Brand Architects: Lisa Curtis of Kuli Kuli Foods

It all started with a feeling of exhaustion in a small village in Niger. Lisa Curtis, then a 22-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, found herself struggling with her vegetarian diet of mostly rice and pasta. When she approached the women at her village's health center about her fatigue, their solution seemed almost too simple: they pulled leaves from a tree, mixed them into a local snack called Kuli Kuli, and told her to eat it daily.

Join Bora Celik as he chats with Lisa Curtis, the Founder and CEO of Kuli Kuli Foods.

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"I was like, what? This, like tree leaves? It sounded a little weird," Lisa recalls, "but I trusted these women and I was like, I'll take anything to make me feel better."

Those tree leaves turned out to be Moringa, and they had a "transformative impact" on her health. But when Lisa expressed interest in helping the local women sell Moringa in the US, she had no idea she was embarking on what would become a decade-long journey.

"I think the naivete of youth was actually beneficial," she laughs, "because if I had any idea that I was signing up for what has now become an over 10-year journey, I don't know that I would have signed up."

After returning to the US, Lisa moved in with her parents and landed a job at a clean energy startup. But she couldn't shake her promise to the women in Niger. Every Wednesday night, she and a small team of friends would meet to figure out how to turn Moringa into something Americans would actually want to eat.

The challenge? Moringa was completely unknown in the US, and its strong, earthy green flavor wasn't exactly love at first taste. "You don't eat Moringa for the taste," Lisa explains. "You eat it for what it does for your body."

Their breakthrough came when they started positioning it as "more nutritious than kale" at farmers' markets. This simple comparison resonated with health-conscious consumers and eventually caught the attention of major media outlets, including NPR and Time Magazine.

But getting from farmers' markets to store shelves wasn't easy. Lisa spent countless hours driving to every Whole Foods store in Northern California, literally selling her bars carton by carton. "It was quite a process," she admits.

The real game-changer came in 2016 when Whole Foods decided to launch Kuli Kuli nationwide. This milestone helped Lisa raise $500,000 in just three months – the same amount that had previously taken her a year to raise.

Today, Kuli Kuli products are in 11,000 stores nationwide, and they've even collaborated with celebrity chef José Andrés through a Clinton Foundation initiative to source Moringa from Haiti. The company has raised over $11.5 million from investors and is preparing for its biggest expansion yet.

"We're about to like double in size next year," Lisa reveals. They're launching nationwide with Whole Foods in January, followed by rollouts in Kroger, Target, and Walmart. "It's going to be an insane Q1 and Q2."

Looking back, Lisa describes Kuli Kuli as a "10-year overnight success." Despite numerous challenges, including losing half their business during COVID, they've persevered. And while she jokes about the appeal of starting a simpler software company, her passion remains in discovering climate-smart, nutritious ingredients from around the world and introducing them to American consumers.

"We use so few of them," she notes, pointing out that the average pantry contains only about 30 different varieties of plants out of 30,000 edible options. "There's a lot more that we can do."

From a Peace Corps volunteer tasting strange leaves in Niger to a founder revolutionizing American supermarket shelves, Lisa's journey shows that sometimes the most impactful businesses grow from the most unexpected places – even if they start with leaves from a tree.

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