A sports massage therapist. A chiropractor. A corporate travel consultant. And now the founder of Ohi Food Co. Dawn Anderson has worn a lot of hats in her professional life.
After a move to Hawaii, Dawn enrolled in the Living Light Culinary Institute, a culinary school focusing on raw foods. She experimented with creating raw food bars in her Maui kitchen, and was soon selling out at local farmers markets. She initially called her company bRAW, to emphasize the fact that her bars were part of the raw food movement. When she decided to expand to the mainland, she changed the name to OHi.
Dawn credits her initial success to her professionalism when approaching potential customers. As she told Food Navigator in a 2018, she arrived with not only bars to sample, but also a sales sheet, business card, UPC code, and packaging. That and her repeated visits to retailers that stocked her bars made her stand out. She did demos and straightened shelves in order to develop relationships and ensure re-orders.
Today the company has a presence in mainland retailers as well as on Amazon. Amazon reviews frequently note the satiety factor of the bars, and the fact that they aren’t, in the words of one reviewer, “sugar bombs.”
