Our grandfather was a collector.
He worked the Boswellia stands of the Ufeyn highlands from around 1960, as his family had before him. He knew which trees were ready and which needed another season. He knew that a tree tapped too hard gives you one good year and then nothing. He carried resin down from the mountain, sorted it by hand, and sold it at market to men who sold it on to other men.
He never saw what happened to it after that.
That was the arrangement for a century, and for the most part it still is. Somalia produces some of the finest frankincense on earth and sells it as a raw commodity. In 2024, all the frankincense essential oil Europe imported from Somalia came to less than one tonne. The resin leaves. The value is added somewhere else.
We started Dalmaydi to change where that line falls.
Our distillation facility is in Bosaso, 135 kilometres from the harvesting area.
Resin is collected in the Ufeyn highlands, brought down by road, and distilled within days of arriving. It does not sit in a warehouse waiting for a buyer. It does not cross an ocean in a container to be distilled by someone who has never seen the tree.
Ufeyn highlands to Bosaso, 135 km.
This matters commercially before it matters environmentally.
Frankincense is routinely mislabelled in international trade. Boswellia frereana is sold as carterii. Ethiopian papyrifera is sold as Somali material. We buy from the harvesters we know, in the region we come from, and we distil it ourselves — so when we state a species on a certificate of analysis, we are stating something we witnessed rather than something we were told.
Resin degrades. Oleoresin that has spent six months in transit and three months in a warehouse does not distil like resin that came off the mountain last week. Our proximity is the reason our oils test the way they do.
Every batch we ship can be traced to a harvest area and a collection period, because the chain between the tree and the still has two steps in it instead of six.
Distilling at origin means we ship oil rather than resin. Frankincense yields a small fraction of its weight as essential oil, so a kilo of oil distilled in Bosaso replaces tens of kilos of resin freighted across the world to be distilled elsewhere. The shortest journey in the supply chain is the one that never happens.
We distil in Somalia, 135 km from the harvest area. Resin reaches the still within days of collection.
Three generations in the same trade, in the same region, with the same harvesting families.
Independent GC-MS analysis. Certificate of analysis issued on request. IFEAT member.
Dalmaydi is a producer, not a trading house. We buy from the harvesters directly and we distil what we buy.
We work with harvesting families in the region our own family comes from, on the understanding that the trees have to be there next season and the season after that. We test our oils by gas chromatography at independent laboratories and issue a certificate of analysis for any batch on request. We are a member of IFEAT.
Three generations ago, our grandfather sold resin at market and never learned where it went.
Today we distil that same resin, 135 kilometres from where it was collected, and we know the name of every buyer it goes to.
Request a quotation for oils or resins. We will advise on availability, grades, and lead times.
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