Kim and L.J. Williams’s daughter was born in 2015. The same year, they created the edible paste they concocted in order to help them with their health issues. Now, the husband-and-wife team is hoping that this year marks a rebirth of their company, Jinka, which just last month began stocking its product at about 30 H-E-B supermarkets in the Houston area.
Named after an Ethiopian town known for its marketplace, Jinka, which is sold in H-E-B’s healthy-foods section, is a mix of turmeric, ginger, nutmeg and other spices that is sold in both paste form and a capsule form the company added about a year ago. The company is also illustrative of what happens when classic entrepreneurship, a relatively recent corporate emphasis on minority-owned businesses and a pandemic collide.
Jinka was hatched after Kim Williams was diagnosed with prediabetes after their daughter’s birth. Shortly thereafter, L.J. Williams started experimenting with a paste mix that the Williamses say helped Kim Williams shed her prediabetes diagnosis within six months and helped them both lose weight.
After getting friends and other contacts to try the product - L.J. Williams says mixing the paste with almond milk “makes it taste like you’re drinking a warm donut” - the Williamses began selling the paste in mason jars at farmers markets, church events, health fairs and karate events.
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“We started at The Breakfast Klub. We worked that line for four years,” said Kim Williams of the Houston eatery and its nearby weekend farmers market. “We would give it to people in line, they would go into the restaurant, eat, come out and look for us.”
With L.J. Williams devoted to the business full time, aided by his two nephews, and Kim Williams splitting time between Jinka and her eyebrow-threading business Eyebrow Energy, Jinka grew steadily as it moved its operations out of the couple’s kitchen into a 625-square-foot Third Ward studio, garnered shelf space in a handful of health-food stores, and started selling its two sizes of paste jars and its capsules online.
The relationship with H-E-B began about a year ago, when James Harris, the grocer’s director of diversity and inclusion and supplier diversity, met L.J. Williams at a community golf event and subsequently learned that an H-E-B coworker had been using Jinka’s product and spoke highly of its effects.
With the pandemic forcing H-E-B to cancel this year’s annual “Quest For Texas Best” contest, which awards Texas-based producers cash as well as a chance to get shelf space, Harris said there was an opportunity to work with Jinka, which gained the full-time services of Kim Williams after COVID-19 cut back her own business.
“We couldn’t have the contest this year, obviously, because of coronavirus, but that didn’t stop us from looking at great product,” said Harris, who, along with the Williamses, emphasize that Jinka hasn’t been clinically tested as a medical treatment.
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Harris says it can take as long as a year for a H-E-B to ascertain whether a product sells well enough to maintain its shelf space, as there’s what he calls a “settling” in sales between six and nine months after a product debuts. Meanwhile, the Williamses, who declined to disclose revenue numbers, said they are making two to three shipments a day and have had to restock a number of H-E-B stores.
Regardless, the combination of an opportunity to broaden Jinka’s audience and the impact of current events such as the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement has made the Williamses optimistic about Jinka’s longer-term prospects.
“Everyone’s talking about immune systems for the first time in their lives. We’ve been teaching people how to say the word ‘turmeric,’” said Kim Williams. “Since George Floyd died, I think everyone is open to seeing what can be done differently. We’re thankful if we can bring awareness to how many amazing Black-owned products can be brought to the shelves.”
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October 26, 2020 at 06:00PM
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