Meet Kelli: Kaari Foods
From turning down huge deals in order to stay true to their brand and real talking about how what they have faced with a male-domintated start up culture, Kelli and her sister keep it real! They have created salad dressings that are both Vegan AND paleo, and people are digging it! Be on the lookout for their products popping up in stores, but in the meantime, place an order and read Kelli’s wise words about what it’s taken to build Kaari foods into a powerful, loyal, and reliable brand!
Tell us to tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to where you are now?
I went to school in Northern California, and originally studied business finance. My plan all along was to work in finance and kind of take that path, wherever it would go. At my first job out of college, I worked for a large financial company in San Francisco and worked with all tech clients for about ten years. My clients were accounts like Yahoo and Google and another client in the digital e commerce side of things. Another main client was Monster who originally created Beats by Dre before they were officially beats, and a lot of those direct consumer products gave me really great insight into a quickly growing e-commerce world. After about a year working there, I realized I loved e-commerce, but finance just wasn't stimulating. I'd always kind of loved fashion and wanted to really just dive more into the e commerce space. I actually moved to New York and spent the last seven years working in fashion e-commerce for a few different luxury fashion brands building out their digital marketing.
Then, a couple of years ago, when I was in college, I found out that I had a gluten intolerance. I started changing my diet as a result, cooking at home and making cleaner versions of things. When I started reading labels, looking for gluten, or wheat or any of those items, I started noticing how much processed sugar and additives were in salad dressings and considered “healthy”. I started spending a ton of my free time cooking and discovering new brands and making cleaner versions of all my favorite foods. Then, my sister and I started playing around with a healthier version of ranch dressing, because she loves ranch but started to have issues with dairy. So we really thought we could find a cleaner option on the market, but neither of us could really find anything that was both dairy free, gluten free, and also not full of preservatives and additives. As a result, about a year and a half ago on the side, while I was still working in fashion, we started experiments with a bunch of different dressings and building out different flavors. We truly identified a gap in the market. There are quite a few newer salad dressing brands out there that are paleo and pretty clean, but they still had egg in them or other animal derived ingredients. We were just so disappointed with the Vegan options out there, and just how many additives, chemicals, and preservatives are in salad dressing.
So we decided that we were going to try to build a product to fill that gap between the Paleo offering and the Vegan offering. We started doing recipe development and research and got an opportunity to show our dressing at the Founder Made show in LA in October 2018. Both of us were still working full time in our other careers and we decided to do the show to just see what happens. I did all the branding, initially on our website with shopify pretty quickly over a couple of weekends. We decided to just get the product out in front of people at the show. We got such great feedback from the people that attended the show, as well as some of the buyers for whom we would want to be in their stores. After the show, it went so well- people were messaging us on Instagram and on our website so we sat down and decided to make this a real thing and officially launched the company. Then about a few weeks later, we decided that if this was really going to grow into something, it needed more attention, so I quit my full time job at the end of October to focus on growing Kaari. Now we're in a handful of grocery stores on the east coast and moving into some on the west coast in the next couple months.
2. Tell us about the mission of your brand? How does it empower women?
One of the big things that was really important to my sister and I was to lead the charge for building our brand. There had been discussions around going to existing companies and having them build it out. We really wanted to build a female founded company. Something that our Dad instilled in us from the beginning was that women deserve to be making the same decisions that men do, and they deserve to be in the boardroom. It was really important to us that it be a family business with my sister and I at the forefront of all.
The other thing that we realized really quickly is a majority of our customers are moms- a lot of young mothers looking for healthier options for their children, and they're being screamed at by these larger food companies that are ran by the GM’s of the world and the Krafts and all of these very male dominated brands and companies that t just aren’t connecting with these women in the right way. I've held so many conversations, either at farmer's markets or, you know, via email with our customers saying, “These other branches don't understand what I'm actually looking for, and what I feel comfortable feeding my kids. And I'm the one making that decision.” We really want to make sure that our approval process is “Would we feed this to our kids? Is this something that we would feel comfortable feeding our future children?” If any of our mom customers ever bring up to us that they wouldn't be comfortable with something- It would cause to reconsider- which hasn't happened, luckily, because the products are so clean, but we decided from the beginning, like that would really be our stop: if it wasn't something that we were comfortable giving to our own kids, it's not going into the product.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have faced as a female entrepreneur? And what are the steps you've taken to overcome it?
