Transcript of Episode

Leah Gervais:  Hey visionaries, welcome back to the Your Biggest Vision show. I’m your host, Leah Gervais. And today we have Josh Shefner with us today. Hey Josh.

Josh Shefner: Hey, thanks for having me.

Leah Gervais: Thanks so much for being here. So I want to share a little bit of a backstory with you guys. For those of you who listened to season one, you probably know that I went to Milwaukee in September of 2019 for a press trip. And part of that was seeing and reporting on some of the entrepreneurial communities and opportunities within Milwaukee. You guys know that my platform is all about promoting entrepreneurship. So I was really excited to see what they had going on there. It was, um, my first time to Milwaukee. I just married a Midwesterner, so it was kind of fitting that I go to this very Midwestern, Midwestern city. And as part of the trip, one of the things that we did was visit a sort of like a coworking space on steroids. Like it has so much going for it, the community is called the commons and I talked a little bit about that in another podcast episode and Josh might mention it but that is where I met Josh.

And, um, he was very impressive with the building the business that he’s built at a young age. He’s very mission driven. Um, and he’s just such a visionary. And so this being the biggest vision show, I wanted to have him on share his vision and I selfishly wanted to hear more about what he’s done. So, um, that’s what we are up to today. So thanks again so much for being here, Josh. And if you could just give us, you know, your elevator pitch about the business you’ve built and then we’ll rewind and start from there.

Josh Shefner: Yeah, definitely. So, um, the problem is that two point trillion pounds of the food goes to waste every single year. And Sub Saharan Africa up to 95% of all food that is wasted is due to food loss. Food loss is a bit different than food waste. It happens between the producer and the market. So it’s what we never get to see. Um, so in Sub Saharan Africa, that’s 95% of everything that goes to waste. Most of the reasons for that is because there’s no ability to preserve that food  because of a lack of technology, uh, and training as well as, uh, they can’t sell it locally because the markets are over saturated and also difficult to get to. So what we do, our company is Agricycle. Um, we sell passive solar dehydrators. Uh, we manufacture them here in Wisconsin. They’re simple machines that work without any electricity. We export them all over the world and then we train cooperatives for women farmers on how to use them.

So that way they’re able to preserve their fruits without really any cost, um, other than their work during the day, we then buy back the dried fruits that they produce. Um, because we work with fruits and, uh, we then take the byproducts of that drying process and we also make other products. So there are three different brands that we buy from the women cooperatives and we bring back to the United States itself. The first is the Jali Fruit Co. Um, it’s an all natural ethically source brand of dried fruits with no added sugars or preservatives and are fully traceable from tree to shelf. So there’s a sticker, QR code called find my farm on every single bag individually that traces that bag back to the farm it came from. So the women cooperative that dried it and um, the farmers who grew the fruit, so you know, the entire story of where it’s been, um, as well as its supply chains. It’s transparent and traceable.

Um, our second brand is Tropical Ignition and that’s a sustainable, technically it’s an alternative biofuel, but it’s a charcoal. Um, and so it’s made out of coconut shells and cacao shells, which is like dark chocolate basically. Um, and so those two mixed together with a bit of starch means that instead of cutting down trees, um, to burn the trees and to trickle, we’re able to take the shells of the fruits that we’re already drying. So that way we’re just using another byproducts and we’re able to make a charcoal that burns hotter and longer than Kingsford. Um, and it comes in a hard box too. So instead of a bag that rips, it’s a fully recycled and recyclable box with a handle on it too. So, and then the third brand is after we’ve made the charcoal from the shells that we can, there’s still other parts of the fruit that we haven’t used yet. So we make a fruit flower. Um, we have coffee flour, we have coconut flour, which people have probably heard of banana flour, people have heard of breadfruit flour. So those flowers come from the byproducts of our other processes, so that way the women that we work with just through the drag fruit alone, um, the average, uh, pay for them is four and a half times the average daily wage. So, we have a network of 35,000 farmers now in Eastern West Africa, Central American, and the Caribbean.

Leah Gervais: Wow. Huge graduations. I have 1 million questions. Okay. So you are, uh, tackling a huge, um, not, maybe not tackling, but starting to make a dent in the huge travesty of food waste in Sub Saharan Africa. And that speaks to the poverty in Sub Saharan Africa. Because you’re saying food isn’t, there’s no food shortage, there is a lack of supplies, a lack of resources to educate these women and a lack of understanding of resourcefulness and what these things can be repurposed as. How did you start this? Like, did you learn this?

