It started with a phone call.

Date Pop started in 2022, over a phone call with my best friend.

I was tired of corporate life, and we both wanted to build something of our own. Fifteen days before Ramadan, with very little time, a lot of excitement and absolutely no idea where this journey would take us, Date Pop was born.

We built it together until 2023. That chapter eventually came to an end, but I will always be grateful for it. Some people enter your life to stay, and some become part of the story that changes you. Date Pop would not have started the way it did without her.

When our partnership ended, one question stayed with me:

Did I still want Date Pop if I had to do it alone?

I was scared.

Scared of the investment, the responsibility, the ideas, the execution and carrying something that had always been shared.

But somewhere inside me, the answer was still yes.

So I kept going.

My father gave me space at his farm in Kamahan, Lahore, to set up our production. He believed in me, supported me and gave Date Pop a home before I even understood what it could become.

Three months later, he passed away.

For a long time, going back there without him was painful. That place held memories of him everywhere. I was grieving while trying to keep a business alive, and there were days when I genuinely didn’t know whether I had it in me.

But the women working with Date Pop would say:

“Baji, dua hai yeh kaam kabhi band na ho.”

Those words stayed with me.

Because suddenly, Date Pop was no longer only about me.

It was about the women who came to work every day. Their homes. Their families. Their prayers. Their belief in something I was still learning to believe in myself.

And for that, I am deeply grateful.

Grateful to every woman who has worked with us.

Grateful to every customer who ordered once, came back again, gifted a box, shared a review or simply told someone about Date Pop.

Grateful to the people who supported this little brand when it was still figuring itself out.

And always grateful to my father, because a part of him quietly lives in everything we continue to build there.

For years, Date Pop was mainly a Ramadan business. But I didn’t want our story, or the work we were creating, to disappear for the rest of the year.

So we experimented.

Some products worked. Some didn’t. Chocolate melted in Pakistani summers. Money was lost. Recipes failed. We started again.

That journey gave us Granola Pop, Seed Pop and a much bigger vision for what Date Pop could become.

Today, we are an all women production team, building a growing family of food products one experiment, one order and one very imperfect step at a time.

We started with dates.

But the dream now is much bigger.

To build a Pakistani food brand people are proud to gift and happy to consume every day, while creating meaningful work for the women growing alongside it.

There is still so much I don’t know.

But when I look back at where this started, the people who stood beside me, the prayers that carried me and the person I became along the way, I mostly feel grateful.

For all of it.

The beautiful parts, the painful parts, and even the parts I once wished had happened differently.

Because somehow, they all brought Date Pop here.

And after everything, I still have my favourite title:

Khajooron wali Baji. 🤍