The biggest one, and we're still in the process of figuring it out, is fundraising. Up until now, the company's been fully self funded by myself, my sister, and luckily our dad. But we do want to grow this company and get wider distribution, and that requires taking on outside capital. The fundraising process is just very male centric. I’ve been lucky that everyone I've spoken to has been really friendly. But there's been a lot of, if you don't know the person leading the VC firm, who was always male, then you're not going to get the meeting or can you partner with this guy who's done this before, and then we'll sit down with you. So it's been an uphill battle, and I don't want to stereotype because again, like so many people have been nice to us. But I think there's just this attitude of “Awww like these two girls doing those little project on the side.” Even though we have real research and real customers and real data, we’re not taken as seriously when I'm pitching these bigger VC firms as we would if there was an older man at the head of the company.
Right now, I've been speaking to a ton of other female founders in the space, and kind of picking their minds of how they have navigated this space. As a result, we started exploring other options, whether that's a small business loan, or just raising funds from more friends and family to get us a little bit further.
4. What do you what sets your brand apart from others?
So I think there's a few things! One is really the ingredients: we will not sacrifice on clean ingredients. A big struggle we've been dealing with right now is extending shelf life. We are testing the product through an HPP process like they use with cold pressed juices. Some of the larger retail stores have expressed interest in our products but they want something with a 90 day shelf life. We can’t do that because we don’t add things like gums or soy lectin, and we just will not compromise on the ingredients. I've had to turn away potential big accounts because they won't take the product until it's able to sit outside the refrigerated section. Second is we really aim to be completely transparent with our customers. I always use the example of Ever Lane in the fashion space. We want to be we want to have a similar model in that we tell our customers where everything is coming from and what the process is. We've been very transparent with our customers that we're not a big manufacturer so there may be issues that come up. Our customer has to know this but we'd rather have that authentic, direct conversation, than pretend like we're some big company with everything figured out. I think at the end of the day, the consumer really appreciates because it allows them to be connected to the brand and truly get behind a brand that they love.
5. How do you collaborate with others working towards a better world?
One of the big things we've been doing from the beginning, and actually the only marketing that we've done is really partnering with people in the influencer space that aligns with our message and are also completely transparent, female, and leaders in the industry who are really making the world a better place. I've been very picky with who we partner with and who we send product to. I have relationships with people that I've worked with that have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, but their message just isn't aligned with our message so we won’t send them products. And again, just like the ingredients, we're not going to sacrifice what we believe in just to get a little bit more PR if that person’s message doesn’t align with ours. We’re also trying to figure out how we can reduce our negative impact on the physical Earth by eventually switching to glass bottles. We really just want to make sure that we're not furthering the issues that are effecting our planet. We're not going to the loudest people in the room about being green, but we want to make sure that we're also not contributing in the opposite direction.
6. What advice would you give to female entrepreneurs in the beginning stages of launching their brand or business?
My number one piece of advice is do not be shy to ask for help. I am someone who really, really struggled to ask for help. I like to do everything myself, and I work very quickly and efficiently. My husband really reminds to do this. It’s so funny- he'll come home from work, and I'm like climbing up on the cabinet to get glass from the top shelf, and he's like, “Hello, I'm here, like, just ask for help.” I think it’s because in my past careers in the fashion industry, I've always just figured it out! With Kaari, there were some things where I had no idea where to start. I had to really take a step back and ask people for help. I reached out to probably 30 different food founders with smaller brands that I really loved. I would email them and ask for help- and they would invite me for coffee or hop on the phone with me! You might think people are too busy, but you never know- I've had some pretty big CEOs email me back and talk with me for a few minutes. I've also talked to owners of nationally distributed food brands, and they tell me “we started in our kitchen too, and we didn't know we were doing for the first 6-12 month.” My second piece of advice is to believe in your idea and go for it! The worst thing that could happen is it doesn't work, and you learn from it! I really dragged my feet in focusing on this 100%, and even after I decided to go full time on this, I tried to take on a bunch of freelance work on the side because I panicked! My husband told me that I had to dedicate myself to this! This has to be your full time job. You can't build a company and then also be spending hours a week working on side projects. I think that's really hard, especially when, you know, there's things you have to give up financially to make it work. I do think that if you really, really want to see something fully through sometimes you just have to dive headfirst into it and figure out the logistics later. Male, female, everyone- we're all in this space together. We all can bring something to the table.