Josh Shefner: Yeah, so, um, I went to Milwaukee, uh, for college. I lived just a tiny bit South across the border in Illinois. And two weeks into my freshman year I was in the honors program and I was given this project of designing a passive solar fruit dehydrator, for context. Passive solar dehydrators work without electricity. Um, and that means, you know, it’s not solar electricity either. So literally, it’s just the heat of the sun and the sun isn’t directly on the fruits. The sun heats up air and then you basically shape a box so that the air, it goes like this into a chamber of fruits and then it goes up so that the moisture is removed. So it’s, it’s a really simple process. But, so yeah. Uh, as a freshman, we were asked to create a business model for taking dried fruits and turning them into a beer.

So we were supposed to take dried mangoes from Jamaica and dehydrate them, ship them, rehydrate them, and then distill them into beers, was the idea that this nonprofit in Jamaica had, it was really silly. Within like three weeks, we had abandoned that idea. Um, we were working with the national science foundation innovation corps at the time to help kind of figure out the model. Um, and we ended up landing on, Oh, Hey, but dried fruit is a real market, um, right. And, and also it doesn’t require any processing after drying it. It’s just dried. So it was funny because we’ve landed on dried fruit and it being all natural in it and it being without added sugars or preservatives, the first reason we landed on that wasn’t because that was what we were trying to do. It was just the easiest thing that the farmers could do. So we were trying to make it so that it was as approachable and usable by the farmers in Jamaica. So yeah, we go through the process, we design a dehydrator. Um, meanwhile there’s all these other partners with the nonprofit that like dropped out of the project. So we keep taking on different responsibilities. Like suddenly we are the ones designing the dehydrator.

Leah Gervais: Let me pause you really quick. When you say “we”, you mean like fellow classmates? Did you have a mentor that you worked with?

Josh Shefner: Yeah. So it was fellow classmates… we were freshman.

Leah Gervais: And are you still are any, okay, well you go ahead with your story, but I’m curious to know who jumped ship with you.

Josh Shefner: Yeah, definitely. Um, so basically we finally get to Jamaica and we find out that the nonprofit had basically been lying. Yeah. Nobody knew about…. So, we had been doing customer interviews with the farmers the whole time. So we thought, and it was through this guy named Kevin. And it turns out that Kevin had not spoken to any of the farmers. He was faking responses back to us and he was siphoning money from the nonprofit. 

Leah Gervais: Oh my God. That’s terrible.

Josh Shefner: Yeah. So we’re all like 19 years old and we show up and we have no idea what we’re going to do. So he’s fired. He’s gone. Um, from the nonprofit, somebody else’s there when we show up and basically, uh, we have to completely redesign everything. So now we go from this production model of the dehydrator to, um, instead of making something that’s educational and we can just teach people all the things we thought we were doing through email, which is probably for the best, it was a way better to, to teach people in person.

Um, the point though is that after that trip we get back and to us we’re like, great, and step one is done. They have a dehydrator. Now we have to train them on food safety and quality assurance. We have to help them get certifications. We have to help them export, brand it, market it, sell it. Um, and that’s what our school is like no, no, no, no, no, no, you’re good. You’re, you’re just engineers. Like you just engineered it. That’s all you have to do today. Um, we’re like, no, of course not. What’s the point of a dehydrator if, if you’re not going to do everything else that makes it valuable. And they’re like, I dunno your engineers though, like, mission accomplished, good job, go home. So that’s when we went to the commons which is obviously where we met and, um, we got a team from there cause we were all engineering students.

We got a team from the commons that help focused on business and marketing. And we had like three international students, two from the commons who like really helped to give us like, um, much better perspective on what we’re doing and helped us see that this model of Jamaica could scale way passed it. Um, so we tried being a nonprofit, within six months that failed and we closed down.

Leah Gervais: Wow, why did it fail?

