Support a Women-Owned Small Business: Try These Snacks!

Renée Dunn and Sydney Chasin lead very different lives, but they have two important things in common: They each founded a women-owned small business to sell snacks, and had their entrepreneurship “aha moment” far away from home. 

Sydney’s Story: Chasin’ Dreams Farm

Sydney was raised in Maryland, but her snack business lightbulb went off in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she was studying financial services and entrepreneurship at Edinburgh Napier University. She always knew that she wanted to start her own company — and more specifically, she wanted to create a brand focused on an ancient grain called sorghum. 

“I grew up gluten-free in a farm town, so I’ve been using sorghum my whole life,” she told The FruitGuys. “It’s an incredible crop: regeneratively farmed, super drought resilient, with a root system that mines the groundwater so that farmers don’t have to irrigate their fields, even in drought seasons.” 

Sydney became “obsessed” with sorghum and its possibilities for gluten-free folks, climate change adaptation, and fighting food insecurity. In Scotland, she started working on the business concept that became Chasin’ Dreams Farm, her brand of gluten-free, non-GMO ancient grain puffs. 

Sorghum has a sweet, nutty taste. Through Sydney’s vision, it became the perfect backdrop for trendy flavors like Sour Cream & Onion and Sriracha made with simple, whole ingredients. That combination of creativity and simplicity inspired Sydney to name Chasin’ Dreams Farm after her childhood home. 

“[When I was growing up on Chasin’ Dreams Farm], my mom bred Shetland ponies and was an artist, and my dad was a software engineer who was also a racecar driver. It was just a really quirky place to grow up,” she said. “The core of the brand is ‘creativity from simplicity’ which is what we learned to do growing up on a farm. I credit a lot of that to my parents.”

Renée’s Story: Amäzi (pronounced uh-mah-zee)

While Sydney was snacking on sorghum baked goods as a child, Renée was traveling from her home in Washington D.C. to Africa with her father, who worked for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They visited Uganda when Renée was in eighth grade and that trip sparked her interest in the country’s economy and culture. 

During her college years, Renée studied in Kampala, Uganda, and learned about local financial literacy and young Ugandans’ relationships to money and business. That’s when her “aha moment” happened. 

“I did a course at the business school there and saw how different discussions around entrepreneurship were versus what we have here [in the U.S.],” Renée told The FruitGuys. “That led me to return to Uganda and do my thesis research on local entrepreneurship, which is what sparked the initial identification of the problem Amäzi is trying to solve.”

Amäzi (which means “water” in Luganda) is the mission-based snack brand Renée created to solve local food and labor supply chain issues. Amäzi sells vegan tropical dried fruit snacks made from Uganda-grown ingredients like jackfruit and plantains that often go to waste because of limited export opportunities. 

Renée first noticed this problem during her college years in Kampala. Around that same time, she saw her first jackfruit when she and a friend visited a local Bahá’í temple. She’d never seen anything like the foot-long spiny fruits and was so fascinated that she took a photo with them. Later, she bought one at a roadside stand.

“The first time I tried it I was a little weirded out — it was just so sweet! But every time I saw it on the roadside after that I made the driver stop. … We don’t have anything like it here [in the U.S.]. It has so much texture and depth of flavor. I tell people that it’s like if pineapple, mango, and banana had a baby,” she said. 

Amäzi sources the majority of its fruit from women farmers and pays 67% above market price on average. From there, workers process and package the fruit locally in Amäzi’s factory, which pays its Ugandan workers at least twice the typical local wage. 

“When you bring production back to the source and create opportunities for local people, it’s actually much more efficient and sustainable,” Renée said. 

Support a Women-Owned Business

The FruitGuys is featuring snacks from both Chasin’ Dreams Farm and Amäzi for Women’s History Month in March 2024. Our Snacks of the Month include four flavors of Sydney’s sorghum puffs (Cheddar, BBQ, Sour Cream & Onion, and Sriracha) and two varieties of Renée’s dried fruit (Ginger Lime Jackfruit and Salted Olive Oil Plantain Chips).

A selection of those snacks will appear in every FruitGuys Thoughtful Snack Box, exposing both brands to thousands of eaters like you. They’re also available by the case all March for companies who want to go the extra mile to support a certified women-owned small business.

Sydney and Renée are proud to run WBENC-Certified women-owned companies.

“I don’t just say we’re women-owned, I say we’re proudly woman-owned!” Sydney told The FruitGuys. “I’m super proud of myself and who we are as a brand. Our team is actually 100% female right now and we work with a lot of female partners. I’m a big believer in the cliché that ‘empowered women empower women’ and using the company as a platform so that we can empower women and future leaders.” 

Renée shared similar thoughts, and added that she hopes her women-owned small business will inspire more women to join the snack industry specifically. 

“This industry can be very male-dominated. I’ve found so much support and solace from other female founders, so it’s important to me to continue to build out that ecosystem so people have a network, feel represented, and can enter the space confidently,” she said. 

If you’d like to support these inspiring women and their missions to help people and the planet during Women’s History Month, consider ordering their snacks by the case.