Rammah Olive Oil: A Story in Every Drop

Building a brand identity out of a father’s legacy and a son’s grief.

How It Started

Late in 2019, a friend pulled me in to help his colleague build an olive oil brand, and what he described wasn’t really a product so much as a father’s gift to his kids that someone had decided to dress up as a business; the greenish-yellow stuff in the nice bottles was just the delivery mechanism.

The colleague was Ramy Rammah, the father was Mohamed Naguib Rammah, and to this day this is the one piece of work I’ve made that I’m properly proud of.

Mohamed had spent fifteen years dragging Egypt’s first genuinely premium extra virgin olive oil out of almost nothing, starting back in 1995 when he bought twenty feddans of land and everyone he knew told him he was pouring his money straight into the dirt. He’d drive six hours there and back to the only olive press in the country, get home around midnight, and bottle the oil by hand in his own kitchen with his young sons half-asleep beside him.

He died in 2016, a few months after Ramy finally quit his government job to come and work alongside him, which is the kind of timing life seems to specialise in.

On paper the job looked simple enough; build the whole written and spoken identity for the artisanal range, the tone of voice, the manifesto, the communication platform, the product copy, the website content, the social strategy, all of it.

In practice none of it was simple, because before I could write a word I had to understand the story the way Ramy actually carried it, not the way a brief would flatten it into a sentence. So I asked him to write it down for me himself, in as much detail as he could manage, in broken Arabic if that’s what it took.

What I Found

I sat with that Arabic text for weeks, reading it and reading it again until the real shape of it came through underneath the jumbled order he’d written it in.

A father so frightened his family wouldn’t survive without him that he spent fifteen years quietly building their future while they ignored him; and a son who only understood any of it once it was already too late.

That was the thing I had to build on. It happened, to real people, and it carried its own weight without any help from me; my only job was to shape it into something a brand could honestly stand on.

The Translation

The actual work was turning all of that feeling into something a brand could use, and that started with a proper look at who else was already on the shelf.

Monini was leaning on a century of Italian heritage, Iliada had its Greek awards to wave around, Wadi Food had the home-turf scale and the name recognition, and Leya had its clean minimalist design.

Rammah had none of those things to lean on. What it had instead was a true story, paid for in sacrifice and carried forward through grief, so that’s the ground I built everything else on.

FROM THE ARABIC TEXT:

“كان يقول بأنه سيأتي يوم في المستقبل و يصبح زيت الزيتون من أساسيات كل بيت مصري”

“He would say that a day will come when olive oil becomes essential in every Egyptian home“

This was the bedrock for the Manifesto.

Remember how stubborn we were? How we used to think it was all a waste of time? How you’d work yourself to the bone every single day for a thought that none of us would have indulged?

You didn’t have to buy that land; you didn’t have to settle for what it had; you definitely didn’t have to travel back and forth everyday, barely taking any rest.

You could have easily cut down all those olive trees and planted something far more lucrative; nobody cared about olive oil back then. But you had more than just the short term in mind; You saw an opportunity to turn raw ambition into a culinary movement, in a country that didn’t care for what it had growing on its soil.

You drove 6 hours to and from the only press around after work, slaving over hundreds of bottles in your tattered blue apron well into the morning. Who could have thought that your legacy came out of our kitchen?

For years, you travelled, learned, applied, and suffered, driven by nothing but passion and belief.

I always doubted you from the start, but you changed how I saw the whole world.

My father, Mohamed Naguib Rammah, took a simple 10 acres of olive trees, and turned it into a legacy. All with his own two hands.

Though only his family truly knows what he’s been through; anyone can taste this man’s journey.

I don’t consider what we do to just be olive oil; I’m furthering my father’s dreams and ambitions with each bottle filled. Same as any other loving son.

But in these bottles is much more than hand-picked, cold-pressed olive oil.

These bottles contain the story of a man who wanted to cause a much-needed change.

That’s what Rammah Farms Olive Oil is: A story in every drop.

A story that I hope will fill your table with timeless flavor.

None of that is marketing copy. It’s Ramy talking straight to his father, and everything else about the brand grew out of that one piece of writing, starting with the line that became the platform:

A Story in Every Drop

No tired lines about premium Egyptian oil or farm-to-table sourcing anywhere near it; every bottle was carrying Mohamed’s old prediction, the one about olive oil ending up in every Egyptian home, finally starting to come true.

The Foundation

With the platform settled, I built the rest of the brand out from there:

BRAND MANIFESTO

The full story in Ramy’s voice. Became the About Us page, adapted as “A Father’s Gift.”

COMMUNICATION PLATFORM

“A Story in Every Drop,” modular enough to flex across campaigns, packaging, and social.

TONE OF VOICE

Gentle, wise, fatherly. Most of all, simple; never use “myriad” when you can use “many.”

PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS

Eight varieties, each with character, context, and a kitchen to belong in.

WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE

Full site architecture: Home, About, “Our Promise,” team bios, product pages with pairings, blog framework, and contact.

CONTENT STRATEGY

Pillars mapped to platforms: “From the Farm,” “Farm Facts,” “Friends of the Farm,” “Rammah Roots.”

What It Became

By the end, Rammah Farms had an identity that actually held together, all of it grown from something true instead of something invented in a workshop. The manifesto became the About Us page, the platform line became the tagline, the tone of voice set the rules for everything they wrote after, the product descriptions gave each bottle a reason to exist beyond the words “extra virgin olive oil,” and the website turned an empty domain into somewhere that felt lived in.

That, to me, is the whole job; a real story, told honestly, and trusted to carry its own weight.