Hot off the heels of last week’s International Women's Day excitement, I bring you a pair of women co-founders and award-winning food entrepreneurs, Jess Mantell & Fumi Tsukamoto of Abokichi. Their business is in the Hamilton area of Ontario, Canada.

Fumi Tsukamoto is a food entrepreneur, award winning recipe developer and product market fit specialist. Her recipe for OKAZU (Japanese miso condiment) won the Gold Sofi Award in 2020, while her Instant Miso Soup, which diverts sake brewing byproduct from going to waste, was a finalist for the SIAL Innovation Award in 2019. Fumi is co-founder and CEO of Abokichi Inc. which has made upcycling a core pillar of their product innovation strategy.

Jess Mantell grew up in a Toronto suburb and went to Tokyo for her Masters in Media Design from Keio University. While in Japan, Jess worked as a graphic designer and reported on technology for The Japan Times; developed a fondness for trying new foods, and ultimately caught the entrepreneurship bug. Abokichi was born out of a desire to share some culinary delight with western consumers, and to create a company with super high standards of quality, customer service, employee satisfaction, and social responsibility.

The real genesis of the launch of Abokichi - a responsible food enterprise

“I like to think of it as an entrepreneurial experiment. We both had this desire to start something. We were already in Japan planning to come to Canada and thinking `well, what can we do together?’”, says Jess.

Fumi talks of the hardships of communicating when Japanese was her first language, “But making food is something I can do; even though I don't speak English well.”

What began in Tokyo as ‘a lot of restaurant hopping’ turned into a summer weekly spot selling Japanese rice balls at the farmers market and on to a full fast-forward to today where Abokichi is a consumer packaged food company distributing via some of the biggest grocery giants including Metro and Whole Foods. And while they’ve had a cafe over their journey, their business is a no-store-front, wholesale food firm.

Jess recounts how, “for the first six months of the pandemic, I thought daily about how grateful I was that we did not have a store.”

What is upcycled food?

“We didn’t start out to be an upcycled food business, but that idea has been brewing for several years now. Now it's becoming more popular, more well known.”

Abokichi’s upcycling journey began with an instant miso soup. The soup has upcycled products from Sake-making. It's the leftovers from the process of making Sake. They are using good quality food by-product that “was previously just getting dumped, or sold to feed livestock”. There’s also a tofu byproduct that the firm works with.

“Currently 58% of food produced in Canada is lost or wasted per year and food waste is costing the Canadian economy more than 49 billion per year.” Fumi says. “But no one knows what to do with some of it. It's a huge resource as a food company to use for a product. Food waste is one of the dumbest things in play that we should solve.”

“It's happening with Japanese foods that become popular outside Japan, for example”, Jess adds. “So in Japan, there are uses for these things. They don't go to waste. And people know what to do with it. But here, there's a bit of a catch up. So something like Sake, or tofu becomes popular, and that's great. People enjoy it. But it's not a closed loop where there's a place for everything and everything gets consumed. Not yet.”

Fun, frank advice from Fumi and Jess

“If you're planning on starting a food business, know that while we love what we do, it's a lot harder and there's a lot more to know than what most people imagine.” - Jess Mantell

“I think it’s important if you’re starting a new thing to remember the result is limited by your amount of actions. And action is limited by your thoughts and imagination. And your thoughts are limited by the information you're getting. So listen and read a lot.” - Fumi Tsukamoto

If you’d like to listen to the full episode with Fumi and Jess, you can find it here: https://iamamillionairesonowwhat.libsyn.com/ep217-your-result-will-equal-your-actions