Our Story
TOUM was built around one simple idea: food is love. When you look back on your childhood, we bet many of your memories revolve around food – your grandmother’s famous pies on Thanksgiving Day, your mom’s perfectly cooked roast during the winter holidays, or three generations in the kitchen baking cookies from scratch, sharing stories, laughter, and a whole lot of love. We simply love the way food brings people together.
We grew up in Lebanon, surrounded by food, love … and garlic sauce. Also called toum, garlic sauce is an essential condiment in Mediterranean cuisine. It’s a creamy, addictively delicious addition to mealtimes across The Levant. We use it on everything – chips, meat, kebabs, fried chicken, veggies, you name it.
Our Company
is small. We are four friends who grew up with a love of Mediterranean food. We are Texans now, with a deep appreciation for brisket, barbecue, and an ice-cold beer on a hot Texas day. But the thing we miss the most from our home country’s cuisine is garlic sauce. We searched and searched, but we just couldn’t find a garlic sauce in the US that tastes like what we know in Lebanon … so we decided to make it ourselves.
We started serving our homemade TOUM at every Super Bowl party, every Fourth of July gathering, every Thanksgiving celebration, and every pool party. Just one taste and our friends were hooked. When they started requesting more than we could make in our home kitchen, we knew we had something good – something we could bring from our old home to our new home in the US.
Our Recipe
comes from the father of one of our owners. Simon Bou Nehme started making his own toum in Lebanon 20 years ago. He’s now well-known for his garlic sauce in his hometown of Zgharta – a small city in North Lebanon where you get a panoramic view of mountains, forests of cypress trees, and the sea all at once.
While we’ve made a few tweaks to Simon’s original recipe, the result is the same: delicious, garlicky goodness that deserves a prime spot on every table. Serve it up at your next gathering as a sauce, a dip, or a spread.
We promise, your taste buds and your guests will thank you.
