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That's c-r-e-s-s-e-t capital.com slash built. OK, on to the show. And this week, we're rerunning an interview from last fall with Chef Pierre Chiam. His company, Yolay Le, is betting big on phonio. It's a nutritious and drought-resistant African grain that could feed billions of people on our warming planet. Hope you enjoy. Hello, and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross. So one of my favorite things to do is to wander the aisles of grocery stores.
I'm always in the lookout for weird and new products. Recently, I came across some mushroom jerky, cassava, cheese puffs with plant-based cheese, a Mexican-fermented kombucha-type drink. Anyway, I always worked to find at least one new thing in the store to try each week. And about a year ago, I came across a grain that looked really interesting. It was high in protein, gluten-free, and most intriguingly, it was an ancient grain from Africa.
It's called phonio and immediately grabbed a bag and cooked it up with some chicken thighs later that night. Not only was it great, but also totally different from other grains like quinoa or farro or rice. The man who is most responsible for bringing phonio to the US is a Senegalese chef named Pierre Chiam. He's the founder of a West African restaurant in New York called Taranga, and peers on a mission to get people to discover phonio.
Why? Well, not only is it a nutrient-dense plant, but it requires very little water to grow. In fact, it thrives in drought-stricken areas. In other words, phonio could be a major source of food as climate change continues to ravage the planet. In 2017, Pierre co-founded his company, Yolele, to bring phonio to the US and eventually to the world. Besides phonio, Yolele now sells phonio flour and even snacks made from grain. And their products are available in thousands of stores across the US.
Pierre Chiam joins us welcome to the show. Thank you, guys. Pleasure. So you are originally from Senegal and you grew up I think in Dakar, right in the capital or around the capital? Yes, yes. I grew up in Dakar in a neighborhood called Poin-E. And you were not from what I understand as a kid or even as a young man. You were not necessarily food focused, right? I mean, as a student, you were into science and mathematics, is that right?
Yes, I had a math baccalaureate and then I went to university for physics and chemistry. But growing up in Dakar obviously food is a big part of the culture. But you know, I say gender-based activity. So Chinese for women and food was not an option as a profession. I never thought food could be a carrier. Yeah, but it's interesting. I know you've talked about this before you get a wonderful TED Talk and anyone listening should go check it out.
Dakar, because of where it is, its location and its history, it has a blend of cultures, obviously, many different West African cultures. But also there's like French influence within the food and Lebanese influence and Vietnamese influence. Tell me a little bit about the foods that you grew up eating. Yeah, like you said, Dakar is like a melting pot really because of its location. You know, it's the most western coast of Africa. Yeah. So it became a natural port of entrance for centuries.
It was the place where mariners would come before going anywhere in Africa. And over time, the French colonized Senegal. So we still have a strong French community there. And the Lebanese community's been there for generations now and they brought their food culture and you have obviously the West African community and the Vietnamese because the Senegalese and the Vietnamese had the same colonial past with the French. Yes. So yeah, I had all those flavors growing up.
I was exposed to that, not to mention the local cuisine which is also very, very interesting because my mom was from the south of Senegal which is a very, more lush as opposed to the north of Senegal the south of the Sahara and dry and arid. So that part of Senegal has a different type of cuisine with lots of seafood which you see everywhere in Senegal but also lots of citrus. Formation also is a big part of our cuisine. So my upbringing was full of flavors.
Wow. I know that you decided to at a certain point to go to the United States to continue your studies. They studied physics and chemistry in Dakar but there was a nationwide student strike and I guess you couldn't continue your study so you ended up getting a visa to the United States and you were supposed to study in Ohio, right? Uh-huh, in Cleveland. In Cleveland. In a small college in a town called Burrie, actually, near Cleveland.
I came here in 1989 and I knew a friend who lived in New York. So I had to land in New York and then take a bus from New York to Ohio that was the plan. So he insisted that I stay in New York a couple of weeks and you know, that was a great opportunity. Everyone wants to see New York at least once and that changed everything. I'm still on my way to Ohio. I never made it there. I stayed in New York and three days after I arrived, I got robbed and I lost every single penny that I had. That was...
What, you got three days after you arrived in New York in 1989? You robbed? Three days. My friend lived in a place on 50th Street right near Times Square and I'm not sure if you knew New York in 1980. Oh, yes. I was a different place. It really was a scary place and I was horrified by it.
