Metropolis Desk –
Biscuits, a staple of morning, midday, and evening tea in Bangladesh, are a popular export, particularly to the Middle East. Bangladeshis prefer crunchy, flat, unleavened, flour-based biscuits, cookies, or crackers. Traditionally sweet or simple, they have recently been created savory as well, gaining popularity internationally.
The head of the Bangladeshi Biscuit Association, Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan, believes that the fact that people no longer view cookies as just nibbles is the source of the increasing demand for snacks.
“Someone may choose biscuits instead of rice because they contain all the food nutrients like carbohydrates, fat, protein, etc.,” he stated.
“Biscuits were once thought of as snacks, but this has altered recently. We have been able to establish the notion that biscuits are not snacks but complete food since the days of COVID-19.
According to Bhuiyan, this was the primary cause of both the 10-15 percent increase in the domestic biscuit market and the rising demand on a global scale.
According to figures from the Bangladesh Export Promotion Bureau, during the first 10 months of the fiscal year 2022–2023 (roughly between July 2022 and April 2023), Bangladesh exported cookies worth more than $30 million. Saudi Arabia received $9 million of the exports, followed by the UAE and Oman.
Malaysia and the Philippines were the two largest biscuit importers in Asia, each spending roughly $2 million on the goods.
The Energy biscuit is extremely well-liked for sharing cookies with friends and family because each box comes with more than a dozen slices. Other names include Nutty and Potata, according to Bhuiyan, who spoke to Arab News.
As the name implies, potato-based Potata biscuits are thin like crisps. Tangy and salty, they won over India, the largest cookie exporter in the world, during the pandemic, where they gained popularity on social media for being just irresistible. Nutty is sweet, as is Energy. The former has a milky flavor, while the former has a peanut flavor. Both are created by Olympic, the biggest exporter, and maker of biscuits in Bangladesh.
Olympic also produces Hilux, the most well-known Bangladeshi biscuit brand in Saudi Arabia. Hilux is a cracker with a vegetable flavor.
Olympic’s head of export Nazim Uddin told Arab News that “this brand has captured the hearts of many Arab consumers.”
But Bangladeshis themselves, not Saudis, are the primary consumers of biscuits from Bangladesh. They number about 2.5 million and constitute a natural captive market for domestic producers because they reside and work in the Kingdom.
According to Uddin, the Bangladeshi immigrants who live in the Kingdom and other Gulf nations are mostly responsible for our export market in those nations.
The UAE is currently our second-largest market in this area, behind Saudi Arabia. It’s strongly correlated with the Bangladeshi population in a certain nation. For instance, due to the large number of migrant workers in Qatar before the FIFA World Cup, we sent a sizable volume there. But now that many of the migrants have gone home, this export has decreased.
Source – Arab News
