Founder Feature: Bilal Othman of Huwa

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0:58I think the core guiding principle of HUA is like, how can I stay connected to back home to my cousins back home? Because like, as you get older, like the nature of things is like you get married, they get married, they have kids and like, there's distance that forms and that's very natural. And the second, how can I like stay, have an excuse to like, essentially hang out with my dad on a random moment. And that's kind of the core ethos of HUA. I think it's just like, I grew up at a certain age where I realized, oh, if I want these things to continue and I want them to be for the next generation, where you have a connection back home or you even just view the thing of like working with your dad.

1:32It's a very big ethos, I think, in like the neighborhood I grew up in. You kind of need to act on it now. Hey, everybody. This is Caitlin Bricker, editor at Startup CPG. We are back with another founder feature. Everybody make space in your pantry because today we're talking with Bilal Offman, founder of Hua. Hua is an olive oil brand with deep roots. Oal's family has been nurturing olive trees in Palestine for hundreds of years. Their extra virgin olive oil is some of the purest in the world, handcrafted with the indigenous traditions they are striving to keep alive. I left this conversation feeling inspired by the brand's family focus from trees to bottle.

2:12I hope you loved this episode as much as I loved the unforgettable brand experience of receiving my first bottle of Hua. You'll have to listen in to learn more. Enjoy.

2:26Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin, and today I'm here with Bilal, often founder of HUA. Bilal, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So excited to have you here. I feel like your olive oil is such a standout product because I have never seen an olive oil with the branding and packaging that your brand has. So I'm really excited to dive in and get to know you and your brand. So to start off, I'd love for you to introduce us to Hua. For anybody who's listening and isn't familiar with your brand, can you tell us what Hua is? Yeah, so Hua is basically existed in my family for 100 years at different variations.

3:08My family's been harvesting olives in Palestine for as long as anyone can know so long that it's like past written history. It's like oral history, basically. So yeah, basically what Huay is, is my family makes good olive oil from Palestine. We've been farmers for generations and generations. I'm the first generation to basically not farm. I work at an ad agency. So like the opposite of farming. And yeah, we just kind of bought it to the US. We've been selling it at the back of like mosque parking lots in my neighborhood growing up. And then we won a community grant from the Queen's Economic Development Fund to actually put it into a bottle.

3:38And that's like what you see in front of you today. This is going to be such a good story. I already know. So before we get deeper into your brand, I want to get more into you since you're the foundation of the brand. I understand that Boal Othman is not your full name. Can you share your full name and a bit of the history behind it? Yeah. So the way Aribi, specifically Palestinian names work, is like it's like your name and then your dad's name and then your grandpa's name and your great grandpa's name. And it goes on and on. And like my full name is like Bilal, Omar Othman, Salah Othman, Mohammed, Smear.

4:08It goes on and on and on. And then there's like a series of names lost in history. And then it goes to Huwawshah, which is part of where Hua comes from. And then it goes to Teriyah, which is like the clan name. So it goes on a very long, essentially, a bunch of names listed at different people. And every single person in that lineage has been a farmer or existed in like agricultural communities in Palestine. So that's the background of my name. That was your question, right? The background of my name? Yes. You answered it perfectly. All right. So speaking of names, why Hua? I know you just touched on it a little bit, but I'd love to hear some more about that.

4:42First of all, it's cute. Hua, four letters. You know, it's like, I like W's and A's. Like, they look nice together. So that's like part of it. The other part of it is Huaushe is kind of a funny name to have as a family name, right? Because the name of it comes from the root word Huaushe in Arabic, which means like people who start a problem. So like, I think it's a nickname that someone gave our family like way back that like is a negative connotation. But like someone was like really stoked on that negative connotation. And it was like, yo, our family name is the Huocha now. So that's like the backdrop, I guess, of like the Huocha name.

5:18And we just took that and just put Hua. It's also like we could be corny and be like, we disrupting olive oil, Hua disruption, et cetera, causing problems. I don't know. But yeah, it's just basically a family name. I do agree that it's very cute. And it is just it's an outlier in olive oil, I will say, not only with the branding and packaging, but with the name. It's not like it's not a mouthful to me. It rolls off the tongue, which is not easy for me because I feel like I get tongue tied very often. So great job. Thank you. So talk to me about your lineage. What makes you an outlier when it comes to olives?

5:52I understand that your family has a history of being olive farmers. So why are you different? Yeah, I think biggest factors was raising the States. So my dad was lucky enough to like, basically everyone has been an olive farmer, right? Like doing it for a very long time. My dad grew up most of his life basically doing agriculture of some kind, whether it's like herding sheep, like being an olive farmer, like harvesting grain, like all their memories. Like when I talked to my dad, his childhood memories are like, it was almond season. And during almond season, we did this. And like, it'll be like stories that are always rooted back to kind of the harvest cycles of Palestine.

