For decades, Afghanistan’s global image has been one of conflict and oppression. But the country has often-ignored attributes, including a rich history of high-quality, sustainable produce—particularly its wild-grown fruit and nuts, which it sends to markets in the United Arab Emirates, India, and Europe.
Ziba Foods wants to introduce those fruits and nuts from the valleys of Afghanistan to U.S. consumers. Its premium snacks are assembled at a factory in Kabul, where Ziba employs majority women, even as the Taliban regime continues to restrict women’s participation in daily life.
Two of the four founders, CEO Raffi Vartanian and COO Patrick Johnson, had previously spent time in Afghanistan for their work in investment and business development, respectively. They both noted the quality of the snacks they’d sample during meetings there. “It’s saffron tea and dried fruits and nuts all day long,” Johnson says.
In 2015, they launched Ziba, to “convince people [to] give Afghan products a try,” Johnson says.
Ziba works with family-owned orchards that have been operating for decades, which supply items like baby pistachios, raisins, and figs for snack bags. Some contain dried white mulberries or sweet apricot kernels; others are trail-mix blends.
Lately the company has seen notable growth: Ziba’s e-commerce grew 163% last year, from its website and Amazon sales; and it’s now selling in mainstream grocery stores including Kroger, Erewhon, Cost Plus World Market, Whole Foods, and, starting last week, Wegmans.
Afghanistan has 80 to 100 varieties of almonds alone. “These were like nothing I’d ever had,” Vartanian says. “You think you’re eating a roasted product, and it’s just in its raw shell.”
The location is largely ignored by Westerners due to the ongoing conflict, so it remains relatively shielded from commercial agriculture—unlike, say, California’s Central Valley, where Ziba’s founders contend that farmers have to maximize yield and sacrifice quality and nutrition for uniform size and shape. And California farmers use a lot of water in the process, with one study claiming it takes 3.2 gallons to grow a single almond. Afghanistan’s orchards are naturally irrigated using water from melted snow from the Hindu Kush mountain range.
Key to Ziba’s model is keeping an all-Afghan workforce. “We’ve never had an expat on a payroll in Afghanistan,” Vartanian says. “It’s been an Afghan operation, start to finish.” That includes 25 full-time employees and 5 temporary trainees, as well as their general manager, Ahmad Qais Jaweed, who is also one of the founders.
Ziba’s factory staffers are 85% women, which Vartanian calls an “underutilized, incredible workforce.” At the factory, women hold multiple leadership positions. A number of the workers at the 300 family farms Ziba works with are women, and 180 women help shell and sort the nuts during harvest season.
For Afghan women, the Taliban takeover in 2021 has been devastating. In many sectors, women are no longer able to work. They’re banned from most public-sector jobs, and since December 2022 they’ve also been banned from working for nongovernmental organizations. The private sector is much more inconsistent. The Taliban reportedly shut down all beauty salons, eliminating 60,000 jobs for women; but the fruit-and-nut industry has been overlooked, the founders say. “We’re happy to remain under that radar,” Vartanian says.
Not much has changed in their operations, except for closing for a few days right after the takeover, when it was “chaos for a moment,” Johnson says. If anything, he says systems run slightly more smoothly since the war. “When I say things are working better, it is not a credit to the Taliban government,” Johnson says. “That is to say that war brings chaos. Without war, the chaos is diminished by an order of magnitude.”
But there is still constant worry for the future—especially as girls have been banned from education beyond the sixth grade.
The lack of employment opportunities for women is becoming more and more concerning. As of last August, the Taliban had signed 80 edicts, 54 of which targeted women and girls directly. “Overall, the situation for women and girls is continually depleting,” Vartanian says. Labor force participation by women has dropped. It was already low in 2020, at 17% versus 67% for men—but was 25% lower at the end of 2022 than in the beginning of 2021.
Because of the massive loss of employment, the economy has been in free fall, and most rely on humanitarian aid. The women who do have jobs—like at Ziba—are the main breadwinners and typically have to provide for extended families of about 10 people. Ziba has been increasing wages over the years, and ensuring women have their own bank accounts. The founders say all the Kabul factory workers earn a higher-than-average wage, equivalent to a doctor’s salary in Afghanistan.
But most importantly, the founders say, the majority-female workplace gives them a chance to congregate and bond with each other when women’s social participation is now essentially a crime. The Taliban has banned women from parks, gyms, and public baths—often with flogging and torture as punishment.
Ziba’s founders hope they can continue to boost women’s participation—while showing the world Afghanistan’s strengths. In Pashto and Dari, ziba means beauty. “It’s more than just having a successful brand,” Vartanian says.