A car is like a peaceful seaside city and now I'm here in New York that was completely different and what I expected to see, you know, it wasn't what I saw on TV and I'm broke now and it's getting cold because I arrived in the beginning of fall so I had never seen winter before and I'm like, I'm out of here. I had my return ticket.
A friend of mine happened to be working in a restaurant and they were looking for a bus boy, the only job that required no particular qualification and how experienced and I applied that came and the bus Richard who's still a good friend just took me. He saw this desperate young kid and he gave me the job and I had a change everything. It's amazing. I mean, you were coming to the United States to study physics and chemistry in Ohio, get robbed in New York and that's it.
It's all gone and it's amazing because it's, I mean, you laugh about it now but it's, I'm sure it wasn't funny at the time and very scary. Oh, boy. But it's crazy when you think about something like that happening. That horrible thing had to happen in order for your life to completely change. I mean, you didn't obviously go and pursue physics and chemistry, you got a job as a bus boy and you would then go on to pursue a life and career and food. Yes, yes, absolutely.
And it had to have happened now. I look back and I'm like connecting the dots and I'm like, without that incident, my life would have been completely different. I would have heard that guy who robbed me. I mean, I, you know, he changed my life for the best. I believe. From what I understand, you really got interested in cooking. I mean, you, you know, you could again have been become a bus boy and maybe risen to eventually to an assistant manager and manager of the restaurant.
But you, you really were interested in what was being prepared in the kitchen and I guess wanted to learn about that. Yeah, yes, it was ingrained in me without knowing it. My mom at an early age, I remember she had this collection of cookbooks. And I, as a kid, I remember that was a La Rousse-Culinaire, a French collection. And I used to look at the photos of her cookbook collection. And I had no design, no, I just like the pictures. It looked delicious.
And now I'm here in New York City, you know, as a bus boy, I'm taking the dirty plates into the kitchen. I'm looking at these food that looks so much like the pictures of my mom's La Rousse-Culinaire. And I'm like, wow. What kind of restaurant was it, by the way? The restaurant was French-slash American cuisine. So the food was beautiful, you know, more beautiful than I've ever seen before.
And the fact that the chef was French-trained too, he spoke a little French and he loved whenever I was in the kitchen, he loved to practice his French with me. So there's so many things that got me, you know, it's very lucky, really. And that chef offered to, you know, I, he knew my story of a time, he knew that I wanted to make extra money because I was still hoping to save money and go to Ohio. I was like, New York is not for me, this crazy, this crazy.
And he said, okay, so why don't you come and do extra shifts in the kitchen? You know, you could be a dishwasher. And I'm like, sure, I'll do the extra shift for the money, but I don't intend to stay in this, you know, this is too hard. And I hated washing dishes. You know, I hated it so much. I hated it, but it was a necessary first step.
And from dishwasher, I went to, you know, when the prep guy is missing, they always call the dishwasher to and give you the knife and you start chopping vegetables. Prepping. And yeah, prepping. And that's how you learn your knife skills and how over time you become a prep cook and then you no longer a dishwasher. And then the garter manger is missing.
And then they take you to the garter manger station and you start learning how to make the dressings and how to clean the leaves and the salads and stuff. And that's where everything changed for me because when I started to make dressings, and I realized that I was making an immersion of acid and lipid, it was vinegar and oil. You were a chemist. And I was chemist. And I'm like, hey, this is chemistry. I was going on here, you know.
And I started to look at every reaction in the kitchen from a different angle now, because I knew the theory of it. I knew what was happening. So it was really something of like, I dig this, I like this, I like the kitchen atmosphere, I like the camaraderie, this became my family. Within just a few years of arriving to New York, you actually became the head chef at this restaurant, boom, in Soho. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's remarkable.
I'm trying to like, I wish I could be a fly on the wall for like those long distance calls you had with family back in Dakar or maybe the letters you write. Dear family, I am not studying chemistry in physics. I'm actually the head chef at a restaurant in Soho. It took me a while to do that. It took me a while. I mean, I was still very embarrassed. It was cultural. You know, you come to from a culture where cooking is really a women activity.
So this cultural thing was stuck with me even though I was very interested. But I knew I was in New York and everyone in the kitchen were men like me. So it was in this world, it was fine. And I was loving what I was doing. I really loved it. I was passionate about it. But it was still difficult to tell my parents about it for a little while. And since I knew that, you know, it wouldn't be long until my mom found out and I had to tell them.
