The Office Pantry Checklist for UAE Companies: What to Stock and How Much

Most pantry overspend in a UAE office has nothing to do with brand choice. It comes from one guessed quantity, a store cupboard nobody measured and a summer nobody planned for. What follows sizes a pantry for a 30 to 150 person floor in Dubai, Sharjah or Abu Dhabi, per head and per week.

Size the pantry per head, not per shelf

Four lines carry most pantry spend in a UAE office: drinking water, coffee, tea and cups. The rest — stirrers, UHT milk, biscuits, sink consumables — is small enough to buy quarterly. Count empty cartons and shrinks for four weeks before setting any quantity; the gap between that count and your assumption is where the budget goes.

Planning ranges for an office where nothing is charged at point of use.

Line	Per head/week, Oct–May	Per head/week, Jun–Sep	60 staff, summer month
Bottled water, 500ml	8–12 bottles	12–18 bottles	3,100–4,700 (130–195 shrinks)
Coffee, beans or ground	20–30 g	22–35 g	6–9 kg
Tea bags	4–8 bags	3–6 bags	780–1,560 bags
Paper cups, 8oz	12–20 cups	15–25 cups	3,900–6,500 (4–7 cases)

Two things move these numbers more than headcount. Free-vend coffee from a bean-to-cup machine pushes bean usage above a manual filter setup: people press the button while waiting for the lift, which is why coffee still climbs in summer while tea falls and tea drinkers move to cold water. Cup size does the rest: a 12oz cup holds 50% more than an 8oz, and both get filled to the brim. The food and pantry catalogue carries a tier break on each line, so a month's quantity can be priced before you commit.

Pick the water format before you pick the supplier

Water is the heaviest thing you buy, and its format decides how much floor you lose for a year.

Format	Storage footprint	Handling reality	Best suited to
500ml, shrink of 24	High — over a pallet a month for 60 staff	One person carries a shrink	Meeting rooms, site visits, vehicles
5-gallon (18.9L) cooler bottle	Low per litre, empties need space	Roughly 19 kg full — two-hand lift, injury risk	Fixed pantries, stable headcount
Plumbed filtered cooler	Almost none	Water point, drainage, landlord approval, filters	Long leases, larger floors

Most offices land on a mix: a cooler for daily drinking and 500ml bottles in shrinks of 24 for meeting rooms and site vehicles. The minimum there is 20 shrinks, or 480 bottles, then in steps of five — about a week for a 40-person office in August. Storage, not the minimum, is the binding constraint.

If any of your people work outdoors in summer, water becomes a compliance line. MOHRE's midday break stops work in direct sun between 12:30 and 15:00 from 15 June to 15 September, and employers must supply cool drinking water and shaded rest areas; MOHRE reconfirms the dates each year. That water belongs in the vehicle, cold, before the crew leaves at seven. Inside, the August complaint is never volume but chilling speed, and a second cooler settles more grievances than another pallet.

One rule gets broken every July: drinking water never belongs in an unconditioned car-park store. Keep it inside the cooled envelope, off the floor and away from cleaning chemicals — PET takes on solvent odour from whatever sits beside it. A plumbed cooler is fit-out work arranged through licensed providers and needs landlord sign-off. The rest of the water and beverages range — juice, laban, sparkling water — is small by value and the line guests notice.

Coffee, tea and the hospitality standard your guests expect

Buy beans monthly. Buy cups quarterly. Coffee peaks in the first weeks after roasting, so the one bulk discount worth refusing here is a three-month bean order: it saves on the invoice and loses it in the cup. Ask for the roast date, not the twelve-month expiry. The 1kg Arabica office blend has a 6 kg minimum, roughly a month for a 45-person floor running one bean-to-cup machine. Store it sealed and dark; the cupboard above the fridge and the shelf by a west-facing window are the worst spots in a Dubai fit-out.

Budget staff consumption and guest hospitality separately, or you run out of the wrong one. A UAE client meeting has a standard: water within a minute of the guest sitting down, Arabic coffee poured from a dallah into small finjan cups, dates alongside. Fill the finjan a third and keep refilling until the guest tilts it side to side, which is the signal to stop. Keep hospitality stock in a locked cupboard with a named owner, or it is gone by Wednesday. The office coffee and tea range covers both lines.

Disposables or washables — decide who does the washing

Most UAE fit-outs under 100 staff have a domestic dishwasher or none, and cleaning contracts rarely put 60 personal mugs in the scope of works. Where a pantry attendant is included, check whether the hours cover the 3pm peak. Settle that against your cleaning and janitorial stock plan before ordering 60 branded mugs.

