Opening Up A New Market

Khalid Sharif has opened up a new market for halal confectionery, with his company Ummah Foods

Halal confectionery isn’t the first thing that springs to mind when you think of commercially viable products, but Khalid Sharif understands that sometimes the only way to market a new idea is to open up a new market. After trying and failing to launch 29 different products, Ummah Foods has hit gold with chocolate.

Ummah is a food production company with a social conscience, using all of its business processes as opportunities to give something back to the community, whether it’s through challenging young artists to come up with wrapper designs, using the marketing material to support helplines, or creating television commercials which address misrepresentation of Muslims in the media. The brand is more than just a product: it has an interactive dialogue with its target market.

Khalid has taken his inspiration not from education which he says provided him with little encouragement, but from looking at actual needs within his community. He watched his father build a business from nothing and although he had to risk investing his own capital to get Ummah off the ground, he says that every failure was a step closer to success.

Given Ummah’s focus on community-led product development, networking on a social and business level has been vital to the company’s success. Recently Khalid used Facebook as a way of polling opinion on a new slogan for the brand.

Khalil’s background in IT may not seem obvious for a food manufacturer but he says: “Not knowing how an industry works means you can be a lot more creative, as you’re not held back by the boring norms everyone expects in the industry.”

When asked what his advice to other young entrepreneurs would be, he responds: “Sometimes I feel it’s just very important to start. I know I spent years thinking about what I wanted to do, and the step from thinking to doing was quite overwhelming. Of course you’ll make lots of mistakes when you begin and throughout the whole life of the business, but that’s just part of the learning process.”