street experience and the coffee festival,” she said.

The JFDF is a multi-day event in Kingston celebrating Jamaica’s culinary scene, bringing together top chefs, mixologists, local artisans, and food enthusiasts for themed parties, tasting experiences, and cultural immersion featuring traditional dishes, drinks, music, and lively atmospheres.

Jamaica Food and Drink Festival Director Nicole Pandohie (left) and Alicia Bogues enjoy the festivities at the launch of National Blue Mountain Coffee Day, which was hosted at the Jamaica Observer last Friday. (Photos: Naphtali Junior)

Similarly, the Blue Mountain Coffee Festival is designed to promote the crop’s economic value and offer a taste of Jamaica’s heritage by featuring coffee purveyors, food, artisan crafts, barristers, entertainment and culinary experiences.

Speaking at the launch event on Friday, Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett said the collaboration between entities was a strategy to boost interaction both locally and internationally with Jamaican produce.

“We believe that to really make tourism the transformational agent that it is — that agent of economic growth, job creation, wealth creation, and prosperity — we have to bring the people of Jamaica into the mainstream. Tourism is the most consumer-driven activity on planet Earth. Now, while we focus on the production, we must own the consumption, and if we own that, the wealth of tourism will stay,” said Bartlett.

He explained that the JFDF will feature several attractions and will give exposure to the dynamic nature of coffee and all the different ways it is used in Jamaican culture.

“The festival is going to be a celebration of the creativity of all people in various derivatives of culture. We’re going to be celebrating barristers, mixologists, the various farmers as well, who actually are those who go and produce the coffee bean and those who do the manufacturing of the powder. Then there’s coffee fashions, the entertainers who are all involved in one element or another.

“There are the nutraceutical drivers as well, who are making coffee essence, perfume and coffee deodorant. So what we are showing in this festival is the wide and elongated value chain of coffee and to invite all people to invest in it, because you can have great wealth from a single crop,” declared Bartlett.