Sana Khouja, a young businesswoman of Moroccan origin, broke down racial, economic and gender barriers to put her name in the Spanish wine world. In 2019, she created Zeena, her brand of organic wine packaged in a 100% recyclable aluminum can.
Born in Morocco into a modest family, Sana Khouja has worked hard to become today a businesswoman with a promising future. At the age of 30, she created “Zeena”, her brand of canned wine, a first in the world of wine in Spain. “The idea was to create sustainable products adapted to new consumer trends,” she explained in an interview with Publico.
“We are not competing with the bottle of wine, we are expanding the market. The wine industry has been run mostly by men, but in recent years more and more women have entered the sector. In my case, as a woman, from Barcelona and the daughter of immigrants without a university degree in oenology, I may have had everything to fail,” said the young businesswoman, proud of her origins and her career.
For Sana Khouja, “being a woman is the best thing that [him] has happened”, she who spent “years being ashamed of [her] origins and hiding [her] nationality”. The young woman admits that she has not suffered any form of discrimination in Spain, probably because she is “blonde and white”. But she thinks of those foreign women who are “darker in complexion”, or who wear the veil, who continue to be discriminated against because of race, religion or social status.
