Before 1962 there was no local dairy plant in Kuwait. That year a factory opened in Shuwaikh under a name few people would recognise today: Danco, short for the Danish Kuwaiti Dairy. It made two things and no more — pasteurised milk and yoghurt.
Ice cream enters the market
Between 1974 and 1978 an ice cream line was added, the first of its kind in Kuwait by the company’s own account. Before that, ice cream was imported or made at home; after it, it became something you bought from the grocer all year round.
The eighties: the Subhan plant
The Subhan plant opened in the eighties, and long-life milk technology came with it. That detail changed the household kitchen rather than only the factory: a carton of milk that keeps outside the fridge until it is opened. Then the lines followed one another — fruit juice, then cheese, then an expanded tomato paste line. Exports to the Gulf states began in the same period.
1990 and after
The factory buildings were destroyed, so production moved to temporary facilities to keep supply going, and then came rebuilding and modernisation. In the following decade a large fire hit much of the plant, followed by another recovery.
Then the golden jubilee
Between 2012 and 2018 fifty years passed since the beginning. In the twenties, fortified milk and reduced-sugar products were added under a nutrition programme.
What stays with you from the story
Three shifts in the Kuwaiti kitchen can be dated from this timeline: pasteurised yoghurt instead of the home-made kind from 1962, locally made ice cream from the seventies, and milk that needs no fridge from the eighties.
Photo: glass milk bottles. By Bruce C. Cooper, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Kuwait Danish Dairy Company, the “our history” page on its official site.
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