Dubai Culture launches the third edition of the Emirati Chefs Grant for Productive Families — a programme where culinary heritage, creativity and entrepreneurship come together to create new opportunities while preserving the cultural identity of the UAE.
There are traditions that survive because they are carefully preserved. And there are traditions that remain alive because each generation is given the freedom to reinterpret them.
Cuisine belongs to both worlds.
A family recipe can be much more than a set of ingredients and instructions. It can carry memory, identity and a sense of place. Passed from one generation to another, it becomes part of an intangible cultural heritage — something that cannot simply be placed behind museum glass because its meaning exists precisely in being practised, shared and reinvented.
This idea lies at the heart of the third edition of the Emirati Chefs Grant for Productive Families, launched by Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Dubai Culture) in collaboration with the Community Development Authority (CDA) and the International Centre for Culinary Arts (ICCA Dubai).
But the initiative is about considerably more than learning how to cook.
It is about transforming culinary talent into independence, creativity into enterprise, and cultural knowledge into something capable of becoming part of Dubai’s contemporary creative economy.
Cuisine as cultural memory
Perhaps the most compelling dimension of the programme is the way it positions Emirati cuisine not merely as gastronomy, but as heritage.
Dubai Culture describes authentic Emirati traditions and recipes as an integral part of the UAE’s collective cultural memory. At the same time, participants are encouraged to explore contemporary interpretations of those traditions without losing their original character.
This balance matters.
Preserving heritage does not necessarily mean freezing it in time. A tradition can remain authentic while its presentation evolves. A recipe can retain the flavours remembered from a family kitchen while entering a contemporary restaurant, a new product concept or a carefully designed brand.
In this sense, culinary heritage becomes a form of design.
Ingredients are selected. A menu is composed. A visual identity is created. A story is communicated. And eventually an experience is designed around something that may have begun generations earlier in a family home.
From the family kitchen to entrepreneurship
The programme takes this relationship between heritage and contemporary enterprise seriously.
Its purpose is to develop participants’ culinary and entrepreneurial abilities while strengthening their capacity to manage small and medium-sized businesses. The broader ambition is to help talented individuals turn their knowledge and ideas into sustainable ventures while simultaneously strengthening the international presence of Emirati cuisine.
For Shaima Rashed Al Suwaidi, CEO of the Arts, Design and Literature Sector at Dubai Culture, this means creating an environment in which Emirati chefs can develop professionally, innovate and discover new possibilities while remaining connected to authentic culinary traditions.
And there is an important distinction here: entrepreneurship is not presented as something separate from cultural preservation.
It becomes one of the ways through which heritage can continue.
Ten talents, ten possible futures
This third edition will support 10 participants from productive families, providing them with education and professional culinary training.
They are:
Amina Abdullah Mohammed Al Abdouli, Maryam Rashid Saif Al Ghafli, Maryam Ali Matar Al Baloushi, Zain Ali Abdullah Yateem, Maria Saeed Ahmed Bou Kroud Al Marri, Meera Saeed Ahmed Bou Kroud Al Marri, Laila Mohammed Hassan, Hanifa Abdullah Ali Jenki, Fatima Khamis Majdam and Ameera Ahmed Hassan Ali Al Khateeb.
Behind those ten names are potentially ten different interpretations of Emirati culinary heritage — and perhaps, in time, ten businesses, brands or professional careers.
That is what makes initiatives of this kind particularly interesting from the perspective of the creative industries. They do not simply teach a craft. They create the conditions in which a craft can acquire economic independence and a contemporary identity.
Designing a business around tradition
The practical scope of the programme makes that ambition particularly visible.
Through workshops and mentoring delivered by experts from ICCA Dubai, participants will learn about professional industry standards, innovative menu development, food safety and public health, nutrition, cost management, planning and preparation.
But significantly, the curriculum also includes visual identity and branding, as well as licensing requirements.
That changes the conversation.
A talented cook may possess extraordinary knowledge, but transforming that knowledge into a sustainable enterprise requires another set of skills: understanding costs, developing a product, communicating its identity and knowing how to position it in the market.
This is where culture, business and design meet.
Empowerment that preserves identity
Maitha Al Shamsi, CEO of the Community Empowerment Sector at the Community Development Authority (CDA) in Dubai, describes support for home-based entrepreneurs as something extending beyond skills development. It is also about building confidence, nurturing capabilities and creating an environment in which individual talent can become sustainable economic and social participation.
The initiative therefore carries two narratives simultaneously.
One is economic: providing people with the tools to develop viable professional opportunities.
The other is cultural: ensuring that knowledge embedded within families is not lost as societies modernise.
And perhaps these two objectives are not opposites at all.
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to protect living heritage is precisely to give it a future.
Tradition does not have to stand still
Dubai is internationally associated with speed, architecture, innovation and ambition. Yet the creative identity of a place cannot be built solely around what is new.
It also depends on what a society chooses to carry forward.
The Emirati Chefs Grant for Productive Families shows an interesting model of that relationship: heritage is not treated as a relic of the past but as material from which contemporary opportunity can be created.
A recipe becomes knowledge.
Knowledge becomes skill.
Skill can become a profession.
And a profession can become a business capable of carrying a fragment of cultural identity far beyond the kitchen in which its story began.
That may ultimately be one of the most contemporary definitions of cultural preservation: not simply protecting what was inherited, but giving the next generation the tools to decide what it can become.
2026.08.11 Stockholm
Editor-in-chief Halina Rosa
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