Lisa Curtis, Founder & CEO of KuliKuli, discusses her mission driven business that sells moringa-based nutritional bars while paying fair wages to women in West Africa who grow it
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next.
Speaker 2:You're listening to method to the madness. Eight Biweekly Public Affairs show on k a l x celebrating bay area innovators. I'm Lisa Kiefer and today I'm interviewing Lisa Curtis, the founder of the mission driven company, Cooley Cooley, that uses the nutritious leaves of the Maringa [00:00:30] tree to solve malnutrition and poverty in developing countries. They support the farmers who grow it and put the leaves in their nutritious health health-wise.
Speaker 3:[inaudible] okay.
Speaker 4:[00:01:00] Welcome to the program. Lisa Curtis. Yeah. So you are the founder and CEO of Kuli. Kuli. What does that mean? What's Cooley? Cooley? So we are creating an international market for Maringa in order to prove that, improve the health and livelihoods of women in west Africa. What is Maringa? I don't know. I've never heard of it. Yeah. Most people haven't. Uh, we're the first company to introduce it as a food product, um, to the u s [00:01:30] so it's one of the most nutritious plants in the world. It's actually a tree and we harvest the leaves and the leaves are even more nutritious than Kale. Um, they're kind of like a multivitamin. You're getting a lot of your calcium, iron, vitamin A, vitamin C, and potassium as well. So there's a lot of health bars out there. How is yours different from, you know, all the other ones that are on the shelf?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a great question. So we are the only natural bar where you're getting a quarter of your calcium, iron and vitamin a for the day. Um, so all [00:02:00] of our bars have less than six ingredients are all natural and they make you feel really good. So what are the ingredients? And so in our Black Cherry Flavor, you've got cherries, dates, almonds, Maringa, and a little bit of a Gavi and the chocolate when you've got similar, except you add chocolate. Um, and then our crunchy, oh man, you just have four ingredients, dates, almonds, marine guy, and a little bit of a Garvey. So is it Moringa Allah, Farrah? Is that the name of the tree [00:02:30] or full name? Why don't we know about this here? That's a good question. Um, I mean, it is eaten all across, all across the tropical belt. So you find it everywhere from Africa to India to Haiti.
Speaker 4:Um, but it doesn't grow very well in the United States. Um, and so most people just haven't, haven't come across it, but we're hoping that same way, you know, nobody really knew about keenwah or Chia seeds a few years ago [00:03:00] that we can help introduce Moringa. Well, how did you even come across this? Tell me a little bit about your story. Yeah. So I first started working with Maringa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Asia or West Africa. What year was that? Um, that was in 2010 and I had been in my village a few months and wasn't getting a lot of nutrients in my diet. So I was actually starting to feel a little malnourished myself. I was feeling really weak and really tired and just didn't have a lot of energy. Um, and so someone [00:03:30] in my village told me about Maringa and said, you know, this is incredibly nutritious. You have to eat it.
Speaker 4:So I started eating it and did some more research and I was like, wow, this, this plant is amazing. Everybody should know about this. You started feeling better. Pretty much immediately I started feeling better, um, and started working with some women in my village to plan a whole way to get more marine there. Um, and to encourage them to really process it in a way that preserves the nutrients. So instead of taking the leaves [00:04:00] and boiling them for hours, actually powdering them and then adding that powder to their sauces or students do know how to do that well. So, uh, peace corps has been doing a big push around Miranda. So Peace Corps are a bunch of different NGOs. Um, even the governments of Senegal in Malawi have been really pushing Maringa as natural nutrition for the tropics. And this was going on when you were there for other reasons. [inaudible]
Speaker 4:the Peace Corps. [00:04:30] I was a community development volunteer, so actually a lot of what I did was work in the health center. And that's how you heard about all of this. What country were you in? So I was in any share in west Africa. Um, and then actually, so I was start had just started all of these Maringa projects when there was a terrorist attack. Um, so there were two, two people who, um, two French men who got killed and in the capital city right across [00:05:00] the street from the Peace Corps office, all these people, no, I didn't know them, but it was a little terrifying. It was a bar that a lot of peace corps volunteers went to. So they evacuated us out of the country. We in like, you know, two days and we were, we were gone, um, and took us to Morocco and we basically had the option of going back and waiting for months and going on somewhere new or just any nurse service there.
