Saudi Woman Entrepreneur Develops Coffee Maker

A young Saudi woman has developed an electronic Arabic coffee maker for commercial purposes, as stated by King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) officials recently.
Saudi entrepreneur, Lateefa Alwaalan came up with this innovation with the cooperation of the Badir Program For Technology Incubators, which functions under the aegis of KACST. According to an official from the Badir program, the new machine, which is available in the market, is similar to the popular Keurig machines. He said that the machine, the first of its kind, has been produced in the Kingdom by a Saudi young woman who had successfully completed her MBA at a university in Washington. “We are proud of this achievement,” he added. Badir is a technology incubator program launched by KACST in 2007. “Badir” means “to initiate” and is a national program aimed at accelerating the growth of emerging technology-based businesses in Saudi Arabia. The program is open to all Saudi technology entrepreneurs who have an early-stage technology based business, prototype or proof of concept product or service that can benefit from incubation. Alwaalan said that it takes nearly 30 minutes to prepare the decoction and that this new machine would save time. The product, dubbed “Yatook,” has two types of machines. “I am very proud that we are able to place a ‘Made in Saudi Arabia’ label on the machine,” she said. Fostering a passion for Arabic coffee and recognizing the difficulty people often encounter in making it correctly, Alwaalan who is also a computer programmer, decided to invest her technical background in coffee production. “I love blended Arabic coffee with spices, but making it is very difficult. It requires a lot of time and tools and mastering it, requires practice. That’s why we launched Yatooq,” she said.
Danube is the sole distributor of these machines in the Kingdom. Alwaalan said that these machines will be exported to other countries in the Gulf soon.