Connect with us

Technology

Americana and Farm Frites to expand MENA footprint with $100 million investment (SAR 375 million) in a state-of-the-art Greenfield Frozen French Fries factory in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Published

2 years ago

on

Located in Sudair Industrial and Business City, Riyadh, the Greenfield Frozen French Fries factory is set to commission at the start of 2026, making this establishment the second Joint Venture ‘JV’ partnership between Americana and Farm Frites in the MENA region, to produce a varied range of Frozen French Fries and specialty potato products.The new facility will contribute to KSA’s Vision 2030 and aid in advancing KSA’s food security agenda, boosting local production. By installing capacity in KSA, we aim to participate in advancing the local agriculture landscape in KSA, support and empower local potato growers to further develop their farming practices, enhance crop quality and improve their yields.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 27, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The Agricultural Growth and Processing Company, a subsidiary of Americana Holding for Food Ltd, is set to expand its business operation with a significant $100 million investment (SAR 375 million) in a Greenfield Frozen French Fries manufacturing plant in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Following a strong three-decade partnership in Egypt with Farm Frites, a global leader in the cultivation of potatoes and production of Frozen French Fries, the new processing factory will be established in Sudair Industrial and Business City, pushing forward our partnership with Farm Frites to greater heights.

To commemorate this significant milestone, the Agricultural Growth and Processing Company (Americana and Farm Frites) held a lease-signing ceremony on November 20th, 2024, with the the Saudi Authority for Industrial Cities and Technology Zones in MODON Headquarters, in Riyadh, in the presence of MODON’s CEO, and hosted a Groundbreaking ceremony in Sudair Industrial and Business City on November 25th, 2024, to mark the commencement of construction for the new Frozen French Fries processing plant. The event was attended by esteemed government and ministerial delegates, and key stakeholders, including local potato growers, valued global, regional and local customers and key strategic partners.

The $100 million investment is a strategic step aligned with the Saudi Vision 2030 plans to diversify the Kingdom’s economy, while also contributing to its food security agenda by boosting local production and creating employment opportunities for KSA nationals, local potato growers and farmers. The investment by the Agricultural Growth and Processing Company will enable the company to expand its footprint in KSA, wherein Americana has been operating for over two decades, with two factories in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Mohamed Ali Rashid Alabbar, Chairman of the Kuwait Food Company (Americana) KSCC commented: “We are excited to start the construction of our new Frozen French Fries plant in Saudi Arabia. Our partnership with Farm Frites dates back over three decades having been partners in Egypt since 1988. We are delighted to be renewing our long-standing relationship with a trusted partner, this time in Saudi Arabia, and are proud to be contributing to KSA’s Vision 2030 and championing efforts to increase local production in KSA. This was made possible through the vital support and collaboration of key government and institutional partners including but not limited to the Ministry of Investment, the Ministry of Environment, Water, and Agriculture, the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources and MODON, each playing a crucial role in our business expansion journey.”

Piet de Bruijne, Owner and Chairman of Farm Frites commented: “We are thrilled to once again join hands with Americana, building on a 30-year partnership of mutual growth and shared success. Among the 100 countries where Farm Frites is present in the world, KSA stands as the 5th largest market globally, reinforcing our commitment to the MENA region and to KSA’s growth and economic diversification. We remain dedicated to advancing the industry holistically, from agriculture and logistics to delivering superior value directly to our customers.”

The new facility will be established on a plot exceeding 100,000 square meters and will employ cutting-edge equipment and advanced technology to produce Frozen French Fries and other specialty potato products. The plant is set to be inaugurated in Q1 2026 and will have a total annual production capacity of 70,000 MT during phase one, with plans for future expansion in the future. Upon commencing operations, this will mark the second joint venture partnership between Americana and Farm Frites and with the new facility underway in Sudair Industrial and Business City, we are set to become the largest producers of Frozen French Fries in the MENA region.

Mohamed Safwat Moustafa, Managing Director of the Agricultural Growth and Processing Company concluded: “I am proud and deeply honoured to kick off this landmark new development in KSA. With a commitment to delivering excellence, we aim to establish a world-class facility right here on Saudi soil. I am looking forward to the opportunity to serve some of the most renowned customers, both globally and regionally, with a superior range of French Fries products, proudly made in KSA. This new facility reinforces our dedication to quality, innovation, and the Kingdom’s potential.”

About Americana

Established in 1964, Americana Foods is one of the largest FMCG companies in the MENA region. From our humble beginnings in Kuwait, to our strong presence and extended reach in KSA, UAE, and Egypt, we have over decades grown to become a trusted household brand name in the region and beyond. Americana operates a diverse portfolio of products across several categories including but not limited to frozen processed products (poultry, beef and seafood), frozen fruits and vegetables, canned and packaged food, sweet and savory snacks. With 19 production facilities across the MENA region, direct route-to-market and distribution network in 4 key operating markets, and presence in 50+ countries across the world, Americana continues to be at the forefront of the industry, continually pushing the boundaries of quality and taste, enriching consumers’ lives through the joy of food.