Josh Shefner: So, we failed to get much, I mean, there’s an insane amount of nonprofits and then just in Milwaukee alone, there’s some, the startup community here loves throwing out the stats of how many nonprofits there are and just like, it’s ridiculous. But, um, the point was kinda that we couldn’t attract any money. And at the time we thought all we needed was money. We thought we had the right answer to everything else. Um, and so we were just like, wow, we’ve tried our very best, but we can’t do it. A couple months later is when somebody offered from a nonprofit, they offered to pay us to make dehydrators and that’s when everything switched and we were like, Oh wow, this could be a business that does the same benefit of the nonprofit. So that’s when we became a social enterprise and that’s been everything since.

Leah Gervais: Right. So, again I have so much that I could ask you. First of all, a huge congratulations on everything you’ve done. And I know you’re still pretty young. Uh, especially, you know, for the audience I speak to, although my brand is called Urban 20 Something, I know many of you are not in your twenties and it’s cool. Um, so were you okay you, if I remember correctly, either paused school like you, you took some, you’re taking some time off?

Josh Shefner: So I would normally call it being a dropout except I’ve recently heard this new term called stop out and I feel like that’s way nicer. 

Leah Gervais: So yeah, it was scary. 

Josh Shefner: Yeah. Um, no it feels good. So right now I um, I think three courses away from four courses away from graduating with a degree in structural engineering, um, which has nothing to do with anything that I’m doing.

Leah Gervais : Right. Well you have a job isn’t the point to get a job?

Josh Shefner: Right. Yeah. So, so I’d walked into college and I walked in as a sophomore and like from all the AP tests and everything I did really well my first year. That was that year that I was doing the Jamaican project with the school. So I advanced very quickly and then the next three years that I was in college, I basically took super low credit loads or I mean in the end, cause I would like take classes in the moment and then Somebody was like, “Hey, we have homework every week” and I’d drop that. I basically used college as like a safe space to build my business and learn how to do business. I knew I was paying for it obviously, but it was, you know, our business wasn’t ready to launch yet. When it was ready was at the end of this past, um, semester. So last May. May of 2019. Um, so we went to the target incubator in Minneapolis, starting in June. And that was kind of the, you know, there’s no need to go back and, and finish these, uh, these extra courses because things were working out.

Leah Gervais: Right, right. Great. Okay. So let’s back up a little bit. So you’re at the comments, you have this great idea, you’re fired up about it. You know that you can really help people and you’ve just got the good news that you don’t have to be a nonprofit. You can actually make money and still really give back in a really great way, which I love. When do you start thinking about this on the scale of Africa and when do you start communicating with people and have you been there to work with them?

Josh Shefner: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. So when, yeah, so I mean, gosh, there’s been so many iterations when, when somebody offered to pay us, it was for when we were working in Panama, which is in central America and we were working in a very, um, a very rural part of Panama, Eastern Panama. It’s right against Columbia, I believe. And so it’s not the Panama city that a lot of people might or initially imagined. But we worked there and we thought our model was, Hey, nonprofits will pay us to build to be hydrators. Um, and then to just teach them on how they can sell tread fruit in the United States. It wasn’t until we did that, that the next year we figured out the right model, which is what we’ve had successful, is to be fully vertically integrated. 

So now instead of us traveling to Panama building dehydrators and teaching farmers how to use them, now we manufactured dehydrators in the United States. We export them, we travel and hire local teams and train them. And then those local teams, so train the trainer model, they go out and they go to thousands of farmers to train them on how to use dehydrators. Um, the cooperatives that they work with our dehydrators. And so this is in this, in the end of 2018 and start of 2019 that we start going to Uganda and we start going to Kenya and we start going to Haiti as well. Um, and so that’s the point where we realized that our model wasn’t just like a, a model that could go anywhere. Like we could put dehydrators anywhere, but there wasn’t a reason to, something that legitimately could scale to right now it’s 35,000. So that’s when we started working in those countries and we started making bigger partnerships. A couple agencies of the United Nations started working with us on some of their, on country branches. We got a grant from the U.S. state department, stuff like that. So we started to see that, like people wanted this to happen more than just the farmers, more than just nonprofits, but also like big, big policy-making groups that decided that this was the right approach.

Leah Gervais: So, congratulations, first of all. So you are a business. So what’s your primary moneymaker? Is it the actual fruit that you sell to bigger manufacturers in the U.S. for charcoal and flour?

