The self-taught cheese maker feeding Pakistan's restaurants

Why Pakistan has no real cheese

The episode opens with Muzamil explaining why he spent a long time trying to find a story like this one. Pakistan’s industries, he notes, are heavily dependent on imported raw materials, and replacing those imports requires founders who are willing to build something from first principles. Imran Saleh, CEO and founder of Farmers Cheese Making, is one of the very few people doing exactly that in the food space.

Imran’s company produces 60 to 70 varieties of non-processed, artisan, handcrafted cheese. The only imported input in the entire production chain is microbial rennet — the living organism that turns milk into a gel and initiates the cheese-making process. It is not manufactured in Pakistan, so it must be purchased from an importer. Everything else — the cultures, the milk, the aging process — is local. “We don’t use no vegetable fats, no artificial colors, no artificial additives,” Imran says. “What the customer is consuming is healthy probiotics, proteins — and it’s given the status of a superfood in the USA.”

Muzamil asks whether the product qualifies as organic. Imran uses the question to correct what he calls a widely misused term. Organic dairy, he explains, requires that the animal’s feed be grown on land free of pesticides and chemicals for at least seven years. Almost no Pakistani dairy operation meets that standard. “This is a misconception I want to correct — but it’s a natural milk, it’s a healthy milk.”

From Canada to a shop in Lahore

Imran grew up in Rawalpindi, attended Saint Mary’s Cambridge School and then Gordon College, and eventually made his way to Canada. He describes the years there as a formative hustle — delivering pizzas, working odd jobs, building partnerships. “Whatever I did, I did it with heart.” He had been planning a pizza business with a Canadian friend when family circumstances pulled him back to Pakistan.

Back in Lahore, he found himself sitting in a family shop selling plastic pipes and air ducts — a business inherited through his wife’s family. The environment was a sharp contrast to Canada. To keep himself occupied and mentally engaged, he kept a laptop at the shop and played Age of Empires. Then a thought occurred to him: if he could make cheese himself, he would save money on the ingredient he was buying for his home cooking.

“I had no idea how to use milk for anything other than tea,” he tells Muzamil. He began researching online — primarily YouTube and Facebook, since this was around 2009 to 2011 — and started experimenting at home with two to four litres of milk a day. The early attempts went nowhere. But his interest kept growing rather than fading.

The rennet from England and the accidental mentor

The turning point in Imran’s self-education came through a misdirected email. He had been trying to source rennet from a company in England and accidentally wrote instead to New England Cheese Making and Supplies in the United States. The company’s blog writer, a woman named Jerry, responded. She could not sell him rennet but she pointed him toward resources and became, in his words, a friend.

He eventually sourced a strip of ten rennet tablets from England, paid more than he wanted to, and began making cheese in earnest. The challenge was that the instructions he was following were written for Western kitchens and Western conditions. Temperatures, timings, and ambient environments were all different in Lahore. “I realised that in Pakistan you have to drive by Pakistan’s rules,” he says. “If you follow the gora’s manual, you will have an accident every day.” He began treating the process as pure experimentation — playing with the milk, adjusting variables, storing results in an old refrigerator.

He started selling at a farmers market in Lahore, then began supplying restaurants and cafes that wanted specialty ingredients. Consumer awareness was almost zero at the time. “Back then only mozzarella and cheddar were available — the processed, artificial kind.”

The Jia’s Deli moment

Muzamil asks about the first real commercial breakthrough. Imran describes driving to Islamabad with his family and a car full of cheese, heading to Jia’s Deli — a specialty food store run by a woman named Naz. He had accumulated roughly one lakh rupees worth of orders. When he arrived, a queue formed. People were buying, complimenting the product, asking for more. “That was my shared turning point,” he says, “because that was the first time I realised I can turn this into a business and I will turn it into a business.”

When Jia’s Deli eventually closed, Imran was left without a distribution anchor. But the customer list he had built through the store became his base. He began delivering cheese by van, with a driver handling routes while he continued production. The cheese business was not yet a passion project — it was a way to make a living. “Passion is one thing, but finances.”