So that's when I must have, or my courage and went to court and say, hey, by the way, you know, I am not going to school. And I am cooking and I love this. And my mom just, you could see, I mean, she was very reserved. But you could see she had this belief. She was smiling. I could feel that. And then she said, wow, that's great. What kind of cooking are you doing? And she was curious about the food that I was doing. And she started asking me questions.
And then she wanted me to give her some recipes. And I was like, wow, that wasn't bad. And she told my dad and my dad came to us. Also, he could feel the smile. But they were both amused. But you could see that they were really, really if parents who knew that their son had found something that he enjoyed doing. And they were encouraging. And I was like, wow, I didn't think my parents would cool like that. But they turned out there. It wasn't there's nothing to be cool about.
I was just doing a job that I like doing. But now I was free. And I was free to become a cook and a leather chef. Pierre, from what I've read, you were trained in the European cooking styles, French, Italian. But in many chefs who are trained in European traditions, but don't have European backgrounds, go on to open restaurants that reflect their own identities in their own backgrounds, when we were able to start exploring that culinary side of your world.
Well, it started really, it came organically. First of all, when I moved to New York, I was always craving for that food, the food I grew up eating. There was no restaurants really that serving that food. So at the restaurant, at boom, the chef is interesting because he's doing a cuisine that's different. He's inspired by Southeast Asian cuisine. And that's new in New York. We like in the early 90s, mid 90s. And that cuisine has flavors that somehow taking me back home.
There's lots of fermentation. There's lots of acidity. There's that freshness and the grain and all that. And at times, when that was my turn to cook family meal, I would cook food for memory. This is that my mom used to prepare, I mean, Pinot's. No, Tamil meal, of course, is what the kitchen staff eats before they serve the customers. Yeah, four, five o'clock family meal. So one from the line is the one in charge of family meal.
And when that's my turn, everyone was looking forward to it now because I got them used to this caramelized onion and lime sauce with chili over rice, I had the Pinot sauce with cassava. I mean, I'm bringing those flavors now, eggplants and all that. And they're like, wow, this is different. This is cool. And then like, this should come as specials. That's how the idea started to come into me now. New York is calling itself the food capital of the world. But Africa is not in this world.
I'm like, hey, no, this is going to be my mission. I'm going to start finding inspiration from that cuisine and bringing it and that I never look back. Eventually, the restaurant was doing so well. We opened a new branch in South Beach, Miami. And guess what? They decided to send me to run that kitchen. And I'm like, wow, this is amazing.
I mean, I'm like completely shocked, but so excited because in addition to sending me to run the kitchen, I was told to even add some of the family mill specials into the menu. Into the menu. Into the menu. These were dishes like you were using sweet potatoes and cassava and plantains and peanuts and chilies and... Exactly, exactly. You said the white ones. So potato cassava, Pinot sauce became my first dish and that one was so well received.
I mean, there was a food reviewer who came to the restaurant and wrote an article about the restaurant that mentioned this one dish. It's like, wow, this is not to me. It was like the top of everything. I mean, being mentioned in a paper here in the US. So that was really the thing that confirmed to me that I had to stick to this mission. So when I came back to New York, I decided to start the catering business and eventually in early 2000, this catering became my very first restaurant. Yoléle.
Yoléle. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Chef Pierre Chiam, about his journey from Chef and Restaurant owner to founding the company he oversees today. Stay with us. I'm Guy Ross and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Did you know that if you're an employer who's hiring, it takes an average of 44 days to fill an open position. If you're investing that much time into each new hire, you wanna get it right.
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One more thing before we get back to the show, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app and it's totally free. So let's go. Hey, welcome back to How I Build This Lab. I'm speaking with Chef Pierre Chiam. Okay, so in 2000 you opened your first restaurant called Yolay.
And you'd begin this journey as a restaurant owner and then eventually a cookbook author and from what I understand for your first cookbook you went to Senegal to research ideas for the book. And I guess during one of those trips you rediscovered this grain called phonio which you had eaten kind of rarely as a child, right? Yeah, so I had eaten phonio on rare occasions when my parents would take me to visit my grandparents in the south of Senegal.
So phonio is grown in that region in the south in Kazamas and Kedugu. Those are like the phonio areas. Of Senegal, but in the car where I grew up there was no phonio. So I never had phonio growing up. So I'm now writing this book many years later and we spend time with the women of my family really. That's where I was getting the inspiration and I wanted the book to be about that.
