A buyer’s guide to choosing a stevia or monk fruit supplier Youssef still remembers the phone call. It came at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning, before he had finished his first coffee. On the line was the production manager of a juice bottler in Sharjah, one of his oldest customers. The trial batch was ruined, she said. The drink had a bitter, liq
David went looking for a sweetener. What he found was an 800-year-old medicine and one of the smartest import opportunities of the decade. David almost walked past the little stall. A wellness-brand importer from London, he was near the end of a long day at a trade fair when a soft-spoken vendor offered him a warm cup of golden tea. It was subtly
Rafique almost signed a beautiful deal. A single line on a lab report and one word on a label stopped him just in time, and taught him what really separates a good sweetener shipment from a costly one. Rafique had the contract on his desk, pen in hand. A health-food importer in Casablanca, he had spent weeks chasing what looked like the perfect op
Tariq lost the same ten kilos three times. It was only when he understood what sugar was really doing to his body that he finally understood the opportunity in front of him too. Tariq had tried everything. The gym memberships, the crash diets, the weekend resolutions that never survived to Wednesday. At forty-six, running a beverage-distribution b
Hamza spent twenty years selling sugar. Then his own doctor gave him a warning that changed not just his diet, but the entire direction of his business. Hamza built his food-distribution company in Hamburg on one humble commodity: sugar. For two decades it moved by the tonne through his warehouses into bakeries, beverage plants, and confectioners
Sourcing Animal Nutrition Products from India Manto thought he was in the business of selling feed. A drought taught him he was really in the business of keeping a nation fed and that the right supplement can decide whether a farmer survives the year. Manto runs an agri-inputs distribution company in Tanzania, and he remembers the season everythin
Isaac used to sell dog food. Then he noticed his customers were buying for their “children” and realised he was standing at the edge of one of the biggest consumer shifts of our time. Isaac runs a pet supplies business in Toronto, and one afternoon a customer changed how he saw his own industry. A woman came in and spent forty minutes
Joseph wasn’t chasing a trend. He was answering a question his own customers kept asking and it led him to the fastest-growing shelf in his business. Joseph runs a health-food and wellness import business in Nairobi, and for months one comment kept following him around his own stores. “Do you have anything without sugar?” He hear
Rafique wasn’t looking for another product to sell. He was looking for the next decade’s opportunity and he found it in something as small as a sachet. Rafique noticed it at a family wedding. At the dessert table in his home city of Amman, three of his younger cousins waved away the baklava and asked, half-joking, whether anything was
