Long before SIMPLi hit shelves at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Erewhon, and Wegmans, Sarela Herrada and her husband, Matt Cohen, were traveling the world working directly with farmers, building the relationships behind a question most pantry brands never ask: where does this ingredient actually come from, and who grew it? They co-founded SIMPLi in 2020 to build a company around the answer.
That turned into a first — SIMPLi introduced some of the first Regenerative Organic Certified® ingredients from South America into the U.S. market, built on direct relationships with the farming communities producing them. Sarela grew up in Lima, Peru, on a family organic chicken farm, watching her father work with Amazonian farming communities cultivating superfoods like camu camu.
Traceability sounds like a marketing word until you realize how few pantry brands can actually answer where a specific ingredient came from, let alone prove the farming practices behind it meet a real certification standard. Today, SIMPLi partners with more than 2,500 farmers across six countries in South America and Europe.
That’s the bet SIMPLi made: that better food systems can scale without cutting corners, and that customers would pay for a supply chain they could actually trust — in a category dominated by massive incumbents who’ve never had to answer that question.
Sarela and Matt get into how they built those farmer relationships and the certification process on this episode of Starting Small.
Listen to the full conversation with Sarela Herrada and Matt Cohen on Apple Podcasts
Cameron Nagle is the founder and host of Starting Small, creator of the Starting Small Summit, and author of Starting Small: The Raw Truth About Entrepreneurship and the American Dream. About Cameron | Listen on Apple Podcasts
