Amira Al Dosari’s date ice cream venture, Ice Station, has grown to 448 flavours since she opened its doors in 2023 near Abu Dhabi‘s Zayed Port, all built around the kholas date and without a gram of refined sugar added to the base. The project took years of experimentation, broke several ice cream machines along the way, and required Al Dosari to solve a problem that most food scientists would find genuinely tricky: how to make soft-serve ice cream creamy and consistently smooth using only the natural sugars already present in the fruit.
Why Amira Al Dosari turned to the date palm
Al Dosari came to ice cream relatively late. At 53 she enrolled in an ice cream-making class, and what she found there troubled her. The course relied heavily on pre-prepared mixes, artificial colorants, and refined sugar. ‘I was thinking about what the future could be for (children) who eat a lot of sugar when they are that young. How would that affect their body?’ she told CNN‘s Youmna Sukkar.
The date was an obvious place to look. For Al Dosari, it is not simply an ingredient: the fruit is bound up with her home city’s economy, agricultural history, and long tradition of hospitality. Dates are high in natural sugars, but their fibrous structure slows the release and absorption of those sugars into the bloodstream, which has been found to lower circulating blood sugar levels compared with equivalent amounts of refined sugar.
Her chosen variety was the kholas, one of the softest and sweetest dates available. The challenge was rendering it down into something that could replicate the precise textural properties of soft-serve ice cream. Sugar in soft-serve does not only sweeten; it keeps the product smooth and scoopable at serving temperature. Finding a way to achieve that without adding any extra sugar, using only what the kholas date naturally provides, took a long time to crack.
Ice Station: Amira Al Dosari date ice cream from pit to frond
Ice Station has now served more than 100 flavours that draw on ingredients from across the date palm, according to CNN’s coverage. The date itself contributes the sweetness and the base, but Al Dosari and her team have pushed well beyond that. Date pits are roasted and ground into a coffee-like powder poured over ice cream in the style of an Italian affogato. Date palm fronds provide bitterness, antioxidant content, and a vivid green colour for a flavour the shop presents as its version of matcha.
Ghalia Al Mazrouei, Al Dosari’s daughter and a sustainability consultant, helped develop new applications for the palm. ‘We know that the entire plant is quite safe for consumption, so it was just more about how we could present this in a way that is enjoyable for everyone?’ Al Mazrouei told CNN. The whole-plant approach keeps waste low and gives the Ice Station menu a coherence that goes beyond novelty: every element on the menu traces back to a single tree.
Al Dosari founded Ice Station in 2023, and the flavour count now stands at 448, a figure that points to genuine product development rather than a fixed menu. The pace of that development has not been frictionless. Reaching the right formulation for kholas-based soft-serve required the kind of iterative testing that destroyed multiple machines before producing a result she was satisfied with.
The business sits at an intersection that is easy to describe but harder to execute: a product rooted in cultural identity, built around a crop with real nutritional properties, and positioned against a global soft-serve industry that defaults to refined sugar and artificial additives. None of that means Ice Station is without commercial pressures or that scaling a 448-flavour menu is straightforward. But the foundation Al Dosari has built, one ingredient, one palm tree, one Abu Dhabi tradition, gives it something most ice cream shops do not have.
Ice Station’s location near Abu Dhabi Ports‘ Zayed Port puts it close to one of the emirate’s main commercial and visitor hubs, with Al Dosari’s next challenge being to bring flavour number 449 to the menu.
