Our story
We buy where
it grows.
Siachen Picks exists because the best fruit in Pakistan was being sold as the cheapest. This page is the whole chain, written down — who grows it, where, when, and what we refuse to do to it.
An orchard scene from the Siachen Picks promotional collection.
It started as an argument about colour
My grandmother in Skardu could not understand why the apricots in city shops were bright orange. Hers dried brown — deep, almost mahogany, sticky at the centre. She assumed the orange ones were a different fruit.
They are not. They are the same apricot, held open with sulphur dioxide so the colour survives a year in a warehouse. It is legal, it is common, and it is what most of Pakistan now thinks a dried apricot tastes like.
Meanwhile the growers who dried the honest way were being paid the least, because brown fruit looks worse in a sack at the wholesale market. The best product in the country had become the hardest to sell. That is a market failure, and market failures can be fixed by someone willing to go and buy properly.
So in our first season we bought four hundred kilos, drove it down the Karakoram Highway in a borrowed pickup, and sold it out of a spare room. We told customers exactly which valley it came from and warned them it would look wrong. Almost all of them came back.
We are bigger now, but the shape has not changed: we buy at the orchard, we pay before it is dried, and we do not touch the fruit with anything. If we cannot get it the right way in a given year, we sell out and wait for the next harvest.
Founder's name
Founder · Gilgit
How we source
Four steps, and no one else in between
Most dried fruit in Pakistan changes hands four or five times before it reaches a shelf. Ours changes hands twice: grower, then us, then you.
- 01
We buy at the orchard
Our buyer walks the same valleys every summer and pays the grower directly, in cash, on the day. No commission agent, no auction floor, no three-month wait for payment. It costs us more per kilo and it is the only reason we can ask a grower not to sulphur a crop.
- 02
It dries where it grew
Apricots, mulberries and apples are laid on flat stone rooftops and turned by hand for eight to fourteen days, depending on the valley and the year. Altitude does the work: thin air, hard sun, cold nights. Nothing is force-dried in a tunnel and nothing is dipped.
- 03
Hand-sorted in Gilgit
Every batch is tipped out on a table in our packing house and sorted by hand — three grades, by size and colour. The top grade is what we sell. The rest goes to the local market rather than into your bag with a nicer label on it.
- 04
Packed small, shipped fast
We pack to order in food-grade, light-blocking pouches, then hand it to the courier the same afternoon if you ordered before 2:00 pm PKT. Dried fruit is at its best in the first six months, so we would rather run out than sit on stock.
Our standards
What we do, and what the market does
Every line on the left is something you can check by opening the bag. That is the point of writing them down.
Siachen Picks
The usual way
- Dried in open mountain air, on the roof it grew aboveTunnel-dried in hours, often hundreds of kilometres away
- No sulphur dioxide — which is why our apricots are brown, not orangeSulphured to hold a bright orange colour for a year on a shelf
- Jams are fruit, sugar and lemon. Three thingsPectin, glucose syrup, preservative, colour, 'fruit content 35%'
- One valley per batch, named on the packBlended from wherever was cheapest that month
- Paid the grower before it was driedPaid the agent who paid the agent who paid the grower
To be fair about it: sulphur is not poison and tunnel-drying is not fraud. Both are legitimate industrial choices that make fruit cheaper, brighter and longer-lasting. We simply think they cost the thing you were buying it for.
Where it comes from
Four regions, one road down
Gilgit-Baltistan is not one place. A mulberry from Ghizer and a mulberry from Hunza are different products, and we buy them separately for that reason.
Hunza
2,400 mHalman apricots and white mulberries. The valley that made both famous.
Skardu & Shigar
2,230 mApricot kernels, walnuts and the small tart cherries that never leave the district.
Ghizer & Yasin
2,100 mBlack mulberries, buckwheat and the seabuckthorn that grows wild along the river.
Nagar & Ghanche
2,500 mDesi almonds, black goji and apples that dry sweeter than they eat fresh.
The harvest calendar
Nothing is grown under glass, so nothing is available all year. This is the honest answer to “why is it sold out?”
Jun
Cherries, early apricots
Jul
Halman apricots, white mulberries
Aug
Black mulberries, apricot kernels
Sep
Apples, walnuts, desi almonds
Oct
Seabuckthorn, black goji, buckwheat
Nov–May
Nothing new — we sell what we carried down
Taste the difference in the colour
Start with the Halman apricots. They will look darker than you expect, and that is the entire story of this company in one bite.
Questions about a specific batch? Ask us — we can usually tell you the village.