At first, Washington University in St. Louis students Izzy Gorton and Chiara Munzi wanted to call their chickpea hot breakfast cereal GOATMeal, a play on the term “greatest of all time” and oatmeal.
Unfortunately, GOATMeal also evokes, you know, actual goats. So Munzi came up with something better — ChiChi, a name both snappy and memorable, perfect for a brand challenging big Quaker.
Two years later, business is booming, with sales increasing month over month. Munzi recently appeared on the popular podcast “How I Built This” with Guy Raz and will compete for $100,000 on the Amazon Prime reality show “60 Day Hustle,” which debuts Aug. 8. It’s an amazing trajectory for two young founders who met in the League, WashU’s advanced entrepreneurship class, and cooked their first batches in the Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
“ChiChi literally got its start at the Skandalaris Center in an Instant Pot. Every time we took the gasket out, there was this puff of chickpea air,” Munzi recalled with a laugh. “It smelled horrible.”
ChiChi is now available in four flavors — original, maple, apple pie and banana bread — online and in markets in St. Louis and Los Angeles.
Gorton and Munzi admit the road to retail success has been bumpy. They’ve had to switch chickpea suppliers, redesign their packaging twice and cut poorly performing recipes such as chocolate blueberry and peanut butter banana. They credit Doug Villhard, a professor of practice and director for entrepreneurship at Olin Business School, with teaching them how to correct quickly.
“Professor Villard really prioritized customer feedback and emphasized the importance of testing and learning, testing and learning,” said Munzi, who graduated in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy-neuroscience-psychology from Arts & Sciences. “So when our customers talk to us, we listen.”
Villard, Munzi added, also told them GOATMeal was a terrible name.
“We definitely learned a lot from him,” she said.
‘Hello, I have this brand called ChiChi’
The idea for ChiChi was born during the pandemic. Back home in Los Angeles, Munzi had started a new running routine. Oatmeal, she assumed, would be a healthy way to power her workouts. But she often felt sluggish after breakfast. She discovered many instant oatmeals have a ton of sugar and very little protein. So Munzi started mixing protein-dense chickpeas into her oats along with savory ingredients like cauliflower or sweet toppings such as honey and fruit.
“You were starting to see a lot of chickpea products like chickpea flour and chocolate-covered chickpeas in the market,” Munzi said. “I knew chickpea cereal would be healthy, but it also tasted really good.”
Munzi had arrived at WashU a year prior with plans to be a neuroscientist. Soon, she developed an interest in entrepreneurship and launched a clothing app called ClosetSwitch. Eager to take her business to the next level, she enrolled in the League, which provides student entrepreneurs a $4,000 grant, resources and professional mentorship.
Enter classmate Gorton, then a sophomore from Iowa on the pre-med track and a member of the WashU Bears cross-country and track-and-field teams. She, too, was rethinking her career path and was thrilled to be assigned to Munzi’s project. Then one day, Munzi showed up with a Tupperware container of dehydrated chickpea flakes.
“I was like, ‘What’s happening,” Gorton recalled. “But when I tried it, I immediately saw the vision. Oatmeal is really mushy and liquidy, but this was something hearty and nutty, just really delicious.”
Munzi abandoned her clothing app, and ChiChi was born. They gave samples to Gorton’s teammates, tweaking flavors based on their feedback.
Soon, Munzi and Gorton moved operations to a commercial kitchen and started selling ChiChi at the Tower Grove Farmers Market and online. The business grew fast — almost too fast.
“Basically from February 2023 to April 2023, I would wake up every single day and call 20 chickpea processors across the world,’’ Munzi recalled. “I was like, ‘Hello, I have this brand called ChiChi. Can you make a chickpea flake for me?’ And nobody wanted to take a chance on us. And I don’t blame them. I’m this 22-year old girl with a non-existent business selling a novel product.”
Leaning over their skis
In contrast, League advisers and Skandalaris Center staff were all in from the start. II Luscri, managing director at the Skandalaris Center and assistant vice provost for innovation and entrepreneurship, became the brand’s top customer, buying ChiChi for friends and stocking the Skandalaris kitchen with different varieties. The Skandalaris Center also awarded ChiChi a $5,000 grant and provided two student interns to the business through its Skandalaris Summer program.
Luscri was in the room this spring when ChiChi pitched at the Global Impact Award, WashU’s annual prize for businesses founded by students and recent alumni. The competition was fierce. ChiChi was up against a number of promising startups, including Top Tutors for Us, an educational technology company that partners with predominantly Black school districts; AirSeal, a medical diagnostics company that has developed a cost-effective blood test for cardiovascular disease; and uFab, a tech operation that aims to revolutionize circuit board manufacturing.
Munzi told judges they would use the prize money to expand retail distribution, boost advertising, apply for gluten-free certification and perhaps move production from Chicago to St. Louis.
“Because the WashU community has had such a big impact on us, we’re excited about our ability to give back and allow other student founders, especially females, to have the chance to do the same,” Munzi told the panel.
The judges appreciated Gorton and Munzi’s commitment to the next generation of WashU entrepreneurs, but they were especially impressed with the team’s ability to evolve and adapt. ChiChi won first place and $50,000 in funding.
“They are just very good at taking in feedback and doing what’s right for the company,” Luscri said. “There is this fantasy of this lone genius who comes up with a blockbuster idea in a lab or somewhere. But that’s not really the way this works. It’s more about the constant iterations — the growth over time — that leads to success.”
Munzi and Gorton have big plans for the future. They plan to sell ChiChi on Amazon — a decision with obvious upside, but also considerable risk, as Gorton explained on ChiChi’s delightful Instagram feed. The team also plans to develop ChiChi bars and mixes, another daring move given the already-crowded breakfast sector. But Munzi and Gorton believe in, as one adviser would say, the value of “leaning over their skis.”
“‘That’s become our mantra,” said Munzi, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay area. “Yes, you may fall over. But you have momentum; you’re moving forward.”
“I feel like we all need that lesson,” added Gorton, who expects to graduate in May with a degree in economics and strategy from Olin Business School. “No one knows what they’re doing. We’re all figuring it out as we go along. You have to just do that one thing today that will make you 1 percent better.”
This story was originally published in The Record, the official newsletter of WashU, on August 1, 2024.