While Al-Rabie is traditionally known as one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest juice producers, the company revealed details of its plan to tap the growing market for ready-to-eat vegetables such as chickpeas and beans at Gulfood 2007. “We’ve recently launched our entry into the food industry by coming up with a new brand called Awal Qatfa, which is what we are focusing on in this exhibition,” Manzoor Karimuddin, marketing manager, of Al-Rabie, told
Retail News Middle East
.
“Awal Qatfa is a ready-to-eat food in fibre packaging. It is designed to compete against similar foods that are available in cans. The key selling point is that it is ready-to-eat, so all you need to do is open it, put it into a container and heat it, and then you can eat.”
The new product range, which includes mixed vegetables, baked beans and chick peas, among other SKUs, will be launched in Saudi Arabia in the coming months before being launched in the UAE. “We are investing a lot of money to build awareness and increase visibility and distribution and it will continue to improve,” Karimuddin said. He added that Al Rabie intends to use Gulfood as a platform to raise awareness of the new product lines and to introduce the products to export markets.
“We take part in this exhibition for two reasons; one is to raise awareness and the other is to seek out potential partners in countries where we are not present,” he said.
“We are taking it in stages. We are currently focusing on the MENA region and then, eventually the plan is to go as global as we possibly can. We already get a lot of enquiries from India, Pakistan and even the UK and other European countries.”
Al Rabie’s products, which mainly consist of juices, milk and milk-based products such as ice-cream, are distributed by NTDE in the UAE.
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