About Us

After graduating as the first food technologist in the community, I realized that our industrious farmers have been wasting their organically produced fruit by unhygienic traditional sun drying. The fruit was being contaminated by dust and flies while the color was being deteriorated by sudden summer rains. The quality of the final product was substandard and worthless due to ignorance of farmers and lack of technology. Consequently, the farmers were not in the position of bargaining on the price of fruit and they had to accept the nominal price offered by the agents. According to my first survey in 1999, the farmers were hardly getting the labour cost of production, let alone the value of fruit. Back in the day, I was working with an NGO (AKRSP) and I decided to take a lead and proposed to initiate a project, aiming to produce export quality dry fruit in Gilgit-Baltistan. The objective was to organize the scattered mountain communities into groups and benefit them through export of hygienically dried fruit to high-end organic markets. In the year 2004 active as the project manager, I incorporated the project as an independent business namely Mountain Fruits Private Limited. Being a non-profit organization the NGO (AKRSP) sold the start-up in the year 2007 since they had no mandate to continue the project as a business. I purchased the majority shares in the business as the first CEO and decided to continue the business under the fairtrade system so that the farmers could continue to exist as an integral part of the business. Soon after privatization the company acquired fairtrade, organic (eu, nop & biosuisse) and haccp certifications and got entry into the European market. In the year 2012, nuts and nut oil were introduced as the new products expanding the total export volume to 100MT. After the Brexit our main buyers in the United Kingdom had to close their business which badly impacted our sales of dry fruit. As a small family-owned business we are still working in close collaboration with 1,400 farmers and committed to support the smallholders who lost their market share due to the global issues. We are grateful to the principles of fairtrade and commitment of our importers that enable us to export over 50MT dry fruit and nuts presently.