Little Sesame, Zego Benefit From USDA Grants

The USDA is giving small businesses a boost.

The goal is to help them grow and prosper, and to invest in American farmland, promoting crops like chickpeas, lentils, and millet to help with climate change and promote a move to more organic crops.

In March, Little Sesame heard that USDA was awarding it $2.2 million, which was big news for a small, three-year-old company. The funds are part of a $75 million Organic Market Development Grant.

The Washington, D.C.-based hummus maker sources chickpeas from Casey Bailey, an organic regenerative farmer in Montana. It now buys from several additional farmers in the state.

Little Sesame's owners, Nick Wiseman and Ronen Tenne, plan to quadruple the company's volume over the next three years; expand production capacity; and boost sales and marketing. At the same time, said Wiseman, this will help them work with 10 more farmers.

"The challenge is farming this way [regeneratively] can be expensive and because of the lack of subsidies it can be hard to compete," said Wiseman. “But there's no middleman so you start seeing efficiencies and can scale this into a meaningful business."

Growing chickpeas allows the farmers to plant wheat in rotation because garbanzos fix the balance of nitrogen in the soil. 

"The motivation to grow is more and more acres under regenerative management," Wiseman said. He's hoping to reach 10,000 acres for the farmers the company works with by 2027.

Zego, which makes products featuring “purity verified” oats, also received a $3 million grant from the USDA, which allows it to “accelerate” its plans, said Colleen Kavanagh, founder and CEO. One of her goals is to improve consumer confidence in the certified organic label but also promote “clean conventional” crops.

San Francisco-based Zego is working with farmers who grow millet in rotation with oats, and thanks to the grant, Zego will be able to continue with its R&D to create products using millet, further supporting the farmers.

The USDA grant, said Wiseman, "is a huge validation,” in Little Sesame’s way of doing business.

If there are good results from these grants, there could be more available, though the USDA is providing more support than ever, said Kavanagh, “for smaller and underrepresented parties in the supply chain.”