Blended Limonana

Fresh lemon, mint, and sugar blended frozen — the Levantine summer drink combining the Hebrew and Arabic words for lemon and mint, claimed by Israel and Lebanon.

Limonana — the frozen, blended version of a mint lemonade popular across the Levant — combines the Arabic and Hebrew words for its two primary ingredients: limon (lemon) and nana (mint in both languages). The drink itself likely predates its name, with blended lemon-and-mint drinks documented earlier in Syria and Turkey. The specific name and its explosive popularity in Israel, however, trace to a genuinely strange origin: in the early 1990s, the Fogel-Levin advertising agency ran a campaign of bus-only ads to prove the effectiveness of that new advertising medium, featuring celebrities supposedly endorsing a soft drink called "Limonana." The drink didn't exist — the whole campaign was fictional. But consumers began asking for it at restaurants and kiosks anyway, and within weeks, real restaurants and then soft drink manufacturers started producing a lemon-mint drink under the name to meet the demand the fake ads had created. Lemons and mint have both been cultivated across the Levant for centuries, but it was this accidental viral marketing campaign that fixed "Limonana" as the name for the blended, iced version of the drink that's now considered a staple of Israeli summer culture.