And as I'm traveling in the south and I'm tasting all these different flavors and the phonio came back and it hit me and I'm like, oh wow. This grain is so delicate. And in that part of Senegal they still consider it the most delicious grain of all grains as like how they see phonio. So it was like, I need to write about this grain. I need to bring this grain. I need to even include it in my menu. We should ferment. Just stop and describe phonia.
Because I said this before we start recording that I have made it. It's a little bit like and help me out here. Like it's a cross between like couscous like the fluffy lightness of couscous and sort of a nutty, there's a nuttiness. But it's none of those things. It's not quinoa, it's not couscous, it's not a wheat, but it has that lightness. Is that fair to say? Yeah, it's fair to say it has the size of couscous. It's tiny like couscous and fluffy. It's even lighter than couscous.
Because you know when you eat couscous you kind of feel heavy after that. But with phonia, it's really, I mean you can eat phonia and just go for a run right after it. It digests really easily. And it has nuttiness, you're right. It's slightly nutty. And the other particularity of phonia, which is really great, is very neutral flavor. So that makes it very versatile. You cook phonia with so many different flavors. It adapts to so many different sources. My last cookbook was dedicated to phonia.
So I have lots of recipes from the whole journey. From desserts to baking to to sugary dishes to, I mean, phonia sushi. I mean, there's like so many ways to use phonia. Before we talk about the business that grew around this because that would eventually happen. I want to ask you a few more questions about phonia. Because it is this grain that is, I guess it's really high in protein and amino acids and also doesn't require a whole lot of water to grow, right?
No, phonia grows in an area called the Sahel. Senegal is south of the Sahara. And it's dry and arid. But phonia grows so easily there. It's like one of the fastest maturing grain that requires very little water. It's rain fat. But it just requires the first rain. And after that, even if there was no other rain coming or the rain is inconsistent, like it's the case right now, it's climate change. Phonial is guaranteed to grow. There's a nickname for phonial.
They call it the lazy farmer's crop for that reason. Because what the farmers do is when the first rain comes, they just throw the seed. They don't even till the soil. They don't really do any work to the soil. They just throw the seeds, like broadcasting it. And then they can just go and sleep for two months and come back and harvest the phonial. That's how easy it is to grow. And in addition to that, the most important part is the agriculture of phonial.
The agriculture of phonial helps to regenerate the soil. Because it has deep roots that add nutrients to the soil. So they create aeration in the soil essentially. Exactly. Exactly. And you don't have to turn it up with tractors, which releases carbon. No. You can just, those deep roots aerate the soil. Exactly. And when they harvest it, they just cut the top. The roots stay in the soil. And eventually, it adds nutrients to the soil.
And not only that, phonial is a nutrition powerhouse, like you mentioned. It's gluten free. And has so many properties. One of them being very important is it has, it's caused a low glycemic index. Oh, good for diabetics. Exactly. So there's like, I mean, there's so much going for that grain. And I was like, I have to figure out a way to introduce it to my readers. Yeah. And because my cookbook was incomplete, I always had to think of substitution for certain ingredients.
And that's when the idea of yolele, the business of bringing those crops to the market came to be really, when that seed was planted. All right. So the seed is planted. And you're starting to think, this could potentially be the next quinoa. Because quinoa was introduced to the US maybe in the 70s, but really didn't take off until the 2000s. Right. And we know there are challenges with quinoa. It's hard to grow. It's very resource intensive. And there's a shortage of it in some places.
And so as the climate is changing, it makes sense to look for a more robust and resilient crop. And here you go. Here you have one. From what I understand, even in Africa, phonia was much more widely eaten 100, 200 years ago than it is today. So what happened? Why is that the case? We got colonized colonization came. And then there was a mindset that came with it. Crops like phonium, millet, sogum, which was our traditional crops, became the country people crop.
We were branded with crops like wheat. You know, in Stenegal, for instance, we love eating our baguette bread. We eat baguette bread every single day. We don't grow wheat in Stenegal, we don't grow wheat in Kodivaya in many of those countries. But Africa now is like importing, bringing wheat. I mean, and it's interesting that you asked this question. Because today, with the Ukraine crisis, there's a serious shortage of wheat. Serious.