Speaker 4:Um, and I loved my [00:05:30] village and I didn't really want to go somewhere new, so I ended my service and actually went to India and started working with us social enterprise incubator. Um, and that was where I really started to think more about social enterprise and you know, kind of asking myself the question like, why isn't anybody doing some of this innovative work with nutrition? Like we've been shipping American corn over to Africa for the 50 years and it hasn't actually [00:06:00] really helped anyone. I'm like, we have this terrible history of just dumping stuff there and nobody knows what to do with it. Yeah, exactly. And training or came up with the idea, well maybe I can do something with Maringa and you know, maybe use that as a tool to help improve nutrition and livelihoods over there. So how long did it take you to research and figure this all out and what you needed to do it?
Speaker 4:It's been a, it's been quite a process. So I, you know, I got back to the U S in, [00:06:30] uh, summer of 2011 and started kind of thinking about it then and then found one of my best friends since I was little, has been doing consumer packaged good consulting and taking basically, you know, general mills will come to them with the idea of we want to do a breakfast shake and then they'll formulate a product, take it through all the consumer testing and then actually take it to market. Um, and so she was like, well, we can do it. Like, let's, you know, let's start. So we started just testing [00:07:00] and farmer's markets, seeing what different levels of Maringa people liked. Um, you know, what different ingredients in a bar people liked. Um, and then last June we did a big crowdfunding campaign and raise 53,000 to do our first manufacturing run.
Speaker 4:Kickstarter, Indiegogo. Okay. And how long did it take you to raise that money? While we raised 25,000 in a day. Oh my goodness. How did you market through your, um, it, it went viral. It was amazing. [00:07:30] Um, so, you know, obviously we all hit up all of our friends and family, but then had a lot of people who then sent it on to their friends who sent it onto their friends. I had this one email from my friend's mom's friend who had donated to our campaign and just said, you know, I love what you guys are doing. It actually made me cry watching your video and keep it a video. Made it that real video that, yeah, that really told the story. So I'm moving about the video. Tell me about that. When did [00:08:00] you make that video? We made the video, um, in May. Okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think it was moving because it was, it was a very personal story. I mean it was, it was Kinda me saying, I went to the BS score and I started working with this plan and it's amazing. And I, you talked about your own malnutrition. Yeah. Talked about that and talks about how this, this is one of the most nutritious plants in the world and grows naturally in a lot of countries that suffer from malnutrition, but it's being really under utilized and we have an opportunity [00:08:30] to get more people to grow it and use it, um, and do it in a way that is sustainable. So how are you doing that? I want to get deeper into that because so many times, you know, we take a product and we end up getting all of the product in the developing world and it doesn't leave anything for the people back there.
Speaker 4:How are you managing that process? No, that's a great question. And one of the things we've been really careful to do is to grow more Meringa than we're actually importing here. [00:09:00] So our main partner is this awesome nonprofit in Ghana that does a lot of nutritional education, helps women set up cooperatives who grow Maringa, um, to use it in a way that preserves the nutrients and decel it locally as well as selling it to us. We're not fair trade certified yet. We should be soon, but we are paying very fair wages and so some of these women are making up to $300 a month, which for reference as a Peace Corps volunteer, I made $75 a month and they probably did play a lot in there. [00:09:30] Yeah, quite a bit. Is that nonprofit checking to make sure that the practices are clean and organic or you know, whatever.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we're working on organic certification and fair trade certification. Um, and so that, you know, it all is very fair trade in organic right now. But with the certification we can prove that to everyone. So it should have that pretty sound. How did you get such an astounding board or advisory board? I'm looking at some of these people that [00:10:00] knew me t and you know, some really great entrepreneurs. So how did you get there? Amazing. Um, I don't know. We've had an incredible, did they come to you or what happened? So, I mean, they've all come in different forms, but I think just people have kind of heard this story and then, you know, I've sat down and talked to them and they've been willing to help us. We've gotten an incredible amount of support from all different places because it's such [00:10:30] a big problem of being able to actually help those communities rather than just taking.
