1/ Today we announce immi, a food brand we've been working …

2/ We met close to a decade ago working as product managers at a company called Kabam. We didn't know each other, but during a work trip in Vancouver one morning, we somehow arrived at the same noodle joint. We became the two PMs in our org. who bonded over noodles for breakfast.

3/ After Kabam, we stayed close friends and roommates, but both of us went separate paths. KChan stayed as a PM at a health-tech startup called Amino, and later went on to be a lead PM at Facebook. I went the early-stage venture route, most recently as an investor at @pearvc.

4/ Over our friendship, we discovered that we share similar family backgrounds in the Asian food industry. My grandparents are farmers in Taiwan and grow a fruit called a rose apple. KChan's grandmother ran a noodle stand in Thailand and his dad ran a Thai restaurant in LA.

5/ Our families immigrated to the U.S. so we could avoid working in the food industry. (Ironically, we've now come back full circle).

As we've grown older, we've noticed an alarming fact: our families are getting sicker due to chronic health conditions from unhealthy diets.

6/ Our families didn't receive education around nutrition that we've been fortunate to grow up with here in the U.S. My grandmother is pre-diabetic, and both my parents have taken medication for high blood pressure for many years. KChan's family deals with similar health issues.

7/ Apart from helping our families' farms and food stalls in Asia as children, we've never worked in the food industry. But KChan has always had a strong passion for health & nutrition and I've always been fascinated with the food industry.

8/ A few years ago, we started talking about the idea of combining our interests and family backgrounds to start a better-for-you Asian American food brand that could tackle many of the health issues we saw in our families and millions of people around the world.

9/ It wasn't hard to arrive at the conclusion for a first product. We both had bonded over noodles for breakfast, and as children, we grew up eating instant ramen when that was all that our families could afford.

10/ Instant ramen is one of the world's most ubiquitous and nostalgic foods. Ask any stranger on the street from any cultural background, and they've probably eaten instant ramen at some point in life but stopped eating it as an adult once they realized how unhealthy it was.

11/ The market is dominated by the same Asian conglomerates who've made the same empty carb-filled, preservative-loaded, nutrition-less, sodium-bombs that they've sold for 60 years. They taste great, but health standards have changed, we've grown up, and instant ramen hasn't.

1/ Today we announce immi, a food brand we've been working on for 18 months. @kchanthasiri and I spent the past decade in tech and started over by learning the food industry from scratch. Here's why we're doing this, the $42bn food category we're tackling, and where we're going👇

More from Business

You May Also Like