For four years, Joshua Reed-Diawuoh’s side hustle took up his nights and weekends. He spent long hours connecting with suppliers, making sure shipments cleared customs, and doing production runs in a commercial kitchen in Boston. Then last fall, having gotten traction from farmers market sales and his first retail accounts, he quit his day job at a global manufacturer to go all-in on his start-up, GRIA Food Co.

“I took the jump, took the leap of faith,” said Reed-Diawuoh, A13.

The result has been a learning experience—challenging and sobering at times, but also fun and satisfying, as he builds a business that he hopes will profit not only himself, but the farmers in Africa that he works with. 

GRIA  is a snack company that sells flavored cashews sourced from West Africa. It is Fairtrade International-certified, which means the farmer cooperatives Reed-Diawuoh works with follow wage, working condition, and production standards, including using no synthetic fertilizers or harmful pesticides. In return, they get a fair price for their produce plus a premium they can reinvest in their operations or communities.

Sure, Reed-Diawuoh could purchase much cheaper cashews, but without the fair-trade certification, “the whole mission falls apart,” he said. “It’s at the center of what I want to achieve with my company.”

The venture is grounded in the principles he learned in business school, but it’s also personal. From the time Reed-Diawuoh was a young boy growing up in the Greater Boston area, his father, who was originally from Ghana, has shared Ghanian culture, history, and food with his son at every chance.

Yet the seeds of GRIA, which stands for Grown in Africa, were really sown when Reed-Diawuoh was a student at Tufts. When he wasn’t studying for his political science major, he took courses on African history and art, to better understand the continent’s path to independence, its economic growth and vibrancy, and the challenges it has faced since colonialism. In his junior year, he made his first trip to Africa, spending six months studying at the University of Ghana. While there, he journeyed more than 10 hours from the capital to visit the rural village where his father had grown up and worked on a cocoa farm.

“That was absolutely incredible,” he said, describing first meetings with uncles, aunts, and cousins, starting relationships that he holds dear. 

He also saw some of the challenges that the local farmers face. “I was able to see how hard it was to make a living on the land,” he said. 

After graduation, he took a job in international development, working on projects focused on agricultural, and ended up going back to Ghana in 2014. There, he met farmers who were stymied in their desire to grow their businesses. There was the citrus grower who wanted to make juices, and the cassava producer who wanted to export her product, but neither could navigate what it would take to buy new machinery and take the next steps. 

“It’s really tough, when you’re working day in and day out on the land and have very thin profit margins, to access capital and scale up your business, even if you’re relatively successful,” Reed-Diawuoh said.

In 2018, he enrolled in an MBA program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and soon decided that he wanted to start his own business. He kept thinking back to his experiences in Ghana and asked himself, “What can I do to contribute to agricultural development and empowering producers and farmers and helping them grow their operations?”

That’s how he settled on the idea of importing cashews. “They’re shelf stable, they’re in demand, and you can use them to make a number of different consumer goods” from cashew butter to cashew milk, he said. He could also ensure that the initial stages of production—shelling, peeling, and the first round of roasting—could happen before the cashews left Africa, keeping more economic benefit in the local communities.

As soon as he received his first shipment from West Africa in 2019, he got cooking. “I started experimenting with different recipes, asking friends and family to try the first iterations,” he said. The spicy flavors in particular were hard to get right, but he eventually fine-tuned his spicy garlic and hot honey versions, two of the six flavors GRIA offers. 

His target consumers are people who love cashews, know they are nutritious, and want to know where they come from. “That’s my core demographic—folk who are health conscious, but also care deeply about ethical sourcing,” he said. He has reached many of them through farmers markets and pop-up events. He has also developed relationships with smaller, independent stores that source from local brands and showcase new foods. 

Reed-Diawuoh has shared some of his start-up journey through a Tufts course, Starting a Small Business, which he co-taught last semester with Elaine Chen, director of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center. One of his takeaways? That there’s so much you can’t predict.

“You can create the best business plan in tremendous detail, and you still won’t cover 10% of the issues that might come up,” he said. But the rush he feels on a good sales day, or when people tell him how much they like his product, makes up for those surprises. It may seem basic, he said, but as an entrepreneur, “getting that type of recognition from people is awesome.”