In 2017, Rebecca Brady took her homemade seed crackers to a farmer's market in Buffalo, New York, just hoping to sell one box.
Brady has also positioned herself to help vulnerable members of her community: The 44-person Top Seedz workforce is 90% refugees — a majority of whom are women — from roughly 20 different countries, she says. The company provides English-language training, a mother's room and a prayer room to help the employees better acclimate to their new environment, Brady adds.
After moving to the U.S. in 2015, she got her work visa but struggled to land a job, she says. She made friends playing tennis, and noticed how much they loved it when she brought homemade seed crackers to matches. With her kids going off to school, she decided to explore her inkling that American shoppers might be interested in her homemade seed crackers.
Her lack of experience made her "very, very conservative" when it came to spending: She didn't even think to build a Top Seedz website. "This was very conscious, the thought that I might just be wasting money," she says. "I wasn't very confident that it was going to work." Some of those employees are simultaneously learning English, which Brady says has led to "a steep learning curve for a lot of people when they first come — we play a lot of charades in our building, but our words are 'mixer' and 'oven.'"
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Source: NBCLA - 🏆 319. / 59 Read more »