Keisha Smith-Jeremie had an affinity for applesauce as a child that stuck with her as an adult. When the Bahamian native attended the University of Virginia, she found herself searching for comfort and nostalgia after experiencing her first snow and feeling homesick. She decided to make some applesauce in her dorm room and added unique ingredients.
"If you know anybody from the Caribbean, you know we make a lot of different things with fruits because fruits are in such abundance," she told Insider. Green apples are plentiful in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and she gave making a concoction a try.
"I didn't know that you were supposed to take the skins off or that you're supposed to use red apples, but it ended up just tasting so different," Smith-Jeremie said. "More tart, bolder, but my friends loved it."
She continued to make her applesauce after graduating and as she climbed the corporate ladder, preparing it for the holidays or when she had a craving. It wasn't until 2017, when she started adding flavors from the Bahamas like guava, hibiscus, and tamarind that she realized there was a similarity between her creations and what the brand Chobani was doing with yogurt.
"The founder of Chobani, he brought his cultural flair to yogurt, which was like a pretty sleepy category at the time, and introduced the concept of Greek yogurt to the American palette," she said.
At the same time, she noticed applesauce picking up sales with children as companies found new flavors and ways to package it, like in pouches.
She decided that she wanted to put applesauce back on the map for adults and started her company Sanaia Applesauce in 2017, named after her goddaughter.
"We want to be thought of in the same breath as Chobani and Fage as that healthy snack and alternative that's dairy-free," Smith-Jeremie said.
Making a decision on market value
When she decided to start Sanaia Applesauce, Smith-Jeremie knew that part of the equation would be to have objectivity when it came to her business plan.
"Doing something that you're going to put your money in or ask other people to support financially, you owe it to yourself to take a step back and figure out, is there a market?" she said.
Smith-Jeremie did her due diligence to understand the market, consumers, and price point for her product. She found a 2017 Nielsen Brand Sales report that showed her the applesauce industry was a $900 million market, with a majority focus on children. She felt that it was ready for a disruption in the adult-snacking category.
Learning how to scale while working full time
At the time, she was the global head of human resources for News Corp. In the beginning stages of Sanaia, she did everything herself, spending the first four months building the business out of her home. She'd wake up at 4 a.m. on weekends and start making batches of her applesauce to package and ship to customers on Monday.
Her early customers were friends and family who helped create word of mouth for the business. She marketed her business on her website and social media but found participating in events with her products featured as snacks or gifts to be a great way to generate new customers.
"We developed a beautiful gift box that offered customers the ability to taste all six of our flavors," she said. In September 2017, she moved the business to a commercial kitchen and hired a chef.
"Over the course of the three years, there have been all of these transitions as an entrepreneur — you hold a lot of the tasks close to yourself, and then you have to learn to then delegate or have others replicate," she said.
"If your goal is to have a business at scale, you have to get comfortable with the fact that the making of the product gets further away from you," she added. "Your job is basically to project manage that process and make sure that it stays as true to your brand as possible."
She's now the chief people officer of Tory Burch and hired a head of production and business to run the company full time in her absence. Because she kept her day job, Smith-Jeremie was able to self-fund her business. In the first year, she said she spent about six figures on Sanaia Applesauce to launch her e-commerce website operations and fund the first production runs with a copacker to identify the one she would work with. She also self-funded the packaging, including the glass jars and designs.
"I had the ability to do it, but for me, it was really important to make sure that the business got to a certain place before I started asking others to invest in the business," she said.
'Shark Tank' becomes a lesson in finding the right investors
In March 2018, Smith-Jeremie received an email from an executive producer of "Shark Tank" who came across her website and asked her to apply. She had two weeks to submit her application.
At that point, Smith-Jeremie hadn't planned to raise money, and she had never pitched her business to investors before she filmed the episode in front of panelists Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Kevin O'Leary, Lori Greiner, and Robert Herjavec.
"One of the lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur is that sometimes an opportunity presents itself that is telling you, you are ready for it because I certainly was so scared to do this," she said.
Though viewers see seven minutes of her pitch, Smith-Jeremie said it was a rigorous two and a half hour process in the "Shark Tank" and included a real investor presentation.
"The sharks are learning about your business for the first time, and they take the time to really dig into the business," she said.
She ended up receiving an offer from Cuban, which was a $150,000 investment and 25% stake in the company, but decided she wanted to raise money on her own for a higher valuation. "I think it just helped solidify my confidence that if I could pitch in a Shark Tank for the first time, then I could pitch," she said.
But she didn't start raising money until her second year of business. She pursued the traditional friends and family round with a nontraditional approach.
Smith-Jeremie said that as a person of color in "a position to potentially self-fund a business, for a lot of us, we're also the person in our family or in our circle who other people are depending on; I really struggled with that."
Instead, she reached out to her network that she's created from a 20-year career and asked them to leverage their network for funding.
"Even if they didn't invest in it, my question was, 'Can you open the door for me into your network so that I can raise money?'" she said. To date, she said she's raised over $750,000 to support the business.
Handling retail and e-commerce distribution amid the pandemic
In summer 2019, Sanaia Applesauce began selling in 800 Walmart stores. Smith-Jeremie's opportunity to partner with Walmart came from a customer who had a relationship with the superstore and offered to make an introduction. Her chance at retail came with many early lessons learned, including understanding the capital required to market a new brand.
"From a business perspective, the margins are better for us, and it requires less marketing dollars," she said of e-commerce.
COVID-19 has disrupted many supply chains, especially for small-business owners like Smith-Jeremie. Sanaia Applesauce was up to six figures in sales for 2020 until it sold out of product on their distribution channels. The company is trying to get production back up to replenish their stock on Walmart.com and Amazon.
"That was a huge learning curve for us, between COVID-19 and having production challenges, we sold out of the product by March," she said. But, Smith-Jeremie added, every time her "Shark Tank" episode airs, she sees a surge in sales, including a February re-airing that helped her sell out in stores.
Her golden rule for managing a senior role and business
Managing a C-suite job while running a business is no easy feat, but what keeps Smith-Jeremie going is the feeling that Sanaia Applesauce is an idea that was meant for her to build.
"It's one of those things that if I were to stop today, I would have regret," she said.
Her golden rule is to uphold her commitment to her 9-to-5 role. Smith-Jeremie never makes her team feel like there's a conflict or an influence on her performance.
"You honor the platform that you're on," she said. "The fact that I have an employer that is 10,000% supportive of my entrepreneurial venture, my job is to make them not feel any diminution of my effort."
This article was originally published on Insider August 18, 2020.
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