From Saudi to the US: selling camel milk as the new superfood

A Palestinian raised in Saudi, Walid Abdul-Wahab moved to Los Angeles in 2009 to study at USC, where he discovered how health-conscious a lot of people were. So in 2012, when some friends back home told him about the medical benefits of camel milk, he instantly saw business opportunity.

He realized that camel milk was not available in stores, neither in Saudi, nor the US. So he decided to do something about that. Believing that the Middle East countries were more likely to jump on the wagon if Western countries were already selling camel milk in supermarkets, and that L.A. health and fitness trendsetters would be easier to convince, he decided to launch a camel milk brand in the US.

A surprising trend

Back in the US, he discovered that there are currently 3,000 camels in the country, some wild, and some privately owned. Some of this population are descended from animals which were imported from North Africa to use as pack animals during the Gold Rush of the 1840s, and then during America’s Civil War in the 1860s. You can check this recap for more amusing details.

Until recently, a handful of farmers had camels that they would lease for churches’ Christmas nativity scenes. But, five or six years ago, people started requesting camel milk, and some farmers from the Amish community, traditionalist Christians who reject modern technology, started catering to that demand. According to Abdul-Wahab, it all started with one Amish family from Missouri, a state in America’s Midwest region, started milking camels three years ago, soon followed by other Amish farmers.

When Abdul-Wahab started paying attention to this market, he discovered that a growing number of farms are milking camels, but none is doing so in a scalable way, only selling the milk individually or through cooperatives, rather than in supermarkets.

From Saudi to the US: selling camel milk as the new superfood