Hawa Hassan, founder of Photo: Courtesy of Anastasia Mikhanoshina
“Even when I was a little girl, I was doing the cooking and the shopping while my mom was selling at the store. As a Somali girl, you grow up in the kitchen,” says Hawa Hassan, founder and CEO of Basbaas, the only line of Somali hot sauces and chutneys available in the U.S. “Also, raising myself in Seattle, I had to make sure I had enough to eat. Some nights I had hot wings from 7-Eleven for dinner but I got creative with that.”
For Hassan, who was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, learning to cook was a necessity growing up. (Little did she know that she would later parlay that culinary knowledge and love of good flavors into a food business.) She lived in a U.N. refugee camp in Kenya with her mother and four other siblings before moving all by herself, at just seven years old, to Seattle in 1993. She stayed with a family friend while she waited for the rest of her family to join her in the States, but after a few years in, she realized no one was coming. Hassan went through high school and headed to Bellevue College in Washington, where she accidentally fell into a modeling career.
“My best friend was a model and I would go with her to these castings and photoshoots with the agency and her booker would say, ‘Hawa, you really should think about modeling.’ I said, ‘I am a basketball player and basketball players don’t model,’” she explains. “When I realized what a good moneymaker it could be, I decided to try it.”
She quickly started getting booked for shoots with major retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s, then moved to New York City in 2005 with dreams of supermodel stardom. Unfortunately, as she describes it, New York at that time was a “we already have a black girl who looks like you” market. Feeling a little defeated, she headed to Oslo, where her mom had relocated with her new husband and Hassan’s nine other siblings, to regroup after 15 years apart from her family. It was during those four months in Norway that Basbaas came to fruition.
“I kept telling my mom I wanted to start a juice business and she said that ship had already sailed,” says Hassan. “But I had taken my Vitamix with me because I thought I was going to come up with recipes and write my business plan. But in that process, I started blending these sauces that my family was eating every night during Ramadan and then I realized that I wanted to start a different kind of conversation—a positive one—about being Somali. What could be a better way to do that than through food?”
In 2015, she returned to Seattle and got to work on building Basbaas (which means ‘chili’ in Somali) from the ground up, with a little help from some fellow female entrepreneurs, including her mom. “The level of strength she had to restart so many times gives me so much gratitude for my life,” Hassan says of her mom, who started selling gold at the markets before opening her own shop, then opening a Somali goods store and a furniture outlet, all while raising 10 kids. “It makes me feel like there isn’t much I can’t achieve,” Hassan adds.
Hassan also found a mentor in Beth Linskey, creator of the NY-based jam company Beth’s Farm Kitchen, who showed her the ropes as she navigated the challenges of launching a food business all on her own. “I would go home at night and Google things like ‘how do I find a co-packer’ and a man gave me her name…Beth made a big impression on me and my work,” says Hassan, who is also an alum of the incubator program at Hot Bread Kitchen, Jessamyn Rodriguez’s Brooklyn-based non-profit social enterprise and bakery that employs low-income women and their families. Basbaas sauces were being made at Hot Bread Kitchen until Hassan needed a bigger production space.
The two sauces in the line—a smokey, tamarind date sauce and a coconut cilantro chutney—are all the buzzwords you want to hear today: all-natural, locally sourced, gluten-free, and vegan. They’re handcrafted in small batches and now bottled in the Hudson Valley. “Basbaas is like what ketchup or hot sauce is to Americans. We eat it every single day, with every single meal,” says Hassan. “It’s a family heirloom, but also a Somali thing. Everyone makes it a little bit differently.” While the sauces make for a great fish or meat marinade, they are meant for everyday use like sriracha or salsa or any other hot sauce. Put the tangy green sauce on your morning egg and grain bowl or use it as a dip for chips (Hassan also has recipes integrating the sauces on her website).
As for what’s next for Hassan? She’s focused on fundraising so she can bring her business to the next level. She’s also using her platform to help create and inspire change in the world through food, speaking on podcasts like Radio Cherry Bombe and Prince Street about changing the rhetoric around Somali culture, and putting together small dinners to inspire action. “I host dinners with about 20 to 25 friends from all over the world to have the conversations that are really hard. One night we will talk about prison reform or immigration, another night we talk about one small task we can each do for the Dreamers,” says Hassan, who is currently a green card holder. “I think that when you bring people together with good food—and wine!—on the table, almost any conversation can be had from a place of love
