The world is their oyster: Dubai warehouse holds world’s most expensive seafood

Rabih Zeineddine, the operations manager at Fresh Express in Dubai, inspects the live lobsters. All photos by Satish Kumar / The National

The logistics behind getting fresh food to the UAE’s top restaurants and supermarkets is largely the domain of Fresh Express. For about 40 years the company has been sourcing all that is good to be found around the world.

Until it sits on a plate in a pool of molten butter, the Maine lobster’s preferred habitat is the cool waters of the north-east United States.

Before reaching the seafood buffet, the Norwegian king crab makes its home in seas 5,500 kilometres away. Dutch microherbs spend most of their short lives in greenhouses in northern Europe.

So how can all these exotic ingredients appear daily on the eclectic menus of the UAE, a country famous for its five-star restaurants and internationally renowned chefs?

A warehouse in Dubai Investment Park holds the answer. In one of the building’s 25 chilled rooms are 2.5 tonnes of “the most expensive crustaceans on the planet”, says Rabih Zeineddine, the operations manager of food import business Fresh Express.

It takes between 24 and 48 hours for the creatures to be taken from the water and flown by Emirates Airline to the warehouse from the US, Europe and Australia. The company has a licence from Dubai Customs to take seawater from Dubai in which to store the live animals before they are delivered to the country’s hotels and restaurants.

Set up by Costas Bouyoukas, a Syrian-born Greek national, Fresh Express has been operating in one guise or another for about 40 years.

“He started with a small shop in Abu Dhabi. It was very small at the time and everybody knew everybody,” says Ali Serhal, the company’s commercial director. “He started to develop connections and a certain reputation. He started to buy seafood from Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah and Ajman. It grew from there.”

Mr Bouyoukas, now in his 70s but still active in the business, was born and raised in Aleppo by Greek parents who had fled their country during the war with Turkey in 1897.

By 1974, he had moved to the UAE with his wife and children and set up a Mediterranean deli-style shop in Abu Dhabi, specialising in seafood.

He built up a network of fishermen across the country and acted as a middleman between them and the buyer, before expanding into the hospitality sector.

Mr Bouyoukas was contacted in the mid-1990s and asked to start a similar operation in Dubai. He agreed and set up Fresh Express.

It now operates using all Emirates routes, flying perishable produce on either SkyCargo or commercial planes from all corners of the world.

“Logistics aren’t a big issue for us now, they used to be,” says Mr Serhal. “Emirates wasn’t going everywhere, now they have direct flights everywhere. They are still a young airline so you can find the top technology for handling perishables. We have access to all sources around the world.”

The company flies in tonnes of fruit and vegetables each week. It also handles a variety of dairy, poultry, meat and seafood products, importing 5,000 items from more than 50 countries.

Some products, such as large wheels of hard cheeses from France or Italy, arrive via temperature-controlled container ships.

To keep the produce fresh, especially meat, poultry and seafood, the factory needs a constant supply of ice. Two machines fed with mineral water produce up to five tonnes of shards a day.

The large warehouse is split into sections to prevent cross contamination. Staff are also separated between the food groups and wear different coloured overalls depending on their section. Blue is for seafood, red for meat, green for vegetables, yellow for chicken and white for cheese and dairy.

“It is especially designed to avoid cross contamination, this is very, very important,” explains Mr Zeineddine.

“The receiving happens on one side, the packing on the other, and in between are the chillers. Everything is sealed and the temperature is always controlled.

“Wednesday, delivery day, it’s a party for us – it’s like a festival.”

The delivery and packing lorries pull up to the building and create a seal so there is no internal temperature fluctuation when the products are being loaded and unloaded.

The business serves hundreds of hotels and restaurants across the country, as well as delivering a small percentage of its wares to supermarkets.

Some of Mr Zeineddine’s favourite products this season include Sicilian Datterino tomatoes, Sorrento lemons and Medjool dates from California, which, he says, are “the best Medjool dates in the world”.

The main vegetable chiller is filled with large ripe stalks of asparagus, corn on the cob, ripened avocado, baby chicory, basil from Cyprus – “It has the best landscape”, Mr Zeineddine says – and a wide selection of edible flowers and microherbs, most of them from Holland. It smells incredibly fresh.

The dairy section holds imported cheeses, eggs, yogurt, milk and butter, most which go straight to five-star restaurants.

One of the cheese rooms has space for 456 large wheels of Grana Padano cheese from Italy and soft varieties from France. There is also halloumi from a boutique farm in Cyprus and small portions of French yogurt customised for and ready to send out to the Burj Al Arab.

“There are thousands of types of cheeses. If the client ordered any of these cheeses, we could get them,” says Mr Zeineddine.

The ripened cheeses are brought in on large ships and it can take up to 60 days for a shipment to arrive. When it comes to the aged wheels, there is no time pressure.

There are temperature sensors in every plane and ship that carries Fresh Express produce. These are connected to an online system that sends and tracks real-time measurements so any problem can be immediately noticed.

In the icy-cold seafood room there are stacks of boxes filled with some of the best fish from Scotland, Norway and even further afield.

There is also a large box full of yellowfin tuna from the Maldives. The fish are so large it takes two people to lift one.

The on-site smoking, curing and filleting team go through a small mountain of fish each day. Some of the fillets are weighed and packed on site so restaurants can avoid over-ordering and having too much of a particular fish left over at the end of a night.

All of the foodstuffs are imported to order. The company works closely with chefs to source everything they need for their elaborate menus, often with no expense spared.

One of the chefs from Nobu, Dubai, spent a week in Japan with a Fresh Express delegation to show them exactly what the restaurant wanted.

The company imports more than 1,000 different varieties of vegetables.

“For every variety there is a subvariety that someone wants,” Mr Zeineddine says. “We always follow the seasons. You can’t find good asparagus in one place all year round, so we move to Peru and Chile in the summer, and in November, December and January we buy from Australia.

“We have tomatoes and cucumbers in the UAE, but it’s not consistent. Whatever we buy from Holland or France, it stays in your chiller for almost a week and it’s all natural and most of it is organic.”

The argument of locally grown versus imported is particularly pertinent in the Middle East where so little produce is able to survive without a lot of human intervention.

While the local agriculture is a growing industry, it is not necessarily the most sustainable way to feed people.

Agriculture uses 34 per cent of the UAE’s groundwater, making it the biggest drain. UAE University in Al Ain has revealed that the water table in some parts of the country has fallen by up to 60 metres.

There is also the carbon footprint to consider, but Mr Serhal says there is more to sustainability than just this.

“Sustainability for us is about the environmental aspects linked to growing and farming food, and how far we go in protecting the environment, the natural habitat, and preserving it for generations to come,” he says.

“We care about the quality of the food people are eating. A natural habitat does not mean growing vegetables in water or farming fish in tanks on land where a lot of energy and resources can be wasted.

“In the same time, or less, you can get a superior product from its natural habitat with far better quality and health benefits and in most cases, at a lower cost.”