Date seeds. Palm pollen. Even palm fronds.
Most people see a palm tree. Abu Dhabi entrepreneur Amira A sees ice cream. Over the past three years, she has transformed the UAE’s national symbol into 145 premium soft serve flavours, using everything from fresh dates and dried dates to roasted date seeds, palm pollen and even palm fronds.
Her menu has since grown to 447 original creations, including soft serve inspired by traditional Emirati dishes such as luqaimat, balaleet, aseeda, khabees, qurs bread, rahash and talbina.
But her mission was never simply to create unusual flavours. It began years earlier with a question that completely changed how she thought about ice cream.
During her first professional training course in Kuwait, Amira expected to learn recipes and production techniques. Instead, she discovered an industry built around commercial powders, concentrates, artificial flavourings, preservatives and large amounts of added sugar.
Everything had a purpose, from extending shelf life to reducing costs and speeding up production. But instead of feeling inspired, she left questioning whether she wanted to make ice cream that way.
“I honestly felt that God would ask me about every child who ate ice cream from my shop,” she says.
From that moment, she decided that if she ever opened her own business, it would follow a different philosophy.
Rather than relying on artificial colours and flavourings, she wanted real ingredients to define every recipe. Wherever possible, she avoided added sugar, allowing fruits and other natural ingredients to provide both sweetness and colour.
She is careful not to describe her products as “healthy”, insisting instead on calling them “less harmful”, acknowledging that naturally occurring sugars are still sugars.
The decision made every part of the business more difficult.
Without commercial stabilisers and ready-made ice cream bases, every fruit behaved differently. Every recipe had to be created from scratch.
Amira says she broke more than 15 ice cream machines while chasing the creamy texture she envisioned, spending months experimenting before finally finding a formula that worked.
Her determination soon became an obsession with learning.
Over the years, she travelled across the Middle East, Europe and beyond, completing 21 professional training courses and immersing herself in the science behind ice cream production.
Yet despite everything she learnt overseas, she never wanted to recreate what already existed elsewhere.
Instead, she returned to Abu Dhabi asking herself a different question.
Why should Italy be famous for gelato while Abu Dhabi could not become known for its own premium soft serve?
The answer, she realised, had been growing in front of her all along.
The palm tree.
For Amira, it is far more than a source of dates. It represents the UAE’s heritage, resilience and generosity, and reminds her of Sheikh Zayed’s vision and the traditions that shaped earlier generations.
The idea became even clearer while visiting Mina Market near her shop.
She watched tourists eagerly buying fresh dates while many younger Emiratis seemed disconnected from ingredients that had once been part of everyday life.
“The new generation does not necessarily like these things,” she says. “So I asked myself, how can I bring this heritage back in another form?”
The answer was ice cream.
“I transformed heritage for a modern generation,” she says. “Young people today do not relate to heritage in the same way, and they are drawn toward foreign trends. So how do I bring them back? What do people love most? Ice cream. Then let them taste ice cream that tastes like luqaimat.”
Sometimes, the smallest moments convince her the idea is working.
She remembers one father bringing his children into the shop.
One of the boys tried a traditional flavour and suddenly became excited.
“He kept saying, ‘I know this, Dad. I know it,’ but he couldn’t remember where he had tasted it before,” she recalls. “His father smiled and said, ‘It’s the sweet we eat with coffee during Ramadan and Eid.’ That’s when I realised we were bringing heritage back to children by presenting it in another form.”
Her curiosity extends far beyond Emirati ingredients.
She has imported pink pineapples from Costa Rica after a 22-hour journey, experimented with black sapote, rare mangoes, barberries and water chestnuts, and even reinvented the Italian affogato by pairing fresh date soft serve with coffee brewed from roasted date seeds.
Visitors often mistake her palm frond ice cream for matcha, exactly the reaction she hoped for.
“They think it is matcha,” she says. “That is exactly why I brought it. The younger generation loves matcha, but if someone loves that taste, I can offer something similar using the palm tree.”
The business has since received international awards for innovation and attracted franchise enquiries from across the Middle East and Europe.
Amira has repeatedly turned them down, believing rapid expansion could compromise the quality and philosophy behind Ice Station.
“My brother once told me, ‘This is the first time I have seen someone open a shop in order to lose money,’” she says with a laugh. “I am not losing money, but I am not making much profit either. I want people to understand that they can eat ice cream in a less harmful way.”
Today, her ambition reaches beyond a single shop in Abu Dhabi.
She wants Ice Station to become a global Emirati brand that introduces people to the UAE through its flavours.
“My real ambition is for ‘Born in Abu Dhabi, inspired by nature’ to exist in every country in the world,” she says. “Just as people say Italy is famous for gelato, I want people to say Abu Dhabi is famous for natural soft serve.”
For Amira, turning palm trees into ice cream was never about novelty.
It was about proving that innovation can preserve heritage, one scoop at a time.
Source: Khaleej Times