by Amanda Lago
Businesses turn to gold in the hands of Filipina entrepreneur Gem Misa
Health is wealth, so the old cliche goes and for Gem Misa, this could not be more true.
At the moment, the UK-based Filipina entrepreneur is on the verge of taking the UK food industry by storm, and she’s doing it with real food–products that are all-natural, not loaded with preservatives, and are actually good for you.
She started with Righteous, a line of all-natural salad dressings that managed to get listed in top London establishments like Harrods almost as soon as it launched in 2010, and get stocked at other big brands like Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s not long after.
Five years and one successful business down the line, and Misa is on to her next project, still centered on healthy eating. Already, the new product has captured the attention of foodies, so much so that it has allowed Misa to exceed her crowdfunding targets twice. More than that, it has also been awarded a grant from no less than Virgin’s Richard Branson, one of the UK’s top entrepreneurs.
Interestingly enough, this new product that’s winning over investors big and small is as simple as it is groundbreaking: Cauli Rice.
Replacing rice with crumbled cauliflower is not actually a novel idea. It has long been common practice among health-conscious foodies who wanted to replace the staple carb with a lower-calorie alternative that still satisfied.
Misa herself got into the habit of making cauliflower rice, which, as it turns out, is a time-consuming procedure that is not as simple as it sounds. It was in 2012 that she, along with her husband, started to develop what would become her next breakout product: long-life, pre-packaged, ready-to-eat but still all-natural cauliflower rice.
The product that is now on the market is the first of its kind, is pre-packaged, comes in four flavors, and is ready in just two minutes, all the while still offering the same health benefits of the homemade cauliflower rice that has had people breaking out their food processors and box graters to prepare: 75 percent less calories than white rice, with the same taste and satisfaction level.
Coming up with a great idea is one thing, but executing it is another–and in the case of Cauli Rice, it proved to be no mean feat. But as she had already proved with the success of Righteous, when it comes to building a brand, Misa is on point.
Perfecting Cauli Rice took three years. Doing so required a lot of research and back and forth consultation with food technologists. That alone already sounds challenging enough — even more when you consider that at the time, Misa still had to manage Righteous and, as a determined hands-on mom, take care of her three-year old daughter.
Most people would balk at the enormity of the task of balancing all two businesses and a family, but Misa, evidently, is not most people. After all, most people do not leave their high-ranking corporate jobs to venture out on their own from scratch, but that is exactly what she did.
As a global brand manager for Unilever, working at their head office and handling a 1.1B euro laundry brand, the corporate world was Misa’s playground. However, eight years into it, and Misa found herself wanting to do something else.
“It was really exciting at the time, but I think after eight years the novelty wore off and I think you kind of know when you wanted to do something else, and I wanted to start a business on my own,” she said in an online video by the Female Entrepreneur Association’s Carrie Green.
As if quitting her stable job to build a business from the ground up isn’t already enough of a challenge, Misa revealed in the video that she decided to start her business right in the middle of the recession, with people trying to talk her out of it. What kept her going? The almost single-minded belief that doing so would bring her happiness.
As it turned out, building Righteous proved to be a bit difficult in the beginning. After toying with the not-so-successful idea of doing prepacked gourmet salads, Misa quickly moved on to focus on salad dressings. Without a backup source of income, she was even more motivated to make the business work.
“If it really is your business that you’re counting on to be your main breadwinner you really have to think on your feet and learn really quickly from those mistakes,” she said in the video.
Misa has since come a long way from the touch-and-go days of her early days in the health food business. Righteous is now listed in over 1,000 UK stores, and continues to be a hit. At the same time, Cauli Rice has received hundreds of thousands of pounds in investment from crowdfunding and is among the winners in the 2015 Virgin StartUp Foodpreneur Festival competition.
It would appear that every enterprise Misa touches becomes a commercial success. Perhaps it’s the products themselves and the fact that they are healthy. Maybe it’s Misa’s sharp business mind, her tireless entrepreneurial spirit. Most likely, it’s all of these combined.
Now, we don’t know what Misa has in store next, but we’ll bet our money that whatever she has in mind is bound to be yet another smash hit. The world will just have to wait, and eat a little bit healthier in the meantime.
NOTE: This article was first published in the November-December 2015 issue of adobo magazine.
