Ash Glover-Ganapathiraju @ Ojaswe
South Asian-Inspired, Regenerative Chickpea Pancakes
Ash Glover-Ganapathiraju is the Founder and CEO at Ojaswe. Ojaswe is supporting regenerative agriculture with their lineup of pantry staple items like pancake and muffin mix made with regeneratively grown chickpeas.
The Brand
Ojaswe produces Indian and South Asian-inspired regenerative pantry items, including savory pancake mixes and the just-launched Masala Muffin Mix. Available online, their pantry items are made with chickpea flour, and are vegan and gluten-free. The mixes only require water, but pair well with additions like tomatoes, cilantro, zucchini, bitter greens, and more.
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Better Choices
A cultural anthropologist by training, Ash is fascinated by people and their behaviors. While academia seemed a natural path, she instead moved to Arkansas to pursue an MBA. At the time, the University of Arkansas was known for being very CPG focused, with JB Hunt, Tyson, Walmart, and much of the country’s logistical and supply chain experts nearby. After school, Ash worked at Unilever, Starbucks, and Nestle but realized she wanted to do deeper work on solving the climate crisis.
Flash forward to 2021 when Ash decided to take a pause and pivot her career to better align with her values. She explored roles in climate and sustainability, but quickly realized they are often viewed as resource strains. She spent time in Terra.do's Climate Farm School and started thinking about where she could combine her passion for food systems, work experience, and desire to help with climate issues.
“Food is culturally embedded in me. I'm like any South Asian mom who wants to know what you ate for lunch today. It’s my way of expressing interest. Farm school got me thinking about what it means to be part of a food system, and the importance of connecting with our food in a more direct way. How do you make people care about where the food they eat comes from, and make choices that are better for the environment?” – Ash
The Missing Portion
Ash began her entrepreneurial journey by experimenting with online and in-person events and experiences to better connect people with regenerative food and where it comes from. While the work was rewarding and successful, it revealed a different path to solving a bigger problem.
"Once I went through farm school, it became really obvious to me that where my skills would be best used is to connect everyday people with our food and our food system in a direct way. The thing we kept hearing over and over again was, 'This is great, but what does this mean when I go back up to my kitchen? What can I do to support regenerative agriculture (there)?' And that became the impetus for me: How do you make it easy for everyday people to make choices that are better for the environment?" - Ash
As Ash explains, even when people can access fresh food or go to farmers’ markets, that’s still just a portion of the plate. The rest – filled with grains, legumes, pantry items – that’s what she’s interested in. What people choose to eat, however, isn’t always defined by availability, often it’s driven by convenience, price, and, of course, emotion. Ash reminds us that even the smallest decision about one part of your meal or a snack can make an impact. We don’t need everyone to be perfect environmentalists, but can do things for the planet in little ways – and food is such an easy way to get there.
“The idea that food should mean the same thing to everyone is ridiculous. We live in an increasingly globalized world where we all have such complex identities as people. How do you create culturally relevant food that’s climate-friendly on a rapidly warming planet?” – Ash
Creating A Brand
In her exploratory phase, Ash was introduced to the Axten Family who are regenerative farmers in Saskatchewan, Canada. She learned about their journey, their struggles, and their desires. After putting so much effort into growing regeneratively, they wanted to see their products end up where they are valued – not just in the commodity markets. One of the crops they were looking to place into a higher-value and more traceable market was black chickpeas.
Not native to North America, black chickpeas look like shriveled brown Legos. It’s a highly nutritious legume common to cultures around the world – including Ash’s native India. It was also the product on which her aspirations of sustainability, cultural connectedness, and creating a CPG brand all aligned.
“So much of the work in this movement is being done by small brands. We’re saying we want our supply chain to dictate what goes out into the market. In a larger multi-stakeholder-driven public company, it’s much more complex because your incentives are not aligned to creating a restorative supply chain. That would require changing supply chains that are hundreds of years old.” – Ash
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Resource Constraints
While there are plenty of consumers who want to try new flavors and ingredients, a huge portion just don't have the time or the bandwidth for it. Packaged food brands, however, can more easily change the way consumers think about things – if they have the opportunity.
For Ash, the biggest challenges to creating that opportunity are funding and data. To manage cash flow, Ash has crowd-funded product launches and pre-sold inventory of new products. Coming from her category management background at big CPGs, Ash really misses having access to the best-in-class category, product, retailer, and consumer data. Ojaswe has had to become scrappy, like relying on an intern to send packages to her friends and circling back for feedback on taste and texture. They’re using farmers' markets to run sampling, sharing the story of their brand, and seeing how it resonates. Then it’s tested at scale.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
In addition to being a trailblazer in regenerative CPG, Ash has paved her own path as a queer immigrant of color.
“I’m definitely checking all those boxes. The biggest way in which my personal experience has informed my path is that I keep going back to all those people that came before me, to lay the foundation for me to be able to be in this place. We stand on the shoulders of giants and then it’s our turn to continue on, to shoulder the responsibility for future generations. I don’t want my 11-year-old to have a planet where she can’t access fresh food or is devastated by climate change. This intersection identity makes me feel like I'm seeing things that other people may not be.” – Ash
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50% Market Share 4 Regen
Ash sees emerging brands as being the tip of the spear when it comes to rethinking our food supply systems – but believes brands need a different growth model.
“Too often, brands in CPG are operating in their own silos, so it’s important for us all to share lessons and learnings of resources across the board. I’d love to see a world where that (collaboration) becomes the model of growth versus every brand fighting for the same consumer. We need to find incentives that enable consumers to make their choice – whether it’s for health, convenience or taste.” – Ash
Ash agrees with Kyle and AC that the regenerative certification landscape still has strides to make to produce the right set of tools for brands, farmers, and consumers.
“I recognize the power that certifications can have in decision-making frameworks for consumers. But I also don't want to be standing over my farmer's shoulder. I trust that my farmers are going to do the job that they are doing and we will do the job that we are doing. When you think about smallholder farms in other parts of the world that have had indigenous farms for millennia and used practices that are specific to their soil systems, it certainly rubs me the wrong way to say, oh, wait a minute, we are going to make all these standards that you have to not only follow but pay for in order to get certified. It’s absurd to ask someone who has followed these practices to pay so that they can get a mark that shows that they have followed these practices.” – Ash
You can check out the full episode with Ash from Ojaswe HERE.
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This ReGen Recap was produced with support from Kristina Tober