Gama spoke to Milana Boskovic, Chief Marketing and R&D Officer at Al Ain Farms Group.
Read this Industry Insight in the next issue of Gama News.
How is the formation of Al Ain Farms Group helping you leverage scale to redefine your identity as a ‘National Food Champion’?
The formation of Al Ain Farms Group is really about creating the scale and capabilities needed to strengthen the UAE’s food system. By bringing together five established local food brands, we are moving from being known primarily as a dairy and poultry company to becoming a broader, integrated food system.
What makes our model particularly powerful is the combination of local production and vertical integration. We have greater control across the value chain, from farming and feed through processing, logistics and distribution.
Scale also gives us the opportunity to invest more confidently in R&D, technology and new categories – from functional nutrition and camel milk to poultry and other locally produced foods.
For us, being a National Food Champion is not simply about being bigger. It is about using the scale to make local food production more resilient, innovative and competitive, while contributing to the UAE’s long-term food security ambitions.
How will your new partnership with FoodIQ and adoption of Multi-Layer Cooker (MLC) technology accelerate your 2026 clean-label and protein-rich pipeline?
The partnership with FoodIQ is a good example of how we are turning our food-security ambitions into practical innovation. We are bringing advanced food technology into the UAE, including Multi-Layer Cooker (MLC) technology, and we see this as an important enabler for the next generation of products.
What is exciting about MLC is not simply the technology itself, but what it allows our R&D teams to achieve. The process gives us greater control over how ingredients are treated, helping us preserve nutritional value while developing products with cleaner formulations and the taste and texture consumers expect.
Our focus is therefore on clean-label, protein-rich and functional nutrition – products that respond to a clear shift in consumer behaviour towards healthier and more purposeful eating.
How do you translate your research partnerships and UAE Food Security goals into tangible benefits for the daily grocery shopper?
For us, food security is not an abstract national objective. It has to be visible in the everyday shopping basket.
Our approach is built around local production, vertical integration and partnerships. We are working with universities, technology companies and strategic partners to improve everything from agricultural productivity and climate resilience to animal nutrition, food processing and logistics. Recent collaborations with Khalifa University, Al Dahra and ne’ma are examples of how we are connecting science, local supply chains and national food-security priorities.
We also have to make sure those investments ultimately create value for consumers. Our farm-to-shelf model allows us to deliver products to more than 23,000 retail points within 24 hours of production, which is a very tangible advantage in terms of freshness and reliability.
And food security is not only about availability. It is also about quality, affordability and consumer confidence. Initiatives such as the Premium Food Mark for locally produced poultry are important because they help consumers identify quality-assured local products at the shelf.
So when we talk about food security, our measure of success is ultimately very simple: can we give families reliable access to fresh, nutritious, locally produced food, every day?
How are you evolving your brand storytelling to balance your Emirati heritage with the expectations of a younger, digitally native consumer base?
Our heritage is one of our greatest strengths. Al Ain Farms began with a single farm in 1981 under the vision of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and that history gives the brand a very authentic connection to the UAE and its food-security journey.
But heritage should not mean standing still. The question for us is how we take those original values – local production, quality, trust and national contribution – and make them relevant to today’s consumer.
Younger consumers want to know more about what they buy: where it comes from, how it is produced, what is in it and what impact it has. So our storytelling is becoming more transparent and more experiential. Digital content, traceability and storytelling from our farms allow us to bring consumers closer to the people, animals and processes behind the products.
We are also putting sustainability into the story in a very practical way. For example, our approach to packaging starts with a simple principle: reduction first – using less material, lighter packaging and more local sourcing where possible.
For us, the balance is quite clear: we don’t need to reinvent our heritage for a younger generation. We need to show them why that heritage still matters, and how we are carrying it forward through innovation, transparency and responsible local production.
