The founder making cutlery out of palm leaves
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We speak to the Emirati entrepreneur who set up a business making biodegradable cutlery made from discarded date palm trees, driven by the goal to replace single-use plastics in UAE.
Lamis al-Hashimy, co-founder of Palmade, shares how a hobby project became a business producing millions of items, the early failures that nearly stopped it, and the challenges of competing with cheap plastic. How did a failed prototype including a fork that melted in pizza, lead to a growing business?
If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.
Each episode is a 17-minute, daily deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.
Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, the economic impact of the war in the Middle East, and why bond markets are so powerful.
We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include Google's Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and the CEO of Canva, Melanie Perkins.
Presenter: Sarah Rogers Producers: Bisi Adebayo, Victoriya Holland and Jay Behrouzi
(Photo: Lamis al-Hashimy. Credit: Lamis al-Hashimy)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Sarah Rogers and welcome to meet the founders from Business Daily on the BBC World |
| 0:12.7 | Service. This is where we speak to innovators around the world about how they build businesses, |
| 0:18.5 | the ideas behind them and the risks. Today, turning palm tree |
| 0:22.8 | waste into millions of pieces of eco-friendly cutlery. |
| 0:26.4 | If you think about impact, we've diverted 60 million single-use plastics from our environment. |
| 0:34.0 | My guest is the co-founder of Palm Made, a company using discarded date palm leaves to create |
| 0:39.5 | sustainable alternatives to plastics. It's a business born out of personal change, persistence |
| 0:45.3 | and plenty of early failures. That's Limis al-Hashimi, our founder today. |
| 0:54.0 | Dubai is a city known for rapid transformation, but one thing has remained constant, |
| 0:59.3 | the date palm tree. |
| 1:00.9 | For Lemise al-Hashimi, it became a starting point for an entirely new kind of business. |
| 1:07.1 | But her story starts in the Dubai that she grew up in back when the city skyline and her own ambitions were yet to take shape. I was born in the 80s, so I'm an 80s child. I can't remember if that makes me a Gen X or Gen Z. I can't keep up. I think you're a millennial, aren't you, in the 18s? Oh, millennial, yes. Same as me. All right, good. Yes, great. Life was a lot simpler, Sarah, as you can imagine. |
| 1:31.7 | Dubai was a different Dubai than I'm sure you've seen recently. Although it could get really hot in the summers, for some reason, we still were able to bike around, to go to the local grocery store and just to enjoy |
| 1:47.9 | simple moments on the beach or birthday celebrations. I'm one of three siblings. I'm a middle |
| 1:54.9 | child. I have an older sister and a younger brother. Do you have middle child syndrome? Because I'm a |
| 2:00.2 | middle child as well and I definitely do. We have have middle child syndrome because I'm a middle child as well and I |
| 2:01.6 | definitely do? We have a lot in common. I can see. And you got to a teenager and then you decided to |
| 2:08.9 | leave the UAE and go to America. What was behind that move? So that was in the 90s. Dubai did not |
| 2:15.4 | have a lot of strong postgraduate or university institutions. I remember |
| 2:21.3 | there was just one or two. And if you had really good grades, you can apply for a scholarship |
| 2:26.4 | from the Ministry of Education. So my parents cut a deal with us. They said, if you get the good |
... |
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