Tell us about yourself and your career journey.
I was born into the food industry and never really left. My earliest memories involve waking up at 4am to help my family prepare Knefe before school. That passion led me to a degree in Agronomy & Food Engineering, and my first job in an Industrial Research Centre’s Cereal, Flour and Bread Lab—an ideal start rooted in scientific discovery.
Curious about what happens beyond the lab, I joined the region’s largest F&B bakery franchise, where I built its R&D department and centralized a wide portfolio of baked goods. I later helped set up a new factory in Riyadh before moving into consulting and engineering between Dubai and the Netherlands, designing baking and snacking plants across emerging markets.
Through the years, my focus evolved—from the technical “how” of food manufacturing to the strategic “why” behind food investments.
In 2020, backed with a rich network of exceptional talents, I founded AGZIA Food Industry Brainiacs addressing an immense need for professional holistic knowledge in the food industry space across multiple verticals.
Today, AGZIA champions food industry investments with a fresh, insight-driven approach that blends science, engineering, and investment strategy.
Tell us about your company, AGZIA Food Industry Brainiacs.
AGZIA as the Arabic phonetic suggests, deals with FOODS – we are a multidisciplinary Investment Advisory firm, enjoying solid financial acumen tying up knowledge around what we represent at The Hex, in order to reach Profits at the centre (Honey in the Honeybee Structure).
What inspired you to found AGZIA Food Industry Brainiacs?
The Middle East in general and the GCC in particular have been going through a heavy economical transformation, with governments thriving at diversifying the economy, decreasing their reliance on Oil & Gas, and also getting obsessed in improving their Food Securities, and Private Sectors getting thrown around with fragile supply chains (highly witnessed during the covid times and spurring all over the globe). When looking at all of this, I thought I should be able to play a role and bring sense to all of this. I am in a position to “Create Value” and “Keep Value” in the region, so I decided to bring it to life through Food Industry Brainiacs.
The knowledge is there, and whatever is not between my ears, is highly within my personal and my partners reach, the network is also present within the Food Industry Ecosystem – supply, demand, transformation and engineering, technologies. What was left was to put the pieces together logically and creatively to make the business make sense out of chaotic, scattered fractions.
What is your company mission?
At AGZIA, we exist to create and preserve value in the evolving food industry landscape of the Middle East and GCC. Through strategic investment advisory, industry intelligence, and a multidisciplinary network of experts, we help shape resilient, future-ready food systems. Our mission is to empower governments, private sectors, and entrepreneurs with the insights, partnerships, and innovation needed to secure sustainable food growth, rooted in regional strength and global relevance.
Do you have a client success story you can share?
We love seeding our projects with unique technologies.
To the benefit of the investors, we place smart solutions in various cornerstones of the project, creating a higher barrier against the competition, and tough situation for the copycats.
In one case, I can think of what started as a simple industrial bakery project.
Soft sliced bread is often sold with a 10-day shelf life; thus, the distribution (reach) is a challenge to cover a large territory. So we decided to attempt 45 days of freshness on the bread without the addition of nasty preservatives.
A challenging concept, where we balanced an integration of natural enzyme technologies, a smart and modern cooling technology that prevented any bacterial contamination, stringent environmental conditions, and a functional packaging solution that had the right oxygen barrier. All this while keeping an eye on the COGS and keeping the player within the market standard price wise.
This was a recipe for success, the client was able to occupy the line at 90% efficiency within less than 6 months of operation. Bull’s eye on the ROI.
What are the main factors currently impacting the quality/price of what we get on the dinner table?
Simply put, these 3 factors are the largest components of a Food Product Price:
- Distribution & Retailing is one of the largest Price Components; this is where, of a certain Chocolate Bar on the shelf retailed at 10 bucks, easily 5 to 6 of those are going to the company that placed it on the shelf and the company that owns the shelf. For sure, there is an unfair imbalance between making the product and delivering the product.
That’s why, together with the emergence and ever enhancements of online e-commerce, q-commerce brands and consumers are finding it (in some instances) more economical to transact packaged product there.