About Farm Frites

Founded in 1971 as an independent family business, Farm Frites was born from a passion for potato cultivation and crafting quality fries. Over the past five decades, this passion has driven our growth into a global enterprise. Today, we process over 1.2 million tons of potato products annually and serve more than eighty types of fries, potato specialties, and appetizers to foodservice providers all over the globe. While our operations have grown, our primary focus remains unchanged: to serve happiness, from field to plate. Our team has expanded to over 1,600 colleagues across 6 manufacturing facilities and 43 global sales offices, serving foodservice entrepreneurs in over 100 countries. 

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2568359/Americana_Farm_Frites.jpg

 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/americana-and-farm-frites-to-expand-mena-footprint-with-100-million-investment-sar-375-million-in-a-state-of-the-art-greenfield-frozen-french-fries-factory-in-the-kingdom-of-saudi-arabia-302317234.html

SOURCE Americana

Related Topics:
Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Technology

RTX’s Pratt & Whitney Valox™ 1500 Engine Completes Key Design Milestone

Published

7 minutes ago

on

July 21, 2026

By

Valox 1500 design set to deliver an optimal mix of affordability, performance and speed to market for autonomous platforms

LONDON, July 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Farnborough International Airshow — Pratt & Whitney, an RTX (NYSE: RTX) business, has successfully completed a key design milestone for its Pratt & Whitney Valox™ 1500 engine, a new powerplant intended for semi-autonomous collaborative platforms. A comprehensive digital assessment confirms the design is on track to deliver an optimal mix of performance, affordability, and speed to market.

“This milestone reflects Pratt & Whitney’s agility and commitment to delivering critical capability to the warfighter at speed,” said Jill Albertelli, president of Pratt & Whitney’s Military Engines business. “By optimizing the engine design for reduced mission life and moving beyond traditional development timelines, our team is bringing forward a more affordable, scalable propulsion solution for emerging operational needs.”

Leveraging proactive investments in digital engineering, Pratt & Whitney has significantly de-risked the development timeline and is now focused on maturing the design for follow-on ground testing. In late 2025, Pratt & Whitney received a contract award valued at more than $10 million from the U.S. Air Force to advance the engine design.

Pratt & Whitney recently unveiled the Pratt & Whitney Valox™ engine family, which is engineered to deliver the speed, precision, and affordability required for modern collaborative combat systems and a broad range of emerging applications.

About Pratt & Whitney
Pratt & Whitney, an RTX business, is a world leader in the design, manufacture and service of aircraft engines and auxiliary power units for military, commercial and civil aviation customers. Since 1925, our engineers have pioneered the development of revolutionary aircraft propulsion technologies, and today we support more than 90,000 in-service engines through our global network of maintenance, repair and overhaul facilities.

About RTX
With more than 180,000 global employees, we push the limits of technology and science to redefine how we connect and protect our world. With industry-leading capabilities, we advance aviation, engineer integrated defense systems for operational success, and develop next-generation technology solutions and manufacturing to help global customers address their most critical challenges. The company, with 2025 sales of more than $88 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

For questions or to schedule an interview, please contact corporatepr@rtx.com

 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rtxs-pratt–whitney-valox-1500-engine-completes-key-design-milestone-302830230.html

SOURCE RTX

Continue Reading

Technology

CLO zFab Kit Now Available Globally: AI-Powered Fabric Digitization, No CLO License Required

Published

7 minutes ago

on

July 21, 2026

By

Standalone solution available via CLO-SET brings fast and accurate cutting-edge fabric digitization technology to brands, vendors, fabric mills and supply chain partners worldwide

NEW YORK, July 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CLO Virtual Fashion today announced the availability of the CLO zFab Kit, a revolutionary AI-powered fabric digitization solution, now available for order and shipping to customers worldwide. The biggest news for the industry: the CLO zFab Kit can operate as a standalone solution without needing access to the CLO software to operate. Brands, vendors, fabric mills, fabric agents, and supply chain partners can digitize fabrics with full accuracy and produce ready-to-use digital materials via the web using CLOFAB via CLO-SET; a CLO software license is not needed.

“We’ve been eager to come up with ways to address some of the pain points of fabric digitization that our users and clients were going through. Quality was inconsistent, devices were slow and difficult to operate, pricey and often locked behind specialist workflows,” said Justin Kim, 3D Design & Implementation at CLO. “The CLO zFab Kit closes the gap. And by making it truly standalone via the web on CLO-SET, we’re putting accurate digital fabric in reach of the entire supply chain, not just the design teams already using CLO.”

