The Dubai Municipality has announced the return of the Hatta Honey Festival, the prominent annual event that brings together beekeepers, local producers, and honey enthusiasts to celebrate local honey production and Hatta's unique rural nature and authentic environmental heritage. The festival also provides a comprehensive platform that combines production, education, laboratory testing, and sales of honey, which enhances sustainable development and supports the emirate's local tourism and economy system. This year's edition includes over 50 platforms for beekeepers and honey producers, in addition to 10 outdoor kiosks dedicated to family producers and sales outlets. The festival offers visitors a comprehensive experience that combines learning, heritage, and entertainment, which boosts the local economy and reflects Dubai's vision for sustainable development in the tourism and agriculture sectors. The festival provides a complete winter family experience that includes interactive workshops, educational activities, and live shows in both indoor and outdoor areas, ensuring an enjoyable and inclusive experience for all family members, enhancing quality of life, and encouraging community participation. The festival is organized as part of the comprehensive plan for developing the Hatta area, which aims to diversify the local economy, empower Emirati entrepreneurs, and create sustainable investment opportunities in the agricultural sector and small industries, while ensuring the highest levels of quality and safety for products. A distinctive feature of this year's edition is the inclusion of unique devices used for the first time, operating on infrared technology, specifically designed to perform some basic laboratory tests on honey and its products in a time frame of no more than one minute. Dubai Central Laboratory also features a comprehensive honey testing system that includes up to 512 tests, reflecting the breadth of its services and capabilities in supporting product quality and safety, confirming Dubai Municipality's continuous commitment to developing laboratory tests and enhancing their efficiency and speed to achieve global leadership and contribute to consumer trust in product quality. During the festival, the laboratory showcases an innovative and advanced model for sample collection, employing the latest smart technologies to develop the laboratory system, ensuring smooth procedures, enhancing accuracy and reliability, and maintaining the highest standards of safety and quality. The festival is expected to witness the signing of a cooperation agreement with the Hatta Traders Council to launch the project, which is the first of its kind at the national level. Dr. Nasim Mohamed Rafee, the Acting Executive Director of the Environment, Health, and Safety Institution at Dubai Municipality, explained: "The Hatta Honey Festival reflects Dubai Municipality's commitment to supporting sustainable agricultural tourism and empowering local producers through organized platforms that combine economic opportunities, quality assurance, and community participation. The festival also includes outdoor spaces for educational workshops, an indoor hall, live shows, and designated areas for children's activities and four food and beverage carts. Dubai Central Laboratory is also participating in this edition of the festival with a comprehensive laboratory platform that includes the latest equipment and technologies for testing the quality and safety of honey products. Samples are collected from beekeepers using a smart robot that operates fully automatically without any human intervention, ensuring smooth procedures, enhancing accuracy and reliability, and maintaining the highest standards of safety and quality. Alongside the festival's activities, Dubai Municipality will announce an innovative project representing a qualitative leap in the quality certification system for Emirati honey. This project aims to develop a laboratory fingerprint and a digital identity for local honey, enabling the verification of its type, origin, and quality based on advanced scientific analyses. The festival kicked off today as part of the 'Hatta Winter' initiative and will run until December 31st at Hatta Hall, with free admission for all visitors. The festival comes within the framework of Dubai Municipality's continuous efforts to establish Hatta as a leading destination for agricultural and environmental tourism and to create direct economic opportunities for local producers and small business owners.
