Ask the average person in the street about Finland’s most famous exports, chances are they’ll say Nokia mobile phones.
Enquiries about the country’s culinary exports, however, are more likely to produce blank looks. Minna Herranen, the founder of Dubai-based Nordic Power Food, plans to change all that.
In addition to her day job as Nokia’s head of trade management for the Middle East, Africa and India, the Finnish native is determined to increase local knowledge of her country’s proud food traditions, and to bring traditional Finnish ingredients to UAE shelves, starting off with the country’s berry products.
“Traditional cooking was very important in the home I grew up in,” Ms Herranen says.
“There was a lot of importance on cooking from scratch, and also we used a lot of local ingredients, picking our own berries and mushrooms. My mother taught me how to cook traditional food, as she had been taught by my grandmother. And, of course, when I moved abroad I came to love and cherish our traditional food even more.”
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Ms Herranen’s love for traditional Finnish food first manifested itself with the launch of The Naked Plate, a food blog promoting Finnish recipes and healthy eating, which she started as part of an internet marketing course.
It wasn’t too long, however, before she decided to further promote her home cuisine by importing Finnish ingredients. Her starting point? Berries, or more precisely, bilberries.
“The thing that I really started to miss in the UAE was proper berry products. There are plenty of berries in the supermarkets here, but I found they tend to be not very good quality and quite expensive,” she says.
“Finland is around 65 per cent forest land, and berry picking is a traditional pastime. Throughout July and August families tend to go into the forest to pick berries together. They can be eaten fresh, or frozen or preserved for the winter months.”
Bilberries are similar to the humble blueberry, but have a darker blue skin and a deep red juice with a more tart and stronger taste.
They contain high amounts of vitamins, minerals, flavonoids, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids as well as nutritional fibre, with anthocyanin levels up to four times higher than that found in regular blueberries.
Ms Herranen formally launched Nordic Power Food in January, funded exclusively from her family savings, importing bilberry powder in partnership with the Finnish supplier Berryfect.
She intentionally started small to test demand for the product, keeping costs to a minimum.
“There’s a small office that I run to comply with local regulations, but most of the business is run from home or from a cafe with my laptop, with a lot of the marketing happening face to face,” she says.
“My logistics are very easy at this stage. I can order the products directly from Finland and they arrive here pretty fast. We have a small warehouse in Al Quoz, but we don’t need to keep large stockpiles here yet.”
Rather than approaching the big supermarket chains from day one, she decided to start by partnering with local retailer Ripe, selling directly to cafes and restaurants, and through a small website, www.bilberry.ae
“At this point it’s still a one and a half person operation, basically me with my husband helping out every now and then,” she says. “I’ve also done some work with some marketing professionals to help get the word out, as well as a recipe developer.”
Starting and running a small business in Dubai has for the most part been straightforward for the entrepreneur, with local regulatory bodies helping her get the necessary permissions without much fuss.
“I didn’t need to spend too much time on basic things like opening up my own LLC,” she says. “I needed to work with various authorities in Dubai to make sure I had the right procedures for importing food items, but everything went pretty smoothly.
“Like in any developing economy, compliance rules can change quite quickly ... But I’ve found there’s flexibility in local authorities’ approach, where they’ll look at things on a case-by-case basis.”
Take up of the bilberry powder has been encouraging so far, she says, inspiring her to ramp up Nordic Power Food’s activities in the new year.
Nordic Power Food’s range will soon be expanded to include concentrated bilberry juice extract, a mixed bilberry and blackcurrant powder, as well as lingonberry products.
Ms Herranen is also beginning discussions to offer the company’s products in two larger supermarket chains in the new year.
“At some point it will be time to put the turbo boosters on,” she says. “I decided to start out slowly and see how well the product was received. So far things look positive, and I think next year there will be bigger plans.”
jeverington@thenational.ae
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