- The second chunk is, fairly, the actual Cost of Goods. We hear that the ingredient and packaging material, and what the consumer is often unaware of, is the difference between a low-quality ingredient and a high-quality ingredient used in a certain product will probably move the needle by not more than 5–20%; Apart from exceptional price surges of specific ingredients; for example the Cocoa price hikes we witnessed in 2024 due to climatic disturbances of crops and in previous years, the Corn 2022 hikes due to supply interruptions due to Political conflicts.
This makes you sometimes wonder if the Retail Price proportionality – between a high quality and low quality product is a fair or an exaggerated marketing stunt to highlight the claims and benefits of certain “better for you” positioned products.
- The Third factor is the Payroll element of the Production Plant. A highly variable figure that obviously gets better in terms of percentage as the business becomes more production-efficient and further automated. This figure generally varies between 18% (on a low efficiency factory) and 3% (on a maximized efficiency) of the revenues.
Automation is key to keeping that figure on a single digit, especially in our region, which has long relied on relatively cheaper manpower on production floors, but things are changing; labour and their associated costs are getting more expensive, and manufacturers are slowly enhancing their production setups to scale smartly. We need to see more efforts from banks and other financial institutions to facilitate access to CapEx for further automation.
How do you see the food industry investment scene in the GCC developing?
Because we are equally involved in the setup of new ventures and some transactions through M&A activities, we have a particular visibility and opinion about the landscape.
We like to visualize the landscape as a pyramid, where at the top we have few consolidators (privates and semi-governmental) entities ever hungry for decent sized acquisitions, at the bottom of the pyramid are a number of startups populating the physical and the digital landscape; there is a flagrant absence of the middle of the pyramid.
A Middle Part that must be fed by the upcoming startups transforming into scaleups, to then graduate into Exits, IPOs, or be part of one of the large strategic consolidators, is for many reasons highly absent from the scene.
Some of these reasons can be caused by the affluence and strength of traders that find it easier to dump imported products in the markets, rather than strategically invest in manufacturing capabilities – apply that over several years and decades, and you get that handicap.
The good news is that there are a number of scaleups in the making, promising a rising future and a marginal correction of the Foodscape; Governments are also helping, but we believe that more attention needs to be given to the mid-section of the pyramid.
Easier access to lesser conditional funds, easier access to affordable land (shielding the manufacturers from real estate bubbles), and easier access to export markets (we see the UAE very active in this regard).
How are the recent developments with AI and tech-backed ventures impacting the food industry?
We are seeing that recent developments in AI and tech-backed ventures are reshaping the food industry across its entire value chain—from production and manufacturing to retail and consumer interaction. Artificial intelligence is enhancing precision in agriculture through data-driven insights, helping farmers optimize yield, reduce waste, and manage resources more efficiently. In food manufacturing, AI is playing a growing role in automating processes, ensuring quality control, and even formulating new products by analysing vast datasets on Ingredients, Flavors, and Market Trends.
On the supply chain side, tech-backed platforms are improving traceability, allowing companies to monitor the journey of ingredients in real time and respond swiftly to any disruptions. Retail and consumer-facing sectors are also undergoing a transformation, with AI being used for demand forecasting, personalized marketing, dynamic pricing, and even in smart checkout systems.
Perhaps most notably, tech startups are revolutionizing the development of alternative proteins and functional foods, using AI to replicate animal-based products or engineer nutritionally tailored food items. These innovations not only meet evolving consumer preferences but also address global concerns related to sustainability and health.
It is obvious that the integration of AI and advanced technologies is accelerating innovation, improving efficiency, and opening new business models in the food industry, making it more responsive, personalized, and resilient.
How does AGZIA help investors?
For the Strategic Investors, who have been operating in the food industry scene, we dare to challenge a preconceived idea, push the limits of innovations in order to move their game from the red ocean (where they often find themselves in a race to the bottom with the competition) to the blue ocean (where they can enjoy higher margins).
For Greenfield Investors, we start at very early stage of strategy development, it is quite helpful to have the early-stage Investment Advisor be the same as the late-stage Go-To-Market advisor and the in-between stage system integrator. Think it – Make it – Sell it.
