Zwïta

Zwïta We craft ancestral Tunisian foods that make your life tastier.

08/12/2026

Our late grandma's harissa — a thick garlicky Tunisian sun-dried chili paste to spice up your cooking. This is the last chapter of our factory series.

Up until earlier this year, we were making product out of a chocolate sauce kitchen and renting a second warehouse twenty minutes away.

Then came the fake engineer. The demolition scam. The concrete disaster. Contractors ghosting us. A boiler room that almost cost us a fortune. Two hundred and fifty feet of city sidewalk to redo. A clogged toilet failing our first health inspection. A destroyed sewer line. A canceled trip to Tunisia. A frozen water heater. A pump that didn't work. Weeks of begging the city to fix their sewer.

Then one day, after so many hurdles and mishaps, things slowly but surely fell into place.

The pump pumped. The line ran. Jars filled. Caps went on. No spills. No clogs. The city crew finished the sewer work the same day. We were finally in business — but after everything we'd gone through, we still couldn't believe it.

The recipe our late grandma Bechira spent her life making. The one our mom used to smuggle back to Houston in suitcases. We finally had a space to make it the way she did. On our terms.

From a chocolate sauce kitchen to our own factory...

07/23/2026

The last inspection before we could open was the health department. 30 minutes before the inspector arrived, Mansour clogged the toilet.

The plunger did nothing and the inspector failed us. The plumber came the next day, snaked, jetted, removed the toilet entirely. Still nothing. He put a camera down and told us the whole sewer line — inside and outside the property — was destroyed. We were supposed to fly to Tunisia in two days. We canceled the trip.

Then a Houston freeze cracked our tankless water heater the morning of re-inspection. Two hours until before the inspector arrived. Six weeks to reschedule if we failed again — we didn't have 6 weeks. We bought a brand new water heater on the spot and had the plumber install it as the inspector pulled up. We passed.

Then came the pump. The same thickness that made co-packers reject us in the first place was defeating the pump we'd hand-picked for that specific reason. Another pump company shipped us a trial unit for free. It worked.

For weeks after, we called, cried, and begged the city to fix their sewer line. One day, another crew came — and actually did. We didn't celebrate. Just ate tacos in skeptical relief.

The finish line seemed so near…

07/14/2026

Building our own factory to make our late grandma's harissa — a thick garlicky Tunisian sun-dried chili paste to spice up your cooking.

After the concrete disaster, we thought the worst of the build was behind us. It wasn't.

Contractors disappearing with our deposits. A roof pooling six inches of water. Random leaks with no source. Then our boiler arrived with three electrical panels instead of the two on the drawings we'd built the boiler room from — and city code required three feet of clearance in front of every one of them.

A month and a half of dead time later, the city showed up with a permit we'd never heard of. 250 feet of public sidewalk. Corner lot. On our dime.

By this point we were out of money for anything we could outsource. So we became caulkers, electricians, and installers. A data scientist and a food scientist on their hands and knees wiring machines and putting up bathroom rails. If our late grandma could turn a chili and a mortar into world-class harissa, we could figure out how to build a factory in her honor.

The finish line was in sight.

At least that's what we thought....

06/21/2026

Our late grandma's harissa — a thick garlicky Tunisian sun-dried chili paste to spice up your cooking. Six months into building our own factory in Houston, the concrete pour was the milestone we'd been waiting for. After months of demolition, contractor disasters, and learning the construction business one mistake at a time, this was supposed to be the day everything stopped feeling temporary.

The trench drains — the channels that carry liquid off the production floor for sanitation — had been set into the ground and connected to the new plumbing before the pour. We were assured everything was in correctly.

We were deceived.

Of course we didn't realize until the concrete had cured. A big block of cement, clogging the drain. After arguments, finger-pointing between contractors, and a plumber who would eventually ghost us mid-work, we broke out the hardened concrete to fix what was supposed to be in place from the start.

Frustration, delays, and tension between us and contractors who were mainly concerned with getting their check rather than doing a good job.

