Where Can I Find White Lifa in Sweden?

A friend messaged me recently and asked a simple question.

“Where can I find White Lifa in Sweden?”

I read it once, then again.

It was one of those small messages that carries more than it says. On the surface, it was just a product question. Where is it sold? Which shop has it? Is there a distributor? Can I buy it there?

But I knew the person asking.

She has been in my life since I was a child. She left Lebanon during the war, like so many Lebanese people did, and built her life somewhere else. Sweden became home. Lebanon stayed home too, in the way Lebanon often does for people who leave it.

We have kept in touch all these years.

I am 46 now. That means this connection has lived through childhood, distance, war, migration, family changes, different countries, and different seasons of life. And then, after all that time, a message arrives asking where White Lifa is sold in Sweden.

I had to tell her, regretfully, that it is not sold there.

Not yet.

There was something bittersweet in that answer.

A Lebanese question in a Swedish home

Sweden has a Lebanese community with its own story. Many Lebanese arrived there during and after the years of war, especially through the 1970s and 1980s, carrying what people carry when they leave home: language, food, family habits, memories, religious traditions, music, humor, grief, pride, and small ordinary things that never make it into history books.

A person can leave a country and still keep pieces of it in the kitchen, in the way coffee is served, in the Fairuz songs playing in the morning, in the "finjen il ahweh" that says more than the conversation around it, in the foods they miss, in the brands they recognize, in the objects that remind them of a house they once knew.

That is what struck me about the message.

She was not asking about a luxury item. She was not asking about something loud or fashionable. She was asking about a loofah.

A simple bathroom product.

And somehow, that made it more emotional.

The things people carry without packing

Some products do not travel through advertising. They travel through people. They travel in suitcases, in family visits, in gifts from someone coming back from Lebanon, in memories of a supermarket shelf, in a bathroom in a childhood home, in the familiar feeling of “this is the one we always used.”

For many Lebanese abroad, home is not one single thing. It is not only a flag or a song or a plate of food. Sometimes it is something much smaller.

A certain smell.

A certain texture.

A certain object.

A product your mother bought.

A product you never thought about until you could not find it anymore.

That is the strange thing about everyday products. When they are nearby, people barely notice them. When they are missing, the feeling changes.

You start looking.

You ask someone.

“Where can I find this?”

When memory arrives before distribution

Her question reminded me that White Lifa has reached places where our distribution has not yet reached. It has reached people’s memory. It has reached families. It has reached Lebanese homes far away from Lebanon, even if it has not reached every shelf.

There is something humbling about that.

As a manufacturer, you think in terms of markets, orders, export routes, cartons, distributors, and retail shelves. Those things matter. Of course they do.

But then one person writes from Sweden and reminds you that a product can have another kind of life.

A quieter one.

It can live in recognition. It can live in habit. It can live in the mind of someone who left Lebanon long ago and still remembers what belonged in the bathroom, what felt familiar, what felt like home.

The Lebanese diaspora knows this feeling well. Leaving does not erase the small things. Sometimes it makes them sharper. A product that felt ordinary in Lebanon can become meaningful abroad, not because it changed, but because distance changed the way it is held in memory.

That is why I did not hear her question as just, “Where is it sold?”

I heard something else inside it.

I remember this.

I still look for this.

Is it there too?

Can I find a little piece of home where I am?

Not yet

For now, the honest answer is no. White Lifa is not yet available in Sweden.

But I hope one day the answer changes.

I hope one day someone in Sweden walks into a shop, sees White Lifa on the shelf, and feels that small moment of recognition. The kind that does not need a long explanation.

The kind that simply says:

Yes.

I know this one.