Hailing from Gujarat, India, Harish Tahiliani belongs to a business family with several generations of experience in processing and trading of pulses and spices. Arab & India Spices was started in 1986 as a trading company predominantly for spices by his father, Kumar, who foresaw the immense potential for food trade in the Middle East. Harish began assisting his father from 1989 and started to handle certain operations of the business, shuttling between the UAE and India on a regular basis. In 1990, Kumar started the first processing plant for pulses.
In the same year, Kumar finally summoned Harish to the UAE. Harish quit his studies and travelled to the UAE to take the reins of the business, after which there was no turning back. Within a couple of years, he expanded the facility from a 4,000 to 40,000-sq-ft premises in Sharjah, incorporating five processing plants of pulses. In 2003, he purchased 352,000 square feet of land in Ajman, which was the first emirate to give ownership of commercial plots to expats. In 2007, Arab & India Spices moved its base the newly opened processing facility in Ajman, which had eight state-of-the-art production lines capable of 325 metric tons of production a day. In December 2011, under Harish’s leadership, Arab & India Spices LLC received the SME Award for most exports from Dubai Chamber of Commerce. In 2015, he bought an entire hatch of lentils in a bulk vessel to Sharjah, which was the first of its kind in the UAE. Pressing his goal for growth and achievement, Arab & India Spices currently has 18 production lines and the capacity to process 700 metric tons a day.
In 2019, Tahiliani successfully erected 12 pulses storage silos, which can hold 52,000 metric tons at a time. This facility is sprawled over 300,000 sq ft of land at Hamriyah Free Zone (Phase 2) and can store enough pulses at one time to feed the entire UAE population for six months.
Tahiliani has been featured three times in the Forbes (ME) Top Indian Business Leaders. Apart from his business achievements, he does a lot of philanthropy and has tied up with Human Appeal International to contribute a percentage of profits from certain product categories as proceeds to charitable organisations.
What do you think the biggest economic game changer will be over the next five years?
I think cryptocurrencies have great economic potential and could be a big game changer in the coming years. As we’re seeing that they are getting hugely popular day after day and are now even being backed up by multi billion dollars MNCS, these currencies are surely going to change the face of our economy as we know it, if they continue with their current trend.
The second potential I see is that within the agricultural sector. I believe that in next couple of years there will be a major boom in this sector which can bring in a change in the economies of the countries. Already in countries such as India, we have seen major corporations that were not involved in this segment eyeing for it. In the same way we can see that institutions like the World Bank are now aggressively trying to develop this sector within the African continent.
Follow us on