A split works: named mugs at desks for the daily drinkers, and 8oz paper cups for guests and the afternoon rush. Single-wall 8oz cups are hot to hold, so people take two and the cup line quietly doubles; ripple-wall costs more per cup and less per drink.

Material choice now carries regulatory risk. Single-use plastic bags have been banned across the UAE since the start of 2024 under federal rules from the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment (MOCCAE), and the phase-out has since been extended to other single-use plastic items. As of 2026, paper cups, wooden stirrers and paper plates are the low-risk default; before ordering plastic cutlery by the case, confirm the current scope with MOCCAE or your emirate's municipality.

If you are unsure two cases of 1,000 cups — the minimum on that line — will clear your cupboard, send the line items with headcount and machine type while you browse the disposables and serveware range, and ask the sales desk to confirm every pack format before pricing.

Storage, heat and pests: the constraints a fit-out ignores

Storage is the real ceiling on order size, and building access is the second. A fitted office gives you a run of 600mm cabinets and one shared store; a pallet of 500ml water occupies roughly 1.2m by 1.0m and stacks past 1.5m. Towers in Business Bay, DIFC and Al Barsha want a service lift booking and a delivery window outside core hours; a pallet does not enter a passenger lift. Business parks in Al Quoz, DIP and Mussafah are easier. Where access is tight, ask for cartons instead of pallets — it costs handling time and prevents an aborted delivery.

Plan one 25L solo microwave per 20 to 25 staff, or the 12:45 queue stretches past half an hour. Solo rather than grill: grills get used for fish and the whole floor finds out. Before adding a boiling-water tap or a second fridge from the breakroom appliances range, check the circuit — pantry spurs in older Dubai fit-outs were sized for a kettle and a microwave, and a 3kW tap trips the board at nine.

Heat and sugar bring pests. Anything sweet goes in a sealed container. Empty the pantry bin daily, not on the cleaner's rota. No chocolate in an uncooled store between June and September. One step almost nobody takes: pour a litre of water down the pantry sink and every floor drain before a long Eid closure. A dry trap is an open pipe, and that is how cockroaches reach a clean floor. Pest control is licensed work, so keep it with a licensed provider. If the pantry doubles as a breakout area, its seating belongs in your workplace furniture and ergonomics plan.

Ramadan, Eid and the exhibition weeks

Ramadan reshapes the pantry instead of shrinking it. MOHRE reduces private-sector working hours by two hours a day for the month, and with fasting staff the daytime coffee and cup lines fall sharply while water, dates, laban, juice and iftar disposables rise. Guest hospitality does not stop, so cut the coffee line rather than cancel it. MOHRE issues the reduction each year, so check the current circular.

Eid brings two closures that stop consumption dead and restart it with a surge, so order before the break: vendors and drivers are on leave too. Exhibition weeks such as GITEX and Gulfood invert the mix, with guest hospitality doubling while staff consumption falls. The biggest step in the pantry year is late August, when annual leave ends and the school term restarts in the same week. Rebaseline then, and before Ramadan.

Run this checklist before the first order leaves

1. Count four weeks of empties and set every quantity from that.
2. Measure storage in linear and cubic metres, then cap the drop size at what fits.
3. Confirm access before quoting: lift booking, delivery window, loading bay, pallet or carton.
4. Fix cup size and wall type first; that choice sets coffee, milk and cup spend together.
5. Read the cleaning scope of works: is crockery washing included, or only assumed?
6. Split by shelf life: beans and milk monthly, cups and plates quarterly at the better tier.
7. Give guest hospitality its own cupboard, owner and reorder line.
8. Price the list as one order, then model it annually against your office supply cost baseline.

Storefront prices exclude VAT, with 5% shown separately, so build the annual figure ex-VAT and add VAT once. CoHub buys from vetted vendors and resells under its own name, so a mixed pantry order is consolidated where stock allows and settles as one bilingual UAE tax invoice carrying the TRN — one document for your FTA records instead of five. Delivery covers all seven emirates, usually within the same week, with same-day options in Dubai on stocked lines, confirmed per order.

Send your pantry list and we will price it

Send the line items — headcount, machine type, cup size, pack formats and delivery address — through the request for quotation form, or photograph the storage cupboard and send it to the pantry desk on WhatsApp. A sales expert prices every order, applies the volume tier and any discount they can approve, then issues a proforma invoice, normally the same day. Payment is cash on delivery; the bilingual tax invoice follows once the order is paid and packed.