Yassin Sibai’s mother still checks the falafel. A company can acquire machinery, court grocery buyers and move into a larger factory, but Fadia has her own inspection procedure. She visits the production line. If she cannot get there, she asks for a bag to take home. Her family’s recipes helped make Afia possible. Expansion has evidently not relieved anyone of the obligation to get dinner right.
That is a useful place to begin with Sibai, Afia’s co-founder and CEO. His work involves numbers, sales and the machinery of a growing business. The food connects him to his mother; the company connects him to his wife and fellow founder, Farrah Moussallati Sibai. He has a professional past in technology and financial services. His present includes a frozen food factory in Taylor, Texas. The career change has given the word “output” a rather different meaning.
An engineer at the family table
Before Afia, Sibai worked in the world of software and finance. His career includes companies such as Kasasa, Desjardins and Penson Worldwide. He describes himself publicly as a technologist and strategy executive. Those are occupations concerned with systems: how separate parts connect, where something slows down, what has to happen before the next stage can work. A manufacturing business provides plenty of opportunities to keep asking those questions.
The family partnership began elsewhere. Friends introduced Farrah to Yassin through Facebook while he was living in Dallas and working as a computer engineer. Conversations became video calls and, eventually, a marriage that brought their families together. Farrah moved to Texas. Dallas did not suit her. Yassin thought Austin would, and the move gave the couple the setting in which their food business would eventually take shape.
His parents later left Syria, carrying what they could. Among Fadia’s possessions was a small black book of family recipes handwritten in Arabic. Cooking familiar dishes gave her a way to settle into the household and share something with her granddaughters. Farrah began to see a commercial possibility in those meals. The foods the family knew were difficult to find in the grocery freezer.
The point matters to any account of Sibai’s second career. Afia grew from a specific household and a specific gap on a shelf. Farrah brought the idea; together, they worked on turning it into a business. The story has several authors, including the woman who had kept the recipes. Giving Yassin his due means keeping those other people in the picture.
The order before the factory
Afia launched in 2017. Its early life included Austin farmers markets, where the family could put food directly in front of prospective customers. A market stall makes demand unusually visible. People taste something, ask about it, decide whether to buy, and sometimes come back. There is very little room between a founder’s idea of the product and a shopper’s actual response.
The next steps were recognizably Texan. Afia became a finalist in H-E-B’s Quest for Texas Best competition in 2018, then entered the grocer’s stores in 2019. The same year, it joined the Chobani Incubator. Each milestone gave the founders a different sort of opening: a buyer’s attention, a retail presence, or access to other people who understood the food business. A farmers market product was beginning to require an organization behind it.
Sibai eventually left the corporate world as Afia’s expansion demanded more attention and capital. That decision joins the two halves of his working life. He had experience in businesses where strategy and financial knowledge mattered. Here was a company, close to home in every sense, with orders to pursue and growth to finance. The practical question became how much of the operation the founders should take on themselves.
They chose to make the food. Owning production gives a recipe a direct route into manufacturing decisions. It also gives the founders equipment, staffing and capacity to manage. The convenience of asking another company to handle the process comes with its own compromises. Afia’s choice placed responsibility for the result much closer to the people whose family name and history sat behind it.
“In the conventional channel, price matters.”
Yassin Sibai
A building that needs work
The larger Taylor facility made that responsibility visible. Afia moved into the roughly 21,000-square-foot space in September 2023 after construction and supply delays had pushed back the opening. Planning a factory and waiting for it to become usable are separate experiences. Demand continued while the building was delayed. The company had to make choices about what its existing operation could accommodate.
At the time of the move, Afia was producing about 200,000 falafel a day, with the ability to increase to about 500,000. Those figures describe different things: the first is reported output in that period; the second is capacity. The distance between them is where a manufacturing executive’s job becomes interesting. Equipment has to be available before a large order arrives. It also has to earn its place when the order book is quieter.
Falafel per day. Historical operating snapshot; capacity is not a claim of actual production.
Co-packing, or making products for other companies, offered one way to use that room. Afia had reduced much of this work while its own products needed the earlier factory’s capacity. The new space reopened the possibility. For Sibai, the calculation includes what the equipment can do between Afia’s own production runs. An idle line may look reassuringly ready. The bills tend to be less impressed.
By December 2024, he was discussing those decisions onstage at Nosh Live, alongside manufacturing consultant Craig Albert and Keychain founder Oisin Hanrahan. The discussion covered ownership, co-packing and the revenue possibilities inside an operating structure. It was a fitting subject for him: how to turn a difficult responsibility into something that supports the business, while recognizing that the difficulty does not disappear.
Two founders, different desks
Inside the company, the marriage comes with a division of work. Yassin’s strengths in numbers and sales complement Farrah’s in logistics and operations. They may spend a working day at the same site and still occupy separate parts of it. The arrangement gives a more useful picture of their partnership than the familiar image of founders doing everything together. There is quite enough to do without duplicating it.
The family also knows what the early company asked of them. Their daughters helped sell at farmers markets. As the business developed, work took time that could otherwise have been spent with the children. A family business distributes opportunity and inconvenience through the same household. Its growth is experienced across calendars, weekends and conversations, long before it can be displayed as an annual percentage.
Afia’s approach to employment extends that household concern outward. It employs refugees and supports educational opportunities for them. The company says it has donated more than 500,000 falafel and kibbeh since 2020. These are activities within a business that still has to sell food and organize production. The connection between its origins and its employment choices gives the family history a continuing practical expression.
The form with no box to tick
Sibai has also spoken about a barrier that appears far from the production floor. Applying for business certifications, he encountered forms without a Middle Eastern or North African category. Writing in “Middle Eastern” did not solve the problem. His account describes repeated rejection and the difficulty of getting the business recognized within somebody else’s available classifications.
He welcomed MENA certification as a way to establish that recognition with retailers. The episode supplies a small, revealing detail about his working world. A company can have products, customers and an operating history, yet still struggle with a form. For a founder dealing with retail relationships, the language of a certification process has consequences beyond the paperwork.
It also puts his public advocacy in context. Alongside the tasks of building Afia, Sibai has been willing to describe an obstacle other business owners might recognize. The specificity makes the account useful. There is a category missing, an application that fails and a process that needs to accommodate the applicant standing in front of it.
A bigger company, a familiar standard
The company’s more recent progress has a public marker. Afia ranked No. 1,103 on the 2026 Inc. 5000, with reported three-year growth of 317%, after ranking No. 2,697 in 2025. Sibai has credited the team and partners for the advance. The rankings record a particular period of business growth; the work beneath them includes years of retail conversations, production decisions and learning how to organize a larger operation.
Afia’s range has grown beyond its original falafel into kibbeh, bowls and chicken meals. That broader menu creates more reasons for a shopper to encounter the brand. It also gives the founders more details to get right. Each addition enters an organization shaped by earlier decisions about who makes the food, how the work is divided and what the family expects from the finished product.
For Sibai, the ambition is expressed through that work: bringing Eastern Mediterranean food to more tables while building a business able to deliver it. There is something pleasingly concrete about the standard waiting at the other end. A retailer may assess the numbers. A customer may decide what to buy again. Fadia can ask for a bag of falafel. The CEO has several constituencies, and one of them remembers the recipe before it became a company.