And by the way, it's reverberating around the world, including in places like Sri Lanka. They're all connected to the shortages of wheat. We're seeing these crises happening around the world. And that tells you how foolish we are to rely on crops like wheat. I mean, the first of all, the limited number of crops we rely on. Our system is wheat, rice, soy, and corn. And we ignoring crops that are much more not only resilient, like phonium. And we need to integrate them.
But the most crazy thing is continents like Africa, which have such a diversity of plant crops. And now, because one part of the world is in crisis, and the whole continent is suffering from it, because the concentration of the supplies coming from Ukraine and Russia, it is mind-boggling. So it's urgent that we rethink it, and we start integrating crops like phonium. And not only it makes sense, because for our food security, we need to make sure we have that.
But also because those crops are so much more adapted to the environment, they're resilient, they're drought resistant. There's a lot of reason why we need to rethink it. And so your question, that's what happened. After we got colonized, we started importing rice. We even had a rice culture in Senegal, but because of our connection with the French, we started importing broken rice from Vietnam, so that Senegalese farmers
would focus on growing peanuts that we need for our industries. Colonization was a business. So the French made peanuts a cash crop in Senegal. So the farmers started growing peanuts. It was a monoculture, and it became a monoculture. And as a result, phonium, people stopped growing. And people stopped growing phonium. You had to go to Kedugu and Kazamas, that's the only place where you would see phonium. That's an amazing story, right?
You are a chef in the United States, and now have a platform with a book. And you come across this grain, and you're thinking, I got to get this in the hands of American cooks. When you start to think, okay, I'm going to create a business, and I'm going to start a business around this grain. I'm going to start to bring this grain to the US, because it doesn't happen right away. It took you a few years before you did that. But what was the impetus? Well, the impetus was my naivety, first of all.
It was always important. Very important. I'm like thinking, I'm a chef in New York. I've seen how Kinoa did it. It was not this grain, I mean, a non-grain, and then today everyone is Kinoa. Phonium can do it, you know, if Kinoa can do it.
And all I'm going to do is take the grain and introduce it to my fellow chefs, because they're all looking for new products, new food, new flavors, and they'll embrace it, and then they'll serve it on their menus, and then the customers will ask for it, and then the supermarkets will require. I mean, that was my thinking very naivety, like I said, right?
But really, the impetus was when I, one of my travels in this part of Senegal called Kedougu, where Phonium is king, and there you realize the level of poverty. The people in Kedougu, I mean, it's only pretty much all people living there. You know, the youths, they left pretty much, they're all trying to make it to the city or to Europe. They're looking for jobs, they're able, they're willing to work, they're risking their lives to go find a better life.
And I'm like, if this grain can become a world-class crop, like Kinoa has become, this will change the situation here. So this really was my thing, I felt like I could bring something, I could, it could be my contribution.
I've brought, I was uniquely positioned, being a chef, from this part of the world, in the food capital of the world, and if this plan works, it wasn't whichever plan, but if this plan works, you know, this is going to bring jobs, people are not going to leave, because they're going to stay and grow Phonium and make money from it, because the workers and everywhere else, even people in the city, Dacá will start wanting it, because all we need to do is create a channel value.
And to me, there's one thing I got right was I knew it needed to be branded, those French, they branded their baguettes, that's how we still eating it, they branded this broken rice to us. And now I'm going to brand Phonium and I'm going to make it sexy.
And this is going to work, and these guys are going to have a dignified living with something that grows in their land, that's been growing in their land for 5,000 years, and that was just the way I was thinking, and I just went for it, just like, let's do it. We're going to take another quick break coming up, more from Chef Pierre Chiam, founder and president of Yolay Le, I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Have you been hiding your smile this summer?
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Visit Audible.com slash Wondry Pod, or text Wondry Pod to 500-Hip and 500-Hip, to try Audible free for 30 days. Audible.com slash Wondry Pod. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross, and I'm speaking with Chef Pierre Chiam, who's building a food company based around an ancient west African grain called Fonio.
Okay, so Pierre, your initial idea was, hey, if we can produce Fonio, if we can get people harvesting Fonio, processing it, and then creating a pipeline to the US, we could create an industry here in Senegal that would help the local economy. But I guess at the same time, you're also thinking, let's market Fonio, because it's also really nutritious, right? It's an efficient and nutrient dense product. Is that more or less right?
