One of the biggest challenges was funding. In the earliest days, we bootstrapped as far as we could. I sold my engagement ring, I maxed out every credit card I had, and I emptied my 401(k) to keep the business going.

We got nearly a hundred “nos” before we got a “yes” on our seed round of funding. We raised a million dollars in June of 2019, which made me the first Black woman to raise a million dollars for a food or beverage company. I’m proud of that, but I also think it’s a dismal statistic given the rate at which Black women and women in general are starting companies. It speaks to the lack of funding that goes to women.

I was inspired in part by my experience at Coca-Cola, where I was so often the only woman or the only minority in the leadership room. The second part was that I wanted to make sure our team at Partake was diverse: Diverse in ethnic background, in gender, in lived experiences. As we were hiring, I found the applicants to be extremely homogeneous. 

I wanted to think about how we could work to increase diversity in the food space. We thought, “What better way than helping students get access to the social capital, the mentors, and the education to develop a career in the food or beverage industry?”

We run an eight-week curriculum that covers everything from food safety and food science to marketing and selling a product to the finances of starting a business. We have members of our team participate, but we’ve also had a lot of people from both emerging and established consumer-packaged goods companies who have been willing to donate their time and expertise to teach our students. It’s open to juniors at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

That was one of our other biggest challenges in getting Partake off the ground. Martha and I got into the kitchen, but we couldn’t crack the code. Thankfully, we found a product developer who was able to bring my vision to life and still use ingredients you can understand. My daughter Vivi is our chief taste-tester on everything we create.

Start small. I learned this out of necessity because we didn’t have the capital or the resources to start big. We just started in the way that we could. For us, that meant starting by selling cookies out of our car, which created discipline and knowledge in the business that has allowed us to scale. At the time, I was wishing away that part of the journey, wondering, “Why aren’t we growing faster, why aren’t we able to raise capital?” but it ended up being beneficial.