Al Rawabi Dairy is the dairy arm of the Emirates Rawabi Group, a state-linked corporation that is supported by the Dubai government, the Arab Authority for Agricultural Investment and Development (AAAID), the Gulf Investment Corporation and other private shareholders.
Since its establishment in 1989, the firm has grown to become one of the region’s largest dairy and juice brands, alongside its sister brand Al Rawdah which leads in poultry and related processed products.
Heading up Emirates Rawabi today is Group CEO Mazen Al Refae, who strongly believes that high protein products are set to take off in the Middle East, but firms need to cater to local needs in order to stand out.
“Al Rawabi wants to develop and grow with a ‘from UAE to UAE’ mindset, so we are creating many new product ranges catering for our local taste buds and not international ones,” he said.
“However, international markets are always on our radar as well, so the key to finding a balance between these needs is to make the localised products so good and so well done that they can be exported easily as well.”
Case in point is one of the firm’s latest launches, the Al Rawabi Date Milk.
“Dates have been a staple food in this region for centuries so everyone is familiar with it, not to mention it has proven benefits such as being high in fibre as well as protein naturally,” he said.
“We made this using real dates and have not added any additional sugar so it is not overly sweet, but dates are already naturally sweet so it can still appear to most consumers.”
Al Refae believes that there are already many potential export markets for a product like this, naming Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt and China among these.
“These are markets already familiar with dates as a snack or a fruit, so there is a lot of opportunity here,” he said.
Other products tapping on both protein and localised tastes are the firm’s lactose-reduced, high-protein Greek yoghurt with 13g protein per serve, and its lactose-free kefir drink.
Convenience is key in poultry
Drawing on knowledge from the Al Rawdah brand, he also highlighted convenience as the most crucial consideration when it comes to innovation for poultry products in the region, animal protein or not.
“In poultry, I can say that consistency in production quality and supply has been our focus, and not so much diversification, but the innovation here has been in the convenience areas such as ready-to-eat (RTE), ready-to-cook (RTC), pre-marinated and so on,” he said.
“This is because convenience is very, very big here in the Middle East — just look at the growth in areas such as home deliveries and catering year-on-year, and how home cooking is reducing, so the only way people will be interested again is if it becomes convenient for them.”
To this end, most of the firm’s new chicken products have been in the RTE or RTC space, such as pre-marinated whole chickens.
“For consumers this means cutting out so much effort as they can just collect it from the fridge at the retailer, it is all ready-spiced and marinated up, they can just put it in the oven for five or 10 minutes and it will be ready to go to feed an entire family,” he said.
Dairy still where the growth is
That said, Al Refae acknowledged that in the near future dairy looks like where the growth is majorly going to be coming from in the region, so a lot of focus will be going into this segment and the growth of dairy protein.
“Dairy is seeing an average of 4.5% CAGR year-on-year growth, estimated at some US$1bn annually, and we are definitely focused on growing our market share here,” he said.
“This is why we are expanding our production and our farms, and for bio-security reasons we are choosing to open a new farm away from our current facilities. As it is, we’re going to start with 4,000 milking cows that have been hand-selected and bred for the quality of their milk, and they are going to be at the heart of Al Rawabi dairy fully securing our own milk production in this region.”
Moving forward, further strategies will be rolled out with a focus on protein as well.
“After we reach the production volumes required, we’re going to also look at diversification into cheese production, specifically researching using enzymes and making high-quality high-protein products,” Al Refae added.
“So there’s a lot of upscaling as well as both horizontal and vertical growth going on, but high-protein is seeing high growth and demand in the market, so this is something we do have our eye on.”
