Dubai SME and Kitopi Open Founder Series to 12 Emirati Food Entrepreneurs
The Emirati Chef's Table expands into a three-month programme that puts 12 founders inside Kitopi's kitchens, delivery network and Eatopi menu.
Karim El-Sayed Karim El-Sayed covers company news, policy and regulation across the UAE and wider MENA for Anecdoted, with a focus on how new rules and licences reshape how startups operate. karim@anecdoted.com
Dubai SME and Kitopi have opened the next phase of The Emirati Chef's Table, turning the programme into a three-month Founder Series that will take in 12 Emirati chefs and culinary entrepreneurs between September and November 2026.
Dubai SME, formally the Mohammed Bin Rashid Establishment for Small and Medium Enterprises Development, operates within the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism. Kitopi is a Dubai-based food technology company. The two organisations ran the first edition of The Emirati Chef's Table in 2025, when five Emirati food and beverage entrepreneurs took part. The Founder Series widens that intake and stretches it across three months.
The 12 founders are divided into three batches of four. Each batch receives access to Kitopi's kitchens, its customer base and its delivery network, alongside mentorship, content production and marketing support. Concepts chosen from the group will be listed on Eatopi, Kitopi's menu platform, where they can test products in a commercial environment and reach customers directly.
Batch one runs from September 3 to October 2, and its four concepts are already available through Eatopi. Wadeema Abdalla founded Saccharose Desserts. Rehab Al Ameri founded the pizza concept Local Foundry. Abdulrahman Lootah founded One Made, a contemporary comfort-food concept. Zainab Al Mousawi founded To The Moon & Back, which builds contemporary dishes around Emirati ingredients and flavours.
Batch two follows from October 2 to 30. Batch three runs from November 2 to 30. Dubai SME and Kitopi will announce the founders in each of those groups before the relevant batch launches.
Ahmad Al Room Almheiri, chief executive of Dubai SME, said The Emirati Chef's Table was created to give Emirati culinary entrepreneurs practical access to expertise, platforms and market exposure. He said the next phase expands the opportunity to 12 founders and provides them with a direct route to test concepts and strengthen their commercial readiness.
The arrangement is notable for where it places the founders. Rather than asking early-stage food businesses to build production capacity and find customers before they can trade, the programme slots them into an operator that already has both. Kitopi supplies the kitchen space and the demand; the participants supply the product. Splitting the intake into three batches also gives each group a defined commercial window with a clear start and end date, which resembles a menu trial more than a conventional accelerator cycle. Whether the model continues past November is unresolved. Nothing in the announcement commits Dubai SME or Kitopi to a further round.