The science of aging and the shelf-life problem

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises the question of how Imran transitioned from selling directly to consumers into retail and FMCG — a shift that requires packaging, preservation, and shelf life management. Imran explains the fundamental tension in artisan cheese: because his products contain no preservatives, their shelf life is naturally short. The commercial cheese industry solves this by removing cream from milk, reconstituting it with milk powder, adding vegetable fats, and then adding preservatives. “The animal protein is removed and vegetable proteins are added. That’s not a very healthy option, but that’s commercial.”

The solution Imran found was to lean into aged cheeses. Parmesan-style and other mature varieties develop their own natural preservation through the aging process. A cheese aged for a year or more becomes shelf-stable without artificial additives. “The gora calls it a leap towards immortality,” Imran says. The aging process also produces conjugated linoleic acid — which he describes as a compound that doctors recommend for cancer patients — and eliminates carbohydrates entirely. “Cancer feeds on sugar. When you open market cheese, it’s full of carbs. When you take artisan cheese, sugar is zero.”

The company has also installed UV tunnels through which all packaging passes before dispatch, killing bacteria and extending shelf life without chemical intervention.

B2B, big chains, and the pricing wall

Muzamil pushes on the B2B opportunity — specifically whether Imran has explored supplying large pizza chains. His argument is straightforward: the reason Pakistani pizza tastes different from international pizza is almost always the cheese. Dough, vegetables, and tomato paste are broadly comparable. The cheese is where the gap is. A large chain partnership would give Imran the volume needed to bring his per-unit cost down and reach economy of scale.

Imran confirms he has had meetings with the owners of chains including Papa John’s. The conversations have been frustrating. “I found them troubled too,” he says. The chains are caught between their own cost pressures and a consumer base that walks away the moment prices rise. The economics are stark: at current milk prices, producing one kilogram of cheese requires approximately eleven litres of milk. At 150 rupees per litre, that is 1,650 rupees in milk alone before enzymes, electricity, labour, and delivery. “If I go to them at 1,800 or 1,900 rupees per kilogram, they say price matters.”

Muzamil draws a parallel to KNNs, the meat brand that reportedly built its scale through a supply deal with KFC before becoming a household name. The logic is that a large institutional buyer allows a small producer to reach the volume at which pricing normalises and quality becomes commercially viable. Imran agrees with the model in principle but notes that the large chains are themselves under severe economic pressure right now.

The French partner and the 2025 benchmark

Imran reveals that Farmers Cheese Making now has a French national as an investment partner — a Pakistani-origin billionaire named Amjad Malvi who left Pakistan young, built a business empire in Europe, and chose to invest back in Pakistan out of what Imran describes as genuine love for the country. “He has his own planes, his own cruise ships. Big businessman, simple person. But his heart for Pakistan — you cannot describe that journey.”

The partnership has set a specific benchmark for 2025: reach a production capacity of 20,000 litres of milk per day, which translates to roughly two tonnes of cheese per day. Once that benchmark is hit, a larger funding commitment from European partners is triggered. The plan after that is to begin exporting to the Middle East within two to three years, with camel cheese for the Saudi Arabian market as a specific product target. Imran had previously been an innovator in camel cheese — a category that remains rare globally — and sees it as a natural entry point into Gulf markets.

Brain drain, resilience, and Pakistan in 2050

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Imran the question he poses to all guests: how do you see Pakistan in 2050? The answer is characteristically direct. “This brain drain concept — it’s a bullshit concept. I don’t trust it, I don’t believe it.” Pakistanis who leave, he argues, remain Pakistani in their values and their loyalties. They learn, they earn, and they find ways to give back. Amjad Malvi is his proof. “That’s not brain drain. That’s exactly how you are training your people without any resources.”

On the broader question of Pakistan’s trajectory, Imran is honest about the current low point — “the economics are horrifying right now” — but refuses to lose hope. His own life, he says, has been a continuous mix of success and failure, good times and bad. The country has given him dignity, income, and family. “Pakistan has a lot of potential. This is a resilient nation. Without thinking too hard, they will do things that will leave you astonished.”

Muzamil closes by calling it one of the best episodes he has recorded in some time — not a formality, but a genuine statement from a host who admits he had been growing bored of recent conversations. The farmers cheese link, he notes, will be in the description.