Wer sind wir - Swisspica

We, Lina Karam and Romain Hintermann, are the founders of Swisspica. We already had a long-lasting friendship when we took the great decision in a café in Zurich on a hazy day in November 2018 to start a company as best friends. This decision was driven by Lina’s proposition to develop her family’s Iranian business in Switzerland.

The first product of our company that was still in the starting blocks, was Iranian saffron of exclusive quality. By the way, our company’s name Swisspica includes saffron: “spica” is a latin word for it. While searching for interested parties, we realized quickly that there was a big demand for another Persian delicacy. It didn’t take long and we were already working intensely to include this product in our assortment: Iranian caviar. A second hint in relation to our name: If you read “pica” backwards, you’ll get the first four letters of Acipenseridae, the scientific name of the sturgeon family.

In the summer of 2019, we finally launched our business operations and convinced step by step costumers from our high-end Persian delicacies. We didn’t stop there and kept looking for other products in Iran with beautiful stories that might be interesting for European clients. Swisspica stands therefore also in general for “Swiss Persian Import Company”!

We searched and found: We got to know a unique Iranian olive farm from which we import know already big amounts of organic green olives and organic olive oil. Just after that, we also encountered an organic pistachio cultivation whose story fascinated us as much as the one from the organic olive orchard.

That’s how we fell in love with organic Iranian products. Since then, it’s our conscious aim to make our customers acquainted with the best products of Persia in sustainable and healthy organic quality.

We allow ourselves now in the end of 2020 to have a small review and we realize that we grow quite quickly and achieved to expand consequently our product range and circle of customers.

Lina’s working as a viola teacher and Romain’s a translator, but we both work at 500% for our small company for which our hearts are beating. The Middle East is Romain’s passion with which he got in closer touch during his studies. And Lina firmly believes as a naturalized Swiss citizen of Iranian origins that she should narrate the story of her country and about its great people in Switzerland and Europe.

Together and at the same level, we take decisions and guide our company in a direction that suits us and our philosophy.

From time to time we ask ourselves why we’re doing all of these things that we do. And we try not to lose our targets out of sight.