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Vancouver’s Asha Wheeldon finds success with tasty African and Caribbean cuisine

Meet the entrepreneur behind Kula Foods
1/14/2025
Asha Wheeldon
Asha Wheeldon. Photography by Lucas Finlay

Growing up in Isiolo, a small town in Kenya, Asha Wheeldon developed an affinity for East African cuisine. “A lot of where I identify [with] food and community is really embedded in my culture,” she explains. Wheeldon immigrated to Canada at the age of 11, settling in Toronto, where she was exposed to Caribbean eats. “When I was introduced to Trinidadian, Jamaican and Bajan food, there was such a linear alignment with East African flavours,” she says. “There’s a clear story path of how we season our foods, and the process of cooking is so familiar.” 

Wheeldon’s career in tech brought her from Toronto to Vancouver in 2015; it was here she used food as a way to build a community. She recalls lovingly preparing East African stews and curries, rice pilau, chapati and ugali—a polenta-like dough—for new friends and guests. “I believe food is a vehicle to connection,” Wheeldon says.

At the same time, Wheeldon was experimenting with plant-based eating and found a lack of East African and Caribbean foods available in Vancouver. A year later, while on maternity leave from her job as a tech sales product developer, Wheeldon began envisioning a food business offering plant-based East African and Caribbean dishes. By 2017, she had taken an entrepreneurship course at the British Columbia Institute of Technology to research African and Caribbean communities and the demand for plant-based foods. “These communities are growing,” Wheeldon says. 

As a new parent, Wheeldon also saw the utility of easy meal solutions. So, in 2018, she launched her food business, selling jarred stews such as sukuma wiki made of sautéed collard greens, and a portobello mushroom and black-eyed pea curry at farmers markets in Vancouver. “People were really excited,” she says. “They loved the idea of the heat-and-eat convenience, but also that the meals were very flavourful.” Wheeldon named the company Kula Foods, noting kula means “eat” in the Swahili language.

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When COVID hit in 2020, Wheeldon shifted her business to selling online. The next step of Kula’s growth was experimenting with vegan soy proteins. “I wanted to create a barbecue option,” Wheeldon explains, which led her to develop vegan ribs and a barbecue chicken meal alongside no-sugar barbecue sauces and pili pili, a spicy East African sauce. “We needed a sauce for our proteins, and we eventually ended up creating it from scratch because we couldn’t find anything on the market that would be suitable, with low or no sugar added, but also tasted good,” she says. 

By the end of 2021, Wheeldon had pivoted from stews to focus on vegan protein meals and partnered with local online grocery retailers including Vegan Supply and Spud to sell her products. With that came another pivot, from jars to recyclable bags to package her products. “The jars were too heavy in a freezer,” Wheeldon explains. “We could not scale that.” 

Wheeldon also began making progress getting her products on the shelves of major grocery stores, but it took her many years and several “noes” along the way, with buyers telling her the product was too niche. But, Wheeldon persevered and, by mid-2022, landed her frozen meals in eight IGA stores in British Columbia. Another major win came in 2023, when Kula Foods launched in 12 Whole Foods Market locations across Canada. “When I was testing out the stews, I would shop at Whole Foods,” she recalls. “I remember manifesting this idea that my products will be on the shelves at Whole Foods. It was such an important milestone for us.” 

Also in 2023, came two new plant-based meal products: G.O.A.T. curry and ginger beef. Then, in late 2024, another grocery chain—Loblaw-owned Fortinos—began stocking the company’s sauces in all its Ontario stores. Kula Foods has plans to venture even further afield in 2025, launching at an upscale grocery chain in California. And soon, Wheeldon says Kula Foods will be introducing new products. “We have a functional seasoning line that speaks to East African and Caribbean flavours that also is infused with mycelium,” she explains.

Kula Foods is currently available in 100 grocery stores. Wheeldon says that number will jump to 300 by the summer of 2025. For Wheeldon, growing Kula Foods isn’t just about a business succeeding, it’s about representation. “As a Black woman, being able to provide a product that is culturally relevant to myself, it’s very powerful,” she explains. “These opportunities are not always necessarily available. I love being able to bring that joy and access to larger communities and people that either resonates with them or introduces them to a new flavour.”

This article was first published in Canadian Grocer’s December2024/January 2025 issue.

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