Edit: For people who are new here, my father and I are building a guacamole brand in Lebanon. If you want the full context check out this blog post: https://bychelseasaydi.com/2025/06/15/figure-it-out-he-said-and-i-just-might-%f0%9f%a5%91/

Before I share with you the recent progress in GOUAC, i would like to preface by saying that we’ve paused the work on operations as of now for reasons I will get to in a seperate post (we will be resuming very soon). But for now enjoy the fun I had these past few months!

In August, my dad and I worked on perfecting the product. That meant getting the right taste, but most importantly a good shelf life. Working on this made us both realize why this hasn’t been done in Lebanon before.

I researched a ton on ways to preserve fresh products. We landed on a few options; using absorbic acid and/or citric acid or using techniques such as HPP or vacuum-sealing or MAP… And I wondered what technique were the big guacamole companies in europe and north america using to perserve their fresh guacamole. So I did more research and landed on the fact that they all used HPP, a technique that would require purchasing a 1,000,000 dollar machine. Wayyy out of my dad’s budget for a product with no market validation to begin with. So I decided to contact the CEO of Europe’s biggest avocado and guacamole brands called The Naked Avocado. https://thenakedavocado.com/ So I sent mr. Vidrequin a message on Linkedin on a whim – an innocent act that would have sent 18 year old perfectionist me into a coma.

The next day I had a call with him and he told me that we didn’t have to go through the R&D he and his co-founder had to go through and that they would be overjoyed to share their expertise with us. And he even mentioned a potential future partnership. I asked him a gazillion questions in french and he said that for now, the best way to go was MAP or modified atmospheric packaging. And it made sense, because what turns avocadoes brown is the oxygen, so replacing it with nitrogen would keep it looking fresh for long.

So we researched companies in Lebanon that sold machines for MAP and we found one in Beirut. Only to later find out that we actually had to go to their warehouses in the South (3 hours away from my hometown) to try the machine. And so we did.

Once a week for 3 weeks, we woke up at 5am my dad and I and drove to Nabatieh. We packed perfectly ripe avoadoes, lemon, tomatoes, onions I had chopped the night before and a lot excitment. The car rides were either us reciting Ziad lRahbani theater pieces (specifically nazl l sourour)(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAfMCIhD1q4) or fighting over gouac ideas.

We’d get to the warehouse greeted by the nicest guy. He’s an engineer and he currently works with his dad selling and doing maintenance on industrial machines. He would smile at the look of my dad and I making guacamole batches in the middle of his warehouse haha. We tested a few batches over the course of 3 weeks, trying different packaging plastic, size and technique. Had a few failed test runs. But on the last test run, it came out so much better than we expected. We taste tested it a few weeks later and shed a tear at how good it remained and how long it lasted in the fridge. Will share the picture of the final perfected product once I get ahold of the photos on my broken phone hahaha.

Now the latest thing we worked on was brand identity. I knew that creating a fun and visually appealing brand identity was something I needed to work long and hard on. We started with the name itself. At first my dad was intent on it being named MOZO Guacamole and for good reason. He wanted the mother company MOZO, to be at the center of this new concept. Because GOUAC was not born independtely of MOZO, it was born out of a problem MOZO faced. If you’ve read my lastest post you would know that MOZO got avocadoes from farmers with 15% of them being aesthetically imperfect on the outside but perfetly fine on the inside. Which mozo had to sell at half price and more often than not the avocadoes would be thrown away. And that was how the concept of GOUAC was born.

Any way! We decided on GOUAC because it had a fun aspect to it. We even conisidered GOUAK (courtesy of Rabih Rowell – thank u for inspiring).

Then we looked at BRAND IDENTITY. I wanted fun bright greens with fun slogans.

It started with this vibe:

And 100 pages on Canva later:

This is where we’re currently at – very very far from perfect.

But what working on GOUAC taught me was

1- Done is better than perfect because perfect never gets done

2- The universe rewards bold action

Thanks for reading!