Youmna and Layla started their business when this part of Lebanon was isolated from Beirut by the Civil War in 1989. It was a bit of an accident and a bit of madness, is how Layla remembers their business coming to life. Recipes were gathered by word of mouth from friends or family. An aunt who had spent time in Egypt taught them how to make the perfect almond stuffed dates. Layla’s husband came up with the idea for mulberry preserves. And Uncle Timothy, who happened to be writing his memoirs around the time they began, was able to advise them on all of the logistics and chemistry involved in canning since he had a degree from Cornell in nutrition chemistry. 

More than just a story of tasty products, this is a story of family and community. Rasheed was the man who helped the sister’s grandfather maintain the land here. His son Abdu helped their father and is still working in the factory today. And Abdu’s three daughters, Marlene, Norma, and Nada all are integral parts of the Mymoune team. The sisters employ women from the surrounding area to help do the work, some of these women being the sole breadwinners in their families. The work is still all by hand and is tedious, meticulous. A deaf/mute woman spends all of her days making the beautiful candied orange and lemon peels that Mymoune sells. She has her own workspace and carefully slices each piece of rind to the right size, making sure the bitterness is gone and sugaring it at just the right moment before allowing it to dry on racks in the sun. 

Mymoune is a play on words – taking from the mouneh (the pantry) but also meaning blessed by God. “But you’ve got to know how to catch those blessings,” Youmna quickly said. They have been blessed, but they’ve also worked hard and that work has paid off as 24 of their products have won Great Taste Awards in the UK and chefs like Yottam Ottolenghi and Annisa Hellou recommend them. Their mulberry jam took the gold medal in the annual Good Taste Awards there in its first year on the market. It was one of their first products when they started in 1989, mulberries (or toot as they are known here) being bountiful and delicious on their family’s land. Not all of the ingredients Mymoune uses are from this region. They proudly source the best products from where they are grown the best. One crop they imported specially for its bestness was Damascus Rose bushes which they now grown on their land for their delicious rose jam, rose water, and rose syrup. There’s nothing like Damascus roses they repeated over and over.

There was a time when women only had power through their pantry, Youmna tells me. The only right they had was to build their pantries, fill them, and lock them up at night. Only the woman had the key. They decided how to distribute their precious food, to whom, how much. Their power, their only power was through food. These sisters have capitalized on this idea and are now passing it down to the next generation of women. Layla’s daughter Randa is now the full-time manager of the brand, working tirelessly on the development of new items, a process that takes full year from idea to shelf. Mymoune indeed. 

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