I was thinking, Bob, I knew it was nutritious, and I knew that there was a demand for that here, ancient grains, nutritious, gluten-free, Fonio was checking all the boxes. So I was like, this is what we could do. Let's brand it. Let's brand it and create a demand for it. I knew I needed a partner, and I looked into someone who also had an experience in actually doing it really, Philip Tevro, who's a veteran in the food industry, who actually had worked with bringing quinoa in the 80s.
Philip Tevro, I think at the time he worked at Deen and Deluca, right, for many years. That's right. He worked at Deen and Deluca. So if you remember Deen and Deluca, they used to bring all these interesting flavors. And me, when I was working in Soho, we often times shop at Deen and Deluca. Yeah. There was a groundbreaking store that went in Manhattan, and really all kinds of cool, amazing things came into Deen and Deluca.
That's correct. That's correct. And a lot of the food we were serving, we couldn't be doing it at Boom without the ingredients, the access of Deen and Deluca. So he had eaten, because I wouldn't mention it, and you had to open a second restaurant in New York, Kirit and there. It's called La Grande Carr. And somehow you started to talk to him about Fonio, and in treatimony thought, hey, there's something here.
Yeah. And actually, we have two versions of the story, but he remembered reading an article where I was talking about Fonio. The article was really a call, really, for... I was so distraught by the stories of these young people. It really is a tragedy if you heard of me, not have heard about it, but there's for decade now, the kids who are dying in the ocean, because they're taking the guard boats, fishermen, the guard boats, to travel from Dacar to Barcelona.
Yes. And thousands are drownings. And they... many make it. That's just amazing. Just imagine the journey. Many of them make it, but thousands are drowning every single year. To me, it was something needed to be done, and we shouldn't expect help to come from anywhere, but from ourselves. And I was like, Fonio is actually the thing. It's grown here, and this could be desired, and bring income.
And that would just help. So this was the thing. I was talking about it in that paper, and Philip read it, and he reached out, and we met, and we talked, and I was like, yeah, actually, you know, let's do it. You and Philip decide to form a business called Yolela. And how did you initially... I mean, did you go out and raise money for the company? No, no, actually, we didn't... It was... it started with friends and family, really. Yeah.
So we did one thing. We knew the logistic of it was going to be something we didn't have the means for. So we reached out to a company called Woodlands, who have been importing food from 60 plus countries around the world, interesting flavors, and they... We knew they would get that, and they were intrigued enough to decide to send a few executives from the company to Kedugu Senegal with us, for them to see what we're talking about.
And they came, and those guys are like, this Chicago executives, and never been to Africa, and now they're going into not only Dakar, but like in this deep, south, you know, six, seven hours drive through, like, dirt road and stuff. So it was quite a trip, but once they got there, they were all transformed, and they felt so at home and welcome, and they had so well as well.
And they came back and they're like, yeah, we got to do it. Let's figure out a way to do it. And that's how we did it, you know. We started working with group of women cooperatives, they were getting the phoenix process for us, and we would ship it by containers to Woodlands and Woodlands would package it under our Yolela brand.
And you managed to broker an agreement with Whole Foods initially that Whole Foods would carry this product, because they like interesting new, unique products, and it's a great platform to get this out there. But one of the challenges from what I've read about Fonio is the processing of it, right, because it's, it has a very thick haul that isn't inedible, and it has to be like ground out of it.
So how did you solve the challenge of like processing it, because to get to the grain is a lot, it's very labor intensive, right? Yeah, and Fonio, that's the only challenge you see. It's easy to grow with this hard to process. It has a skin that's inedible. And that's also one of the reasons why Fonio didn't make it big until now, because the processing was so, at the time, it used to be a mortar and pestle.
A mortar and pestle, a person literally grinding each. Oh yeah, yeah. You see the African mortar and pestle, though, they like the big ones carved out of a trunk tree, and with a big pillow, and they pound it, and they pound it, and they pound it, the big pestle. And it takes about two hours to just have one kilo of Fonio. That was the time. And eventually, it became mechanized, you know, and actually a Senegalese engineer came up with a technique, and Fonio was mechanized.
Which is the Fonio we're getting right now. There's a mechanized aspect, but it's still some manual parts of it. And we knew we had to fix it at some point. We knew we can now identify some great cooperative that are doing a much better job than others to get us a good quality Fonio. But we knew there's a moment as a demand growth that we had to figure out the solution for the processing of Fonio.