6:27The reason I didn't kind of go down that path is just because I was raised in the States. I was raised in little Palestine, Chicago, and like a very small immigrant pocket community. But I was always exposed to oil. So the way it works is every October is olive harvest season. So the whole community goes down in Palestine. Everyone's picking it. I'm in school, so I know it's happening. But like my dad's not obviously sending me back to go help anyone. But November hits and basically these 17 liter tanks of oil come at our door and we start eating fresh olive oil. And like when we first get it, it's like a big deal in the family.

6:58Like my mom makes certain dishes. Like my dad is like super excited about like, yo, this year's harvest was good. This year's harvest was like average. the rain was etc etc so even though i grew up in the diaspora like it still was a major part of the way the family saw the like yearly schedule i love that i feel like i could picture just this bright luscious green oil arriving in a tank it must have been like a real celebration to see that show up for your family no 100 especially because it was like yo like that's the moment that i think even your father especially like man like there's not really ways that they kind of dispense information about their lives well like they don't like sit you down here's the story it's always like through the vehicle of something.

7:35And it was always like he would tell us these stories like being a kid or like what his dad was like or what even like family members that I know from back home, but like what they were like at like 20 that it would pull things out of him, which I always really liked about it. Can you share anything specific when you think about an olive oil memory? I'm curious if there's anything that stands out in your mind. Try to think of any that like I heard that I think are like funny. The one that I like is like my dad's older brother, who's like a big part of Hua, right? He's my uncle. He was kind of like a bully to my dad.

8:09So basically like while my uncle wouldn't be looking, he'd like sneak in like cigarettes and basically you would live on the olive grove in that two week period to go harvest, especially ones that are super far off in the Jordan Valley that are no longer accessible. So he'd basically be trying to see cigarettes or something like that. And then like when he'd get caught or in trouble, he'd always blame my dad. So I feel like that's the one that I like because when you see these two men hang out, they're objectively like, One's 67, the other's 63. They're older dudes. And like they still feel like children kind of bickering at each other in a way that's very cute and wholesome.

8:42And you kind of see those stories like, oh, I kind of see the dynamic of like him being kind of a little bit of a bully too. In like a wholesome way, like an older brother sibling. That's really funny. I see the smile that it's bringing to your face. And it's like bringing me joy hearing that story because I can totally picture that happening not knowing your dad or your uncle at all. Yeah, both are funny people. That's awesome. So what prompted you to take the olive oil and create Hua? What was the moment where you thought this needs to be a brand? Yeah, I think the core guiding principle of Hua is like, how can I stay connected to back home to my cousins back home?

9:16Because like as you get older, like the nature of things is like you get married, they get married, they have kids and like there's distance that forms. And that's very natural. And the second, how can I like stay, have an excuse to like essentially hang out with my dad on a random moment? And that's kind of the core ethos of it was I think it's just like I grew up at a certain age where I realized, oh, if I want these things to continue and I want them to be for the next generation where you have a connection back home or you even just view the thing of like working with your dad, it's a very big ethos.

9:41I think in like the neighborhood I grew up in, you kind of need to act on it now. So we had these basically like what used to be is like kind of what I mentioned is every October 17 liter tanks, people in the neighborhood started hearing our region is known for good olives. People be like, OK, bring me a tank over when you guys get it and we'll pay you guys. and it kind of catapulted into kind of being a bigger and bigger thing where, you know, we're bringing in a couple dozen, like, you know, 60, 70 tanks for people in the neighborhood. And like my dad's sending me off to the north side of Chicago to drop it off to some random guy who I don't know.

10:08And it was like, OK, let's formalize this. This is like good oil. People like it. It's a fun thing to do with my dad. Like, how can we actually make this more legit into a business and bring in the skills that like I built, like being in America to like work with the family, essentially. Like I was texting my cousin earlier today and it was just Like probably wouldn't have been texting him today if it wasn't for Hua. That's kind of the backstory. I love that. We'll be right back. What's up, friends? Years ago, I opened an account with one of the old banks, but they were stuck in the past. The online banking was terrible.

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12:01So would you say that Hua is a family-owned and run business? Oh, 100%. Like the whole point of it at some level isn't to make money. I mean, obviously, like we all want money. Like I was looking pretty obvious, but like the core of it is literally just like, how could we hang out as a family? And if we keep that as a guiding principle, I think everything else would just fall into place. That is so good and so refreshing to hear. I feel like I do not hear that often enough. I actually have not heard that yet. And I just love that so much. It definitely sounds like you're building quite the legacy with the brand within your family.

