The idea for ChiChi got started when I was in college. I was eating a lot of regular old oatmeal every day before class, and I would get hungry an hour after eating it because it just wasn’t that filling. I saw another company making chickpea pasta and thought, why not do chickpeas for breakfast?
I took this idea to an entrepreneurship class where I met my friend and now co-founder, Izzy, and said, “Look at this chickpea mush I invented last night.” I made the first batch in my dorm room with all these complicated steps, involving a pressure cooker, rolling pin, and dehydrator and brought her the final product in a plastic bag. She liked it and suggested we make it our project.
We got about $4,000 to start the business as part of the class and immediately started selling to people at school, making every bag by hand in a commercial kitchen and doing taste tests all around campus to figure out our flavors. Soon after, we took it to the local farmers market in St. Louis, where we did pretty well, and won a few college pitch competitions that provided initial funding for our first big production run.
By now, we have four flavors of our chickpea-based hot cereal that we've been selling online direct-to-consumer (DTC) for two years, iterating the product a bunch. It’s just us two, a couple part-time content creators, and AI. As a small team, we needed a way to be faster, do more things at once, and brainstorm new ideas, so we started using Gemini early on to help us write scripts for ads and generate marketing concepts. For instance, we recently brainstormed with Gemini in Google Docs to help us come up with fall recipe ideas that we could post on social media and our blog. I’m constantly asking Gemini questions about the industry, like defining various terms, and even calculating margin structures.
It’s also been really effective for PR and sales