Nailah Ellis-Brown and the Largest Black Woman-Owned Beverage Manufacturing Business in the USA @mfgday #MFGDay20
Nailah Ellis-Brown began selling her tea out of the trunk of her car. Now Ellis Island Tea is the larges Black woman-owned beverage maufacturing company in the United States. Her products are sold in concessioners nationwide. Here’s some of her story, from In Good Co. Detroit:
[Nailah Ellis-Brown] Ellis said that her path to entrepreneurship started as a kid while attending the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit, an alternative school founded in 1978 by Carmen N’Namdi. Now closed, the school had a holistic approach to education that gave Ellis a global perspective on Black and African culture. It was that foundation that she credits for giving her the confidence she needed to pursue business in the first place. There, a little mop closet was fashioned into a student store, where she worked behind the counter selling bags of Better Made potato chips and juice boxes to her classmates who bought the snacks with play money issued by the school for good behavior.
…Ellis took the leap and approached Whole Foods Market, which has a history of stocking its stores with local products from small-scale makers, and asked the buyer to give Ellis Island Tea a shot. Her proposal was not immediately accepted, however, and she had to spend the next several months researching how to comply with the grocery chain’s long list of criteria before her tea would be considered for stocking. She continued on with Westborn Market and Meijer stores, which began stocking the brand throughout Michigan. In 2014, she opened her plant, situated in a warehouse across from the Russell Industrial Center, allowing her to start hiring Detroiters to manufacture the product.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