Speaker 4:So tell me about yourself. You, where did you grow up and how did you get from a to B? How did you get from wherever you grew up to peace corps work? Not a very linear path. Um, I grew up in Alameda and actually almost went to UC Berkeley, but decided when my dad said that we could do lunch every Friday and [00:11:00] I could, you know, live at home if I wanted. I was like, oh no, I got to get farther away. So I went to Whitman College in Washington state and did a lot of environmental community organizing work. I actually worked with the United Nations Environment Program for a while, so I got to go to these big UN conferences and worked a lot on climate change and how do we mitigate that? And one of the things that you know, at, at a lot of these conferences, they're really frustrating.
Speaker 4:But it was also really interesting to see the [00:11:30] perspective of India, China, Brazil, the, you know, the so called brick, um, of them being like, well, you know, you guys have been doing this polluting everything for the past hundred or more years and now we're trying to pull a billion, 2 billion people out of poverty. So why do we have to cut back when you've been doing this for so long? Um, and so that, that kind of really sparked my interest in international development and seeing [00:12:00] that as like sustainable development is the way forward and the only way that we can continue to live on, cause you're not planning, you're not going to stop development then. I don't think that we should. I mean I don't, I don't think it's fair. Yeah. So I spent a summer in Kenya. I'm working with a nonprofit there and actually helped us start a biodigester project.
Speaker 4:So using cow dung, um, instead of rain forest trees for fuel. And yeah, I also [00:12:30] worked in the White House for a summer. You did for Obama? For Obama. What did you do there? Um, I was in the political affairs office, so I was writing political briefings for the president, vice president and first lady. Um, yeah, I actually meant to be pretty interesting. It was pretty interesting. It was pretty high pressure. I actually messed up on one. So Arlen Specter, um, it was a senator from Pennsylvania and changed his, changed from Democrat to Republican a couple of times and I put that he was Democrat [00:13:00] when he was Republican on one of the briefings and Joe Biden caught it. That was, but he was really nice. But yeah, that was sort of funny. So how long did that last? That intern, that was this an internship for a summer and then, yeah, just kind of, you know, I, I'm always, I've always been interested in politics but I think especially seeing the polarization of congress right now, I was like, I don't, I don't want to do this.
Speaker 4:I would, I would rather go back and kind of do [00:13:30] some of the international development stuff. So applied for the Peace Corps and then right after graduation I went straight over to here. Okay. Did you get to travel much when you were over there to other places? You were just really, yeah, I traveled a bit when I was in India. I want to talk more about this process. Um, you've got back home and you, where did you come up with the recipe for these [inaudible] glue bars, by the way? Oh yeah. Think I'm going to taste it right now cause I haven't had lunch but, hmm. Wow. [00:14:00] This is a chocolate one. It's really moist. How'd you come up with the recipe? Um, so Valerie actually did one of my co founders. Oh, she the one you talked about earlier that she's the one was real consumer packaged good experience.
Speaker 4:We kinda did it together a lot in our kitchen, just like mixing in different things and then testing it out on friends and family and then testing it out at the farmer's market. So local farmer around here? Yeah, in Oakland. And then how long was that process of the testing of the recipe? A year. [00:14:30] I mean we were all working other jobs and jobs and this was kind of a side project for awhile and at the same time as we were testing things here, like we were also developing relationships with different organizations in west Africa and sourcing Maringa and trying to kind of get that supply chain set up. Are you actually flying over there frequently to work with those people or do you have someone on the ground that you trust? I'm enough. I'm not going there as much as I would like. Um, and it's pretty pricey.
