[friction, motor noise]
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- Angela Fitzgerald: Owning a candy shop
could seem like the fulfillment
of a childhood dream.
- Orson Fournillier: All of the truffles. - Yaw Asare: Uh-huh.
- But for these two immigrant entrepreneurs,
it's just one step toward a greater ambition.
- Yaw: How about the cherry cluster?
- Orson: Hey, one step at a time.
When we started, there was a growing stigma
about immigration and immigrants.
We felt that there was an opportunity for us
to do a little bit to make positive associations.
First time here? - Yes.
- Can I give you a grand tour? - Sure.
- All right.
- Orson Fornillier: We truly believe food bridges gaps.
- Manufacturing executive Orson Fornillier
was born in Trinidad, but fell in love with Wisconsin.
- Orson Fornillier: Came up here, interviewed,
and found that the people were so warm, so inviting.
All day, every day, talking it up.
- Yaw Asare worked in banking
after he came from Ghana
to attend Lawrence University,
but he always had the desire to start a business.
- Yaw Asare: My dream is to be able to go ahead
and sort of like, quote-unquote, "own your own business," right?
- The two met at Appleton's Juneteenth celebration,
where Yaw had a booth selling African masks.
They soon learned they had common interests.
- I think we've seen almost every Marvel movie together.
So, we've pretty much bonded over that.
[Drax the Destroyer yells]
It's our love of cinema
that is part of the underlying friendship
that we have.
- Grab a plate. - Grab a plate.
- And they definitely bonded over food.
- Watch it, watch it!
- Especially food from Yaw's home country of Ghana.
- Yaw: The food tastes great.
Lots of flavor.
Everything is, I mean, cooked from the ground up.
- But Orson and Yaw connected the most
when talking over ideas for a business startup.
- Orson: He's got a treasure trove of ideas, right?
He's got an idea every day.
- Yaw: I'm the guy who's, like, all over the place,
like, I'm like a squirrel,
just kind of,
and he sort of, like, pulls me back.
- Orson: "Good idea.
This one's gonna be difficult."
Or, "Good idea.
There's no way we're gonna do that."
- Many of their ideas centered around food
and sharing their culture.
- Orson: Something that I really wanted to see
if we can popularize African cuisine
and sort of get it into people's consciousness.
- Yaw: That hit a sweet spot
because I've always said within the community,
we should be offering our foods outside of our community.
It is excellent food. It's wonderful food.
- Ghana's lively street food scene
held many possibilities.
Yaw found inspiration in his childhood memories
of a favorite candy snack.
- Yaw: Nkatie cake in Ghana,
which just literally means "peanut cake."
It's a form of brittle, Ghana-style brittle.
I went into the kitchen, I played around
with the formulation and all that kind of stuff
for the brittle
and started giving it to family and friends,
saying, "Hey, this is pretty good.
"You should try it out.
Let me know what you think."
- Orson: And the moment I ate that, I go, [snaps fingers]
Yaw, this is it.
- The kitchen experiments resulted in
Sharay's Ghana-style Brittle,
using Yaw's childhood nickname.
The duo introduced the product
at farmers' markets in the Fox Valley.
- It's the not-too-sweet
nutty treat that doesn't stick to your teeth.
- Mm, superb.
- Orson: One of the beautiful things about this area
was that people were just so welcoming
of the idea and of us.
And that gave us the confidence, "Okay, if we can do it
on our home market, well, we can do this everywhere."
- Doing it everywhere, like grocery stores
and specialty shops, means scaling up,
an expansion that meant increased production.
The solution?
Buy the candy shop
where they had contracted for small production runs.
So, Yaw and Orson are like two kids in a candy shop.
- Yaw: Ghana-style brittle,
very different from your traditional brittle.
It's easy to bite into.
You get rich nut flavor.
- It's a story that Orson sees as worthy
of the Marvel movies he and Yaw love to watch,
and nearly as improbable.
- Orson: It's like, this thing shouldn't exist.
But yet, I'm watching it.
It almost feels like
this is what we're doing with our immigrant experience
and the business, it shouldn't really exist,
but yet, you're living it.
- Brittle is just the beginning.
The start of a vision
of sharing beloved treats from West Africa,
in Wisconsin, and beyond.
- We really wanna get a line of West African snacks
that we can put out there for people to go ahead
and try and enjoy.
- What do you think?
- I think it's pretty good.
- I love that reaction.
- So, I wanted to showcase
that something good comes from Africa.
And that's kind of like the story
that I've been trying to tell.
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