From Aleppo to Opportunity: How Adelle Tarzibachi Helped Turn One Newcomer Journey Into a Path for Other Women

When Adelle Tarzibachi arrived in Quebec from Aleppo in 2003, she was 23 and facing a problem familiar to many newcomers: experience from one country does not automatically tell you how to build a working life in another.

One of her first decisions was to learn the system around her. She enrolled in vocational training in professional sales to better understand Quebec’s labour market and entrepreneurial culture. Looking back on those early years, she later spoke about the value of training before rushing into the first available job when everything in a new country feels unfamiliar.

Years later, that individual experience would take on a wider meaning.

As Syrian refugee women began rebuilding their lives in Canada, Tarzibachi saw women arriving with skills, professions and histories of their own. Among the early women who later worked with Les Filles Fattoush were lawyers, journalists and fitness instructors. Their problem was not an absence of ability. It was finding the first door into a new labour market and a new community.

The answer did not begin by asking them to become someone else.

It began with something many already carried with them: their knowledge of Syrian food, their recipes and the culture surrounding them.

In 2017, Tarzibachi co-founded Les Filles Fattoush in Montreal, creating a first Canadian work opportunity for Syrian refugee women through their culinary skills. The job offered income and social connections, while also giving women a place to demonstrate abilities that extended well beyond the kitchen.

 Photo credit: Maude Chauvin — used with permission from Les Filles Fattoush

That is what makes Tarzibachi’s story more than a conventional entrepreneurial profile.

Her own newcomer experience became part of a collective response to a problem other women were facing.

But turning a meaningful idea into a lasting business brought another challenge: a social mission still has to survive the numbers.

As Les Filles Fattoush expanded, the company discovered that growth could look healthier from the outside than it really was. According to a Business Development Bank of Canada report published on October 5, 2026, labour costs at one stage reached about 70%, leaving the company losing money on every dish it sold. Management began calculating the full cost of each product — ingredients, packaging and labour — and restructuring production to reduce waste and improve margins.

For a young business, that can be a difficult distinction to make: being busy is not the same as being sustainable.

Customers may be ordering. People may love the product. The business may appear to be moving quickly. But if each sale does not leave enough behind to support the next one, growth itself can become part of the problem.

Les Filles Fattoush began treating its numbers not as an accounting exercise after the work was done, but as information that should shape the work itself.

Another lesson arrived through failure.

When the company tested home delivery during the pandemic, 25 of its first 30 orders were incorrect. Instead of continuing to force a part of the business it did not do well, management turned to partners with stronger distribution networks, including Lufa Farms, and worked with specialized producers when particular products required equipment or expertise the company did not have.

There is something useful in that failure for anyone building a business: sometimes growth depends less on learning to do everything yourself than on recognizing what you should stop trying to do alone.

The company used the same principle elsewhere. When it could not afford full-time specialists in every area, it brought in outside expertise for operations, organizational structure and strategic planning. Management also came to view carefully managed financing as a tool that could support growth rather than evidence that the business was failing.

And then the shape of the business began to change.

Catering had helped establish Les Filles Fattoush, but the company wanted products that could travel further than individual events. It entered grocery retail in 2023, creating a route to a much larger market. Its products have since reached about 500 points of sale across Quebec.

In September 2026, the company introduced Cuisine Fattoush as the identity for its grocery range while keeping the Les Filles Fattoush name, team and social mission. The move was designed to help carry the products beyond Quebec and into a broader Canadian market.

The growth is now visible in numbers. According to BDC, the business has surpassed $3.5 million in sales, recorded annual growth of 20% to 30%, and employs 18 full-time staff.

But the figure that brings the story back to where it began is not the $3.5 million.

BDC reports that some employees eventually asked the company for reference letters as they prepared to buy their first homes. Management saw that moment as a sign that employment was becoming something more durable: a foothold in a new country was beginning to turn into economic stability.

More than 50 Syrian women have worked with Les Filles Fattoush since the project began, according to the company.

That is what gives Tarzibachi’s journey its wider meaning.

She arrived in Quebec having to learn how a new labour market worked. Years later, she helped build a project that gave other newcomer women a first place inside that same economy.

The lesson is not that every woman should turn cooking into a business.

It is that something you already know may be more valuable than it appears — but turning it into a sustainable opportunity requires learning, numbers, adaptation, partnerships and the courage to change what is not working.

For Tarzibachi, one newcomer journey eventually became a door through which other women could begin their own.