The UAE still imports around 85% of the food it consumes, a figure consistently cited by WAM and shaped by desert geography and water scarcity. But the direction of travel has changed: behind that 85% there is now a coordinated national push toward local production, food security and food manufacturing, designed not to replace imports overnight, but to build the industrial backbone for doing so over the next quarter-century.
The framework is the National Food Security Strategy 2051, the UAE’s plan to climb to the top of the Global Food Security Index by mid-century. Its five pillars recur in every official document: enabling sustainable food production through modern technologies, enhancing local production, diversifying international supply through partnerships, activating legislation that improves nutrition, and reducing food waste.
That lens came back into focus in April 2026, when the UAE Circular Economy Council held its first meeting of the year, chaired by Minister of Economy and Tourism H.E. Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri at Barakat Quality Plus Group in Dubai. The food sector was front and centre: strengthening circularity in food production is now considered essential to reducing import dependency in a moment of persistent global volatility.
The Food Cluster: turning strategy into industrial policy
If the 2051 Strategy is the vision, the Food Cluster is the operational vehicle. Launched by the Ministry of Economy and Tourism as the first economic cluster under the Strategy 2051 umbrella, it sets measurable targets, referenced with a 2028 horizon at the Future Food Forum: lifting the sector’s GDP contribution from AED 30 billion to AED 40 billion, increasing food-sector foreign trade from AED 25 billion to AED 40 billion, and generating 20,000 new jobs.
Its scope is wide by design, covering local farming, bio-agriculture, agri-tech, advanced agri-food processing, trading and stockpiling, and supported by enabling initiatives: a Food Innovation Accelerator, a national traceability platform, a “Made in UAE” promotion programme, a Food Investment Gateway and dedicated SME support. The logic is to build the industrial scaffolding now, so local capacity can scale where today there is mostly import flow.
Dubai’s Food Tech Valley: where infrastructure meets innovation
The most visible manifestation of this strategy is Food Tech Valley, launched in 2021 by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum as a partnership between MOCCAE and developer Wasl. It is conceived not as a single facility but as an ecosystem, designed to host vertical farms, smart logistics, R&D centres, a marketplace, food innovation hubs and companies across the production chain.
The ambition explicitly extends beyond farming, embracing food processing, applied research, aquaculture, hydroponics, robotics, AI, alternative proteins, smart storage and blockchain-based supply-chain systems. For external partners, that breadth is the point. It opens the door to machinery, processing, packaging, quality control, traceability, food design, ingredients, know-how and industrial partnerships.
Concrete bets on local production
Inside Food Tech Valley, the GigaFarm is the flagship case study. Developed on a 900,000 sq. ft. plot by ReFarm Global with vertical-farming technology from UK-based IGS, it is designed as a closed-loop, waste-to-value ecosystem. At full capacity it is expected to produce more than 3 million kg of produce annually (around 3,000 tonnes), divert over 50,000 tonnes of food waste from landfill each year, and replace roughly 1% of the UAE’s fresh produce imports from a single facility.
A second signal came in October 2024, when Food Tech Valley signed a 27-year partnership with Badia Farms (backed by Gulf Islamic Investments) to develop hybrid vertical-and-horizontal farming on a 236,000 sq. ft. plot, using 90% less water than traditional farming. A third arrived in May 2026, at the fifth edition of “Make it in the Emirates”: Italfood, an Italian-rooted cheese manufacturer based in the Ras Al Khaimah Free Trade Zone since 2010, showcased Italian cheeses produced in the UAE using milk from local Emirati farms. The plant operates a fully automated Burrata line (a traditionally hand-made product) and uses Individual Quick Freezing (IQF) technology for export, a concrete illustration of what “Made in UAE” looks like when Italian know-how meets local production.
Italy is strong on exports, but only on the first layer of the value chain
The Italian footprint in the UAE food market is already substantial. According to the Italian Trade Agency (ICE), Italian agri-food exports to the UAE reached €344 million in the first ten months of 2024.The trend is not new: agri-food exports had already grown by 8.4% in the first eleven months of 2023, surpassing €412 million and confirming Italy among the top three food suppliers to the country.
Yet the picture reveals an opportunity gap. Italy is well represented on supermarket shelves, in the HORECA channel, in the premium layer of UAE consumption, but much less visible, relative to its actual industrial weight, in the manufacturing layer the UAE is now building.
The next opportunity: from the supermarket shelf to the production line
Italy is not only a country of food products. It is also a country of food technologies: packaging, processing machinery, cold chain, traceability, production-line design, ingredients, quality standards, and the food culture that holds them all together.
The data shows exactly where the market is moving. According to ITA figures released ahead of Gulfood Manufacturing 2025, Italian exports of packaging and food-processing machinery to the UAE reached €161 million by July 2025, split between €53.7 million in packaging machinery (+58.3% YoY, 34.7% market share) and €107.3 million in food and beverage processing machinery (+87.5% YoY, 35.4% market share). In both categories, Italy is the market leader.
The question is no longer only how many Italian products reach the Emirates, but how much of the UAE’s emerging food-manufacturing ecosystem will be built with Italian technology, know-how and industrial partnerships.
