The meals you tackle a backpacking or climbing journey will be extra than simply gas on your ft: It will possibly additionally provide a little bit of consolation and relaxation whereas creating moments of fellowship on the path.
When Martha Díaz fell in love with backpacking a number of years in the past, she needed the meals she and her mates dropped at camp to nourish them physique and soul. “Meals for me is love,” she says, remembering journeys to parks and campsites that she loved as a baby, after her household immigrated to the USA from central Mexico.
Eager for acquainted flavors and dreaming of diversifying the backcountry menu, Díaz based the backpacking meals firm Itacate Meals. The enterprise helped her create a way of belonging, empowerment and therapeutic for herself and others within the outdoor.
“Itacate means meals for a journey,” she says, explaining its origins from a Nahuatl time period for the meals you are taking alongside for a distance, or a parcel of meals you is perhaps given as you permit a gathering.
Constructing upon her information of Latin foodways and the particular dietary wants that climbing and backpacking demand, Díaz got down to be taught the whole lot she might about beginning and working her personal enterprise. As a part of the method, Díaz turned a member of REI Co-op’s Path Forward Ventures inaugural cohort with the three-month digital Embark program, developed in collaboration with Based Open air.
Now, her imaginative and prescient of bringing Latin flavors to the camp range is turning into a actuality: Itacate Meals is getting ready to launch its first full-scale manufacturing this fall.
Embark is an acceleration program designed to offer group, steering and seed cash for brand spanking new and aspiring entrepreneurs from Black, Indigenous, Latino/a/x, and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Whereas founders of coloration signify solely round 1% of entrepreneurs within the out of doors business in the present day, visionaries like Díaz are prepared to alter that. Supporting progressive concepts like hers with mentorship, infrastructure, buyer connections and capital investments is a technique to make sure that, going ahead, there can be wider illustration within the out of doors business.
The outside is for everybody: By creating area for founders of coloration to have the chance to be taught, develop and community, REI Co-op believes that the out of doors business will be for everybody, too.
As Díaz says, “Let me see how far I can take it with out anyone stopping me.”
The submit Founder Highlight: Martha Díaz, Itacate Meals appeared first on Unusual Path – An REI Co-op Publication.
