The Crowdfunded Superfood Company Built Around Its Social Mission
Kuli Kuli Foods’ B Corp Certification Helped Secure Mission-Aligned Investors
“For us, B Corp certification was a really good litmus test. If investors that I spoke with showed a lot of hesitation around us being a full-fledged benefit corporation and our social mission being a part of our legal DNA, if that was an issue for them, then they probably weren’t the right fit.”
Lisa Curtis was a determined vegetarian volunteering with the Peace Corps in a small village in Niger. Her experience eating the protein- and nutrient-rich leaves of moringa, which is a complete protein with all nine essential amino acids, mixed with a popular peanut snack called “kuli kuli” eventually led to her founding Kuli Kuli Foods in 2013, two years after she left Niger. The company’s mission is two-fold: Provide people numerous tasty, healthy ways to consume organic moringa leaf powder — from bars to shakes to energy shots — while providing a sustainable livelihood to women in West Africa who sell the moringa leaves to Kuli Kuli.
Curtis has since launched an initiative in 2015 to plant hundreds of drought-tolerant moringa trees in largely deforested Haiti. Kuli Kuli sells a Moringa Green Energy Shot made with the Haitian moringa, spreading the sustainable livelihood portion of the company’s mission into new territory.
Curtis has gone through numerous fundraising campaigns in the process of launching and starting her company. “Our whole company, from day one, has been funded by the crowd,” Curtis says. She means it: The company started with Indiegogo, later ran a crowdfunding equity campaign via Agfunder, and just this January closed a $4.25 million Series A round.
B the Change caught up with Curtis to ask about why becoming a B Corp made sense for Kuli Kuli, and how it impacted her fundraising and search for investors.
When you started Kuli Kuli, did you know you wanted to become a B Corp? And why?
When I first came up with the idea for the company, I didn’t know what a B Corp was. I actually started developing the business plan right after the Peace Corps while I was still living in India. I knew that I wanted to do a social business. India, and New Delhi, in particular has an ecosystem of socially minded businesses. That was a good place for me to say, “Oh, this is a thing that’s happening, you can use market forces to create social change.” And for me that was a new idea at the time, in 2010. I’d always thought of businesses being purely profit-seeking and the nonprofits being the ones that do good. But I really liked that concept of social enterprise, so I started the initial business plan on the idea.
Originally, I was hoping to create product in West Africa and manufacture everything in Niger, where I was in the Peace Corps. But I think one of the important things about starting a company is you have to be flexible with your ideas as you learn more. I realized pretty quickly that there wasn’t any facility in Niger that could produce the moringa bars I was dreaming about. So, I started off by bringing the moringa here to the U.S. and turning it into bars.
I had a day job for about three years while I did this on the side. The company I was working for became a B Corp, and I actually did a lot of the audit for the company, Solar Mosaic. I got firsthand experience in what it took to become a B Corp, and I knew that when I started my company one of the first things I wanted to do was become a B Corp.
Can you describe your crowdfunding process?
The year 2013 was, actually, not only the first time we started taking money but the first time I told my friends and family what I’d been working on. It was a project I didn’t know how the world would react to, and it was a side project in addition to my day job. But it was a passion project that I wanted to get out there. I had recruited a few of my childhood best friends to work on it with me, and together we launched that Indiegogo campaign. It did great — we raised almost $25,000 in the first 24 hours and we ended up raising over $50,000 from 800 people in 23 different countries. It really took on a life of its own and really went beyond our friends and family. That gave me the courage I needed to quit my day job and really get our sales off the ground. Whole Foods picked us up first, then after we got good traction there we moved into more stores.
I then took a Kiva loan to help us more. A Kiva loan is a zero-interest loan, and it’s also through the crowd. Our whole company from day one was built by the crowd. So, for Kiva, people put in $25 or more as a zero-interest loan that would then get paid back over time. That was super helpful for us, because what we really needed was just some startup capital to help us make the product. Nobody was getting paid, it was really about making the product.
We took on crowdfunding equity in 2014. We started a crowdfunding campaign through Agfunder. It was similar to our Indiegogo campaign, but instead of getting product in return, people were actually getting shares of the company. Through that campaign, we initially raised $350,000, and then there was follow-on investment that got us up to $1 million total. It was from about 20 different investors.