Josh Shefner: Yeah, so, so the finish of that, um, vertical integration is that we buy that fruit back and then we brand it, we market it, we sell it. So we’re actually launching our Jali Fruit Co., um, the dried fruit brand in January. We had a successful Kickstarter back in May. And so that will be our primary moneymaker. We also are just closing our investment round right now. Um, we’re reaching 1.5…, we raised 1.5 million. 

Leah Gervais: Congratulations. 

Josh Shefner: Thank you. Yeah. So it was big, had to give a bit more equity than we wanted, but it was, um, it gets us going. So, uh, yeah, so, so that’s the model of where our most revenue is coming from is through the products that we sell.

Leah Gervais: That you sell back. So you obviously have a team, you’re doing this alone, but do you, you are the CEO and official founder, you’re the head honcho. 

Josh Shefner: Yes I am. 

Leah Gervais: Okay. Do you sleep? 

Josh Shefner: Some. 

Leah Gervais: Yeah. It sounds like you’re definitely, you know, um, have your hands involved in every single department. You have your hands involved in the marketing you’re doing here in the U.S. you just did funding like that, that could be a department on its own when it’s a startup. Um, you also engineered the things. So, um, how have you learned to be a CEO, you know, coming from being like a 21 year old engineer?

Josh Shefner: Yeah. Um, so we have an awesome team. 

Leah Gervais: How many people are on your team?

Josh Shefner: We have nine in the U.S. and we have seven abroad right now, but right now our COO is Jacob, he’s in Kenya as we speak, literally doing interviews to hire another eight staff. So we’re, we’re expanding our global team right now. So Jacob’s background is a peace Corps volunteer. And then for six months after that, he was an agricultural supply chain consultant for West Africa. So it was like the perfect fit. Um, Jen is our VP of branding and she’s had 20 years of branding experience on the creative side of things, mostly with agencies and then our own business. So like the right people who are motivated by our mission have come to our company. And that’s obviously helped cause it’s not just me.

Leah Gervais: Right, right. And, you know, um, do what the, the, they say the best CEO’s do you hire people that are smarter than you at what you need them to do. So people that have 20 years of branding experience where you don’t. And things like that where they’re better than you ever could. Okay, great. And so what would you say… this is gonna we’re gonna kind of switch into more mindset stuff now because that’s what I really love to talk about. What would you say is your sort of why and motivator? And it sounds like you care very much about the impact this is making on Sub Saharan Africa, but what really lights you up about this?

Josh Shefner: Yeah. Um, so there’s, there’s two things. On the first thing, it’s the monetary impact that we’re making. There’s, there’s, so there’s economic impact there, social impact and there’s environmental impact that we have. Environmental impacts. We’re reducing food loss, we’re planting fruit trees, we’re keeping trees from being cut down, we are reducing carbon emissions on the social side where the women are establishing their own bank accounts, uh, independent from their husbands. Um their establish establishing credit history so they can get micro loans in the future because that’s the model that we use and we get them partners to that I’m going to get real life job training, um, that they can then leave our cooperatives and go get formal jobs that aren’t just farmers cooperatives because of the food safety training that we give them. Um, but the economic impact is the, the women are able to make $15 a day per dehydrator.

It takes about three hours of work to use that dehydrator to make $15 a day. So that, uh, that, that this is in that area or many of the places that you’ve, you know, that statistic of, you know, uh, people living under $1.90 per day. Like these are those villages, these are those communities and our dehydrators are literally able to pay $15 a day. Um, so that’s the change that I’m happiest with. The second part to that though is that it goes deeper than just that money. So back to that social impact, that’s about the women having their own job training, having their own bank accounts and steps from the credit history, the dehydrators that they buy that they’re able to pay back within two months. And as they pay it back, they’re still taking salary. That now becomes a bankable asset that they can use along with the credit history that they just established through the loan that they took out to get the dehydrator in the first place. They can use those two things to get loans that they can use to provide for their house, to buy a solar cookstove, uh, to buy better food for their family. Um, it allows them to avoid cash flow issues. Uh, and it, our system is literally bringing people into a financial system that they had never been a part of. Yeah. That’s the, that’s the motivating part.

Leah Gervais: What about internally? So you went to college with APS to be a structional engineer, is that right?

