The name on the bottle

I have been thinking about this for a long time.

Olive oil has been in my family for as long as I can remember. It was never a product to us. It was the thing on the table, at every meal, all year round. Nobody in my house ever called it special. It was just there.

I live in Maryland now. The oil stayed in Tunisia. We have the farm, the harvest and the knowledge already. What we did not have was a bottle of our own.

So we started Meema.

Who Meema is

Meema is my mother. She is very much alive, and she will almost certainly read this.

It is not a name we invented in a meeting. It is what her grandchildren call her. When our children arrived she became a grandmother, and the name stuck to her the way those names do — decided by a two-year-old, and then permanent.

The farm is the family's domain. It run as a family and maintained as a family. Meema does something very special.

She ensures the oil is on the table every day for decades and never once made a fuss about it.

That is the whole idea. This is a bottle named after a grandmother, by people who still eat at her table.

What we are actually promising

Not much, and that is on purpose.

One oil. Chemlali olives, one harvest, pressed in Tunisia. Nothing blended in from anywhere else. The bottle tells you which harvest it came from.

We will publish the lab sheet. Acidity, peroxide, polyphenols — the real numbers from the real batch. If a number disappoints us, it goes up anyway.

Shipping is included in the price. No postage surprise at the end.

We are not going to tell you that olive oil will fix your health. We are going to tell you where it grew and when it was picked. You can decide the rest.

The part I did not expect

I sent messages to people I know. That is all. No advertising, no agency, no clever campaign. Just me, my phone, and a list of names.

The replies floored me. Friends, neighbours, people I had not spoken to in years. The first orders came from Maryland, Florida and Utah, and some were from people I have never met in person.

I am not going to pretend that is a business yet. It is a few boxes. But every one of those orders was placed six months before there is any oil to send, by someone who simply took my word for it.

That is not a small thing. That is the entire thing.

Thank you

To everyone who has pre-ordered: thank you. You paid for a bottle that does not exist yet, from a name nobody has heard of, on trust alone.

We will not waste that.

The harvest is in December. We will email you the week your bottle leaves.

You can reserve a bottle from the December harvest. Shipping is included, anywhere in the United States.

Slim Hamza