Dubai’s latest food-manufacturing ambitions put a striking set of numbers behind the push for greater local capacity. The UAE is targeting an increase in the food and beverage sector’s contribution to GDP from AED 30 billion to AED 40 billion by 2028. It also plans to lift food trade from AED 25 billion to AED 40 billion and create around 20,000 jobs. Alongside those goals sits an annual target of AED 2 billion in food-import substitution through domestic production, with support for as many as 200 food factories and a planned 15-30 per cent increase in local production capacity. Gulfood Manufacturing is returning to Dubai World Trade Centre as that industrial effort gathers pace. [1]
Those ambitions frame food security partly as a question of physical capability: whether food can be manufactured, processed and distributed at sufficient scale. Yet greater production is only one side of the equation. Kenya is estimated to lose or waste about nine million tonnes of food along its supply chains each year, with an economic value of roughly Sh72 billion. That volume has been likened to about 1.8 million five-tonne trucks, giving tangible scale to the food and resources that never reach consumers. [2]
The Kenyan figures carry particular weight because millions of people still struggle to obtain enough nutritious food. The NutriSave programme, implemented by the non-profit TechnoServe and funded by the Gates Foundation and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, has spent three years examining how the country can reduce food loss while widening access to affordable, nutritious fruit and vegetables. Its work places attention on the distance between what is produced and what ultimately reaches people. [2]
Elsewhere in the agricultural economy, manufacturing capacity is also being reshaped around machinery. ABZ Innovation has opened a new drone factory in Hungary after completing it in 90 days. The company had faced rising demand, while its existing production site could no longer accommodate its ambitions; the United States had also become its largest market by volume. [3]
That expansion now sits against a changed American policy environment. In December 2025, the Federal Communications Commission added foreign-produced drones and critical components to its Covered List, generally preventing new equipment authorisations for affected products unless a federal security review granted an exception. ABZ had already begun planning a larger facility, but the decision created an immediate difficulty for non-US manufacturers seeking to introduce new models to the American market. [3]
Taken together, these developments show three distinct pressures on the systems surrounding food: Dubai is seeking more domestic manufacturing, Kenya is confronting severe losses between production and consumption, and ABZ is expanding agricultural and industrial drone production while navigating market-access constraints. The circumstances are not interchangeable, but each makes capacity consequential: building it, protecting it and ensuring that what is produced can reach the place where it is needed.
Yum Opinion: Food security depends not only on producing more, but on building systems capable of carrying production through to useful delivery.
