"Carve your own path, tailor processes to your goals."
Sajani Amarasiri, an immigrant female founder, is on a mission to create a more culturally representative and equitable wellness industry, bringing together the best of her roots in Sri Lanka and life in America.
Sajani was born and raised in Sri Lanka and came to the US at 18 for college, and then worked in building tech supply chains at Microsoft and Amazon.
She leveraged that experience with her unique insights into her culture to create the first wellness company to directly source from, and give back to the communities today’s trendy ingredients and rituals originate from.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Sajani Amarasiri: My name is Sajani and I am the founder of Kola Goodies, based in San Francisco, CA.
I was born and raised in Sri Lanka and came to the U.S. at the age of 18 for college. Before starting Kola Goodies, I worked in tech supply chains at Microsoft and Amazon.
At Kola Goodies, we make easy, delicious wellness beverage blends, where generational wisdom meets modern life. We work directly with small farms in South Asia to source the freshest ingredients — you’ll taste the difference!
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffet, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Sajani Amarasiri: Kola Goodies is the first line of functional drinks proudly rooted in our South Asian culture, with a mission of increasing representation from seed to shelf.
We create joyful wellness through ethically-sourced superfood and tea latte essentials. Our Super Green Latte and award-winning Sri Lankan Milk Tea are first to market products.
Our wellness products are good for you and good for the supply chain. By cutting out the middlemen in our supply chain, we are able to direct more profits back to our partner farmers.
This also translates to fresh and potent ingredients in every mug. Our all-in-one latte blends are designed to be convenient to make, crafted with the utmost care without extra preservatives and fillers.
What advice do you wish you had received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Sajani Amarasiri: When I first started Kola Goodies, I was trying to follow the blueprints of other DTC companies. That didn’t work for us. Yes, you should be open to hearing all kinds of advice; but you should carve your own path and find and create processes that work for your specific business goals.
Coming from a non-CPG industry background, I wish I was surrounded by more people in the CPG industry, to be able to learn from their expertise.
In terms of our next quarter, we are looking forward to growing our team and distribution channels on a national scale.
Here is a two-fold question: What is the book that influenced you the most and how? Please share some life lessons you learned. Now what book have you gifted the most and why?
Sajani Amarasiri: I love reading a mix of business, self-help, and spiritual books. An influential book that comes to mind is “Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike” by Phil Knight.
One lesson that really stuck with me from reading about Phil Knight’s story of creating Nike is that creating and scaling a business is a marathon of a journey. It takes decades to build a successful business, with many ups and downs and building the resolve to get up every day to try again and again.
Another big source of learning, for me, are podcasts, such as The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett, The Skinny Confidential by Lauryn Evarts Bosstick, and How I Built This by Guy Raz.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Sajani Amarasiri: The real challenge right now is scaling a CPG business without many resources. CPG is a very capital intensive industry, from production or distribution.
As a bootstrap small business, we are figuring out how to scale profitably with the increasing costs of everything in the supply chain, from ingredients to transportation.
You’re getting squeezed in two ways: the consumer does not have a lot of money to spend and all the costs are increasing. So, it’s figuring out how to navigate that in a way where the product is still accessible to a lot of people, while taking care of everyone in the supply chain.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Sajani Amarasiri: People tend to underestimate how hard it is to get people to adopt something and understand things at the early stage of your business.
You might start out thinking that because you have an innovative product, that people will take interest in it right away.
But really, it takes a lot of time for your consumer base to find your product and adopt it.
What does “success” in 2024 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Sajani Amarasiri: Success in 2024 for Kola Goodies would look like
- successfully launching at one of the biggest natural grocery stores in the US,
- being able to grow our team so we can create good jobs
- creating more accessibility to our products for a lot of people.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Sajani Amarasiri for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Sajani Amarasiri or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
