Realizing Your Business’ Value: The HerbyPoP Story

“When we show up with our products, we still find some people are ’intrigued’, for lack of other adjectives.” Mellini Monique Bramlett is telling me about her and her husband Brodie’s experience of selling their HerbyPoP popcorn at a few places in their hometown of Chicago. “They say ‘You make this? You market this? You package it?’ We know they’re really wondering: how did a Black family create this?”

Stories like this are the reason why we created the Accelerator for Local Goods, of which Mellini Monique is a recent graduate. It’s an educational program designed to uplift local, consumer packaged goods businesses owned by entrepreneurs who are women, transgender, immigrants, or people of color. We offer graduates a guarantee to sell their products via DashMart and I wrote about another graduate, Tiffany Leong, for my last story.

HerbyPoP tosses hand-crafted organic, gourmet, herbed popcorn in artisanal flavors, inspired by global cuisine. It’s a B corp with an inspiring mission to connect customers’ taste buds with natural herbs, culture, wellness, and flavor that will change their lives. Mellini Monique’s story is inspiring too, beginning at a very early age.

“I really did start with a lemonade stand! But then, around the age of 10, my grandmother hosted all the grandchildren for a summer, with the requirement that we each start a business. So I got up at 5 am every day, baked, and then sold cookies on the far South Side, where I grew up. I learned how to stand up for myself, how to pitch the product, the ‘why’, and how to handle different temperaments and customers. At the time, this was so I could earn a little pocket change for things I really liked–like pretty stationery.”?

Family life soon gave this young entrepreneur a different understanding of the value of money: “My mother and father were middle class at first, but then we hit some really, really rough times, and so I had to take the agency that I was taught as a young girl and enact it again in high school, selling candy bars from a second backpack. I would sell in between classes, before school, and after, if I still had inventory.”

Later, Mellini Monique pursued a path at graduate school that her family simply didn’t understand. “When I first said I was going to be a drama therapist, my dad asked ‘Is that going to pay bills?’ But then they were wildly supportive and just incredibly proud that I was headed toward being the first in my family to graduate from college.”

Mellini Monique’s journey has taken some fascinating turns. Out of college she joined the Abell Foundation and became a chaplain at an all-boys boarding school in the town of Nanyuki, Kenya. After that, she began her career as a drama therapist in hospitals back home. But she became disillusioned with the system and the way that medicine was administered to children in the hospitals’ care. That led to her becoming a medical missionary.

“I was still doing a lot of medical missionary work, helping people change their lifestyles, especially what they ate and drank, from what we call the SAD diet–also known as the Standard American Diet. I also knew there was something in salt and sugar that gives us those dopamine hits we want to feel good: hello junk food! And at the time, we were making our own herbed popcorn at home for our children, free of processed ingredients. One day we thought, what if we share this with our clients?”

Mellini Monique and her husband make their popcorn with real herbs (having a popcorn party, above, with five of their children) and really were giving it away to their health clients for free. But someone kept insisting on paying for it: “If people wanted to - we just let them pay what they could. But then we identified this as a source of revenue to do more good, and of course, help us feed our six growing children.

Shortly after they turned HerbyPop into a business, the pandemic dealt a double blow: “Because we have some education to do to show what herbed popcorn tastes like, we’ve always liked to sell at pop ups. But the pandemic shut those down. On top of that, we had to leave a shared popcorn manufacturing space.”

For many, this could have been the last stop before shutting down altogether. But Mellini Monique and Brodie just got creative: “We started hosting conversations live on Facebook and Instagram, around flavor and global culture and wellness. Customers tuned in and said ‘Great, just tell me when I can order again’. Slowly we were able to restart the pop ups, and get into a kitchen where we could pop overnight.”

While Mellini Monique definitely wants DoorDash to help HerbyPop become a national brand, right now the company is enjoying marketing to, and developing for local communities: “We don’t have Ethiopian flavors, but masala, like the kind we use with our Masala Munch, has a very similar flavor profile to Ethiopian cuisine. So we invited Tigist Reda, the owner of a popular Ethiopian restaurant, to come on the show and talk about her culture. That helped us create a strong relationship with her, bridging that cultural gap.”

Mellini Monique manages recipe development, marketing, and account management while her husband controls packaging, shipments, and all other logistics: “Or as I like to say I’m the spice, and he’s the kernel!” Despite all that entrepreneurial muscle between them, she told me what drew her to join the Accelerator: “For a small business like ours to be connected with such a big company like yours, it gives us street cred. People will stop calling us ‘that little business’ when they see us alongside major national brands on the platform.”

The journey to educate as well as excite customers may not be an easy one: “When you see a product with ‘natural flavors’, just start looking into what companies mean by that phrase,” she says. “We think you should know exactly what’s in your favorite snacks. Each of our bags tastes a little different, because there are subtle differences in every handful of herbs we use to season it. To the big popcorn makers, that probably sounds like it doesn’t scale. But that’s real food–we’re actually leaning into those differences.”

It was a pleasure to get to know Mellini Monique’s journey this week! Watch out for a future story in which I’ll be talking with the founder of Kokomo, one of the Vancouver, Canada restaurants which recently made our Most Loved All-Star Restaurants list. Its fresh, nourishing, plant-based bowls are inspired by sunshine and catching the eye of some famous customers.