Member Spotlight: Veena Prasad, Founder of Veena’s Market
Veena Prasad is Net Impact Seattle’s featured member of the month for June 2010. Veena recently launched Veena’s Market, a company that sells recipe kits for ethnic cuisines. She’s looking for mentors with retail expertise or experience with grocery chains. Send her an email if you have ideas that can help.
What do you do and why did you join Net Impact?
I recently started a company called Veena’s Market. As a child growing up in South India, my mother made delicious and healthy food every day. After having lived in the US for a while, I saw the opportunity to bring authentic Indian cuisine into American kitchens. Americans attempting to cook Indian food at home are discouraged by the challenge of finding all the right spices in reasonable amounts and recipes that work for them. Veena’s Market solves this problem by offering recipe kits with the specialty ingredients in just the amounts you need, a shopping list for the fresh ingredients and a proven recipe.
When I first heard about Net Impact in 2007 after having started the MBA program at the UW Foster School of Business, corporate social responsibility (CSR) was just another buzzword in my mind. But while on a guided CSR study tour to Peru in 2008, I truly started to understand the impacts socially responsible organizations could have on the communities in which they operated. My favorite example of a company that meets the triple bottom line is the Rainforest Expeditions eco-lodge in the Peruvian Amazon. By partnering with the local Ese-eja tribal community which co-owns and manages the lodge, Rainforest Expeditions offers visitors a rare glimpse not only into the diversity of species in the Amazon but also to the traditions of the forest tribes. In addition to making money, the partnership also ensures that the local tribal social life is preserved and the rainforest, at least in that part, is saved for generations to come.
This example, among others, brought home the point that even one business can have a positive impact on society. By being a part of Net Impact, I look forward to the networking, knowledge, support and inspiration on the way to making my own positive impact on society.
What have you participated in changing that you are excited about?
Ethical sourcing of ingredients is very important to me. For Veena’s Market, I currently source about two thirds of the spices from a certified organic supplier and continue to search for organic sources for the remaining ingredients despite a shortage in organic suppliers. For packaging, I make it a point to minimize materials and use post-consumer recycled content and locally sourced packaging wherever possible. The food packaging is sourced locally and its high quality ensures the spices remain as fresh as possible. The shopping bags, packaging fill, shipping boxes and labels are made from 100% post-consumer recycled content. The paper used for printing the recipe cards is FSC certified and is made from 30% post-consumer recycled content.
What did you learn in the process that you would like to share?
When I talk to suppliers about more sustainable packaging options, I get the feeling they think I’m a bit crazy. More often than not, these options cost extra and they don’t understand why I want to take on these extra costs as a fledgling business. Perhaps I am naïve, but I think companies, big or small, old or new, should be built (or rebuilt) around a solid core of sustainable principles if it can be considered to be a socially responsible company. While sticking to these principles will take me longer to reach my financial goals for Veena’s Market, I believe this foundation will ultimately lead to more lasting success.
I realized how important it is to be persistent in voicing demand for more sustainable options. The more that customers demand greener products, the higher the likelihood of suppliers keeping them in stock and ultimately offering them at competitive prices. Simply by asking about sustainable options, anyone can help drive change.
What changes are you thinking you might want to spark in the future?
The business model for Veena’s Market is based partly on encouraging people to cook food at home using responsibly sourced ingredients and giving them more options on what they can do with locally grown produce. I would love to scale up my operations to reach more people nationally and thus expand the positive impacts of the organic and local food movements. In order to do this, I’m looking for new distribution channels, specifically retail options such as Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh. To increase my impact even more, I would love to go beyond organic sourcing and do fair-trade sourcing.
What do you feel you need to learn, or be supported in, to scale up your operations?
Access to mentors with retail expertise or experience with grocery chains, and networking opportunities with fair-trade buyers or suppliers in the food industry, would be very useful in helping to achieve scale. I’m also hoping that the Net Impact community will help me develop an enthusiastic customer base that gives feedback to improve, expand and spread the word about Veena’s Market!
Want to connect with Veena? Send her an email at veena@veenasmarket.com