Building a Supply Chain - Amaranth | Part 2

Welcome back to Part 2 of the Amaranth Supply Chain Series! Read Part 1 here. 

To give some time context, the buyer and I had initially started talking in the summer of 2023. By the late fall, I had found a researcher and he was texting me pictures of the amaranth harvest from the test plots. Everything was going smoothly! The slightest of problems arose. The buyer wanted a couple hundred pounds of this variety to test whether it would work with their process. It’s a different variety of amaranth so they needed the specifications of it (nutrition panel, moisture, toxin tests, purity etc). Except no one has a product spec sheet because the last time amaranth was grown in the states for grain was in the 90’s. That’s basically pre-Internet and I had a hard enough time finding some farmers who had even grown it for grain much less whether they any of them kept a pdf of the spec sheet. 

So the researcher, the one testing the variety with various planting and harvesting methods, sent a couple pounds up to the buyer so they could run some of the tests they needed on it. I was getting pretty excited about the possibility of building an agriculture supply chain from scratch for an ancient grain with buyers already in place. It's the type of challenge that I think about on my drives just because I wonder how I would go about doing it.   

And then everything stopped. The buyer didn’t reply to emails or calls, Drew hadn’t heard anything and I figured it just wasn’t going to happen anymore. For months it was just a thing that I had been obsessed with for a while. 

This is really common in the food world. Sometimes it’s a timing issue and this year won’t work but maybe down the road but they don’t tell you that and you have to guess and continue to follow up for years waiting to see what the status is. Or people change roles and those who couldn’t wait to make progress suddenly move on and contacts are out of date and no one knows what the status of anything is, much less if the project is still happening.

Which was exactly what happened here. Eventually the buyer reached out and said he had left the company. So everything was at a standstill. 

Until I got a connection request on LinkedIn from someone I had never met before who worked at the buyer’s company. Anyone on LinkedIn knows there are loads of invitations to connect from strangers (if I had a nickel for every “Hey Claire I help D2C brand founders like you 200x their online sales! Let’s connect!”...). But this one seemed promising. Sent him a note and we got on the phone in fall of 2024

Which led to another phone call, some follow up emails and then nothing. 

But do we think that's the end of the story?