A tin of Ya Albi olive oil was supposed to appear on a Los Angeles shelf within days. The buyer from Laurel Supply had requested a free first order, Yasmeen Abouremeleh had agreed, and the oil had been delivered. Then an email arrived: one of the owners had pulled it almost as soon as they saw it. The buyer relayed no complaint about the product and identified no problem with its quality. The Palestinian olive oil had barely reached the shelf before someone removed it.
Ya Albi, however, is hard to overlook. Its hot pink tins reject the muted visual codes often applied to both olive oil and Palestinian identity. Early 2000s references and Arabic nostalgia make that visibility joyful rather than dutiful. Limited-edition bottles created for a Huda Beauty Ramadan event carried the same confidence into a major beauty and influencer setting. This was an explicitly Palestinian product entering the room without concealment or apology, and without accepting that Palestine must be packaged as grief before others will take it seriously.
This was an explicitly Palestinian product entering the room without concealment or apology, and without accepting that Palestine must be packaged as grief before others will take it seriously.
That tension between removal and unmistakable presence runs through what Yasmeen has built with her mother. Ya Albi does not hide the difficult route its oil takes from Palestine, but it also refuses to let violence and restriction become the only language available for Palestinian goods. Narrative ownership starts with deciding what reaches the kitchen, how it is allowed to look, what feelings it can carry, and who determines its meaning.
Olive oil was never just an ingredient in Yasmeen's family
In Yasmeen's family, olive oil belonged in far more places than salad dressing. Her grandmother put it on stomachaches, rubbed it around ear infections, and took a shot every morning, long before the practice circulated as a trend on TikTok. It was an ingredient, condiment, flavor, remedy, or simply something always at hand. Separating it from daily Palestinian life would have made as little sense as treating it as an occasional specialty item.
That familiarity made olive oil the obvious foundation when Yasmeen was looking for something meaningful to create. She had stopped working in fashion and was moving through a period of grief. She wanted to make something tangible that could help her while giving other people a piece of Palestine in their homes. Her mother proposed olive oil. Yasmeen accepted the idea and took responsibility for everything around it: how it would look and feel, and what sort of presence it would have on a counter or table.
Her mother became her co-founder, and the business remains materially tied to family life. Yasmeen's parents live in Castro Valley, where they store the oil on their ranch and fill tins using a machine twice a year. When Yasmeen runs out, the operation can become remarkably direct: her mother may drive supplies down to her. The polished pink tin comes from an arrangement that is both commercial and domestic, with inventory, machinery, memory, and parental help all contained within the same family structure.
Few staples hold that much meaning without being burdened by empty symbolism. For Yasmeen, olive oil did not need an invented story. The story was already present in her grandmother's morning shot, the remedies applied to a crying child, and the assumption that oil could be used for nearly everything. Ya Albi does not elevate an ordinary ingredient. It makes clear that, in this family, olive oil was never ordinary.
A Palestinian identity formed between protests and return visits
Palestine was never a separate subject in Yasmeen's childhood, reserved for certain occasions or private family explanations. It was present in food, conversation, the news, and both parents' activism. She remembers protests in San Francisco's Union Square when some gatherings might have drawn around 20 people and many classmates did not understand what Palestine was. Visibility was not an abstract communication strategy. It meant standing in a public square and naming something that others scarcely recognized.
The pressure to name it followed her into school. During an exercise about where families came from, a teacher told Yasmeen that Palestine was not a place. The remark explains the stakes behind her father's insistence that she was Palestinian before she was American. He would not let that identity become secondary, and Yasmeen learned to make it known quickly. Speak with her for 10 minutes, she has said, and we will probably know she is Palestinian. When the surrounding world treats the name itself as disputable, naming it becomes a refusal of erasure.
When the surrounding world treats the name itself as disputable, naming it becomes a refusal of erasure.
Childhood visits to Palestine gave that refusal a lived basis. Yasmeen would go for a month or two at a time, even when her mother had to fight with her schools and ask teachers to provide assignments for the trip. Her mother's argument was direct: Yasmeen would learn more there than she would by staying in school. While her identity was still taking shape, she absorbed family, place, and the strain of daily life. Those experiences became part of her childhood rather than knowledge acquired later from a distance.
Ya Albi carries the same insistence that Palestine should not need permission to be visible. Its appearance answers a childhood in which classmates confused Palestine with somewhere else and a teacher denied its name. When a Palestinian product announces itself in hot pink, the color is playful, but the identification is serious. Yasmeen knew early that allowing others to decide what can be named also gives them power over what can be seen.
What the olive oil endures before it reaches the pink tin
The bright packaging does not erase what the oil has endured. Yasmeen describes Palestinian farmers facing violence, restrictions, threats, and land theft while trying to pick their own olives. After pressing, export brings another stretch of uncertainty. One driver may carry the oil to a checkpoint but be unable to cross, so another truck must wait on the opposite side while workers unload and transfer the shipment. Even that arrangement depends on whether the checkpoint is open that day.