What the CLO zFab Kit Delivers

The CLO zFab Kit combines three pieces of purpose-built hardware (zFab Cutter, zFab Scanner and zFab Draper) with CLO’s AI-powered software to capture a fabric’s physical and visual properties from a single circular sample. The output is a high-fidelity digital fabric, including PBR maps and physical property data, ready to drop into any workflow.

Three things set it apart:

Superior Accuracy. Replaces error-prone manual measurement with a streamlined cutting, scanning and analysis system, producing digital fabrics that can effectively drive production decisions.AI-driven Automation. Powered by proprietary AI and trained on CLO and swatchbook’s extensive fabric dataset, the CLO zFab Kit speeds up digitization while keeping results consistent across operators and locations.Seamless Integration. Outputs work natively in CLO’s platform and export cleanly to other 3D environments – no rework, no format gymnastics.

 

Built for the Fashion Supply Chain

While the CLO zFab Kit perfectly complements design teams using the CLO software, it was purposefully built with fabric mills, vendors, sourcing teams, and material libraries in mind. By providing suppliers with the best tools to create high-quality digital fabrics quickly, easily and consistently, the CLO zFab Kit can help cut physical sample shipments, shortens material approval cycles, and gives everyone in the workflow chain cleaner and better data to decide and act with more confidence.

The CLO zFab Kit is available globally for ordering today. It does not require CLO licenses to operate and use. Pricing, configuration, demo requests, and how-to-use tutorials are available at zfabkit.clo3d.com

About CLO Virtual Fashion

CLO Virtual Fashion is the creator of CLO, the leading 3D fashion design software used and trusted by designers, small businesses, and titans of the fashion industry to achieve a seamless digital workflow. With over two decades of research and development in accurate garment simulation, CLO Virtual Fashion’s mission is to empower users at every step of the garment journey, from concept to design, manufacturing to marketing, and fitting to styling. In addition to 3D garment design software, CLO Virtual Fashion’s products include CLO-SET (a cloud-based asset management and collaboration platform), CONNECT (a digital fashion hub and marketplace), and consumer-facing solutions such as e-commerce virtual fittings. CLO’s interconnected and ever-growing product ecosystem is built to power the future of everything related to garments.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/clo-zfab-kit-now-available-globally-ai-powered-fabric-digitization-no-clo-license-required-302830468.html

SOURCE CLO Virtual Fashion

Continue Reading

Technology

Arcfra Releases Neutree 1.1 to Help Enterprises Optimize GPU Utilization and Govern AI Inference at Scale

Published

7 minutes ago

on

July 21, 2026

By

SINGAPORE, July 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Arcfra today announced the release of Neutree 1.1, a Model-as-a-Service platform for enterprise AI inference. The new version adds native GPU virtualization and expanded model governance capabilities, helping enterprises improve GPU utilization while managing model usage, quotas, access control, and security audits across AI applications.

As enterprise AI moves from pilots to production, organizations are running more diverse model workloads, including LLMs, OCR, ASR, embedding, rerank, and other task-specific models. GPU passthrough remains important for high-performance LLM inference, but lightweight and high-concurrency small models can leave GPU memory and compute capacity underused when each workload occupies a full GPU.

Neutree 1.1 adds native vGPU support on top of existing GPU passthrough and logical isolation capabilities. Users can enable GPU virtualization as needed and split GPU resources by memory and compute capacity, allowing one GPU to run multiple model instances for workloads such as OCR, speech, embedding, rerank, and multi-service concurrent inference. For performance-sensitive LLM workloads, users can continue using GPU passthrough to access full-card resources.

The release also provides a global view of node-level GPU usage, helping administrators allocate, schedule, and split resources based on actual demand. With hard-isolated resource partitioning, multiple model instances can run on the same GPU without interfering with each other, improving utilization while maintaining predictable service behavior.

Neutree 1.1 also extends its model gateway with a unified governance layer for internal and external models. As model services are connected to more business systems, platform teams need centralized visibility into usage, quotas, access permissions, and request-level traceability. Neutree helps teams manage token usage, request activity, API key quotas, rate limits, concurrency limits, model access scopes, access logs, and security audits without changing existing application calling patterns.

Neutree is a key component of Arcfra’s agentic AI infrastructure for AI inference. Together with Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform, it helps enterprises build production-grade, high-performance, and governable model inference infrastructure across compute, storage, Kubernetes, and observability layers.

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, was among the first customers to try Neutree. By using its existing Arcfra infrastructure as a production-grade AI foundation, Foxconn adopted Neutree to streamline model delivery and unify compute and model resource management.

Neutree 1.1 is now open source on GitHub. For Neutree Enterprise, contact Arcfra.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/arcfra-releases-neutree-1-1-to-help-enterprises-optimize-gpu-utilization-and-govern-ai-inference-at-scale-302830475.html

SOURCE Arcfra

Continue Reading

Trending