Some days it felt like the universe was telling us we were idiots for even thinking we could pull this off. Then we'd remind ourselves it was never going to be easy. So we did what our late grandma Bechira would do. Picked ourselves up and pushed forward.

06/18/2026

Tunisia lost 5 - 1 to Sweden 💔

But Tunisians haven't lose their appetite!!

While Tunisia fights on the pitch this Saturday against Japan, get a taste of where the team is from 🌶️
Our late grandma's harissa. Thick, garlicky, made with 100% whole sun-dried chilis.

No fillers, no shortcuts. The ancestral recipe.

Link in bio to shop. 🇹🇳

05/31/2026

Trying to build our own harissa factory so we can continue replicating our late grandma’s recipe, but on a larger scale.

We needed an architect to draw city-compliant plans for the new space so we could finally get the green light to start the real work. But before the architect could file anything, we had to lock in the exact list of equipment that was going inside the future factory — every machine on the packaging line, with all the specs.

A couple of consultants and equipment companies quoted us. We didn't like the answers. So we sat down and designed the packaging line ourselves — based on each step we wanted to automate, plus the critical variables: temperatures, viscosity, acidity, flow rates, equipment throughput.

We took that design and flew out to one of the biggest processing and packaging equipment trade shows in the country. Countless booths. We engaged with about a hundred suppliers. Many back-and-forth meetings, emails, phone calls, and negotiations later, we handpicked every machine.

When we totaled the equipment cost and added the estimated buildout cost, we made the call: we were going to skip hiring a general contractor. We'd become our own GCs and figure things out as we go.

Little did we know what the implications of that undertaking would be…

05/26/2026

We did something terrible to a Costco rotisserie chicken.

Or maybe the best thing. You decide.

It takes 30 seconds and three ingredients:

• 3 tbsp of our harissa (mild, spicy, or smoky — your call)
• 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• Salt to taste

Stir together in a small cup. Drizzle the whole thing over your already-cooked bird. That’s it.

05/24/2026

We'd just signed the lease on our future harissa factory. We were still running weekly production in the old chocolate sauce kitchen while we started demoing the new space. Two things at once.

We needed an engineer — someone to draw the plans, pull the permits, and stamp the whole buildout. We had no idea where to find one.

Our demolition guy connected us with a "so-called engineer." We trusted him. We started writing checks. Drawings came in — late. Deadlines slipped. Then... he ghosted us with our money. We'd later find out he'd been working under another engineer's license the whole time.

Not his own.

Meanwhile, the demolition guy himself was dragging his feet. His workers were hauling debris with a broken wheelbarrow. And when we sat down and actually looked at his invoices, we realized he'd been charging us by the hour instead of by the project. He'd been pacing the work to maximize the bill the whole time.

Two scams. Same buildout. We hadn't even started the real construction yet.

Was this whole harissa factory thing a mistake?

05/11/2026

Our late grandma's harissa — a thick garlicky Tunisian sun-dried chili paste to spice up your cooking. We were making thousands of jars a week out of a small chocolate sauce kitchen. We were at capacity. Time to build our own space — which meant we needed a building.

We searched for months. Everything we liked was way over budget. The places we could afford weren't built for food production — no grease trap, no three-phase power.

Then we found a decades-old building with three lives behind it: car mechanic shop, then meat market, then catering company. It wasn't our dream spot but it had three-phase power, a grease trap, and a lot big enough to grow into and for trucks to load or unload from. The interior? We'd have to gut the entire thing.

Our options were limited. Time was running out. So we said "screw it" and signed the lease.

We had no idea what we were walking into.

05/10/2026

We have a confession to make. For years we ran our Tunisian foods company out of a small chocolate sauce kitchen. Storage in two locations. Hauling ingredients across town every production week. No room for equipment. No room to optimize.

So we tried to find a co-packer in the US to manufacture our late grandma's harissa for us.

Every one of them said no. "Too complicated." "Impossible to scale." "Too thick — why don't you dilute it?"

That left us with one decision: stick with what we'd outgrown, or build our own factory and make the "impossible" ourselves — without diluting the recipe.

The decision we'd make would change our lives. For better or worse.

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Houston, TX

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