Barkat Frisian Agro’s bet on the industrialization of food

One of the best ways to make money is to create - or at the very least, pioneer - an entire category of products and services. The newly publicly listed Barkat Frisian Agro, a joint venture between a Dutch food company and a Pakistani industrial conglomerate, does just that.

The company buys up eggs from Pakistani poultry farmers and processes them so that they can be utilized in the manufacture of processed food, both by companies inside Pakistan as well as the Gulf Arab countries. It sounds like a simple enough business, and perhaps a bit niche, but here is what it represents: a bet that more women will enter the workforce, incomes will rise, and domestic labour in food preparation will have to be replaced with spending some of that extra income on buying more processed food rather than preparing from scratch.

And while this publication is not, nor will it ever be, in the business of making investment recommendations, it is noteworthy that BF Agro represents the kind of innovation and growth that many of the biggest names among publicly listed companies lack.

In this story, we explain the rise of BF Agro, what makes the company able to generate the kind of growth it has seen, its successful public listing, and why it represents something new and different in the Pakistani industrial landscape.