Josh Shefner: Yup. Yup. Structural engineer. Yeah.

Leah Gervais: So engineers aren’t usually known for their entrepreneurial skills a little. Um, yeah. I’m not trying to be, I’m not trying to pigeonhole anyone, but did you have an entrepreneurial bug in you before you went to college? Or was this just, it just felt right and you just ran with it?

Josh Shefner: Okay. So I think I’m, I might have, because I hated rules and I always, I questioned everything. So I think that’s a part of it. I just didn’t think that was entrepreneurship. I actually hated the title of entrepreneur and, and, yeah. And I hated the idea of entrepreneurship. To me, it was just like, it was people who wanted to call themselves a CEO, who wanted to say, I came up with an idea that took like 10 minutes to come up with. And they’re the ones who don’t do the work. They’re the ones who sit around, like talk all flashy, like their LinkedIn titles as entrepreneur and stuff like that. And, and that was like my original perspective going into college. It’s about wanting to be a humanitarian. And so I thought of studying international development, which is a policy based approach to that.

But I went to this leadership camp called boys state is a boy state and a girl state, um, in every continental U.S. state. I decided after coming out of that, you know, no, I’m not just going to learn the policy behind it. I’m going to learn a practical skill that will let me do international development. So I chose structural engineering so I could build bridges, dams, etc. Um, so I walked in with this title that I wanted to have on my LinkedIn page of humanitarian engineer and I fell that land backwards into being an entrepreneur, which was crazy because we started as a nonprofit and I was like a student project before that and eventually it was a social enterprise.

Leah Gervais: Right. That’s hilarious. And I have that too. I’m like had so much judgment around something and then a few years later I’m like, damn it. Um, okay. So it sounds like you had the heart for humanitarianism and international development and all that. So all of that makes perfect sense to me. So you know, your situation is a little bit different in the sense that when you were becoming a nonprofit, when you were finding team members, when you were really getting off the ground, you were in school, you, you did have, for lack of a better word, a backup plan, even though it did cost you a lot of money, like you said, a lot of the people listening to this show that are entrepreneurs, you know, their backup plan is going to get another nine to five job. They really don’t want to do that. Some of them might still be in it and they’re thinking of making the leap. So what did you, what kept you going when you’re like, this nonprofit is not working or, you know, I’m sure you still have days where it doesn’t feel like you’re failing, but things just straight up don’t work. Um, how have you learned to deal with that and how do you keep going?

Josh Shefner: Yeah. Um, so I think as a founder specifically, um, I think the thing that has always kept me going, it’s more of a responsibility. In the past I’d say two and a half. So I’ve been doing this for over four years now. Past two and a half years, I’ve felt a responsibility to continue to do it all. The first like year and a half was just like, it’s a great idea. I’m going to try it. Wow. It’s like actually working kind of, you know, like, like we’re going to keep going. Um, then it started to get serious because there we had our first employee in Uganda and that’s when somebody had literally left their job and said, yeah, sure, I’ll trust you, guy who showed up to my country once to follow through on your year long commitment to employ me.

Then obviously very quickly that tumbled into more people and that tumbled into more commitments, and its commitments to employees. But it’s also commitment to all the cooperatives that we have right now that are expecting for this to do the benefit that for some of them it’s happened so far because we’ve sold some fruit, but we haven’t obviously launched everything. So we haven’t been able to make the wide-scale impacts that we’re just about to do. And the like, there’s a huge responsibility it feels like to follow through and all of that. So, that’s what’s been…

Leah Gervais: Yeah. And that’s your responsibility to your vision. You know, you want to see this through, like you obviously, like you said, have three pillars of impact. You don’t want to just give up on that.

Josh Shefner: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think that’s what, that’s what keeps me pushing along. Yeah.

Leah Gervais: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. You obviously are probably going to employ some of the people that I know and not too long. So congratulations on the impact, with everything you’ve done and I can’t wait to see everything you’ve done. I’m honored to be interviewing you because it’s like you’re going to win some awards someday as I will have known you when you did this. Um, I have a few, Your Biggest Vision specific questions for you. Are you ready? 

Josh Shefner: Yeah, sure. 

Leah Gervais: What’s your go to when you’re having a bad day? And I know you just said a responsibility, but like actionably what do you do?

