Lio Food in Canada: The Latakia Line We Import

Who Lio is

Lio was founded in 2000 in Latakia, Syria, by Bilal Ibrahim, and grew from a single product to more than 80 canned-food and beverage items under the company's "Be Different" positioning. Its factories are ISO 22000 certified — including a sister manufacturing company, Sindyan Company for Food Manufacturing, opened around 2018, with a dedicated coffee factory added roughly four years later — and its products are sanitized in autoclave systems, made without preservatives or colorings.

The company maintains a Turkish sales office in Mersin alongside its Syrian production base, and exports to more than twenty countries including the UAE, the US, Canada and Europe.

What we import: the range

Lio's own Syrian-made core runs to canned vegetables and legumes, pickles, jams and pomegranate molasses too, and our catalogue carries pieces of that as well — caper and artichoke among them — alongside the four lines above. Lio also imports complementary products from other countries into its own range (tea, rice and similar staples); we're naming that for transparency, not because those complementary lines are part of what we currently stock from them.

What's genuinely rare here: whole desert truffles

Whole Truffles — kama'a, a desert truffle rather than the European variety most Canadian buyers picture at the word "truffle" — is one of the more unusual items in our whole catalogue, sold in either a 635 g glass jar or an 800 g can. Our dedicated guide covers sourcing and formats for this product specifically; we're pointing to it here rather than repeating that page.

Buying through a Canadian distributor vs. sourcing directly

Buying Lio's range through an established Canadian distributor means you're not managing customs clearance or an overseas factory's own minimum order quantities yourself — you're ordering by the case against a catalogue that's already landed in Canada, on one written quotation. Importing directly from Latakia is a real option at large enough volume, but it comes with its own overhead: freight consolidation, a preventive control plan, and the Safe Food for Canadians licensing that goes with handling the import file on your own account rather than a distributor's.

For most retailers or kitchens testing this range below full-container volume, buying through a distributor is the simpler path — and it's the same relationship Levant Direct maintains across all ten of our supplier houses, not a special case for Lio alone.

Ordering across the Lio range

A single inquiry can mix tomato paste, truffles, olive oil and coffee in whatever combination suits your shelf or kitchen — see how inquiry-based ordering works. If coffee freshness is a factor in your planning, how long ground coffee stays fresh is worth a read before you settle on a pack size and reorder cadence.

First orders into the Lio range often start with tomato paste and olive oil — the two most familiar entry points for a Levantine-leaning kitchen — with coffee and truffles added once the rest of the line has proven itself against actual demand. There's no requirement to order the full range at once; each product is quoted on its own as easily as it is together.