DHAKA: A favorite Bangladeshi companion to morning, midday and evening tea, biscuits are increasingly also a top export product, especially to the Middle East.
Bangladeshis like their biscuits, cookies or crackers flour-based, flat, unleavened and crunchy. Traditionally sweet or plain, they have lately also been made savory, winning appeal abroad.
For Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan, the president of the Biscuit Association of Bangladesh, the reason for growing demand of the snack is because biscuits are no longer seen as merely nibbles.
“Instead of rice, someone may have biscuits as they contain all the food nutrients like carbohydrates, fat, protein, etc.,” he said.
“People used to consider biscuits as snacks but recently this has changed. Since the days of COVID-19, we have been able to establish the idea that biscuits are not snacks but a complete food.”
This was, according to Bhuiyan, the main factor behind the 10-15 percent growth of the local biscuit market, and also of increasing demand worldwide.
Bangladeshi Export Promotion Bureau data shows that between July 2022 and April 2023, or the first 10 months of the 2022-23 fiscal year, Bangladesh exported biscuits worth more than $30 million. Almost one-third of the exports, $9 million, went to Saudi Arabia, followed by the UAE and Oman.
In Asia, the main importers were Malaysia and the Philippines — buying about $2 million worth of biscuits each.
“For having cookies with friends and family, the Energy biscuit has huge popularity as each of the packs contains more than a dozen slices. There are some other names also like Nutty, Potata,” Bhuiyan told Arab News.
Potata biscuits are thin like crisps and made from potatoes, as the name suggests. Tangy and salty, during the pandemic they won over India — the world’s largest exporter of biscuits — where they made the rounds on social media as irresistible. Energy and Nutty are sweet. The first has a peanut flavor, while the latter is milky. Both are produced by Olympic, the largest Bangladeshi biscuit producer and exporter.
Olympic also makes Hilux — vegetable-flavored crackers which are the most popular Bangladeshi biscuit brand in Saudi Arabia.
“This brand has won the hearts of many Arab consumers,” Nazim Uddin, Olympic’s head of export, told Arab News.
But the main consumers of Bangladeshi biscuits are not Saudis but Bangladeshis themselves. About 2.5 million of them live and work in the Kingdom and are a natural captive market for producers from their homeland.
“Our export market in the Kingdom and other Gulf countries mostly depends on the Bangladeshi migrants living in these countries,” Uddin said.
“After Saudi Arabia, at the moment, the UAE is our second largest market in this region. It’s much related to the number of Bangladeshis in a particular country. For instance, before the FIFA World Cup, we exported a significant volume to Qatar as there were many migrant workers. But now this export dropped as many of the migrants returned home.”
