Entrepreneurship inspired by more questions than answers

If anyone has ever had a conversation with me, even during my teenage years, they know I’m incredibly long-winded, and they struggle to get direct answers to their straightforward questions. And if you haven’t talked to me yet, just ask me a simple yes or no question. I’ll start talking about some tangential topic and get to the yes or no part after what you might experience as a confusing 5 minutes. I’m working on this though.

I’ve just begun to realize that this tendency to speak in loops vs. lines is less of a communication style, but more reflective of the way that I think—in and about systems. Systems thinking is a holistic approach that looks at how everything is interrelated, and how those pieces move and influence each other. Imagine standing, hovering over a complex domino set up with thousands of patterns and loops, making slight arrangements with different pieces while trying to understand how each movement of each piece affects the ultimate domino effect.

How systems thinking has influenced Forested Foods

I was first exposed to the concept of systems thinking while working with the NGO, TechnoServe, in their Ethiopia office. In the context of international development, systems thinking is commonly referred to as Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) or Market Systems Facilitation (MSF). (Side note: Is there any industry that doesn’t require you to learn an alphabet soup of acronyms?)

On one of my projects with TechnoServe, I conducted a research study using systems thinking to understand how we might improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Majang Forest while conserving the critically biodiverse forest ecosystem. We evaluated different conservation-based agroforestry (basically integrating agriculture + forestry) supply chains for coffee, honey, and spices, looking at all the different steps of the supply chain that ultimately impacted smallholder farmers’ ability to sustainably earn more from these products. This could be as simple as whether there is even a road to connect a farmer to market, whether a cold storage warehousing partner exists in the region, or if there is an incredibly high (or low) tax on particular goods and services. Or it could be as complex as how a piece of government policy may incentivize or disincentivize certain actions.

The idea behind Forested Foods—to build the Cargill of deforestation-free, regenerative agriculture products—was informed by a lot of what I learned building more environmentally-friendly and smallholder farmer-inclusive supply chains at TechnoServe. Our first office was actually set up in Majang Forest five years after that project.

This might all sound very abstract. It’s been difficult finding the right way to message this. It’s probably why we have both Maryiza and Forested Foods brands (I swear it isn’t just to confuse people!). The team here keeps telling me we need to find a way to simplify the message. People aren’t going to understand all these nuances. I agree. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

Maybe I can give a few examples to make this more concrete.

Here’s one: A lot of companies are starting to talk about direct sourcing from smallholder farmers. It’s a nice linear story to tell: “Smallholder farmers are getting exploited by a global commodity system. We will directly source from these farmers to bring you better food and better equity for farmers.” It’s easy to understand and who doesn’t want to support smallholder farmers?

It’s also a bit incomplete. A good analogy is the current diversity and inclusion movement in Corporate America. Companies are being asked to increase minority leadership at the board level and C-suite. Their method is very much linear, where they set staffing targets and measure how many minorities are being interviewed and hired. Some minorities are making it through, which we celebrate, but we all feel a little empty afterward when companies bemoan the lack of talent and the difficulty hiring. Direct sourcing feels a little like that. It’s celebrating the outliers in the current system, rather than redesigning a more equitable system for all. We’re only trying to solve the problem at the end, not trying to address the root cause. Maybe those minorities that make it happened to have a lot of privilege that is no different from the current leadership. Maybe those farmers that sell beautifully grown, regenerative food happened to be fortunate to have the support of NGOs like TechnoServe to invest a lot of time and money to build up their capacity and operations. Or maybe they’re just lucky they live near a road that leads to a major market. For the record, I still love direct sourcing and believe it is greatly needed. But it is a starting point and just one piece of a greater system that needs redesigning.

Here’s another one: Some companies have tried to address some of this by offering price guarantees. They’re saying: “We’ll go beyond just direct sourcing. We’ll provide an incentive for smallholder farmers to shift toward more sustainable growing practices by offering them a price premium for fill-in-the-blank (deforestation-free, regeneratively grown, etc.) products.” Again, easy to understand in a very linear way, where a higher price should help offset higher costs.

