We were lucky to catch up with Rana Kamal recently and have shared our conversation below.

Rana, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

My brother Khalid and I grew up in an entrepreneurial household. Our baba (father) immigrated from Jerusalem in the mid-70’s and opened up one of the first Middle Eastern restaurants in Minnesota in 1979, The Mediterranean Cruise Cafe. It was in this small cafe where he introduced hummus, baba ganoush, tabouli, falafel and other middle eastern staples to a predominately white community.

Fast forward many years later, in 2015, Khalid and I were working together in the restaurant. We both knew we wanted to do something beyond the restaurant and that’s where the idea for Baba’s sparked. We grew up eating our mama’s home cooked Palestinian food as well as the best hummus whether that be in our family restaurant or back home in Jerusalem. But we had always felt that our food was either mis or unrepresented in our community and especially in mainstream grocery stores. Middle Eastern products like hummus were either in specialty grocery stores or they were brands by big box retailers. They didn’t represent us nor did they resonate with us.

We wanted to change that with Baba’s and share with our community what real, authentic hummus taste like- especially being made by makers who are from the Middle East where hummus originates. But we also wanted the brand and the products to be representative of us- Palestinian Americans. Although both our parents are Palestinian immigrants- we were born and raised in the US, but grew up with strong Arab culture and traditions embedded in us. Our product line features our traditional hummus which was created in the restaurant 44 years ago, but we also wanted to create recipes that blend American and Middle Eastern flavor staples- like our sriracha or za’atar hummus.

After a couple years of iterating our recipe, we launched in 2018 with three flavors. We went from grocery store to grocery store, handing out samples and pitching our products. A few amazing co-ops took a chance on us from the get-go and we started to grow.

Today we’re all over Minnesota and Wisconsin and are excited to continue growing.

Rana, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am the daughter of immigrants. A wife. A mother. A dreamer. A creative. And an accidental entrepreneur.

I went to school for journalism and worked as a freelance broadcast reporter in Jerusalem after graduating from the University of St. Thomas. I loved being a reporter and having the privilege to share the stories of my people in my motherland. I look back and know this will always be some of the most profound years of my life.

I went on to progress in my journalism career as a TV host for the CW Twin Cities where I would win a Mid-west Emmy for my story on Syrian refugees. During my time at the CW, my brother and I started Baba’s as a side hustle. We had no idea where it was going to go and if the brand would resonate with anyone. Our hummus passion project was a slow burn in the beginning. We were working on our recipe development and creating the brand all while managing our busy lives. Eventually in 2018, when our small business came into fruition, we took a leap of faith and launched Baba’s. We didn’t know how it was going to go, but we were hopefully.

The early years were a hustle. I would be working at the CW during the day and after work, I’d race over to the commercial kitchen where we were making our products, put an apron and hairnet on and make and package hummus with my brother and mom. I’d race to pick my girls up from daycare right before they closed at 6:30 pm and quickly make dinner, only to repeat the same thing the next day. And on the weekends, we were running from store to store sampling our products.

It was a crazy time in our lives, but the hustle proved to work. We started to steadily grow from 20 stores to 50 to 100 and now we are in over 350 stores.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We have manufactured our products since day one. When we launched Baba’s, we started off in a commercial kitchen which gave us the ability to slowly scale our business on a tight budget. When our business began to grow, we were met with challenges producing out of a commercial kitchen: storage space; kitchen availability and lack of equipment. Our promising growth prompted us to make the decision to build our own production facility in the basement of our family restaurant. We built a 800 square foot facility to accommodate our needs as a local hummus brand in the Twin Cities. We bought our own equipment and hired a small production team. It was an exciting time! Our small, but mighty production facility allowed us to control our environment to ensure the upmost quality assurance for our products. It also gave us the ability to run our production and distribution out of the same building.

We are now starting to out grow our space once again and are in the process of revamping a 10,000 square foot production facility in Minneapolis. This will allow us to continue to expand and optimize our business as we scale into more and more states.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

When we decided to launch Baba’s it was because we knew we had an amazing product that we wanted to share with our community. Not only is our hummus an authentic family recipe, but it’s the best hummus we had ever had. When we launched, we weren’t sure how far our side hustle was going to take us, but it was our product that spoke for itself. All of our marketing up until now has been organic and grassroots. It has been word of mouth that has grown our passion project into a real small business with legs and so much promise. We have so much gratitude for our amazing community that has shown us love and support from the very beginning. They are the reason why we have kept growing year after year.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lovebabas.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eatbabas/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eatbabas
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rana-kamal-45351964/
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@eatbabas

Image Credits
Professional photos credited: Christine Armbruster