Meet an organic food startup with Indigenous roots

Editor’s note: Around the world, innovative businesses are helping to solve some of the biggest environmental challenges of our time. Conservation International’s investment fund, CI Ventures, provides funding and support for early-stage companies that are benefiting people and nature. In this occasional series, startup founders join CI Ventures’ investment experts to share their origin stories.

 

Pantry staples don’t get a lot of love. 

Grains, beans, spices, oils — these kitchen essentials are often relegated to the back of the shelf.  

But for Sarela Herrada they’re at the heart of a mission to support farming communities and make healthier, ethically sourced foods more widely available. With her husband, Matt Cohen, Herrada founded SIMPLi, a regenerative organic food company that’s promoting nature-friendly farming practices and streamlining supply chains in favor of farmers’ bottom lines.

Her promise to the growers she works with: “I’ll buy your whole harvest, give you a premium, and come back next year.”

Herrada and Cohen started SIMPLi in 2020 with just 80 farmers in Peru. Today, the CI Ventures investee partners with more than 2,500 farmers across six countries in South America and Europe. And their regenerative organic certified products are in more than 2,500 grocery and retail stores.  

Conservation News talked to Herrada and CI Ventures’ investment officer Fabrice Garnier about how she got her start, the Indigenous practices at the root of company’s approach — and just what “regenerative farming” is, anyway.  

SIMPLi co-founders Sarela Herrada and Matt Cohen purchase their quinoa directly from Peruvian farmers. © SIMPLi

What inspired you to start SIMPLi? 

Sarela Herrada: We really wanted to bring local farmers’ market values to a global scale. That means knowing where food comes from and who’s growing it. We saw an opportunity to empower customers and started to dig into what makes a really good grain, or bean or oil. We found it comes down to three things: how the products are grown, who is doing the work and the health of the land that’s left behind after the food has been harvested. 

And there’s a reason why I’m deeply connected to this work, and I continue to come back to it. It’s because I truly believe that the food that we put into our bodies is medicine. And if we’re able to bring the best food to the market, and not think solely about profits, we as a society are going to be better off. 

What made SIMPLi a good candidate for CI Ventures portfolio?

Fabrice Garnier: What really attracted us to SIMPLi is the way that they operate with local communities and help them grow through financial support, technical assistance and by engaging with them as commercial partners. 

From an environmental standpoint, their regenerative organic certification is really important for us — it ensures sustainability. We also appreciate that they are working directly with farmers and removing middlemen, who in many cases pocket much of the commercial value of a crop. SIMPLi buys direct and can offer better prices because of organic and regenerative certifications, which can yield 8 percent to 20 percent price premiums.

There’s lots of buzz around regenerative farming, what does it mean in practice?

SH: First of all, there is no regenerative agriculture without Indigenous agriculture. When we think about regeneration, we think about the whole ecosystem that supports growth.

This thinking is deeply connected to Indigenous practices and Indigenous knowledge that have been passed down from generation to generation — their respect for the soil, for nature and the land. 

At its core, what we do with regenerative farming is preserve and nurture the soil. So, minimizing tillage and rotating crops is going to enrich the soil and nourish the microbes that need to be there. It’s also going to help store carbon to fight climate change.

Were farmers already using these regenerative practices?

SH: In some cases, the farmers were practicing rotational farming. Others may have moved away from it because there was no market for the rotational crops. 

But planting only quinoa year after year minimizes its protein content, which is what makes this crop amazing. If farmers rotate quinoa with chia or amaranth or lupini beans, it keeps the soil healthy. So, we started to introduce all those products into the SIMPLi line to support the whole farming cycle. Today, we have 15 products, and they are connected to each other in these ecosystems.

Have you seen a change in the communities you’re working with?

SH: We started by working directly with individual farmers in the Puno region of Peru, near the Bolivian border. It’s where quinoa originated and has been grown for thousands of years. This was a very sleepy, poor community. My promise to farmers was, ‘I’m going to buy your whole harvest. I’m going to give you a premium and I’m going to come back next harvest.’

That community is now vibrant. It has a cooperative, which is a governance body for the farmers, and an agronomist on staff who supports them. We’re injecting money into the economy, which is really driving development. Anecdotally, we hear that our farmers are sending their kids to universities. The community has gone from conventional farming to organic certification, fair trade certification and regenerative organic certification in a period of four years. 

FG: We often hear about this supposed trade-off between business performance, and environmental and social performance. This is one of those companies that proves that’s false. They’re working with farmers and making sure that the food they’ve grown benefits them. At the same time, their business performance is good. They’re already selling in large markets across the United States. 

What’s your connection to farming?

SH: I’m Peruvian; I grew up in Lima. We moved to the United States when I was 14. I consider myself a city person — I’m super high-energy and I thrive being connected to other people. But I found fulfillment in farmlands. When I am alone in the fields just walking through, I find my inner peace — it’s kind of my happy place.

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Vanessa Bauza is the senior communications director at Conservation International. Want to read more stories like this? Sign up for email updates here. Donate to Conservation International here.