Rui Nabeiro

Manuel Rui Azinhais Nabeiro GCIH ComMI (28 March 1931 – 19 March 2023) was a Portuguese billionaire businessman and philanthropist.^[1] He was the founder of the Delta Cafés group.^[2][3]

Rui Nabeiro GCIH ComMI
Born	Manuel Rui Azinhais Nabeiro (1931-03-28)28 March 1931 Campo Maior, Portugal
Died	19 March 2023(2023-03-19) (aged 91) Lisbon, Portugal
Occupation	Businessman

Biography

Rui Nabeiro was born in Campo Maior, District of Portalegre, Portugal, in 1931.^[4] He studied until the fourth grade, the primary school education in Portugal.^[5] Starting at 12, he helped his mother in a small grocery store and his father and uncles in a family-owned coffee roasting workshop, at a time when the effects of the civil war in Spain (1936-1939) were still felt and the Portugal-Spain border was a place of smuggling.^[2] He assumed the leadership of his family-owned coffee roasting business at 19, and Delta Cafés was founded by him in 1961, around his 30th birthday.^[6] A market leader in the coffee roasting business, he established Novadelta in 1982, and in 1984, he created a new coffee roasting factory, which was the largest on the Iberian Peninsula at the time.^[7] In 2022, Rui Nabeiro was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Coimbra under the proposal of its School of Economics (FEUC).^[8] In the same year, he won the Award for Merit and Excellence at the Golden Globes.^[9]

Distinctions

National orders

• Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator (5 January 2006)^[10]
• Commander of the Order of Entrepreneurial Merit, Class of Industrial Merit (9 June 1995)^[10]