Shelby Taylor owned a health food store when she decided to launch her own product, even if she wasn’t sure yet what it would be.“I listened to what they were struggling with and heard how they were challenged to feed their families foods that everyone would actually sit down and enjoy and that were healthy,” she says.
A Canadian ingredient supplier connected her with a manufacturer in the U.S., and everything came together. Chickapea began selling products in Canada in July 2016 and in the U.S. in February 2017. In 2018, Ms. Taylor moved manufacturing from the U.S. to Italy and began importing to Canada and the U.S.Chickapea has a line of organic products, including spaghetti, lasagna, elbow macaroni, penne and spirals.
The Canadian and American systems for such goods are fairly harmonized but the gluten-free designation is still “the wild west,” Ms. Russell says, and the organic designation is also a bit more complex when it comes to exporting. In 2017, Chickapea was selected for an accelerator program of District Ventures Capital, founded by Dragons’ Den dragon Arlene Dickinson. District Ventures later made a seed capital investment in the company.
To do that, she enlisted the help of Giovanni Santi, owner of Chicago-based Santi Consulting. Mr. Santi founded and then sold his own pasta production company using peas and lentils and now specializes in helping other companies set up manufacturing in Italy.
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