Dubai’s Gulfood 2025 helps Pakistani food and beverage firms plan new products
DUBAI: The 30th edition of Gulfood - one of the biggest food and beverage (F&B) events in the Middle East - was held at the Dubai World Trade Centre last week, with over one million products on display and featuring almost 5,000 exhibitors from 106 countries, including Pakistan.
For Pakistani F&B companies, Gulfood helps them to understand where innovation is needed and what new products can be brought to market.
“We get to meet people from all around the world,” said Yasir Abdullah Nainitalwala, director business development, Al Khair.
“We get people from countries that aren’t even our target market inquiring about our products.”
Nainitalwala told Business Recorder that his company has been attending the premium food and beverage event since 2014. Each year, visitor and client feedback adds to their research about what new products they should exhibit next.
Shilajit steals the show
Honey is the Karachi-based company’s most popular product, Nainitalwala said, but this year shilajit has stolen the show.
“This was the first time we brought shilajit to the event and it has gotten a great response,” he said, talking about the naturally occurring vitamin and mineral-rich sticky substance that is extracted from the northern mountain ranges in Pakistan. According to healthline.com, it has a whole host of health benefits, including slowing down Alzheimer’s disease, raising testosterone levels and treating chronic fatigue syndrome.
“People have been asking about this product. It’s new to the world.”
Shaking things up
Currently, Al Khair offers shilajit in a liquid and gummy form, but the team is now brainstorming more innovative ways of presenting it to Gulfood visitors. The trick, Nainitalwala said, may be to bring shilajit back in a new form for next year’s exhibit.
Just a few stalls down, Dawn Foods was also looking to shake things up in its frozen bread products.
“We’re looking at increasing our value-added products,” said Adnan Kisat, head of international business, “going beyond naans to maybe pizza naans or other products that would bring millennials into our customer pool.”
The Lahore-based company monitors global trends to determine future product investments, he said, and feedback from Gulfood patrons can help with this.
Kisat said that the premium F&B event has always contributed highly toward expanding Dawn Food’s reach overseas, for both its bread and meat products.
“Every year we come, we find a few more countries that open up,” he noted.
Pakistani rice attracts serious buyers
Meanwhile, rice was one of the leading products Pakistani exhibitors were showcasing.
“We’re exhibiting IRRI 6 (a non-basmati rice type), which we export to Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and China,” said Mawish Moulvi, director, M. M. Group of Companies, adding that they are also exhibiting corn and sesame seeds.
The Karachi-based company, founded in 1986 by her father Mahmood Baqi Moulvi, has a lot of multinational buyers, but Gulfood also gives the company access to smaller buyers.
A Gambia buyer who the company onboarded five years ago started small, with five rice containers, has now expanded to larger quantities.
“Their growth means our growth,” Moulvi noted.
Just as the event has grown, she said, so has interest from visitors.
“Compared to five years ago, we see a lot more serious buyers now,” Moulvi said. “There’s more conversion and the people who come talk to us, they know what they want. There’s more awareness and there’s more knowledge.”
Knowledge has also led to higher expectations among some visitors.
Noah Lev, who was from the Netherlands, said the event drew large crowds and featured numerous exhibitors, but he couldn’t find much of what he was looking for: food innovation.
He and his fellow visitors had been looking for rice, pulses, and millet products.
“We have walked around the rice and pulses section of the Pakistan pavillion as well,” Lev said. “Lots of products but nobody pushing the boundaries of innovation in this space.”
He said he was hoping to come across companies at the forefront of the future of food.
He is interested to see “how they’re addressing sustainability in their approach, not only environmentally but also with the farmers and production”.
According to Moulvi, climate change has seriously impacted Pakistani crops, creating shortages, price spikes and obstacles for traders.
However, she added, “We are not rice growers; we’re just the millers. We will do whatever we can to support farmers thinking about initiatives to deal with the climate change crisis.”
Forging new business connections
Gulfood 2025 ran from 17-21 February under the theme ‘The Next Frontier in Food’, and provided “an unmatched platform for the global F&B community to boost engagement and forge new business connections while appreciating the industry’s evolutionary shift towards new development and trade paradigms,” according to a statement by the Dubai government.
Upon attending the event, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, emphasised the value of the event as a key platform for building partnerships and striking deals within one of the most vital sectors globally.
He added that the exhibition aligns with the UAE’s commitment to playing a central role in driving global efforts and fostering innovation to enable new solutions that boost the food sector.
Next year, it has been announced that the ever-growing event will be expanded to two venues. In addition to the World Trade Centre, it will also be held at the Expo City. And while exhibitors are excited to return in 2026, not everyone is happy about the event becoming so big.
“I personally feel it should not be like that because in this way the audience and the visitors will be divided,” he noted. “Those who will have a stall here [DWTC] will have a benefit or edge over those who will get their stalls in Expo City, because it’s very far away. I think nobody has much time to visit both places.”
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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