Interview with Philip Teverow

Let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there. How did your company get started and why?

When I met my partner Pierre Thiam on the street in Brooklyn, he had for years made a personal mission of sharing the West African foodways that he grew up with. His vision of finding an American audience for traditional ingredients resonated with me. I felt that the business proposition was legitimate, I knew that my background introducing American foodies to unfamiliar ingredients equipped me to help, and I had been searching for a way to apply my skills to a greater purpose. Providing a source of income for subsistence farmers practicing resilient agriculture was just such a purpose.

What is your product and how would you describe it?

Our product is really African foods. Our first ingredient platform is the drought-tolerant ancient grain fonio. Fairly densely nutritious and gluten-free, fonio cooks up delightfully like fluffy couscous in just five minutes. We use fonio in a range of products.

How have you pivoted your business this year?

The big pivot for us, like pretty much everyone else in our space, has been the shift to online sales. We built a new website in 2020 to match our rebranding, and we enabled it for ecommerce. We also started outsourcing management of our Amazon business to a company that specializes in doing that. Perhaps most significantly, though, we had planned a spring launch for our Fonio Chips, focusing on the foodservice channel – college and corporate dining – as a way of introducing the products to our target audience. Of course, foodservice was not an operational distribution model in 2020, so we had to change our strategy and our timing. We’re launching the chips at retail and online in January 2021.

What is your next challenge to overcome?

We probably share this one with many of our peer companies, too. The challenge is achieving discovery at retail in the absence of the in-store demos that we had relied on pre-pandemic. We need to help in choosing and executing online strategies for encouraging trial for an unfamiliar product.

What do you predict for the food industry over the rest of the year?

Aw, c’mon man! How would I know?!? I guess if you held a gun to my head and made me predict, I’d say that perhaps there is a possibility that by the end of 2021, much shopping behavior will once again approach the before times. Until then, I expect on-going innovation in online promotional opportunities.

Learn more at: yolelefoods.com