Fruits and vegetables: the super power behind these Azerbaijani food heroes
With the desire to improve their practices and businesses, Tahmina, Jalal and Isa have all been in touch with FAO, participating in various projects throughout the country.
Tahmina turned her hobby of preserving fruits into a business and is now the first commercial producer of dried fruits in her village. ©FAO/Abdul Mustafazade
A year before the country was faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, Tahmina Isayeva from Zaqatala district in northwest Azerbaijan started a small business of drying fruits in her kitchen.
“In the beginning it was my hobby to preserve fruits by drying them. We arranged fruits on the drying tray, spacing them for good air circulation, and then set the tray in the sun for some days. It is a traditional method, but it is a long process,”says Tahmina.
“It started quite well and my acquaintances became my first consumers. For a year, I produced almost 300 kilograms of dry fruits. It was not easy as I did all the processing myself – harvested apples, plums and figs from our garden or bought fruits from the bazaar,” she said.
In 2019, the Women’s Resource Centre in Zaqatala awarded Tahmina a fruit dry processing machine to enhance her business. Not long after, the pandemic hit. Although this situation challenged her business’s profibility, she used this time as an opportunity to study new techniques and bring her production to the next level. Now she is the first commercial producer of dried fruits in her village.
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