So what did you do? Yeah, how did you do that? So we went to a company that makes actually the best of the milling processing equipment in the world, actually. And we told them, hey, we have this grain, and we need to figure out how to process it. And it has to be all automated, and it has to be efficient. And they took a while to come up. We had to send tons and tons of Fonio party for them to do the testing. And now we figured out we have this machine that completely revolutionized everything.
Now we not only eliminated the waste because at the stage of Fonio processing, we still had close to 50% of waste, which is crazy. And now with the machine, they designed a machine that not only eliminates that. But it really is also processing at a much faster capacity. We have like two tons per hour, as opposed to one ton per day.
It really changes everything, remove the bottleneck that was really slowing everything. And now we can access Fonio to not only the growing demand in the market here, but there's also the food industry that couldn't have access to Fonio because the processing wasn't at the standstill.
At the standard, standard called GFSI that like you can sell to big food now. So now big food that big food is looking to meet the sustainable development goals. And Fonio is offering all of that. And now we have access to it. So that's opened all all the set of perspective. We can have Fonio flower for bakers. We can have Fonio P laughs now. We have Fonio chips. That's a whole other different category we just entered now.
It's awesome. I mean, it's amazing because you've expanded as you see you've expanded your product line from originally Fonio grain to flowers and chips and other things. I think your products are now available in like 2000 stores in the US, the whole foods and some target stores as well.
And obviously online tell me how you are besides doing carbon conversation like this. How are you getting the word out? Like it's still you know you are right now Fonio right now is where Kinoa was let's say in the 80s right where there's very little awareness. It's actually a very easy grain to cook. It cooks very quickly. I'm at absorbs flavors really well. You can cook it in chicken stock or vegetable stock if you want to.
Oh, just or water. But it's it's still not a lot of people know about it. So like how do you make this in the Kinoa? Do you start with restaurants? Do you start with like are there sort of influential places where you really want to get this. You know get this made. So yeah, it's really it started again. You remember when you mentioned whole foods. There was one whole foods that gave us a chance. Right. It was next to buy restaurant in Harlem.
That whole foods I had to go in the place itself and do some cooking demos and right. People taste you know like I met some Fonio salad Fonio mango salad kind of thing and people with this and every time I would do that every time I would do a demo. The Fonio bags would fly off the shelves. Yeah. So that that's really when it started and Whole Foods people notice that this grain is doing really well. Let's give it a chance on the second store and then they give us.
And then we were in the whole foods in Northeastern region and and it kept growing like this. We also started to grow with a community of influences who connected with the food in different ways. Some were connecting with it because of the the heritage aspect of it.
We also have the African diaspora who could connect with this grain who is considered as the oldest cultivated grain in Africa. Others because of the nutrition aspect. You know we have this strong gluten free community who just just embraced Fonio and they are posting it on social media.
As well our platform Instagram and Tik Tok now I mean all of that is being part of it and there's these collaborations we're doing with all the brands that are also similar to ours in terms of mission of like bringing you know diversified food products into the market.
So there's all these guerrilla type of approach that we are using to spread the word in addition to you know I've been fortunate to get media attention through the restaurant or through my books and so all of those creating awareness and more and more the world is coming out but a lot of it is organic.
And you have a restaurant two locations in New York, Tarranga and where you do serve Fonio you've got delicious I mean I haven't eaten there but I'm just looking at the menu like the chicken grilled chicken bowls and the vegan bowls and all this and Jollaf you do Jollaf but you also have many dishes with Fonio as a side.
There's been a series of circumstances that that did help to spread the word I think the timing was also is good people are more aware that we need to diversify our diet we need to bring products that are not only good for you but good for the planet and delicious and Fonio was all of that and again it cooks in five minutes so you can beat that.
Awesome let's do it let's eat it let's eat some Fonio let's make some Fonio right now it takes five minutes that's all you can even do it even faster you get the chips you know so it's a snack so you just open a wagon and you are changing the world your own contribution I love it. Pierre-Sham is founder of Yolele Pierre thanks so much. Thank you guys it was a pleasure.
Hey thanks so much for listening to the show this week please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode and as always it's totally free. This episode was produced by Catherine Cipher with editing by John Isabella our music was composed by Remtine Arableui our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes JC Howard Casey Herman Sam Paulson Ramell Wood Alex Chung Elaine Coates Chris Messini and Carla Estevez.
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