Why we're expanding into the Middle East

Success has a way of pointing to the next opportunity. After establishing weekly export shipments to the Seychelles in 2023, TanzPro Greens began looking at a larger and closer market: the Gulf. In 2024, that looking turned into action, with a new distributor partnership bringing TanzPro's organic produce into the UAE.

The logic behind the move is straightforward. Demand for certified-organic produce has been growing steadily across the Gulf region, driven by hotels, premium retailers, and consumers who are increasingly willing to pay for food grown without synthetic chemicals. TanzPro's decade of organic farming in Mkuranga District put it in a position to meet that demand rather than chase it.

The path to the Gulf runs directly through TanzPro's founding story. The company was established in Dar es Salaam in 2014, and its organic methods were built and proven at the Mitaranda and Kisele Organic Projects in Mkuranga District before ever being tested against an export market's expectations. The UAE and Oman partnerships are the latest test of a system a decade in the making.

The products travelling this new route are familiar ones for TanzPro: passion fruit, peppers and chillies, and cherry tomatoes, grown using the same crop rotation, composting, and bio-pesticide methods used across the company's farms since 2014. What changes is the destination, not the standard.

Beyond passion fruit, peppers and chillies, and cherry tomatoes, TanzPro's wider catalogue - including tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots, onions, beans, avocado, pineapple, ginger, garlic, herbs and spices, moringa powder, roselle powder, organic honey, and sunflower oil - gives Gulf distributors room to expand the relationship well beyond the first products on the manifest, without requiring TanzPro to build any new farming capability.

Alongside the UAE, Oman represents the other confirmed market in this expansion - a natural extension of the distributor relationships and logistics already being tested through the Dubai partnership. Together, the UAE and Oman give TanzPro its first sustained foothold in the Gulf.

Tanzania's position gives this expansion a practical advantage that has little to do with marketing. The climate around Mkuranga supports the kind of year-round organic production that Gulf buyers are looking for, while Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam offers direct flight connections that make same-day and next-day delivery realistic rather than aspirational.

The time zones help too. A sunrise harvest in Mkuranga, hand-picked, sorted, and graded within hours, can be pre-cooled and packed in food-grade export cartons in time to reach Gulf kitchens within 24 to 48 hours - the same cold-chain discipline that already proved itself on the route to the Seychelles.

None of this works without the packhouse steps that sit between farm and airport: hand-harvesting and grading within hours of picking, pre-cooling to slow ripening, and packing into food-grade cartons before dispatch. Extending that process to Gulf-bound cargo required confirming the same cold-chain timing that already delivers freshness to the Seychelles, not reinventing it.

Growth in export volume also carries forward a commitment that has nothing to do with any single market. For every tonne of produce TanzPro exports, the company plants 50 indigenous trees, a practice that predates the Gulf partnership and will scale alongside it. A new distributor in the UAE does not just mean another customer; it means more trees planted back into the same coastal landscape the produce came from.

That existing infrastructure is precisely why the Gulf expansion has been possible without rebuilding the business from scratch. The packhouse, the pre-cooling process, and the relationships with contracted farmers were already built to export standard; the new distributor partnership simply gives that system a second destination to serve.

That range depends on the same contracted network that supplies every other market, drawn from the Mitaranda and Kisele Organic Projects in Mkuranga District. Their training in organic cultivation is not adjusted for the Gulf market specifically; it is the same training that has underpinned every export shipment since TanzPro's first commercial harvest in 2019.

Certification and process matter as much in the Gulf as they did in the Seychelles. TanzPro's produce carries the East African Organic Mark (Kilimohai), reflects its membership in the Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement (TOAM), and is grown to Fair Trade principles - credentials that premium buyers increasingly ask for before they will commit to a supplier.

Russia and East Africa's own local demand remain part of that same five-market footprint, a reminder that the Gulf expansion adds to TanzPro's reach rather than replacing any part of it. Spreading volume across five markets, rather than depending on any single one, is itself a form of resilience for a business built on perishable produce.

None of it would be possible without the more than 50 contracted farmers, around 70 percent of them women, who supply TanzPro's farms. Their training in organic cultivation and access to certified seed are what make it possible to promise a Gulf distributor the same quality, week after week, that a Seychelles resort has already come to expect.

The Middle East expansion is still early. But the pattern is a familiar one for TanzPro: prove the model in one market, build the infrastructure to support it, then extend it carefully to the next. The Seychelles route took a decade to reach its first weekly shipment; the UAE and Oman partnership is the next chapter in that same story.

TanzPro Greens Ltd is actively seeking further partnerships with buyers, distributors, and retailers across the Gulf interested in sourcing certified-organic Tanzanian produce. To discuss supply or partnership opportunities, contact the leadership team by phone at +255 713 398 485 or by email at om@tanzpro.co.tz.