More recently, we raised a Series A round of investment that got us up to a total of $4.25 million of investment. When you include grants and donation-based crowdfunding, we’ve raised a total of about $4.5 million. We don’t disclose the exact percentage owned by investors, but we still own the majority of the company.
How did you ensure investors were aligned with your company’s mission and goals? How did you find investors?
We did a lot of sitting down with investors. We were in the nice place where we had more people who wanted to invest in us than the investment dollars that we needed. So we got to be picky about the people we worked with, and I think are very aligned with all of our investors on what the future of our company looks like.
I met investors through a lot of events — I’ve done a ton of pitch events. And just by building networks and keeping in touch with people, which is one of the most important things you can do. Especially in our early days, we had a lot of people say, “This is super interesting, but I’m not ready yet.” I think in the food industry people don’t take you seriously until you’re over $1 million in sales, so after we got over that it got a lot easier to fundraise.
What role did B Corp certification play in your fundraising? If someone were to say, I’m starting a new company, should I be a B Corp, what would you say?
For us, B Corp certification was a really good litmus test. If investors that I spoke with showed a lot of hesitation around us being a full-fledged benefit corporation and our social mission being a part of our legal DNA, if that was an issue for them, then they probably weren’t the right fit. So, I used that idea a lot as we went through the process.
For other companies, it depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to find mission-aligned investors, then being a B Corp and a benefit corporation is really important, and it’s a great way to know how aligned your investors are.
Has your social mission been part of your hiring process?
Absolutely, without a doubt. Across our employees, we get a lot of people who are exceptionally talented and could be doing so many different things. Often, they are coming to work for a startup like us and are not making as much money as they could be elsewhere. But they feel good about it because they feel like they are a part of a strong social mission and are doing something really important for the world. So, yeah, I think it’s a big part of who we are.
Tell us more about the environment in India and how that community helped you shape and launch Kuli Kuli Foods.
It was the first time I’d heard of a social enterprise, and I ended up working for an incubator for social enterprises, so I got pretty well immersed in it. My colleagues at the company I was working for were very helpful and encouraging. The first business plan I ever wrote, I had one of my colleagues look over and give me feedback on.
I think those types of environments are really important, and I would also say the San Francisco Bay Area has a similar, incredible community. I’ve gotten so much help from so many other people, I now devote one to two hours a week toward helping other entrepreneurs. I’m paying it forward as much as I can.
Do you find yourself giving common advice to those you help?
Yeah. I think a lot of people start fundraising too early. I absolutely understand why it happens. You know, coming out of Peace Corps, I had no real savings and I was starting a company and not getting paid anything, so it felt like taking on money was the only way the company could be successful. But I find in those early days, it’s really hard to raise money and you end up spending a lot of time doing it.
The best thing you can do in those early days is develop a really great sales story and start to show some market traction. That’s ultimately the best way to get investment. So, one of the things I advise is even if you’re only in a couple stores, how can you make your product super-successful in those couple stores? So you can go to investors and go to other retailers and say, “Hey, you know, we’re in two stores, but we’re selling 20 units per store per week. We’d love to come into your 20 stores and do the same thing.”
How did you get started with the heavyweight Whole Foods?
I had seen that they were looking for new products and had open submissions. We made a bunch of bars by hand and submitted our product. They actually invited us in for a meeting almost right away. They had been interested in moringa for a while and saw an opportunity to work with us to bring in their first moringa product. That was pretty exciting.
It wasn’t like they said, “Oh, great, we love it, you’re going to get into all 400 stores.” It was more like, “We think this is interesting, you can go sell it into NorCal stores.” So I spent a lot of time driving around Northern California, selling it in, store by store. We’re now in all Whole Foods nationwide.
Where does the company stand now?
We are ramping up, bringing in new retailers and launching a new product later this summer. Right now, we’re in about 3,000 stores nationwide. We’re in Whole Foods, Safeway and Albertson, Sprouts and a bunch of other natural foods co-ops. We’ve been really focused on expanding within the natural food co-ops in particular because we think that’s our core demographic, so we’re focused on bringing in lots more of those types of stores.
B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