But what does this price guarantee actually do? What if a farmer doesn’t know how to grow more sustainably? What if the farmer doesn’t have any money to invest for better inputs or equipment? (Another side note: we’ve talked to several corporate buyers about selling to them, and for most, our internal estimate is that we’re at least 3 years away from being even close to meeting their certification standards and requirements). Let’s say a farmer is somehow able to get going and is looking to cash in on that price guarantee. What happens if that year’s harvest doesn’t go well? Does the company make the farmer whole? Or does it just move on to the next farmer? If the company moves on and the farmer still needs to make some income, does the farmer continue to try to meet that company’s needs, hoping it will work out in the future, or does the farmer try something else? Maybe that means clearing some trees to plant coffee, which the farmer knows can at least be sold to the local aggregator. Does the system change at all? Or is the farmer still being asked to absorb all the risk?

What problems are we trying to solve?

While not every problem requires the multi-layer analysis required in systems thinking, our problem—smallholder livelihoods, deforestation, and biodiversity loss—clearly does. Forested Foods is our solution to the overarching question of: How might we make global food systems work more in favor of people and the planet?

The challenge we accept in building a venture like Forested Foods, where we are working to change systems, is that the questions don’t end. We can be so fixated on unearthing the nuances of systems, people and their behavior, and the natural world, that we often fall victim to analysis paralysis. It’s been a balancing act of continuing to ask the hard and nitty gritty questions while just executing activities knowing that this is very iterative for now. As long as we’ve got our purpose crystal clear, we’ll iterate until we can fundamentally change the way the global food system works for both people and the planet. Here are some of the questions (in no sequential order or interdependence) that are bubbling in our minds:

• How do we make forests more valuable standing intact vs. destroyed?

• How might we create long-term incentives for forest communities to conserve their forests?

• What would happen if forest communities, businesses, and governments unlocked and/or earned more from keeping forests intact?

• How do we drive forest communities’ behavior change to conserve forests?

• How do we drive the market’s (end consumers, CPG companies, and buyers, generally) behavior change to accurately value regenerative supply chains and their products?

• What data should we be collecting to show that Forested Foods’ business is driving incentives for forest communities to conserve their forests?

We’ve got lots of hypotheses that will continue to be tested as we build out Forested Foods. Do we have any answers? Give me 5 minutes …

Honoring ancient beekeeping practices in Ethiopia

One of the most common questions we get at Forested Foods is, “What the heck is that log doing hanging high up in that tree?” It probably suggests we’re overusing that photo, but we think it perfectly illustrates what we mean when we say we make forest honey. Because that log is actually a beehive, and it’s what most of the smallholder farmers we work with use to produce honey.

Many stakeholders, including NGOs, the Ethiopian government, and businesses (even us!) have tried to introduce smallholder farmers to modern beekeeping methods utilizing box hives. But despite all the funding and training that has gone into this, traditional beekeeping persists (95% of Ethiopian beekeepers use traditional methods). Ethiopia has one of the oldest, if not the oldest, traditions of beekeeping—ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics suggest that the land on which Ethiopia lies today is actually the source of honey and beeswax. It is something we struggled with early on, but as we have worked more and more with our farmers, we have come to embrace the value of traditional beekeeping. 

Traditional hives made out of hollowed-out logs

What is traditional beekeeping?

Not to be confused with honey hunting (we’re not raiding wild beehives like Baloo), traditional beekeeping relies on the construction and use of traditional hives. Traditional hives are mostly cylindrical in shape (about 3 to 5 feet in length and 11 to 20 inches in width) with a single chamber fixed comb and no internal structure (unlike a modern box hive that has a set of frames on which the bees produce layers of honeycomb). In traditional hives, the bees create their own layers of honeycomb within the hives. 

While traditional hives are an art passed down between generations, each with innumerable defining nuances (like the difference between your grandmother’s chicken soup vs. your neighbor’s), the most common variants of traditional hive designs utilize a combination of materials such as hollowed-out logs, bark, bamboo, ensete ventricosum (false banana trees) leaves, straw, and/or clay.

