Founder Spotlight: Natasha Dhayagude (Chinova Bioworks)
Meet Natasha Dhayagude
Company:
Chinova Bioworks
Using the power of mushrooms, Chinova has developed a natural, clean-label preservative to improve quality, freshness and shelf-life for food and beverage products.
Startup Stage:
Seed
Locations:
Fredericton, Canada
What led you to where you are today?
1.3B tonnes of food is lost or wasted annually. This staggering loss shows that there is no lack or shortage of food, but that the culprit is spoilage. As founders, we challenged ourselves to work with nature to find the ultimate solution. The answer came in the form of an extract from white button mushrooms and led to us founding our company - Chinova Bioworks
What do you wish you knew before embarking on your entrepreneurial journey?
Patience is the key to building a company! Things definitely take a lot longer than expected. It is really important to understand that as entrepreneurs. In the startup world you are surrounded by people and their success stories but you never get to their long road that helped them achieve that level of success. We need to keep that in mind and not be so hard on ourselves and take it one goal at a time.
What is the most difficult decision you've had to make regarding your business so far?
The most difficult decision I have had to make was to move to another city away from my core team to further grow our business. This was definitely the right decision as we needed to expand our team, but it was still very difficult being away from my team that I was used to seeing everyday for the past 5 years. Even though its only for a short period of time and we have built a really strong communication system amongst the team, it was still a challenge.
What can you help the VEGPRENEUR community with?
Happy to share information and spread the latest news on the innovative companies within the Vegan community
How can the VEGPRENEUR community help you?
At Chinova, we have developed a natural, clean-label preservation solution. We are looking for brands within the plant-based category who would be interested in our product!
Fun fact about you:
I am strong advocate for women in STEM fields and 90% of our team is made up of women in STEM!
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