A royal decree, a capital and a plan for farms.

NADEC is the short name of the National Agricultural Development Company, a Saudi company with its head office in Riyadh. It was set up by royal decree in 1981, during the reign of King Khalid bin Abdulaziz, the company said in an August 2025 note marking its 44th anniversary. The company says it began with a capital of 400 million riyals, and Saudipedia, the Saudi online encyclopedia, gives the same figure. The company says it was created to support food security and a farming system aimed at self-sufficiency.

NADEC calls itself the first agricultural company to be listed on the Saudi stock market, and Arab News described it in January 2021 as Saudi Arabia’s first agricultural share-stock company. That same report said the government owned 20% of the company and that the rest of its shares were traded on the Saudi Stock Exchange, known as Tadawul. Arabic Wikipedia, citing a NADEC earnings presentation dated April 2025, gives the government’s holding as 32%, so we report both figures with their dates.

The first decade was spent building farms. The company’s own timeline and Saudipedia both list the same early steps: an agricultural project at Wadi Al-Dawasir in 1982, the first factory for fresh milk and dairy products in 1984, an agricultural project at Hail in 1985, the start of milk packaging on the company’s own line in 1986, and an olive project at Al-Jouf, in the north, in 1987. Saudipedia adds that a second dairy factory opened in 1995.

Milk, laban, cheese and juice under one name.

To shoppers in Saudi Arabia, NADEC is mainly a dairy name. Its range, as listed on the company’s website, runs from fresh and long-life milk to laban, the cultured milk drink, and on to yoghurt, labneh, butter, cream and cheeses including feta, halloumi, mozzarella, triangles and slices. A children’s milk sold as Captain Nadec sits in the same list.

Cheese and juice came later than milk. The company’s timeline says the cheese factory was expanded in 2007 and that fresh juice production began in the new expansion; Saudipedia records the same year. Its juice list today is led by mixed-fruit nectars in flavours such as guava, mango, pineapple and pomegranate, alongside apple and orange juices. Saudipedia also notes organic olive oils from the Al-Jouf project, which the company says began a concentrated olive production project in 2006, and a plant for making plastic containers that opened in 2016.

Figures for the dairy side vary with the source and the year. English Wikipedia describes six dairy farms with around 60,000 cows and two dairy plants able to handle 1.5 million litres of milk a day; Saudipedia puts output at more than 1.4 million litres of milk and juice a day and the herd at more than 92,000 cattle. The company itself gives a herd of 94,000 cattle for its Haradh project, which it describes as a site for cattle farms, dairy production and date palms. The company says its products reach about 38,000 distribution points and outlets in Saudi Arabia and abroad, served by a fleet of refrigerated vehicles.

The company lists a number of awards on its website. They include the King Abdulaziz Award for the Ideal Factory in 2000 and, the company says, the title of “Product of the Year 2025” in Saudi Arabia for both its fresh milk and its fresh laban, a title based on a consumer vote.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food, and they come from Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia: Osem, Elite, Strauss, Bamba, Tnuva, Sadaf and NADEC. Food 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 shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or snack 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 food is 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 food is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Four projects, new managers and a long-term plan.

NADEC’s farming still rests on the large projects it opened in the 1980s. On its website the company describes Wadi Al-Dawasir, in the south, and Hail, in the north, as projects growing wheat, fodder crops, onions and potatoes for processing; Al-Jouf for olives and fruit trees such as peaches, apricots and plums; and Haradh for cattle, dairy and dates. In September 2021 Arab News reported that NADEC had received a property deed from the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture for about 269 million square metres of land in Wadi Al-Dawasir, issued on the basis of a royal decree granting it ownership of land it had been using; deeds for its land in Hail and Al-Jouf were still in process.

The company has also changed its management. In January 2021 Arab News reported that Steen Hadsbjerg had become chief executive in April 2020, after Abdulaziz Al-Babtain resigned, and that NADEC had launched a two-year restructuring with the consultancy Bain & Company. In October 2021 the same paper reported that Solaiman Altwaijri, previously chief executive of Saudi Arabian Amiantit, would become managing director from 1 November 2021. The company’s timeline adds a solar power purchase agreement with ENGIE in 2019, a memorandum with the greenhouse farmer Pure Harvest Smart Farms in 2020 and a wider push into red meat in 2024, under a strategy it has set for 2023 to 2027. NADEC sorts its business into two divisions, NADEC Foods and NADEC Agriculture, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, NADEC shows a farming company founded by royal decree that sells its milk, laban, cheese and juice under its own short name. Compare Almarai, the Saudi dairy company, and Americana, the Kuwaiti food maker. For this guide we use a farm green, a desert sand and a milk white with a modern sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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