How farmers attract wild bee colonies

The success of traditional beekeeping relies on wild bee colonies deciding to occupy the hives. To make a hive as homey as possible, farmers will smear fresh cow dung inside the cavity of the hive to keep the hive bacteria free (cow dung serves as a natural disinfectant, containing a penicillin-like substance) and insulated (ie. temperature controlled). Once dry, farmers will smoke the inside of the hive with various herbs and shrubs as well as sometimes leave certain herbs and shrubs as additional bait for bee colonies to enter. The hives are then closed on both ends of the cylindrical structure with woven straw discs. A very small hole is left on one side for bees to enter.

To best attract bee colonies, farmers tend to establish their apiary of hives deep in the forest, usually a several hour trek just one way. Once in their desired location, farmers will hang their hives up in select trees, choosing ones that bear flowers that attract wild swarms, either due to floral production of suitable honeybee nectar or pollen. Setting up traditional hives is always a collaborative group effort. Not only is company preferred for the journey, but for safety. In hanging up traditional hives, farmers must sometimes climb 30 to 90 feet high, where they set up their hives horizontally to ensure a more stable temperature for the bees. Given the nature of traditional beekeeping being further away from homes, there isn’t as frequent hive management as compared to modern box beekeeping. We’re working with our farmers to ensure that there is some practical monitoring and seasonal bee colony management.

Traditional hives hung up high in the trees in Kaffa Forest

How farmers harvest traditional hives

In the southwestern Afromontane forests in which we work, the main season during which our partner farmers set up their hives is after the big rainy season, around September and October. When it is time to harvest, groups of farmers will trek to their apiaries deep in the forest canopy and usually use weight as a first indicator of honey ripeness. They will also bring smoking tools, usually small containers holding a mixture of cow dung and leaves, vines, and/or other natural fibers. They will light a fire inside the container and pump out the resulting smoke from an opening. The smoke acts as a repellent to move the bee colony out of the hive so that the farmers can harvest the honeycombs. These wild bee colonies then move to another traditional hive, or create their own hives entirely from scratch in another tree in the forest.

Why we embrace the traditional

At Forested Foods, we always seek to understand traditional practices of food production before we assume that “modernizing” will lead to improvements. There are reasons—specifically centuries of generations of reasons—why people do things the way they do. Sometimes, the modern just can’t keep up with the traditional.

Meet our newest partner farmers: Andinet, a female-farmer cooperative in Kaffa Biosphere Reserve

We've extended our impact into the vibrant Kaffa Forest with its majestic mountains, vast valleys, and verdant vegetation. Most know Kaffa as the birthplace of Coffea arabica, but we’re here for the honey.

Kaffa is one of Ethiopia’s five biosphere reserves. Biosphere reserves are UNESCO-designated areas where interdisciplinary approaches to managing changes in and interactions between social and ecological systems are tested, including conflict prevention and biodiversity conservation. The research is community empowered, developing local solutions to global problems like climate change. Once an area becomes a biosphere reserve, UNESCO’s presence there inspires businesses (Like Foresetd Foods), NGOs and government and foundation donors to channel investment and resources into the ecosystem and the communities living within it. These organizations aim to preserve wildlife, build climate change resilience and improve livelihoods through economic development opportunities, including agroforestry.

Offering our support to NABU in Kaffa

Right now, most see us as a single-origin honey brand, but Maryiza is just the first step of our journey; we plan to do even more to conserve forests through regenerative agroforestry. Beyond honey, we’ll be producing an array of agroforestry products with our beekeeping partners, such as spices, herbs, fruits, gums and resins.

In 2019, researching more holistic and profitable approaches to conservation agroforestry for our forest farmer partners drew our attention to Kaffa, and we began searching for existing development projects to get involved in here. Many experts advised we connect with NABU, an NGO whose impact through climate-smart, smallholder-inclusive projects has been positively recognized across Ethiopia. Much of NABU’s on-the-ground development work is focused on supporting forest communities in effectively implementing regenerative and conservation agriculture practices.

In Kaffa specifically, NABU were running a project that aimed to tackle the amplified negative effect that climate change has on women and children. NABU had established six female-farmer cooperatives, each made up of 30–60 members, and were helping these women to generate income from environmentally friendly farming by bringing climate-smart agroforestry into their backyards. These backyards are conveniently in close proximity to the women and have nutrient-rich soils, which are perfect for growing valuable spices and herbs such as Ethiopian holy basil, cardamom, and turmeric.

