Women Entrepreneurs under 30
A new generation of 20-somethings are taking over London’s startup space. Never before were there so many inspirational, active and ambitious (and young) female founders changing our tomorrow.
Gini Newton is the co-founder and the head of marketing of Karma Cans. The idea for the company came from when her sister Eccie was working in Mumbai and noticed that everyone else working in the office had their lunch delivered to them in a tiffin tin. Fresh food made by mothers and wives, travelled all over the city in time for lunch. We talked to Gini about her company, running a family business and defining dreams.
Pardon for asking, but how old are you?
I’m 22 and Eccie, my sister, is 24.
How did Karma Cans happen?
Both my sister and I always loved food. We noticed the London lunch market is saturated with unhealthy, unsatisfying and unexciting food. In London today it’s incredibly rare that you get more than 20 minutes to take lunch; who wants to spend that time in a cue for Tesco? Karma Cans started as a favour for a friend running a charity auction; Eccie offered a week of packed lunches for someone who worked in the city. Her lunches went down very well and she was asked to continue for weeks to come by a number of people working in that office. At the time, Eccie was completing her masters at LSE and working part time as a private chef and “packed lunches” became the perfect extra source of income. Later on that year both Eccie and I finished university; we saw the opportunity and decided to build “Karma Cans” into a business.
Karma Cans main message is simple: food should be consumed as sustainably as possible. Tiffins are reusable, we collect them after lunch and they are reused daily, this means no waste packaging. We have disposable packaging available, but rather than plastic, ours is made out of cellulose, which is from the tough outer walls of plant cells.
Walk us through your day!
A normal day in the Karma Cans kitchen would be to wake up, the time depends on what is on the menu, if it’s a fish day that means an early start at 5:00am to get down to billingsgate market. That’s probably why we don’t have fish on the menu everyday!
We normally have an idea of the number of lunches from the previous week but as our cut off time is 11:00am we do get a few surprises, which can lead to a quick cycle to pick up more ingredients.
Breakfast is normally quite rushed, I like eggs, Eccie is more into her yogurt and fresh fruit. We do often have a battle over what to listen to in the mornings, but now we have got it nailed down to Radio 4 first (Women’s hour) and then as it gets a little too depressing we move onto music, an example would be “Just Ain’t Gonna work out-Mayer Hawthorne” or maybe even “It’s you-The white Lamp”.
Eccie is the expert in the kitchen — she learnt to cook at Petersham Nurseries, working in the kitchen before heading to kitchens of restaurants in the south of France. I run the day-to-day operations, sales and marketing. While she starts prepping the food, I might be writing the labels, updating our social media and responding to emails. As we are such a small team it is all hands on deck when lunches are about to go out, this is the busiest time when things do go wrong. We have a great cyclist, Amber who does the deliveries on bike but if it’s a really busy day, Eccie is also on deliveries. When deliveries are done we all try to sit down and have lunch together for an hour. The afternoons are when we have all our meetings. As coffee addicts, we fit in a few of these, spending a lot of time at the Workshop and Caravan in Clerkenwell, and pretty much organising all our meetings around coffee.
Evenings for us are about dinners with friends, recently we have been working a lot of weekends as we also offer private catering services, but weekday evenings are a great time to go out for dinner and explore new restaurants. One of our favourite restaurants is Duck Soup in Soho, they change the menu everyday and it’s always amazing. We do love having people over, but sadly after cooking all day Eccie is no longer that excited about cooking in the evenings so I often have to take over.
Tell us what inspired you lately?
Throughout Karma Cans the biggest inspiration has been meeting likeminded people who have also started up their own business, taking the risk and showing us that the reality is hard and certain ideas do not always work out, but each step it exciting and we both look forward to what will happen next.
At the moment something that’s really inspiring is healthy eating and fitness, it’s something we’re really pushing in February, it comes from partnering with some great people all January like Lululemon, Vita Coco, and Boom Cycle, it’s been fun and we’re both trying to be healthy and active in all kinds of ways — we even had a meeting while rock climbing last week!
We want our customers to feel great after they eat our food and exploring new ways to do that is always fun and exciting. We’re experimenting with some raw food ideas at the moment for a big project in the summer, which we hope to try out on our customers over the next few months.
Please share advice with young female entrepreneurs.
Karma Cans started as a random hobby, it is about doing something you love while having fun at the same time. If you have something you love the chances are that someone else might too.
More stories can be found here, on our Medium Blog, or here, where the magic elephants live. And if you are curious, adventurous and all those things follow us here. More coming soon!
