Yuen: How the mighty sambusa became a Minnesota school lunch hit

If your kid comes home raving about the sambusa they scarfed down at school lunch, there’s a good chance they have Mariam Mohamed and her sisters to thank.

The deep-fried triangle of savory goodness has become an official lunchtime staple for a new generation of Minnesota schoolchildren. Mohamed’s sambusa business, Hoyo (the Somali word for “mother”), partners with more than two dozen school districts across the state, from Minneapolis and Roseville to Willmar and White Bear Lake. That means thousands of Minnesota kids are growing up devouring the East African pocket snack.

My boys are among the legions of young fans. Even my unfailingly picky eater in second grade, the one who complains that mint-flavored toothpaste is “too spicy,” can’t get enough of these pastries bursting with ground beef or lentils, onion, garlic, cumin and coriander.

We all know that food is a universal gateway to other cultures, that it can close thousands of miles in a single, steaming bite. It can foster curiosity about faraway lands and eventually beckon you to a street food stall halfway around the globe.

But this column is about how the sambusa can also introduce us to a remarkable story about women lifting up other women. One of these lifters is Mariam Mohamed.

“For me, in my heart, it was: How do I help women sustain their dignity and take care of their family?” she told me.

Mohamed, 66, of Shoreview, was born in Somalia. During her childhood, sambusas were delicacies served only during Ramadan and at weddings. She recalls pining for the holy month to come, just so she could indulge in the treats. That’s how precious they were.

She moved to United States for graduate school, eventually earning master’s degrees in plant and environmental sciences. Her late husband is Ali Khalif Galaydh, a professor at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs and former prime minister of Somalia. They raised their three children in the Twin Cities.

In 1988, during her husband’s fellowship at Harvard University, Mohamed’s homeland was starting to collapse. She was pregnant with her first child, bored at their home in Cambridge, Mass., and queasy with morning sickness. She remembers approaching a Harvard biology professor in his office and talking her way into an unpaid job in his lab.

She wasn’t aware of her own chutzpah.

“I didn’t know anything about Harvard,” she said with a laugh.

To Mohamed’s fresh immigrant eyes, the Ivy League school looked like any other university. She needed to keep herself busy, even if it meant working for free.

“My brain was trained to work, work, work,” she says. “I didn’t know how not to work.”

Mohamed’s path to the United States was forged through higher education, rather than refugee status. In Minnesota, she built a career in philanthropy and consulting.

But she is in awe of refugees.

“It’s like we look down on them, but these people went through so much, and they survived,” she said. “They are so strong, and nobody gives them credit. I didn’t go through what they went through. They lost everything. They were in camps. They came here, and we expect them to be strong.”

The sambusa idea grew out of her desire to help struggling Somali women, who lacked English skills and degrees, find solid footing in Minnesota. In 2015, Mohamed joined forces with Matt Glover, a young dad living in Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhood. Glover and his wife lived next to a single Somali mom and her children.

The neighbor asked the Glovers for help tutoring her kids. But the couple wanted to provide deeper support.

“Then I was introduced to Mariam,” Glover recalled. “She said, ‘If you want to do this in the community, you should do a frozen sambusa.’”

Mariam’s sisters, Asha and Halima, got on board, too, experimenting with the cooking techniques. (Hoyo’s sambusa recipe comes from Halima’s home kitchen.)

Together, Glover and Mohamed launched Hoyo. As a public benefit corporation — a for-profit entity created to generate social good — the enterprise was meant to empower single moms who couldn’t speak English but had been making the labor-intensive sambusas their entire lives. The business got off the ground with a $43,000 innovation grant from Edina-based Meetinghouse Church.

While the team initially thought the frozen sambusas would be a lifeline for busy Somali families, it turns out that wasn’t their target audience. A “mainstream” American audience is who hungered the most for pre-assembled hot pockets, Mohamed said.

“I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like sambusas,” she said.

In the early days, she routinely picked up the workers from high-rises in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and drove them to a commercial kitchen in Bloomington. The staff has since grown to 24 employees, hailing from not only Somalia but other countries, such as Iraq, Syria and Ethiopia.

The journey hasn’t been without its bumps. Last year, Hoyo had to recall more than 1,000 pounds of sambusas after a thin wire from a steel scrubber was found on the outside of the product. The company now uses regular sponges.

As the business continues to grow, largely through school lunch sales, Ghita Worcester, a retired UCare executive, volunteered to help run the company and reduce its reliance on grants for funding. Hoyo plans to open a larger food production facility in the basement of the Midtown Global Market next year. The frozen sambusas are sold in 60 stores, mostly co-ops.

And popularity in the schools is spreading by word of mouth. One of the newest districts to offer the treats is Lakeville Area Schools, where 4,000 students and staff were served the sambusas last month. The accolades poured in instantly, said Kristen Rezac, who directs student nutrition for the district.

One elementary school teacher told Rezac that her Somali students felt a sense of pride.

“They were so excited, telling other kids in the classroom, ‘This is from my culture. These are things my mom makes at home,’” Rezac said. “They were excited for their friends to try them, too.”

When I visited Hoyo’s current kitchen, housed at the VEAP food pantry, each sambusa was hand-folded by Somali women in hijabs who gathered at the table, speaking their native tongue. They could freely take prayer breaks on a small blue rug facing the refrigerator, with no one raising an eyebrow.

One of them, Ayan Shire, has been here since the company started. She used to work as a janitor and home health aide. Another worker, Safiya Farah, said she’s no stranger to making sambusas for her livelihood. When Somalia broke into civil war, she sold her homemade creations at the market. “It’s how I survived,” Farah recalled.

For Mohamed, this is what she dreamed of: building connection and stability by leveraging the gifts already found in these women.

As a newcomer to this country, she remembers sleeping only two hours a night during graduate school, boning up on her coursework and cramming to memorize English-language workbooks.

“I know the pain — it’s not easy,” she said. “I want to cut that for them.”

It helps, of course, that everybody loves a sambusa.