NABU learned of our experience working with smallholders in other forests across Ethiopia’s Southwestern Afromontane region to produce honey and then market it in the USA, and were eager to see if honey production could serve as an additional income stream for their female-farmer cooperatives. NABU had already tried to make this a reality, piloting a modern box beekeeping and honey production program with one of their six cooperatives called Andinet. They had set about training the Andinet farmers, but because the farmers had never used these modern hives before, they struggled to harvest any honey from them. On top of this, Andinet hadn’t been able to find reliable buyers to sell their honey to. This presented the perfect opportunity for us to expand our partner beekeeping network to include the Andinet farmers, while providing NABU and Andinet with a long-term buyer both eager to dedicate time and resources to training the farmers and intent on purchasing their regeneratively produced forest honeys.

After a year and a half of chatting, we finally began our training with Andinet this year!

Building our partnership with Andinet cooperative

Human-centered research is at the heart of how we approach building relationships with our smallholder farmer partners. We recognize that there are nuances between a community’s relationship with its local ecosystem, its traditional practices of beekeeping and its capacity to improve beekeeping and honey production practices. Unless we take the time to better understand these nuances and what will incentivize forest communities to help conserve their critically biodiverse forest ecosystems, we won’t be able to develop solutions that catalyze conservation. It’s a gradual, iterative process focused on learning from and strengthening our forest community partnerships.

This April, we conducted our first course of beekeeping and honey production training with Andinet. Not only did 70 of Andinet’s female members show up, but also 10 of their husbands!

When we began our training with Andinet, we quickly realized that the women were struggling to beekeep using the modern box hives. In theory, this is more efficient than beekeeping using traditional methods – which require hives be hung deep in the forest up in tree canopies – because the box hives are conveniently located in the women’s backyards and should enable them to produce greater volumes of honey. But Andinet weren’t able to bait, capture, and retain bee colonies in their modern hives. We discovered that domesticating bees in this way is difficult for many smallholders as the dominant, traditional practices require much less to no bee colony management. Many Andinet farmers already had experience with traditional beekeeping, mostly through working with their husbands, who are very experienced traditional beekeepers. Abebech (pictured above), who is one of Andinet’s most respected members and hosts several of the cooperative’s modern hives in her backyard, helped us to understand this.

Although we supported Andinet in continuing to use their traditional practices, the farmers were still keen to learn how to keep bees and produce honey with their modern hives. We therefore decided to train them in both modern beekeeping methods and topics that were relevant to improving their traditional honey production practices. We knew this would be a multi-year process, and in the meantime we wanted Andinet to feel confident that we were committed to building a long-term relationship with them. To prove our commitment, we made it clear that we planned to purchase honey from the women’s households’ traditional hives, while helping them to adopt beekeeping practices that enable them to produce honey with their modern box hives.

After our April training, our CEO Ariana returned a month later with Amsalu, (a member of our team who very helpfully speaks the local Kaffa language, among several others), and they successfully aggregated and purchased around 1,500 kgs of Andinet’s Geteme honey harvest!

So, what have we got to show for all of this?

The crude honey we’ve aggregated is currently being separated into filtered honey and crude wax. While we’re not sure exactly what it will taste like, we realized during harvest that Andinet’s Geteme honeycombs contained some Grawa honey. This was because the bees had been collecting and producing a minor amount of nectar from flowering Grawa trees just a few weeks prior. Rahel (on the left) came to us with a beautiful bucket of Geteme combs from her household’s traditional hives; if you look closely, you can see how the combs feature portions of the darker Grawa honey. Because of this, we expect that Andinet’s Geteme may have a more bitter taste than the Geteme you’re all familiar with from Gera Forest, which is floral and bright.

Through more training with Andinet, mostly focused on timing their hive management and harvest more tightly before and after major tree-flowering seasons, we hope to source not only a more dominantly Geteme honey, but also Grawa, our slightly bitter, orange-peel-like honey with an amber glow, and Bissana, our rich, chestnut-coloured honey with a nutty praline flavour.

Our work in Kaffa has only just begun, and we’re so excited to see what the future holds for our partnership with Andinet. We won’t rest until our mission to align conservation agroforestry with improved livelihoods is complete!

