The officially atheist country is salivating at a $1.6 trillion halal market. So far, it's been unable to break in.
BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN
Foreign Policy - MAY 2, 2016
It’s hard to get far in the holy cities of Mecca and Madinah without somehow consuming China. Made-in-China trinkets of questionable quality dominate the wares of the hawkers who throng Islam’s major pilgrimage sites. Chinese-brand handbags, perhaps purchased at the local Carrefour, grace the arms of lower- and middle-class women. City residents pad around their homes wearing Chinese-made slippers and Chinese-brand pajamas, and using made-in-China water boilers to brew tea they serve from made-in-China tea sets. They blow their noses with Chinese-made tissues and pray on Chinese-made rugs.
But one major domain of mass consumption in Saudi cities remains largely untouched by the bountiful reach of China’s factories: the food aisles. This is true even though Saudi Arabia imports more than 90 percent of its food products. Biscuits from Europe, cooking oil from Malaysia, and tuna from Thailand fill up shelves in Saudi supermarket and convenience store shelves alongside locally made juices and canned meat. Yet China’s space on those shelves is negligible, limited mostly to the occasional packet of halal-certified gummy candy produced by a German-owned factory in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
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