Vol. IV · Issue 02 · Spring 2026 Haarlem · Cairo
Leena OrganicaA working publication of an organic trading house
About·From the founders·Haarlem & Cairo

Three founders, two offices, one ledger.

Leena Organica was registered in Haarlem on a Thursday in January 2019. We have spent the seven years since trying to be the kind of trader we would want to sell to. What follows is a letter, an interview, and the open arithmetic.

Letters from the founders · The house and its arithmetic
A letter

From the three of us, to whoever is reading.

To the buyer, the farmer, the inspector, the colleague —

We started Leena Organica in 2025 because the three of us had stayed in touch for long enough to want to do something tangible together. We are from Menoufia in the central Nile Delta. Sherif has been in Haarlem for over a decade; Mouneer and Mohamed are in Cairo. Between us we have spent something like seventy years in engineering, software, and accountancy. The day we decided to start this firm was the day we admitted that all of that experience would be more usefully applied to a single concrete thing: moving organic produce out of Egypt and into European kitchens, with all the boring administrative discipline that requires, and with the farmer's share visible on the invoice.

We are not the first to try this. We do not claim to have invented anything. What we have done is signed forty-six growers to multi-year forward contracts, taken the audit cost onto our books, and published the per-kilo split for any product on the catalogue. The pomegranate buyer who wants to know which family in Assiut grew the fruit can ask, and we will answer. The strawberry buyer who wants to know what the grower gets paid can ask, and we will show them.

We are a working trading house. We are not a charity, not a co-op, not a marketplace. We take a margin. The margin is on the catalogue and in the colophon of this issue. We sleep better for having put it there.

Sherif Abushadi · Mouneer Rabie · Mohamed Soliman Haarlem & Cairo · March 2026

§ — The three of us

Who does what.

Sherif Abushadi, photographed at the Haarlem office, March 2026.
European desk

Sherif Abushadi

Sherif runs the European side of Leena from Haarlem. Background in engineering and software; twenty-five years building cross-border technology businesses, most of them with Mouneer. Holds the buyer conversations, the contracts, the carrier relationships, and the internal tooling that lets the three of us see the same numbers from Haarlem and from Cairo. Born in Menoufia.

Mouneer Rabie, on a partner farm visit in Beheira, November 2025.
Technology & sourcing

Mouneer Rabie

Mouneer sits between Leena's technology and its sourcing. Trained in medicine and in software; twenty-five years building products in life sciences and healthcare, including REVOSUITE, which he co-founded and still runs as CTO. Worked with Mohamed at Benchmark Middle East in Dubai; has known Sherif since they were both very young in Menoufia.

Mohamed Soliman, at the Damietta port cold store, January 2026.
On-ground operations

Mohamed Soliman

Mohamed is the founder on the ground in Egypt — fields, packhouses, distribution warehouses. Chartered accountant of twenty-six years' standing (Egyptian register 22030); former CFO at Benchmark Middle East; co-founder of Vandorv. A track record in import-export and trade alongside the accountancy work. Born in Menoufia.

An interview

Forty minutes with the three founders.

Edited and translated. Recorded over a long lunch at a café off the Gedempte Oude Gracht in Haarlem, the week the Spring Issue went to press.

Q — What is the easiest way to misunderstand what you do?
Sherif: To think we are a brand. We are a trading house. There is a difference. A brand sells a story. We sell a container of strawberries. The story is in the paperwork because we needed it to be there for our own reasons. Other people are welcome to read it.
Q — Why publish the margin?
Mouneer: Because the absence of a published margin is what allows the conventional trade to be cynical. If you do not know what a trader earns, you cannot tell whether the farmer's price is fair. If you do know, the conversation becomes a real conversation. We publish ours partly because we want the conversation, and partly because, frankly, eight cents on the euro is defensible. We have nothing to hide.
Q — What goes wrong most often?
Mohamed: Cold chain, every time. A reefer that loses power for forty minutes in a Mediterranean port can ruin a frozen lot. We have built the temperature trace into every shipment file from the start, because the moment a buyer asks for it and you cannot produce it inside fifteen minutes, you have lost both the load and the customer. That fifteen-minute number is, I would say, our most important operational metric.
Q — What do you mean when you say you co-invest with growers?
Mouneer: We mean cash on equipment that the farm owns. The Khalil sorting line in Siwa is the farm's asset. We funded it and we recover the cost out of margin, not out of farm price. If the cooperative dissolved tomorrow and never sold us another date, they would keep the line. That is the test of whether co-investment is a real thing or a piece of language.
Q — Why two offices?
Sherif: Because the European buyer wants someone they can drive to and the Egyptian grower wants someone they can drive to. Trying to do this from a single time zone, with WhatsApp, was the first year of the company. It did not scale.
Q — What is the smallest grower you will work with?
Mouneer: Half a hectare, if they are part of a cooperative we already work with. We will not sign a single half-hectare grower on their own — the audit cost is not recoverable. But the Khalil cooperative has families with fewer than two hundred palms, and they are inside the same audit umbrella. The smallest individual farm we sign on their own is around four hectares.
Q — What does the next five years look like?
Sherif: Two more lanes — Hamburg as an alternate to Rotterdam, and a Liège air corridor for the herb and soft-fruit programme. Twelve more growers in upper Egypt. The Demeter conversion programme on three of the larger date and citrus farms. The freeze-drying route via Gdansk going from one-customer-on-contract to standard catalogue. And — we hope — translating this publication into Arabic and Dutch, so the growers can read the colophon on the same Thursday as the buyers.
§ — The two offices

Haarlem, and Cairo.

Gedempte Oude Gracht 41, Haarlem. A canal-side first floor, four people, one meeting room, a kettle.

Haarlem

Leena Organica B.V.
Gedempte Oude Gracht 41
2011 GL Haarlem
The Netherlands

KVK 92 411 808 · BTW NL 8649 21 770 B01

haarlem@leenaorganica.com

14 El-Thawra Street, Heliopolis. The Cairo office, six people, a window onto the railway.

Cairo

Leena Organica Egypt LLC
14 El-Thawra St, Heliopolis
11341 Cairo
Egypt

Tax ID 622-981-114 · Commercial Reg. 184 660

cairo@leenaorganica.com

§ — The arithmetic, again

For the record: where the euro goes.

Same number as on the home page. Repeated here because it is the centre of the business and we would rather over-publish it than under-publish it.

One euro of Beheira strawberry

Net retailer price, 2026 spring season
62¢ farm
14¢ ship
6¢ cert
10¢ EU
8¢ us
62¢to the farm
14¢shipping
6¢certification
10¢EU handling
8¢Leena margin

The split varies by product — air freight on herbs is more freight-heavy, the dried hibiscus margin is wider because the audit is simpler. The general principle holds: never less than fifty-five cents to the farm.