Philadelphia entrepreneur Sarela Herrada recently found her name alongside the likes of Katy Perry, Natalie Portman and Billie Jean King on Inc.'s 2024 list of the nation's "Most Intriguing Women Entrepreneurs." It's a long way from her roots growing up on a chicken farm in Peru.
The founder of sustainable food brand SIMPLi, Herrada is seeking to create a food supply chain focused on sustainability.
SIMPLi sells organic pantry staples like quinoa, olive oil, and various beans and salts. It partners with some 3,000 farmers in South America and Europe that focus on regenerative practices.
In 2023 alone, SIMPLi's retail footprint grew by 144% and year-over-year revenue doubled, though Herrada declined to disclose specific figures. It has 35 employees, a number that has also doubled in the past 18 months. SIMPLi's products can be found in more than 4,400 stores and restaurants nationwide, including at local outposts of Whole Foods Market, Sprouts Farmers Market and MOM's Organic Market, in addition to food co-ops across Philadelphia.
Herrada, 33, founded the company in 2020 alongside her husband Matt Cohen, and is pursuing her MBA at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. SIMPLi is headquartered in Baltimore, near where Herrada and Cohen had roots when founding SIMPLi, though the duo is now based in Philadelphia.
Choosing to work in the food industry stems from Herrada's passion for food and how it impacts global communities. She was born and raised in Lima, Peru, where her family owned an organic chicken farm and worked with Amazonian farming communities. Herrada immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 14, but has drawn on that heritage to focus her "whole career on food and supply chains and global systems," she said.
Herrada was the third employee at fast-casual Mediterranean dining concept Cava (NYSE: CAVA), where she worked from 2014 to 2019. As the director of food and beverage, she helped scale it into the national brand it is today. As of February, the company reported having more than 300 locations.
While leading supply chain operations for Cava, Herrada found it difficult to find companies that supply and source ingredients "that connected deeply to where food comes from," she said.
Inspired to change the corporatization of the food supply chain, she and Cohen sought to connect with farming communities that were left out of the global supply chain, including in her native Peru. They started by sourcing quinoa, a Peruvian grain Herrada said has "been westernized for over 30 years, but the community hasn't seen the benefit of that," she said.
"There's something fundamentally wrong with that model and there's too many middlemen, too many hands," Herrada said. "So the idea of simply being that leader, maker of regenerative organic pantry staples that are based on indigenous culture and knowledge is where everything started."
SIMPLi has since established relationships with 3,000 farmers worldwide, who might otherwise be excluded from supplying goods, sourcing grains, beans and oils directly. SIMPLi then packages the goods and distributes them to some of the largest grocery stores in the country. It imports from countries like Paraguay, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Greece and Ukraine.
In addition to grocery stores, SIMPLi sells directly to over 2,000 restaurants across the U.S., including popular fast-casual chains like Sweetgreen, Chopt, Dig and Just Salad. Herrada said the restaurant side of the business yields high volume, but having the branding visible in stores allows the company to "tell the story of what SIMPLi stands for."
"It really has allowed us to create this really strong business model and growing both verticals and both verticals are equally strong for us," Herrada said.
Herrada sees opportunities for growth in both areas, especially with adding more fine dining restaurants to its food service vertical. To fuel that growth, SIMPLi is readying to close a Series A fundraising round, though Herrada declined to disclose the amount.
More than empowering customers to obtain products that they are confident come from sustainable sources, Herrada also wants to have a broader impact on the global food trade.
"For the industry, I would like to have a proven business model that really is changing the fundamentals of how international free trade works and a business model that is shown [to be] scalable," Herrada said.