Speaker 4:[00:15:00] I'm hopefully going there in the spring. So you just do it via the computer or, yeah, we have a call with them every other week. And just kind of talk through what's going on and then, you know, email communication. They must love you guys. They're really excited about us. I just saw that you got picked up by whole foods. Yeah. It was just right after your Kickstarter. Yes. Made it. Yes. So we whole foods was the first retailer to pick us up. They actually picked us up before we had a manufactured product. And so you mean while you were in the campaign mode [00:15:30] itself? Yeah, so they were, they've been awesome. So they started us in 10 stores and then they've just pushed us out. Starting next month we'll be in 20 more.
Speaker 2:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness. I Buy Biweekly Program on k a l ex celebrating bay area innovators. Today I'm talking with Lisa Curtis, founder and CEO of Cooley Cooley, introducing super [00:16:00] food bars made from marine gully [inaudible]. What does that mean to you? Like what are the challenges now, now that
Speaker 4:you're actually getting popular? Yeah, it's, well, it's a good, good challenges. I mean, one of the things is just managing, managing our sales team. Like a lot of, you know, a lot of what we do is kind of educating people about Maringa, getting them to try the product [00:16:30] and then buy it. Um, so a lot of in store sampling demos and then on the west Africa side, like they've, they're definitely able to scale up with us at least for the next year. We think they've, there's enough marina, they're growing. And uh, one of the cool things about marina is you can plant it and harvest it within three months. Um, so it does it ready to go and doesn't take very long to get to the short cycle. Yeah. Very good. Right. So would you consider, are there other farms going in over there [00:17:00] of Maringa trees or, yeah, so that's what's over here with about 500 women and a few different women's cooperatives.
Speaker 4:Um, and they're all growing Maringa and then, um, kind of taking it to a central spot and powdering it and then sending the powder leaves to us. Okay. And this is just niche air. God actually is our main spot. We're also working a bit in Asia. These years has been harder to export from New Jersey, so it's north of Nigeria. It's a landlocked desert. Um, [00:17:30] and so we, you know, I've been in touch with some of the women's cooperatives there and we've gotten some Maringa from them but had a little bit of a hard time getting out of the country. So is it just one, what other countries are you looking at for export later as you grow or are you yeah, so we are, um, so Ghana and you share Tanzania and Nigeria are the four countries that we all have that we've developed relationships with some cooperatives.
Speaker 4:It also grows in other tropical areas like so [00:18:00] India, right? Yeah, so definitely India. Um, they actually don't use the leaves as much, but they do use the seed pods. Oh, they do. So they've been using it for some time. I mean, is this an old, it's in our vedic medicine. I mean the ancient Greeks and Romans used to eat Moringa. It's, it's very well known. And each day it was called today. Yeah. When the, how do they use the pods? What are they? You're putting it in nutritional bars. How are they eating it? So the, so the pods are kind of these long [00:18:30] string bean looking things and they actually put them in soups a lot. Oh, for flavoring. Yeah. And then the Philippines, they make Maringa Pesto, which we're hoping will be one of our products down the line. That's awesome. That's really great.
Speaker 4:Super Food Pesto. Has there been an interest on the part of like the Nestle's of the world, these big corporations in Moringa and if or not, and why not? Why wouldn't they want to do something good like that? So generally what we've seen [00:19:00] with bigger companies like general mills and Nestle is that they're, they're not usually the ones to bring something totally new to market cause it costs them a lot in r and d to develop a product to get through their whole process and bring it. Um, and so then they won't do anything with Maringa until you've proven it. And then often what they would do is try to acquire us instead of compete or it can be, yeah. You sound like you have this [00:19:30] philosophy around sustainability, right? So were your parents enlightened about sustainability? Did you grow up in that atmosphere or just living in the bay area?