For Private Equity Firms, we often get involved as food industry experts for a pre-acquisition assessment – Technical Commercial Due Diligence, post-acquisition transformational and growth planners, and on their exit representation to assist them in selling the business to strategic buyers.
For Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in their various forms, Greenfields, M&As, and Joint Ventures, through collaborations with local entities having a deep understanding of the region, the consumer, and the key success factors. The GCC, through the stability, security, and economic growth, we play a key role in elaborating winning investment propositions.
What are the biggest investment opportunities right now in the food industry space?
Opportunities are valued differently depending on who’s eying them.
These examples would clarify what we mean:
- Look at the Imports – Pick the largest Volumes & Values to localize production, you’ve got yourself a few projects, where value and margins could be retained within the region instead of wasting bucks in the oceans on the supply. This is also a serious contribution model to the food security, accessibility, availability, and affordability of a certain country or region.
So, if you are a governmental entity, that’s definitely high on your agenda. From a retail CPG (consumer packaged goods) perspective; Think Baby Food, Future Proof Snacks, Chilled and Frozen Dessert Concepts, etc.
From a HORECA and Ingredient business; Think of the localization of butter, aged cheese and other dairy products, baking and pastry value-added and functional ingredients, etc.
- Look at the Exports – Double down on what has been witnessing success in the export markets from our region. True the GCC, is historically not big on agriculture, but things are changing. Local produces of which Dates have been doing great in the West and the East. Arabic Sweets and other indulgences are highly appreciated in the export.
- Look at the Private Labels – For many years traders from the Middle East and the GCC have turned to Europe, the USA and the Far East to have their label stuck on a unique product proposition. Now with the increase of shipping costs and often disturbance of supplies, we can find many pockets of opportunities to enhance manufacturing capabilities locally and invite the foreign brands to localize their production in the region for the region – jokingly international shipping companies have been growing at double digits rates in the last years – part of those double digits are ours to keep! If you think about it, much of the food content is water – you are literally shipping water on oceans and you pay it at premium prices.
How do you see the food industry transforming over the next 5–10 years?
Before we go to the techy answer, I’d like to give a highlight on some forgotten segments in the industry – the ones treated as culprits for being unhealthy. Let’s not forget that a large part of a product judgement happens on your taste buds, away from trendy healthy blogs and posts.
Enjoying a melty chocolate decadent cake, fatty salty chips, crunchy fresh baklawa or a creamy gelato, won’t lose the fight against their sugar free, gluten free, fat free and dairy-free replaced alternatives, in spite of the bombardment of healthy trend news.
On the flip side of the coin, the Food Industry and the Nutrition Industry have been on a divorcing trend for many years and yes this is reversing, some changes are being shouted louder than what it really is (Marketers doing great jobs), but nonetheless, the nutritional benefits within the food industry are being highly present in every discussion of a new project we are planning.
No less important – the Food Industry and the Pharma Industry are getting cosier together… you will be finding more Functional Ingredients in your everyday snack, more Nutraceuticals claims.
A trend at the base of which you will find developing sciences, including:
- New sources of nutrients (e.g., algae oils)
- Foods from non-traditional parts of plants or animals (e.g., chia seeds, baobab fruit)
- Foods from new production processes (e.g., UV-treated mushrooms)
- Genetically modified microorganisms
- Insect-based ingredients
- Lab-grown or cultured meat
- Fermented products with new microbial strains
Alternative proteins are not slowing down. Through Precision Fermentation and other technologies, they are a category that the region needs to catch up with. Investing in the underlying science (focus on universities and non-profit research centres), but also by investing in the scale-ups and commercialization of the solutions.
What is your vision for AGZIA over the next 5 years and beyond?
AGZIA Food Industry Brainiacs has been elaborating, engineering, and executing food projects across many markets for a while now. And increasingly we are being requested to become part of those projects. This is something that was not on our agenda for many years, but we are contemplating new models where we become an integral part of some selective projects in UAE and KSA.
Other models under discussion could see us going into Fund Management spaces dedicated towards capital deployments in various food vertical spaces.
