Safe Trading plans to export food items

We want to contribute to the country’s economy through creating employment and exporting Bangladeshi traditional food items to overseas countries, Mostafa Kamal, the owner of ‘Safe Trading Corporation’ and the winner of this year’s SME Award, told The Business Post’s Muhammad Ayub Ali in an exclusive interview

Why do you feel interested in doing food catering business?

I always thought of doing something exceptional for creating employment, but did not have a clear idea and better scope. While working at a private organisation, I went to a village fair and saw that people were gathering there for traditional food items of our country. Then, I decided how can I provide such types of food items to the people round the year.

In 2010, I started collecting information on the traditional food supply business after leaving my private job.

Share your experience and the challenges you are facing in doing traditional food catering business.

In the early stage of the business, I was collecting information on traditional food items from various parts of the country and packaging these types of food to maintain the quality, but only one year later, suppliers have started cheating me as they supplied very low-quality products and that is why orders from all my buyers dropped sharply and I was withdrawing all the products from the market. Just within two days, I have started production after renting half of the factory in Tongi area on the outskirts of the city.

When I saw the demand for traditional food items increased significantly, I shifted the factory from Tongi to Uttara. Now I am setting up another factory in Pabna district, but due to financial crisis, I could not complete the ongoing work of the factory.

Everything was going on well but the Russia-Ukraine war has forced me to struggle for sustaining in the market.

“I am getting orders of nearly Tk 60 lakh-Tk 70 lakh from the buyers every month, but due to fund crunch, I can meet the demand for only 50 per cent of the orders.”

What is the condition of your industry now?

I started traditional food supply business with only Tk 92,000 by renting a room and appointing two people for packing in the Uttara area of Dhaka city.

Now I have a bank loan of around Tk 1.5 crore and there are around 32 permanent and 10 temporary employees in my corporation.

Though I started marketing with Meena Bazar in the early stage of the traditional food supply business, now I am supplying my products to Pran daily shopping, Best Buy, Unimart, Shwapno, Trust family need, Agora, and many other retail shops.

What is your future plan?

As a large number of people in our country especially lower and lower middle-class people are unemployed, I want to create more employments for these people. As the country has a huge potential for exporting Bangladeshi traditional food, we want to export the Bangladeshi traditional food despite fund crunch.