Single-origin honey: Experiencing floral sources and ‘terroir’ in honey

It was August 2017, and I was excitedly introducing the agroforestry venture I was setting out to build, Forested Foods, to my new classmate during our MBA orientation.

“We’re launching Forested Foods with Maryiza, a line of single-origin ­­honeys from Ethiopia’s indigenous tree flora.”

Confused, he responds, “But what does ‘single-origin honey’ mean?”

“You know how ‘single-origin’ coffee indicates that coffee will present a distinct flavor profile based on being from the same botanical variety of beans from the same area? Like, a coffee from Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia might be described as light-bodied, floral, with citrus notes whereas a coffee from Sumatra, Indonesia as fuller-bodied, earthy, chocolatey, and of tobacco?” The look on his face indicates the reference potentially sounds familiar. “It’s similar to the concept of ‘terroir’ in wine, in that the unique taste and flavor profile of a wine is imparted by the environment — soil, topography, climate — in which it is produced.”

He’s now clear regarding the overall concept but still unclear about the connection to honey. He exclaims, “But isn’t all honey the same? I mean, it’s all sticky, kinda light-ish brown-ish and…tastes the same…?” He’s still searching for the words, “…like that honey taste!”

Truth is, single-origin honeys, which are traceable back to a specific area from a specific flowering time of year, are incredibly unique from one to another. Single-origin honeys will exhibit specific characteristics — in colour, texture, aroma, and taste. Each hive-batch of honey is the product of the natural harmony between art and science. Art presents choice: what flowers bloom when and where, and what nectar bees decide to feed and collect nectar from. Science presents process: bees’ unfailing, perfect execution of honey production. And at last we get the privilege to enjoy nature’s perfect performance of honey creation.

Given how honey is one of the most referenced foods in history, modern literature, and day-to-day life, it’s somewhat surprising that our understanding of and exposure to its boundless variations in flavour, appearance, and texture, is so limited. The driving cause of this issue is, like many other agricultural products, honey exists in our incredibly commoditized world. Most expectations of honey are that it is predictable: that it visually presents as an amber, perfectly syrupy liquid, and that taste-wise, it resembles a sugar concentrate, lacking much dimension. Additionally, the world has built and increasing runs on a large-scale, manufactured food systems that reinforces a muted understanding of honey as a homogenous product.

To fuel the world’s evolving appreciation of honey, Maryiza is inspired by the opportunity to amplify the art and science behind each batch of single origin honeys. We’re continuously discovering nature, by exploring the floral nectars that, when processed into honey, construct beautiful varieties of flavours, colours, and textures. To research and showcase Maryiza’s single-origin honeys, we work with forest-based communities and train them to manage their bee colonies and produce honey alongside the flowering seasons of indigenous tree flora. We also collaborate with Ethiopia’s Holetta Bee and Honey Center of Excellence’s botany team to better understand the correlation between the sensory results of honeys with their floral origins.

Each batch of Maryiza honey is a reflection of a major flora source — in aroma, taste, colour, and texture. We’ve designed our own sensory wheel that will be introduced soon to help convey how we can all enjoy the nuances of single-origin honeys. We are in the business of offering our fellow, enlightened foodies limited editions of flavour, because that’s what nature — kept natural — is.

Maryiza’s origin story is part of a greater vision to combat deforestation and conserve biodiversity through working with forest-based communities to sustainably grow and realize increased incomes from all kinds of agroforestry products. Maryiza is just where we start. Learn more via our canopy company, Forested Foods.

Ethiopia’s Afromontane Region

While our vision is global, our first region of operations is in the southwestern Afromontane forests of Ethiopia, where our team has years of expertise working with smallholder farmer-based agriculture and agroforestry. Ethiopia’s Afromontane region is one of 36 of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, classified as being one of the most biologically rich but most deeply threatened ecosystems. Biodiversity hotspots represent just 2.4% of Earth’s land surface but over 50% of the world’s endemic plant species and over 40% of the world’s endemic animal species. We are specifically working with producers in three ecologically unique forests in this region: Belete-Gera Forest in Jimma, Oromia; Kaffa Biosphere Reserve in SNNPR; Majang Biosphere Reserve in Gambella. Our growing product portfolio includes a variety of distinctive forest-based bee products, spices, herbs, and fruits.