Alia Ballout
Alia Ballout is the Founder of Beît Ballout, Singapore's first olive oil brand and processing facility, born in Singapore, raised in Oman, and shaped by a Lebanese heritage that runs through generations of journalists, writers, and revolutionaries — a grand-aunt, Leila Baalbaki, who was the first female feminist in the Middle East and revolted against religious leaders in Lebanon, a grandfather who owned a newspaper firm and served as political advisor to Saddam Hussein, an uncle who was a founding member of Al Jazeera and became head speaker at the BBC, and a mother who left Singapore because she refused to follow the rat race, joined the airlines, was selected for the royal flight with the Sultan of Oman, and went on to build the first day spa in the country. Growing up in an international school with eighty nationalities where nobody saw race or colour, then moving to Singapore and being categorised into a box she never asked for, Alia pursued a Juris Doctor at SMU, trialled for the national women's football team, joined the opening team of the Mondrian Hotel, and endured law firms that told her to be quiet, stop standing out, and that her personality essentially sucks — before being read an eleven-point list with not one thing about her work, looking at the partner and the HR lady, and saying two words: I quit.
From there she registered a company in a corporate law class before she even knew what she would sell, watched her mother hold up olives on a video call from South Lebanon and thought a Chinese-Singaporean woman picking olives is so absurd this has to be it, filled olive oil into badly packaged bottles bought from Scoop with cheaply printed stickers, sold solo at market fairs for nine to ten hours too embarrassed to tell anyone or take a single photo, packed up and pushed a trolley home because the taxi was forty dollars, looked at a product nobody wanted to look at and said nah this is a one million dollar product — delusional, but that is how she thought — landed Tatler Dining as a nobody, went viral off a single reel she never planned to post, got covered in the Straits Times in print, and built The Shared Table into an intimate curated dining experience bringing together founders, cooks, and makers over food prepared with intention. Now building Singapore's first olive oil processing facility, co-oping farms across South Lebanon, Palestine, and Spain with her own ethos on how to press olives, launching handmade soaps made by her mother using herbs from their land dried with their own olive oil, and carrying the conviction that branding is so much more than sitting on a shelf, that supermarkets are not built to give you fresh food despite what they are saying, that the only protection you have in this world is economic, and that nothing she is doing has ever been done before.