On Sourcing
A house that puts its name on the paperwork has to know what is in the box. What follows is how we actually work — who we buy from, how the certification cost is shared, and where the line is drawn between a Leena lot and one we will not carry.
The Egyptian growing belt that matters to a European organic buyer is not large. It runs in a thin curve from the Mediterranean coast at Beheira, south-east through the Delta to Sharqia and Ismailia, then west across the desert reclamation lands at Nubaria and Wadi Natrun, and south along the Nile to Minya, Assiut, Qena and Aswan, with two outliers at the oases — Siwa in the west and Fayoum in the depression south of Cairo. Across those eleven regions we work, at the time of writing, with forty-six farms. Some are families with a single hectare and a poly-tunnel; others are second-generation reclamation farms with three hundred hectares and their own packhouse. The smallest grower on the list ships us forty kilograms of mint a week. The largest is the strawberry programme at Edfina, which moves two pallets a day for eight months of the year.
We do not choose growers by tonnage. We choose them by whether the farm is run by someone who will pick up the telephone when there is a problem in the field. That is a slow filter — one of us goes to the farm at least twice before we sign anything, usually in different seasons, and we ask the same questions each time. What did you spray last year? Who paid for the last audit? Where does the irrigation water come from? Show me the seed receipts. The questions are not interesting in themselves; they are interesting because the answers come back differently each time the farm is visited, and the differences tell us what we need to know.
Mouneer, who runs sourcing, spent his first ten working years as a field agronomist for one of the larger Egyptian export houses, and he came out of that decade with a list of growers he wanted to work with directly. Most of the farms on our list now were on that list then. We started with eight farms in 2025; we added eleven more in the first six months, then slowed deliberately. A new farm joins the programme only after a full season of trial volume, and only if our existing growers are willing to share their packhouse and their certifier with the newcomer. That last condition does the most work — it means the existing growers vouch for the new one, and it means the new grower is not stepping into the volume of an old grower.
The European organic certification is not free. A first-time audit on a five-hectare farm runs to roughly two thousand four hundred euro all in, against revenue that might be twenty thousand euro across the whole season. The smaller our growers are, the harder that arithmetic gets. So from the first year of the firm we have written the audit cost into our buying margin and paid the certifier directly. The grower receives an invoice for zero, and a copy of the inspection report. The farm holds its own certificate — we are not the certificate-holder — but the bill comes to us. This is the part of the model that took longest to argue out with our accountant in Haarlem. It is also the part the growers tell us made the difference.
“Before Leena, we had the organic practice and not the paper. Now we have both, and we did not have to take it out of the family.” — Anwar Hosny, Edfina, Beheira
Every box that leaves an Egyptian farm under our programme carries a lot identifier — region, product, year, week, sequence. The same identifier is on the pallet wrap, on the pre-shipment inspection note, on the bill of lading, on the customs entry at Rotterdam, and on the delivery note that arrives at the customer's distribution centre. A buyer who wants to know which farm picked the strawberries in the punnet on a Wednesday afternoon in Utrecht can read it from the lot code in seven seconds, and we will send them the inspection report by return of email. We do this not because traceability is a marketing position but because once you start handling certified-organic produce you find out that you cannot do the job without it.
There is a sort of produce we do not carry, and it is worth being clear about it. We do not carry conventional produce alongside organic on the same paperwork. We do not co-mingle organic from different farms in the same lot if the certifications differ. We do not write a customer's private label onto a box of fruit that is not from the farm we said it was from. We have walked away from two contracts in the first eighteen months over the third of those rules. It is not a moral position — it is a structural one. The house only works if the box says what is in it.
If you are an Egyptian organic grower reading this, the answer to “how do I sell to Leena” is the same as it was in our first month. Write to Mouneer in Cairo at sourcing@leenaorganica.com. Tell us the region, the crop, the certification status, the harvest window, the volume you can hold in a season, and the names of two buyers you have shipped to before. We will come and see the farm. If we say yes, we will start at one pallet a week and grow it from there. The conversation moves at the speed of the growing year, not at the speed of email.
— and sixteen further smallholders working through these cooperatives.