12:34And then for people who adopt the brand too and become who are all of oil users in their household. I love that. So this bottle, I think I've talked about it already a few times. I'm kind of obsessed with it. I feel like there's an olive oil craze. I would say the market is kind of saturated. But again, Hua is an outlier for me anyway, because it just looks so different from anything else that you'd see on a shelf. So walk me through your design from the shape of the bottle to the way it dispenses, the cartoon, the stickers. This is unlike any experience I've had with a brand in general before.

13:13So talk to me about this. Yeah, I think it was really fun to make because it was like the first exercise of like, okay, how do we do this as a family? And it's like kind of a silly thing to go bring. Like when I showed my aunt the bottle, she's like, bro, this is like one dish. Like this is not a portion of oils. And it was really fun to just like talk to everyone in the family and like get their ideas. And this is genuinely like aggregation of everyone's memories, I feel like in a design. So, I mean, there was some part of like traditional market research, right? Like, okay, I realized like, hey, if you want to be on a retail shelf, like you got to look unique to stick out.

13:45Like that was a key learning point. But then from there, he went and left for like, OK, how do we get the whole family involved in this process? Because that's creative energy that's never been tapped. Right. Like no one's tapping in a 65 year old Palestinian woman to get her take on design. And I think what we came across is like components of different people's memories of oil. So, for instance, it's a clear bottle, right, that looks like a baby bottle. And the reason is, is my sister called this out of like when we used to get oil, when you go to Palestine in the summer, you always get back things of like zata, cheese, oil, like whatever it is, like everyone's suitcase is always stuffed with these things.

14:16And the way that it's packaged is always in reused like soda two liter or one liter packages. So like we were like, okay, how can we take that like idea of a repurposed bottle into the design of the oil? The stickers came from like, I was talking to my cousin about like, what's our most distinctive memories as kids when we were in like, basically like when I had to go visit Palestine, like one of them was, it was a world cup happening. It was like 06. And it was like a thing to go collect the stickers of the different players in the World Cup. And we're like, okay, like, let's, let's try to figure out how to incorporate that.

14:45So it's kind of just like the design itself. Like, yeah, we worked with an artist overseas to basically draw it out. But like the ethos when we gave him the creative brief was like, you'll make it feel like the magazines and the like kids storybooks that we used to have as kids, like basically this channel called Space Tunes that redid like animes from Japan and like would dub them in Arabic, but then like cut out a bunch of scenes with like the story is like, like there's entire animes without like main characters in them, because like etc making a like islamic and wholesome for kids and like that's the kind of art style and art direction we wanted so that's the backstory of the design to find the bottle was like a thing within itself where we just like scavenged the internet to find unique shaped bottles and this is actually like a honey bottle from china that we then realized we could put like insert a disc in to be an orifice reducer and the first like couple thousand bottles were just like manually inserting a disc and like destroyed my body but like it was worth it because the design was cool and now we finally have a mold where i don't need to insert an orifice reducer are you over engineered the design but it was worth it because the way we see it is like from a business side i guess it's like it's marketing within itself like you open it it's an experience you have a relationship with a product that you don't have anyway and then on top of that like it's very you know shareable or whatever you want to call it but that's how we justify the overkill design and we're still trying to figure out production for it like it's really hard to figure out how to do this efficiently because it probably we're not making money probably per bottle because of how complicated the design is, but it's worth it.

16:08Again, I just love it. And you mentioned that it's an experience when you open up that bottle. I did not realize what I was getting myself into when I got the bottle. Great. It's like a paper label. Like, okay, but now there's a seam here. There's a perforated line. What is going on underneath the label? I have never had a brand experience like I had with Hula. Yes, people send stickers, people send swag, but it's always in the box. It's not part of the product. And for that experience of unwrapping the bottle, the label comes off and then you can decorate the bottle if you want to. I loved it.

16:47Thank you. I generally appreciate it. So well done. I've gone to restaurants before. They give you olive oil, they give you sauces, you dip the bread, you dip whatever you have in there, and you might be able would taste like a different flavor profile in the olives depending where they come from in the world. So tell us about Hua. If there are any people out there that haven't tried Hua or they're thinking about trying it, what would they taste with Hua compared to maybe more mainstream olive oil brands? Yeah. So the agricultural process that you go through to make oil is what makes a unique flavor of oil.

17:25I didn't realize how unique it was until I went back and like I talked to my like basically people in Italy. I'm like, oh, how do you guys produce? And I'm like, oh, this is done in a completely different way unless it's done at a very small batch form. And we're doing it at like a very high quantity, right? So the flavor of it initially is very fruity up front and then it's like peppery, almost spicy in the back. And the reason you get that is kind of what I mentioned, the way it's harvested. So first you start from the tree. The trees that we're planting are the same ones my dad planted, the same ones my great-great-grandpa planted, etc.

