Yemisi Awosan

About Yemisi

• I grew up in Nigeria and was raised with an appreciation for food, built around helping my mother in the kitchen, and always seeing food at the center of our celebrations and gatherings.
• When I went to college in the U.S., I started learning how to cook our traditional Nigerian dishes myself to share with my friends.
• I started out as a pre-med major to please my parents but didn't enjoy it at all—I decided to take a semester off for a fashion buying internship in New York, which I was much more passionate about.
• After my internship, I finished college as an apparel marketing major.
• After graduating from college, I got a job as an allocation analyst and then worked my way up to becoming a buyer—this is how I gained the understanding of what it takes to run a business.
• In my free time, I really enjoyed bringing people together, cooking for them, and sharing my culture—I realized that this is what I should build my brand around.
• I worked in fashion buying for another decade—all while dreaming of starting my business—before I actually started researching how to get my food into stores and out to consumers.
• After a lot of research and hard work, I founded my company Egunsifoods, which produces ready-to-eat food derived from West African dishes.