Speaker 4:Did you pick up on this or did you absolutely pick it up when you were in college? Yeah, it's hard to kind of pinpoint men. My parents are pretty eco minded. You know, warehouse is always cold because nobody turns on the heat and it's true all around the bay area. Yeah. Yeah. High School, I have this distinct memory of [00:20:00] my high school Bentley didn't have a recycling program, which was like very frustrating to me as this eco kid. And my mom was like, well if you're, you know, if you don't like it, why don't you just do something about it. And so started this whole cans for habitat recycling program there. That was kind of my first taste of activism of, you know, they don't like it, fix it, and I'll do something about it. So I looked at your website and it's really nice.
Speaker 4:It's really well done. Who did your website? Um, so one of my co founders, so there are four of us that [00:20:30] all are founders of Cooley Cooley. One of them is a software engineer and one's a graphic designer. So they did our website and we do sell quite a bit online. What is the website, by the way, if, if some of our listeners want to know more about you and your product, where would you send them? Ww Dot Cooley Cooley bar.com. And how do you spell that? K. U L I. K U L I v a r.com. All one word. I think you [00:21:00] told me earlier. But tell me again, what does was Cooley Cooley mean? Yeah, so it's a word in Hausa. It's actually this, what does the house as a tribe, right? Yeah. Houses a tribe. It's the, and it's also a language. It's the second most widely spoken African language after Swahili.
Speaker 4:So, so Haley's east Africa, how says West Africa? Um, and Cooley who is actually this peanut paste that in Asia is often mixed with Maringa to make this really delicious snack. That's how I first started [00:21:30] eating marina. I was in these, these coolie Khalif snacks and that was kind of the inspiration for our cool. Equally. Cards have nuts in them as well. Yeah, they do not tasty. I'll tell you, I'm going to have another bite because it really is good. It's not dry. Yeah, there's not gy they're really delicious. So are you gonna what are you gonna be doing next? So we've got a whole sketched out a whole pipeline of products. I think next we will probably be looking to stay in the snack category. So [00:22:00] something like, you know, sort of Maringa fruit leather strips, doing maybe some savory snacks. Um, and then at some point we would love to do a Maringa bread fridge, like a Maringa energy drink.
Speaker 4:Yeah, makes sense. And so would use the same manufacturing people to do your manufacturing for all these other coming products? Yeah, different factory. You'd have a different co-packer cause our co-packer just as bars all we'd have to find somebody else who can do something [00:22:30] different. And how did you find the manufacturing people talk to a bunch of them. So you went out and met with people? Well mostly via phone. Um, but like interviewed six of them. Um, and these guys were the best. I mean they, how did you even know how to do that? Google's amazing. I found most of them online. So you learned a lot of this on your own? Yeah, the whole business process. Oh yeah. It's been a really big [00:23:00] learning curve. We are, I mean, like you pointed out earlier, we have some amazing advisors and so, you know, we recognized pretty early on that we are a young team, but our advisory board has been helping us a ton.
Speaker 4:So one of my philosophies is that the only failure in life is the failure to try. Um, and I think lots of people are afraid to start something or really, you know, throw themselves into their idea or their business or organization because of [00:23:30] a fear of failure. But you know, when you, when you really think about it and kind of write down like, okay, what's the worst thing that can happen? Um, it's not all that bad to fail. It's not bad. But I think, you know, sometimes people ask me like, you know, why are you doing this? This is so risky. It's like, well, I think if I didn't do it, I would regret that I never tried. Even if this totally fails, I will have learned so much and [00:24:00] have at least I, at least I tried, you know, at least I did something.