17:52It goes on and on and on and we're not planting since the GMO5 tree. It's basically the same tree, same trees and we're just planting their kids and like that's kind of how most of the olive groves are built. Some of the trees actually go back all the way to like the Roman Empire. Like we have like Byzantium trees and there's these massive husks and like the veins on it or the husk is like almost veiny and it's like this beautiful tree. And some of the oil that you might get is like in this bottle like might be roomy trees and some of them might be newly planted trees. It's completely rain fed and there's no chemical fertilizer.

18:21So it's dry irrigation basically when we actually go down to harvest it everything is handpicked we're talking about extensive as it gets is kind of handpicking machines that are like basically fingers and it like kind of whatever it like hits the tree and it like takes it out and essentially what we're doing is picking out the most ripe fruit compare that to what like traditional olive companies at the scale like the uc on a grocery store do is they attach a giant like machine to the husk they shake it and everything that comes out is basically what's in your oil so in that sense it's very unique.

18:49Then we take it down to the community press. And the way we're doing it basically makes it that like the oil in this bottle is either from the same tree or the tree right next to it. It's not when we say single origin, we mean genuinely single origin. Some people say single origin and be like, hey, you know, we're single origin and it's the size of the entire like the size of Chicago. It'll be like that single origin, any tree from this region. And it's like, no, we're actually very focused in on making sure that the oil press within that tree, the tree adjacent or like two trees over. It's not kind of looking at it from a very et cetera, et cetera way.

19:18and then when we go to presser obviously pressing it very cold very slow if you're not buying cold pressed oil basically what they're doing is they're pressing at a super high temperature olives are basically fruit and olive oils in some sense like fruit juice pressing at a high temperature basically cooking it before it even gets in the bottle is how we see it so that's basically what makes the oil special and that's why you get that flavor the last factor the most important factor is just brush like this oil harvested in October it's in front of you today I don't want to sell oil that is like two, three years old like the majority of other oils that sit on shelves like the way it's done is these companies buy massive amounts of olives at like very low cost from farmers.

19:52And then they like squeeze it in a mill. And then like it's a commodity sold the way that we sell petrol or sell, you know, any other commodity. And at the end of the day, this is fruit juice. Like this is not a raw resource in that sense. So yeah, that's kind of why you get that flavor. We'll be right back. Are you going to crush it on Amazon this year? It's such an important channel, but it's so hard to do alone and most agencies are a total ripoff. We can't afford$5 ,000 a month and a commission on our sales. They just don't get it. That's why I love our partners at Daybreak. They are full service, meaning they do the creative work, the listings, the logistics, and of course, all the ads, all with the most reasonable retainer out there.

20:30I work with them personally. I'm so grateful we have such a good partner to recommend out to you, our community. They do evaluate your product first to see if it might be a fit. So if you want them to have a look, email them. startupcpg at daybreak.agency and they'll do a free audit for you. Good luck, everyone.

20:50So it truly is a craft. And I also just love picturing in my mind this idea of single origin, but then this generation of trees, of olive trees that have been planted that you're then just like really just taking from the family. So this is a it's a family run business through and through. even down to the trees. That is just so special. And there's also generations within who's picking the olives, right? Like you'll see a six-year-old out here, like, you know, sorting the olives on the ground. And then like a 70-year-old grandma, like my aunt or something like that, who's very old, like she'll still be at the olive grove just chilling.

21:28And like her daughters and sons are like, you know what I'm saying? It's like the entire lineage is always there picking it also, which is really nice and awesome. That it really is just so special. I feel like the story that you're telling me now about your family and what you've been doing with the olives is like what many people dream of or it just seems like it's something you'd read about but it's not a reality and the fact that you're actually doing it and keeping that alive is i'm very impressed jealous isn't the word but maybe you get what i mean i wish i had something like that in my family no i mean i'm jealous too right like i'm not there i'm in the diaspora i'll go in october i don't have the core childhood memories the way that like my cousins do.

22:10But it's like, oh, it's special. And it's like, oh, if I can maybe I didn't have it, but if I can give my kids a version of it, like that's like the dream. Right. It's really cool that you've taken something that could be maybe just verbally passed down. And now you're giving everybody something physical that they can pass down to each other for generations to come. Hopefully. Love it. So if there are any retailers who are listening to this episode, what is one thing that you'd want them to walk away with and keep in mind when they're considering Hua for their shelves? I think the biggest thing is your consumers once, especially as like people that are elevating the things they want ingredients wise, people are starting to realize that olive oil is more should be in the produce section and shouldn't be in the aisle in the back next to the canned beans.