Reaching the port does not end the uncertainty. Israeli authorities can hold the oil there until they allow it to leave, while Palestinians remain responsible for paying rent during the delay. This is more than friction in the neutral language of logistics. Time, movement, and cost are imposed unevenly, making a basic commercial journey dependent on decisions outside the producer's control. A finished tin has passed through several points where its progress could be stopped.
That control reaches the words and images allowed on packaging. Yasmeen describes pressure to use "West Bank" instead of "made in Palestine," along with objections to watermelons on labels. Ya Albi therefore ships raw goods and completes the packaging in the U.S. Packaging the oil in Palestine could jeopardize whether authorities allow the product out at all. The finished tin is not merely decorative. Its production reflects a route governed by restricted movement and disputes over Palestinian identification.
This knowledge changes the meaning of the pink. The design is not a screen over hardship or an attempt to turn a difficult supply route into a cleaner consumer story. Ya Albi keeps two realities in view. Palestinian oil must pass through restrictions controlling its movement and presentation, while Palestinians can still decide how the finished product enters the world. The tin does not imitate the conditions of its journey. It reclaims some authorship after a process in which others have withheld so much control.
The tin does not imitate the conditions of its journey. It reclaims some authorship after a process in which others have withheld so much control.
Hot pink makes room for Palestine beyond sadness
Yasmeen's decade in fashion taught her to begin with feeling rather than category convention. She did not ask first what an olive oil brand was supposed to look like. She asked what she wanted in her kitchen, what would make her happy to see, and what owning the product might communicate. Across olive oil shelves, she found what she called a "million shades" of green. Her response was simple: olive oil did not always have to be green, and food packaging could be fun.
Her visual references were more personal: growing up in the early 2000s, Arabic nostalgia, old records, and colorful Arab packaging. She did not preserve those elements as artifacts from a closed past. Yasmeen reworked them into something current, combining familiarity with her own specific taste. She has described the design process as 75 or 80% what she wants to see, leaving the remainder for others to recognize something familiar. The result is personal without shutting anyone out.
Most of all, the color refuses a narrow emotional assignment. Yasmeen was building Ya Albi during a period of sadness, but she did not want sadness to dictate its appearance. Palestinian life contains grief, but it also contains love, fun, and joy. Those truths can coexist. A Palestinian product should not have to appear solemn, traditional, or carefully palatable before others accept its identity. Hot pink makes room for a Palestine that does not perform pain on demand.
The limited-edition bottles made for a Huda Beauty Ramadan event showed how this approach could work beyond Ya Albi's own shelves. Yasmeen adapted the tin to Huda Beauty's visual world, and attendees received it in a setting associated with beauty and influencers. Ya Albi did not mute its Palestinian identity to enter the room. The collaboration placed Palestinian goods in a contemporary, desirable setting while remaining explicit about where they came from.
Reclamation continues from contested shelves to Jericho dates
The Laurel Supply incident shows why control over appearance cannot be separated from access. A buyer asked Yasmeen to provide the first order for free, something she did not normally do, and said the oil would reach the shelves within days. Soon afterward, Yasmeen learned that an owner had pulled it almost immediately. A Palestinian product had passed through the buying process and been physically delivered, only to be removed at the moment customers might encounter it.
That shelf is not the entire retail story. Yasmeen names Dada Markets and Yela Coffee as supporters who have carried Ya Albi since the beginning. The oil is available across the U.S., in Canada, and through a small number of international retailers, with stockists listed online. These stores provide distribution, but they also offer something less routine: shelves where Palestinian identity is neither a problem to manage nor a label to remove.
For Yasmeen, reclamation means refusing to let other people decide how Palestinians are seen. Retail makes that struggle concrete. Shops decide what they carry, while customers decide where their money goes. People can notice which stores make room for Palestinian goods and which ones remove them, then choose which businesses to support. Narrative ownership does not end when a product leaves its maker. It continues on the shelves that hold it and with the people who buy it.
Reclamation means refusing to let other people decide how Palestinians are seen.
Ya Albi's next possibilities take that reclamation beyond olive oil. Yasmeen plans to import dates from Jericho, which she remembers from childhood for its beauty, date trees, and fruit. By the time she described the project, she had already developed and discarded five or six versions of the packaging, unwilling to proceed until it felt right. Dates are not a detached expansion. They are another Palestinian food through which Ya Albi can grow on its own terms.
Her ambition is to build a household Palestinian food brand, with room for dates, snacks, and other products still to come. Being rooted, however, does not require being fixed in the past. Ya Albi draws on family memories, including her grandmother's remedies, her grandfather's suggestion of the name, and childhood visits to Palestine, while remaining open to reinvention. Its reclamation is the right to create an image of Palestine that can be vivid, changing, joyful, and unmistakably its own.