Hunza Foodways

Hunza Foodways is a community-supported agriculture business registered in 2013 and run by women farmers from the Hunza region, working out of Rahimabad Valley near Gilgit in northern Pakistan. The business processes its harvest in small batches by hand - dried apricots, dried cherries and mulberries, cold-pressed apricot and walnut oil - without added preservatives or coatings, keeping the operation closer to a farm cooperative than an industrial food producer. Its wild-thyme Tumuru tea draws on a plant that grows locally in the Hunza valleys and has long been used in the region's own kitchens rather than cultivated as an export crop, giving the line a product that is genuinely regional rather than a generic herbal blend repackaged for outside buyers. Because the business is women-led and structured as community-supported agriculture, the model ties directly into the economic position of women farmers in a mountainous, relatively isolated part of Pakistan where off-farm income options are limited; selling dried fruit, pressed oil and tea beyond the valley gives that labor a market it wouldn't otherwise reach easily. The range stays narrow and unprocessed by design - fruit, oil, tea, made in small batches close to where it's grown - rather than expanding into a broader packaged-goods catalog.