Speaker 4:I try to keep that philosophy because so many people are afraid of just stepping out and good enough. All right. [inaudible] gonna land. Yeah. You know, we've, we've had kind of countless failures along the way just in, in doing something new, you're going to fall down sometimes, but you just got to get back up and correct it and move on. Yeah. Do you have any stories? I've, well, I've got one that I just think [00:24:30] proves that nature is the most hospitable country in the world. So I was walking down the street and you know, streets in my village for basically like mud paths full of like, there was cow dung, there was all sorts of stuff on in the street. And I had these little flip flops and I was going down and like, you know, maybe 10 or 15 minutes away from my house and my flip flop broke, the strap [00:25:00] came out and I was just like, ah. So frustrated. Didn't want to walk through all of the like mud and poop and everything. And this guy on the street who I'd never met in my life, takes his shoes off his feet, hands them to me and says, oh, well, you know, why don't you walk back to your house, get another pair. And then I'll just wait here.
Speaker 4:I don't think that would happen anywhere else in the world. Did he speak to you in English or else your multi-lingual? How many languages tell me the languages. [00:25:30] Um, so I'm pretty decent in Spanish, French and Hausa and English. Did you know how so before you landed over there? No. Peace Corps taught us. Yeah. Peace Corps has an amazing language training program. So we picked it up really fast. So you're, you became fast friends with this guy that gave you the shoes. I bet. Yeah. I was just blown away. It was so great. What was the hardest part of getting this whole thing off the ground? [00:26:00] You had your Indiegogo campaign going out and seeking advisors. What part was the hardest thing of all? I think the hardest part was actually just starting, cause we spent a lot of time talking about it and like, you know, emailing different people and meeting with people to just kinda run the idea by them and spent way too long, like six months or something.
Speaker 4:Just like just talking about the idea. [00:26:30] Um, and then finally we were like, you know, let's just, let's just try it. Let's just give it a go. Um, and get out there. And so what was the absolute first spark thing that you did? Um, so the first thing just, you know, making stuff in our home kitchen. Um, but then, you know, we, we actually got a commercial kitchen. I was amazed at what it takes to sell food in California. Does it take, tell me a lot. So it's a, it's a [00:27:00] good amount of money. He was like over $1,000, um, for all the permits and licenses. Um, and then, you know, we had to get food safety certified. So we had a food safety certification, we had a seller's permit, we had a business license, we had a manufacturing license and we had a health permit.
Speaker 4:Um, and so each of those took months to get, just to have it at the farmer's market, just to sell at the farmer's market. It was an amazing hurdle [00:27:30] just to get there. And then once we were there, it was, you know, one of the big things that kept going through my mind is like, how do people make money doing this? Because you know, you, you, you pay like 50 bucks to every market that you do to the people running the market. Um, and then there's all the costs of goods that you're selling. And then, you know, we didn't pay ourselves, but if we had, there would have been nothing left over. So it was, when is the point [00:28:00] where you start making money? Well, food unfortunately isn't going economies of scale business cause you know in the u s we don't like to pay a lot of money for our food products.
Speaker 4:What we've come to the conclusion is that we just have to grow pretty quickly and have to, you know, sell a lot of places. And once you have those economies of scale and manufacturing efficiencies, then it, it starts to get a lot of critical mass happens. Right? Yeah. Well this is just [00:28:30] a really cool story and I really liked the taste of your nutrition bars. Oh good. What could find them at whole foods? So squibble oh Berkeley bowls are helpful as well. Yeah. Oh that's good. And draggers and soon to be Molly stones. Okay, well if you don't see us, you should ask for us. And so what happens when I asked for it, they often make a note and a lot of these folks, a lot of these stories we've reached out to, but we want that when people ask for it, [00:29:00] then that shows the store that there is demand. So they're much more likely to actually put it on the shelf. Okay, good to know. Well, thank you for being on the program and wish you a lot of luck and
Speaker 2:I'm so excited to finish this bar. It's so tasty. That was Lisa Curtis, the founder and CEO of Cooley Cooley. If you have any questions or comments about the show, find us on the k a l x website and drop us an email.
Speaker 5:[00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]
Speaker 3:tune in again in two weeks at the same time. Have a great weekend.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
