Six hundred women in Herat grow saffron by hand. Now their harvest is being served at 40,000 feet on Emirates flights across the world.
- Mira Farms by FBMI brings female farmers’ produce onboard Emirates for Emirati Women’s Day
- Over 1,600 women farmers and processors across Afghanistan and Tanzania supply Mira Farms
- Products include saffron, cashews, almonds, pistachios and chocolate coated dried fruits
- Mira Farms products are available at Dubai Duty Free, Dubai Design District and online
The small foil packet of salted cashews on an Emirates tray table tells a longer story than most passengers will ever know. Behind it is a woman in Herat, Afghanistan, working a saffron field by hand at dawn. Behind it is a processing centre where 42 women sort and pack dried fruit with the kind of focus that comes from knowing the work matters beyond the product itself. Behind it is a social enterprise that chose an airline partnership over a press release and a flight path over a shelf. Mira Farms by the Fatima Bint Mohamed Bin Zayed Initiative has brought the produce of female farmers and processors onboard Emirates to mark Emirati Women’s Day, and the timing, against the backdrop of a day that has expanded this year into a full month of national celebration, could not be more precise.
Saffron, nuts and dried fruit from some of the world’s least visible agricultural communities are now being served somewhere above the Indian Ocean or the Mediterranean. That is a genuinely remarkable sentence. And it is a real one.
Deep in the kitchens of the Dubai Design District showroom, Mira Farms products arrive in packaging that looks considered and minimal, the kind of thing that sits comfortably on a well-edited shelf. What the packaging does not show is the supply chain behind it. Mira Farms currently works with 600 female saffron farmers in Herat, 1,000 female farmers producing dried fruits and nuts across Afghanistan, and 42 women in processing centres. Every almond, every sun-dried apricot, every gram of saffron connects directly to a specific woman in a specific community whose livelihood depends on whether the product reaches a market that values it.
The Emirates partnership does exactly that. It does not simply provide a revenue stream. It provides visibility at a scale that a Dubai Design District showroom, however beautifully curated, cannot match on its own. Several million passengers travel on Emirates each month. Each tray table is a potential introduction to a brand that most of them have never encountered. The baked salted cashews, Indian flavoured cashews, dark chocolate almonds, chocolate coated raisins, chocolate twisted apricots, chocolate coated pistachios, smoked almonds, oriental mix and cinnamon mix that make up the Emirates selection are, in the most practical sense, the best-distributed product launch a social enterprise could ask for.
Travellers stopping into Dubai Duty Free before their flight can already find Mira Farms dried fruits and nuts at the Emirati District at Dubai International Airport, a platform created specifically to give homegrown businesses access to the international traveller passing through one of the world’s busiest airports. The connections keep multiplying. Each point of sale is another point of visibility for the women whose names never appear on the label.
Through FBMI, profits from Mira Farms sales are reinvested into programmes supporting education, healthcare and vocational training across the communities it works with. Buying a bag of Afghan pistachios from mirafarms.com funds something considerably beyond the purchase itself. This is not a marginal claim buried in a mission statement. It is the structural logic of the entire enterprise: a social programme funded by a product people genuinely want to eat.
On a day when the UAE marks Emirati Women’s Day under the theme We Emerge Stronger and Better, with Emirati women now holding 50% of the seats in the Federal National Council and making up more than 70% of the Emirati private sector workforce, the Mira Farms story sits naturally within a larger conversation about what women’s contribution to an economy looks like when it is properly recognised and properly supported.
The cashews are good. The saffron is exceptional. And the story behind both is worth knowing before you open the packet.
Mira Farms products are available online at mirafarms.com, at the Dubai Design District showroom and through Dubai Duty Free at Dubai International Airport!
