Kenya’s Margaret Nyamumbo impresses Shark Tank judges with coffee business pitch
New York-based Kenyan entrepreneur Margaret Nyamumbo is the talk of town after a trailer showing her pitching her coffee business model to potential investors on the popular TV show Shark Tank has left everyone in awe.
An alumni of the Harvard Business School, Nyamumbo will be appearing on the popular show on Saturday morning local time. She hopes to sell 5 per cent of her company Kahawa 1893 coffee to the entrepreneurs for Sh44million ($350,000).
In the promo clip, Nyamumbo says Kahawa 1893 coffee is best product in the world.
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“I grew up on my grandfather’s coffee farm in Kenya. We are very proud of the coffee that grows on our soil; unfortunately, farmers don’t always make enough for the delicious coffee that they produce. In fact, 90 per cent of the labour and coffee come from women but so many are not compensated because they do not own the land,” she says.
She also says her company sources their coffee directly from women farmers in Africa, but their customers can tip the coffee farmers and they match the tips.
An ethical brand of delicious coffee that goes above and beyond for their farmers?? I'm in! 😍 pic.twitter.com/uZfcFNTnOd
— Shark Tank (@ABCSharkTank) February 15, 2023
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Shark Tank is an American reality show were aspiring entrepreneurs from around the world pitch their business models to a panel of investors and persuade them to invest money in their idea.
On her website, Nyamumbo says that after studying abroad in the USA, she returned home with some ideas on how to bring Kenyan coffee to the world in a way that benefits our women farmers the most.
She made history in May 2021 when she became the first Black woman-owned coffee brand to be stocked at Trader Joe’s in the US.
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The brand also started selling at retail giant, Target in September of 2022.
The former consultant at the World Bank in Kenya, who moved to the US for her undergraduate studies in 2007, left her lucrative Wall Street job working with retail and consumer companies to start Kahawa 1893 in 2017.
Her company is named after the year that coffee was first planted in Kenya, but too her it is more about designing the future of the coffee supply chain than honouring the status quo of the past.