A Dozen Cousins brings culture and health together with beans

Ibraheem Basir is on a mission to make relevant, convenient food more accessible.

In 2016, Ibraheem Basir was working for Annie’s Organics as a Brand Manager in Berkeley, California. He’d been in the natural foods product space for a few years and loved it, but knew something was missing. “I felt like there wasn’t a brand that spoke to me and the foods and the flavors I grew up with,” Ibraheem says. “It always felt like I needed to choose between really great ingredients and healthful foods, or these really cultural, flavorful dishes.”

A natural go-getter with entrepreneurship running through his family’s veins, he knew that one day he’d run his own show—and create a mission-driven business that proved health and culture can intersect without sacrificing authenticity. 

His way into that career happened to start with beans, in homage to the flavors of his childhood. Growing up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Ibraheem was exposed to the multicultural flavors of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the American South, which converged at his family’s dinner table. “We ate from this really diverse palate of foods,” he says. “My mother would trade recipes with our neighbors, and bring them over to our house to show them how to cook a Southern dish, and they would show her how to make curry.”

In 2018, Ibraheem leaped from the corporate world to start A Dozen Cousins, a line of culturally authentic, ready-to-eat beans. Now based in Los Angeles, the company is named after his daughter, who became the dozenth cousin when she was born. With his “soulfully seasoned” beans, made with avocado oil and free of GMOs and artificial flavors, Ibraheem wanted to show that healthy and culturally relevant foods can exist. “We grow up with these foods—whether it’s pinto beans in Mexico, black beans in the Caribbean, or red beans in Louisiana—but we don't necessarily perceive them as something that's healthful or something of value,” he says. “Many of the foods that come from our cultures are healthy, but there’s some things we gotta tweak and adjust, like baking instead of frying.”

Germinating a business

As one of the many companies providing culturally relevant foods to America’s increasingly diverse demographic, Ibraheem knew that there was a market for his product—even if others didn’t see the vision. “In the early days, I would send samples, email folks, and call every number I could get my hands on,” he says. “A lot of the early days were a battle to get people’s attention. We spent months trying to get copackers or other partners to even have a meeting with us.” 

Some of the criticism Ibraheem received hit a little closer to home. “When I started the company, some of the people I trusted and were very close to me said, ‘I don't get it. Why would you start a bean company? No one cares about beans.’”  

Ibraheem didn’t let initial investor skepticism sway his vision for serving Black and Latino consumers with healthful, flavorful food rooted in shared culture. American palates are changing in line with demographic shifts, despite the limited representation that “ethnic” aisles in many supermarkets provide. 

When you hear Ibraheem talk about how his beans package culture, taste, health, and convenience, the business just makes plain sense. Investors picked up, and by 2019 Whole Foods had partnered with A Dozen Cousins to sell its products in over 450 locations. 

A multicultural staple rooted in history

From the Americas to the Caribbean and beyond, beans are a staple food and a nutritional powerhouse. “Pound for pound, beans are one of the healthiest foods on the planet, in terms of protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals,” Ibraheem says. Beans have been around for thousands of years serving as a vehicle of cultural expression and history. 

A Dozen Cousins’ products pay homage to these diverse origin stories. Their Cuban black beans are slowly simmered in sofrito, a mix of onion, garlic, bell peppers, and spices considered a staple in many Caribbean and Latin American dishes. Their Creole red beans, launched during Black History Month in 2019, are a spin on a staple of Louisiana Creole cuisine, which borrow heavily from the cooking techniques enslaved Africans brought to the South, along with Spanish and French influences. Even their Trini Chickpea Curry is a nod to the indelible mark Indian indentured servants, brought after slavery was abolished in Trinidad and Tobago, had on the island’s cuisine. 

At the intersection of health and accessibility 

For Ibraheem, the importance of providing healthy, culturally relevant foods is important—but so is creating avenues so more people can enjoy these very foods. He’s built a social impact program at the company designed to help tackle some of the complex issues around food access. “If you're Black, brown, or poor, we're much more likely to suffer from a food-related illness, and there's also the way our communities are constructed,” he says. “We don't have the same outdoor space to go and play. It’s not a simple issue.”

One of those issues is the cost of healthy food, especially in areas where food apartheid and historical discrimination practices like redlining continue to have detrimental effects on many communities. “I really wanted to reach a different set of consumers with natural products. We realized pretty early on that if you build this really healthful, high-quality set of beans, it's going to cost a certain amount,” Ibraheem says. “There are consumers that can’t afford $3-4 for beans, and I didn’t want to leave those people out of the brand.”

In 2019, A Dozen Cousins launched its first social impact grant in partnership with The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegra, an organization that teaches free and culturally relevant health and nutrition classes in food-insecure communities. They sponsored a class for 50 families in Central Texas. 

While one company can’t reverse centuries-old inequalities, Ibraheem wants to do his part. “It’s something that I ask myself often—how do we as a company help reverse some of the structural inequalities in the food and health space?”

Making sure A Dozen Cousins stays true to his mission is even baked into the company’s hiring practices. Every employee is from either a minority or multiethnic background. “One of our goals with the business has always been to be as authentic as we can around the foods and the flavors that we're representing,” he says. “But we also try to return as much of the economic benefit back to the people who we represent. It’s something that I’m really proud of.”

Expanding the menu and the message

What’s next for A Dozen Cousins? “My vision for the brand was to get to a point where you can assemble an entire meal using our products,” he says. The company just launched a bone broth rice line, with 7 grams of collagen-rich protein, to complement many of their bean offerings. It also recently introduced a line of seasoning sauces featuring flavors like Jamaican Jerk, Peruvian Pollo a la Brasa, and Mexican Pollo Asado.

With placements already in over a thousand stores, including Trader Joe’s and Target, Ibraheem plans to keep pushing the culture forward by expanding the brand’s menu and accessibility. “I’m just excited to continue growing the brand, and spread the brand message to more people.”