Even the Taliban eat ice-cream – Afghan confectioner beats the odds

Emma Graham-Harrison
Monday, 30-July-2012
The Herat Ice-Cream factory churns out more than 30 tonnes of ice-creams, lollies and choc-ices each year. Photograph: Ahmad Quraishi for the Guardian

 

Kabul: Ahmad Faizy's network reaches into the most restive corners of Afghanistan: lawless, Taliban-dominated areas where government officials and troops, if they are present at all, have to hunker down behind thick defensive walls.

His trucks travel the risky roads without problems, and his agents are welcomed almost everywhere in a country riven by ethnic divides and suspicion.

The secret of this success is not money or guns, but boxes of sweet, cold treat from his factory in the far west.

"Security is not a concern when selling ice-cream," Faizy says in a modest office near the plant where rows of vanilla ices are being dipped in chocolate, cones filled with strawberry swirls, and orange ice-lollies rapid-frozen and bagged.

Herat Ice-Cream factory was founded eight years ago, with money Faizy had made from the more prosaic business of imports from China and France.

He decided that his home town's reputation for making the best traditional ice-cream in Afghanistan, and very little domestic competition, made frozen desserts an ideal investment opportunity.

Demographics helped as well; around two-thirds of Afghans are under 25, a group Faizy considers his target market.

So with $500,000 (£320,000) he brought in machines and technicians from Pakistan, and started building up a company that he says is now worth $15m, and employs more than 200.

It churns out 30 tonnes of ice-creams, ice-lollies and other treats each day, all shipped off in a fleet of specially equipped trucks to distribution centers in major cities – along roads where trucks carrying more controversial products are sometimes robbed or torched.

"We have our own trucks with cooling systems and generators," says Faizy. "There are security problems along the way, but so far we haven't run into anything."

From the regional hubs the ices are sent on even to places like Khost – the home base and stronghold of the much-feared Haqqani network – and Nuristan, where the Taliban's vice and virtue police recently returned to the streets.

"Even the Taliban like ice-cream," Faizy adds with a grin. "We have agents in every province."

The ice-creams finally make it to most Afghan customers via street vendors who push insulated carts around town, announcing their arrival with loudspeakers playing tinny tunes that float over the high walls surrounding Afghan homes. Celine Dion's Titanic hit My Heart Will Go On and Beethoven's Für Elise are two of the most popular tunes – and two of the most annoying.

The best-selling of their 37 flavors is a Magnum-like vanilla ice-cream coated with chocolate and almonds. Others include a coffee-chocolate ice-cream, vanilla with sour cherry and pistachio, and a mango and pineapple ice-lolly.

Faizy has defied the odds to succeed in business in a country ranked the fourth most corrupt in the world, and in the bottom 20% of the World Bank's "Doing Business" index, which measures how easy or difficult it is to open and run a small or medium-sized business.

One of Afghanistan's worst ratings in the World Bank survey is with a particularly bad rating for trade across borders. Faizy says this is an area his biggest rivals – companies in Iran – use to steal a march on him.

"The customs police at the border don't tax fairly, there may be 1,000 ice-creams but they will only tax 200 of them. Or they smuggle them in."

They are also dumping into the neighboring market, he claims. A dramatic drop in the value of the Iranian currency following deeper and tighter sanctions has probably made Afghan ice-cream eaters an even more attractive market.

"The problem is if we are selling ice-cream for 10 Afghanis [about 20 US cents], an Iranian company will sell for 9 Afghanis just to discourage us and get market share, even if they are making no profit."

The company may also be suffering Afghanistan's reputation – it came last in the World Bank survey for the category "protecting investment".

Faizy has impressive expansion plans, and his company is backed by a US government team helping to develop small and medium-size enterprises in the area, but is struggling to find someone else with the confidence to put up even modest funds in business terms.

"People don't eat ice-cream here in winter, so we have to shut down the business and let the employees go for three months, which I really don't want to do," he says.

"We want to build a large cold storage, to keep the ice-creams for summer, so we can continue production for the winter. We estimate it will cost about $1m we would like a partner."

Review: high standard, low price

The ice-cream wrappers remind me of hours spent poring over the freezer at NK convenience store as a child. There is a chocolate and vanilla clown face, a chocolate fir-tree (no Christmas trees in the Islamic republic of Afghanistan), a plain orange ice-lolly and a chocolate-coated vanilla and strawberry twirl – as well as some luxurious choc ices for the grown-ups.

There are a few clues to the divide between the target audiences for Walls and Herat ice-creams, with saffron added to the vanilla wafer sandwich, and the coffee flavor labeled as "Nescafe". But overall the packaging is surprisingly good for a country that hasn't been focused on marketing mass-produced food during the last 30 years of war, or indeed probably ever.

I decide to start with the "Nescafe" because I've always loved coffee ice-cream and I am ashamed of my low expectations. It's a knockout. The ice-cream is smooth and soft. Whoever mixed the flavors was restrained enough with the sugar that it has kept a satisfyingly bitter edge. And the crisp milk-chocolate covering has plenty of crunchy chunks of almond embedded in it.

It would hold its own anywhere in the world, and my only regret is that I appear to have started with Herat Ice-Cream's pinnacle of frozen achievement, so the others suffer slightly by comparison.

Although the ice-cream is universally good, and – apart from the saffron – not sickly sweet, some of the coatings disappoint. The dark chocolate is a little floury, the mini-magnum almond bits so tiny they don't have any crunch, and the wafer on the vanilla sandwich is a little soggy.

Overall though, Herat Ice-Cream appears to have set themselves high standards in a country where you could possibly argue they don't need to bother, given the limited competition. Particularly as nothing they make costs more than about 30p.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

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