It started with a bowl of beans.

Bissara (also written bessara or byesar) is one of Morocco's oldest and humblest dishes: dried fava beans, slow-simmered with garlic until they collapse into a thick, velvety soup. It's finished at the table with a generous pour of olive oil, a dusting of cumin and paprika, and eaten with bread torn straight from the loaf.

It is winter breakfast food. Street food. The kind of thing sold from a steaming pot on a cold morning in Fez or Chefchaouen for the price of a coffee. Almost nothing goes into it — and yet somehow it is one of the most comforting things you will ever eat.

Why name a company after it?

Because the dish gets right what most products get wrong. Bissara isn't impressive. It doesn't have twelve components or a clever twist. It's a small number of ordinary things, treated with patience, that turn into something people genuinely want. Nobody has ever needed bissara explained to them.

It's also food that belongs to everyone. Beans are cheap. The recipe is old, shared and un-ownable. A bowl costs pennies and is served to labourers and lawyers alike. We liked the idea of a company that had that in its name — one that builds things people can actually afford, and gives some of it away.

So when it came time to name the parent company, the choice was easy. Every venture under Byesar is meant to be another bowl of the same thing: simple, warm, made properly, and passed across the table to whoever's sitting there.

That's it. That's the company.