Momentum had been building inside SIG‘s Middle East and Africa operations throughout the past year as the company sought to demonstrate the commercial value of its Dubai Customer Experience Hub beyond trade-show activations. The push to convert the facility from a demonstration asset into a live product-development engine for regional customers had been a stated priority, and the Ramadan calendar offered a culturally charged proving ground.
Against that backdrop, SIG and Meliha Dairy, an organic brand produced under Sharjah’s Ektifa agricultural authority, converged on a brief that was both time-bound and community-oriented. The result was an Organic Suhoor Drink, a nutritious blend of organic milk, oats and dates packaged in a SIG Smile 200ml carton, designed to sustain energy during fasting hours. Approximately 4,000 packs were distributed across labor camps in the UAE, reaching workers through the fasting period.
The entire arc from concept to finished product was compressed into a short development window, with ideation, recipe testing, and pilot filling all conducted at the Dubai hub. That operational throughput is central to SIG’s positioning of the facility as a co-development resource rather than a standalone showroom.
“This initiative highlights how collaboration with our customers can translate ideas into meaningful impact. Our SIG Customer Experience Hub in Dubai enables us to work side by side with partners like Meliha to rapidly develop new concepts, test them under real production conditions and bring them to life in a way that responds to both market needs and community values.”
— Niall Hoey, Director of Markets (MEA), SIG
For Ektifa and Meliha, the partnership represents an extension of an ongoing effort to close the gap between organic farm output and direct community access, a gap that has been a recurring challenge across Gulf agricultural initiatives seeking broader social relevance beyond retail shelf placement.
“At Meliha, we believe that clean food begins at the source and extends to every individual we serve. This collaboration with SIG reflects our commitment to transforming organic production into real community impact, especially during Ramadan. It is about delivering nourishment with purpose, rooted in sustainability, innovation, and care.”
— Meliha Dairy Leadership, Ektifa
The format choice carries strategic logic beyond convenience. The 200ml Smile carton is a single-serve format well suited to bulk distribution in institutional and community settings, aligning the packaging decision with the product’s intended channel rather than a conventional retail pathway. It also positions the project as a proof point for SIG’s ability to compress the innovation-to-pilot timeline for culturally driven, limited-run product concepts in the MEA market.
Industry context adds weight to the timing. Demand for functional, on-the-go formats tied to culturally significant consumption occasions, particularly Suhoor and Iftar windows during Ramadan, has grown measurably across GCC markets as food and beverage producers compete for relevance within a narrow seasonal cycle. The oat-and-date formulation also tracks a wider consumer shift toward ingredients perceived as both local and functional, a combination that has driven significant new product development activity across the Gulf in recent years.
The project signals where SIG’s regional customer experience strategy is heading. Rather than limiting the Dubai hub to product-format consultations, the company is actively positioning it as a rapid co-manufacturing pilot environment, one capable of taking a brief from a government-backed agricultural brand and returning a distribution-ready product within a single Ramadan cycle. If that model scales, it reduces the development risk for smaller or government-affiliated producers who lack the internal infrastructure to move from concept to carton independently.
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