We started Leena Organica in the spring of 2025 to do one specific thing — move organic produce between Egyptian growers we know personally and European buyers who care where things come from. The house works in two directions. Out of Egypt come strawberries from Beheira, artichokes from Nubaria, medjool dates from Siwa, hibiscus from Aswan and Qena, fresh herbs from Wadi Natrun, frozen molokhia and okra from our partner processor in Sharqia. Going the other way, we bring in seed potato from Friesland, hybrid vegetable seed from the Westland glasshouses, drip irrigation from Twente, and the climate-control hardware that lets our growers compete on quality rather than only on price.
The work is mostly old-fashioned. We sign forward contracts with named farms a season ahead, we share the certification cost when a farm joins the program, and we put our name on the paperwork from the field to the distribution centre. A box that leaves Damietta on a Tuesday morning arrives at Rotterdam on the following Thursday, and we know, to the lot, what is in it and who picked it. This is not romance — it is simply the only way we know to do this job without becoming the sort of firm we set out not to be.
What follows on these pages is the catalogue, the people, the routes, and the registry numbers. If anything here is useful to you, please write.
Out of Egypt, we handle organic fresh fruit and vegetables, IQF frozen lines, and selected dried goods. The fresh programme runs from late October through to June. Frozen runs all year on contract volumes built against the previous summer's pack. Dried — dates, hibiscus, herbs — ships year-round, mostly to specialty wholesalers and to one large Dutch retailer who has been a customer since our first week.
We carry the certifications that European buyers expect: EU Organic, Demeter on roughly a third of the programme, GlobalG.A.P. IFA version six, SMETA four-pillar for the bigger farms, BRCGS Food version nine for the IQF processor, ISO 22000 across the chain, and ISTA seed tags for the inputs we move the other direction. Where a farm is too small to carry a certification alone, we carry it for them and write the cost into the margin.
Going into Egypt, we are the only Dutch counterparty for several of our customers, which is to say we take responsibility for the freight and the cold chain and the paperwork at both ends. The product set is narrow and deliberate: seed potato cultivars suited to the Egyptian winter window — Spunta, Hermes, Lady Rosetta — hybrid vegetable seed bred for hot-climate yields, greenhouse film and irrigation hardware, and a small flow of dairy cultures from Friesland for a Cairo cheesemaker we like.
We are three people in Haarlem and four in Cairo. We answer our own telephones. The list of growers and the list of buyers fits comfortably on one sheet of paper, and we mean to keep it that way.
Festival cultivar grown by the Hosny family on twenty-four hectares outside Edfina, picked the morning of shipment and at Rotterdam reefer terminal nine days later. IQF whole and sliced from the same farm runs into the European frozen-fruit programme from March through July.
From three groves on the western edge of Siwa, harvested in late October and graded by hand. The jumbo grade goes to a specialty importer in Utrecht; the large grade fills our own retail packs in two-hundred-and-fifty gram cartons under our customer's private label.
Karkadeh from a cooperative of fourteen smallholders in Aswan and Qena, sun-dried in the field and graded at our partner facility in Esna. Sold to herbal-tea blenders in Amsterdam and Hamburg; we keep a small reserve for a Dutch kombucha company we have worked with since 2025.
Spunta and Hermes from the Bakker-Visser nursery near Joure, shipped against forward contracts placed in the summer for the Egyptian autumn planting. We handle the phytosanitary file, the plant passport, and the Alexandria customs clearance. Lady Rosetta runs in smaller volumes for crisp-grade contract growers in Minya.
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The Beheira strawberry programme is past its peak but still good for another three weeks; we are running two pallets a day on the Damietta – Rotterdam reefer until the heat closes the window in mid-June. The Nubaria artichoke season finished on the twelfth; the last container left Alexandria the following Friday. Pomegranate is still six weeks away — the orchards at Wadi Halfa are flowering well and the September harvest looks honest.
On the inbound side, we have placed the autumn seed-potato contracts and the first shipment moves out of Rotterdam in the second week of August. There is one Spunta lot still available; we would rather it went to a grower who already knows the cultivar than to a new account.
If you would like to be on the next-season list, write to desk@leenaorganica.com. We update it slowly.
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