Josh Shefner: I typically, typically the bad day will come from something on the U.S. side will come from a hiccup as we’re building a website or we’ll come from, um, a sales call that didn’t work out. And uh, I typically get on the phone with Patrick or Claire who are on the team. Patrick is our East African director and I just talk to him about, uh, how everything’s going in East Africa. He works very independently. He’s building his own system over there and everything. So that’s a part of how we’ve structured things too. But, uh, talking to him helps kind of reground me into what we’re doing. Then Claire, she, she’s just about to stop-out. Um, and like literally two days after she’s done with her finals for this quarter, um, and she’s the one who designed all the dehydrators. So she and I talk all the time about just work through stuff. So I think my go to is just talking to some of my flips co-founders.

Leah Gervais: Yeah. And coming back to like the groundedness of it all, you have a moment that stands out as a moment that you were just really, really proud of yourself or what you’ve done thus far?

Josh Shefner: Ummm.It was the first shipment of dried fruit that we ever got in the United States. You know, we were, we had had 300 women in our cooperatives at that point. And we had traveled the world. We’d been to Africa multiple times, East Africa at that point, but it all felt kind of hollow because we hadn’t yet paid any of the women for dried fruit. We hadn’t done the things that our model says that we can do. And so, so far my proudest moment has been when we successfully paid for dried fruit from the women who we trained from dehydrators that we built and we got fruit in the United States and we started sampling to people. So that, that so far has been like the best moment.

Leah Gervais: When I came full circle. 

Josh Shefner: Yeah. Yeah. When, when the first, the first time that it all worked out.

Leah Gervais: Yeah, totally. Do you have a podcast or book that has helped you as an entrepreneur, as a business? Like with your business strategy, your mind that you rarely recommend?

Josh Shefner: I have one book that’s recommended by a few accelerators. Um, Milwaukee first I’ll say that like accelerators is our version of like a book or a degree or anything. You know, like I said, the NSFI Corps, [unable to transcribe] the commons who went through G-beta through something called mad works. We went through Bab cap, which is focused on sales. We went through workbench labs and we went through the targeting [inaudible]. So we’ve gotten like a parallel degree in startup incubator teachings. One of the books though that we read, we love, um, it’s called “The Mom Test”. Uh, and the basis of the mom test is about how to ask customer interview questions. So, um, your idea is when you come up with your idea, your idea is wrong. You just have to accept that and you have to go to customers with an open mind and have them tell you what needs to change.

So for our charcoal, a sustainable charcoal and everything, we’re so happy about all these features. And after our customer interviews, we were like, okay, needs to be in a hard box because right now that’s the biggest improvement that could be made from current the current charcoal, is the bags that it’s in. But the point of the customer interview questions is you don’t want to ask, Hey, do you like this product? Hey, what do you think about this product? Um, cause they totally understand, uh, that you’re the one offering the question. They don’t want to hurt your feelings. You ask them, would you buy this? They’re optimistic about the future that they would, they, they believe that whatever price it is to like, Oh yeah, sure. But then you say, okay, cool, give me 20 bucks. They’re like, no, I’m not going to give you 20 bucks for that. So the mom test is like, um, how do you ask a question that a nice mom would have to answer truthfully? So instead of saying, would you buy this dried fruit? Ask the question, when was the last time you bought healthy snacks? What were those healthy snacks? Have you ever had dried fruits? When was the last time that you did? How much did you pay for it? And stuff like that.

Leah Gervais: Awesome. That’s a great resource. Thank you for sharing that. Uh, and then last but not least, where’s your website? Are you on social media? How can people follow you?

Josh Shefner: Yeah, yeah. https://jalifruit.co/ is our website for the Jali Fruit Co. Then if you want to just see the mission overall for the company, https://www.agricycleglobal.com/ is our website.

Leah Gervais: Awesome. Josh, thank you so much and a huge congratulations to you and everything you’ve done for yourself, for your business and for the people that need it the most in the world. I’m hugely impressed with the business that you’re building. I can’t wait to see all you do and we’re very grateful for you to have shared this with us today.

Josh Shefner: Thank you very much. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me on.

Leah Gervais: Yeah, my pleasure. Alright, visionaries, if that does not inspire you to be more of a visionary today, I don’t know what will. Thanks so much for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.

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