A UAE factory, a Saudi plant and three founding dates.

Al Kabeer is one of the familiar frozen-food names in Gulf supermarkets, selling burgers, samosas, breaded chicken, vegetables and seafood from the UAE to Saudi Arabia. The company’s own website says only that the group was “founded over 40 years ago,” and the published founding dates do not agree. Savola Group, the Saudi company that owns a majority of the business, gives 1974 on its website. When Savola announced its purchase in May 2018, the announcement, as carried by the Saudi Gazette and the trade site Frozen Foods Biz, said Al Kabeer was founded in 1978. In December 2021 the UAE news site The Brew News, reporting his death, named Ghulamuddin M. Shaikh, known as Gulab bhai, as the founder of Al Kabeer and dated the founding to 1979.

The group’s roots are in the UAE. In a post on its LinkedIn page, Al Kabeer Group says it celebrated 40 years of its “founding factory in the UAE,” Cascade Marine Foods, and business directories list Cascade Marine Foods (Al Kabeer Group) in the industrial area of Sharjah. The investment news site Global AgInvesting described Al Kabeer Group as Dubai-based in 2018. By then, Frozen Foods Biz reported, the business had grown over four decades into a group with processing plants, cold stores and offices in more than 15 countries; the company’s own site today puts the figure at more than ten.

Saudi Arabia became a second manufacturing base. The May 2018 announcement noted that Savola’s deal came on the first anniversary of the inauguration of Al Kabeer’s factory in King Abdullah Economic City, on the Red Sea coast north of Jeddah. Savola describes Al Kabeer as having three manufacturing facilities in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with a combined capacity of more than 40,000 tonnes a year, and the company’s 2023 brand announcement likewise spoke of three factories in the two countries. Not everything starts there: the company says it monitors halal processing at international plants that supply the meat and poultry it imports, with a team carrying out spot inspections, and that its own manufacturing units are approved by the Saudi Food and Drug Authority and certified to the BRC and FSSC 22000 food-safety schemes.

Six freezer categories and a 2023 makeover.

The range is organised into six categories: meat, chicken, dough, vegetables, fruit and seafood. The company says it distributes more than 300 product variants to more than 20,000 retail outlets in the GCC and further afield; Savola, describing the business, counts more than 200 products under three brands, along with snacks and ready-to-eat meals. Its best-sellers, as listed on its website, include beef burgers, breaded chicken fillets, cheese and chicken samosas and fish fingers, and a separate Al Kabeer Professional line serves the food-service trade. Much of its reach comes from its own trucks. Savola says Al Kabeer runs an in-house distribution network with a fleet of more than 300 vehicles and nine cold stores in the region.

The brand’s look changed in November 2023, when Al Kabeer announced a new brand identity. The announcement, published by the Saudi Gazette on 14 November 2023 and by Gulf News two days later, said a refreshed logo and new visual elements were meant to capture the brand’s heritage, and that the change would be followed by a marketing and communication campaign across several channels. The trade site FMCG Horeca Business reported that the brand wanted to show a youthful style. “It is a complete re-imagination of Al Kabeer,” said Rana Sengupta, chief executive of Al Kabeer Group. The same announcement said the brand’s direct distribution arms cover Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar. Savola lists the rebrand among its group milestones for 2023.

New products have followed the rebrand. In March 2024 Al Kabeer and Kiri, the cream-cheese brand of France’s Bel group, introduced limited-edition cheese samosas for Ramadan in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the company said. In April 2024 it added Sriracha and smoked buffalo chicken strips under the line “No Smoke Without Fire.” Its current website, which carries recipes for lunch boxes and Ramadan tables alongside the product catalogue, credits PLAN A Agency.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food and drink, and they come from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman: Al Kabeer, Sunbulah, Al Rawabi, Mazoon, Lacnor, Al Ain and Rani. Gulf food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner grocery to a hypermarket aisle.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or refreshment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Savola Group company since 2018.

Ownership changed in 2018. On 6 May 2018 Savola Group, the Jeddah-based publicly listed food and retail group, signed a share purchase agreement to buy 51% of Al Kabeer Group, then described as a frozen-food company with operations in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman and Bahrain, the Saudi Gazette reported. “We are excited about the prospects of this transaction and adding a brand such as Al Kabeer into our portfolio,” said Savola’s chief executive, Anees Ahmad Moumina. Huda Al Lawati, Savola’s chief investment officer, said the deal was part of a strategy to enter value-added categories in food, adding that frozen food was forecast to keep growing on demand for value and convenience. Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Competition later approved the purchase by Good Food Co., a wholly owned Savola subsidiary, the financial news site Argaam reported. Savola says it completed the acquisition of its stake in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Savola now calls its 51% holding one of its long-term strategic investments in the food sector, alongside its own edible-oil and food brands. For years the group was also the largest shareholder in the Saudi dairy company Almarai, with a 34.52% stake, which it distributed to its own shareholders in 2024, Savola’s history says. Al Kabeer has since presented itself as “a Savola Group company,” the phrase used in its 2023 brand announcement, which said the association had strengthened its position in frozen food. The company says its staff now number more than 1,600.

For a design guide, Al Kabeer shows how a long-established freezer brand can redraw its logo and visual system without changing its name or its six-category range. Compare Sunbulah, the Jeddah frozen-pastry maker, and Almarai, the Saudi dairy company once part-owned by Savola. For this guide we use a freezer navy, a frost blue and an ember red with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Al Kabeer’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.