Healthy Food, Local Impact: Inside the Mission of Yummy Greens
Over the past five years, Ruti Ejangue, MIB24, has been balancing the demands of graduate studies, internships, and intercontinental travel, all while building her venture Yummy Greens. Through Yummy Greens, Ruti and her team provide time-strapped consumers with quick, healthy, and sustainable meals on-the-go. At the same time, Yummy Greens is committed to making sure all their meals are delicious and gourmet. By offering meals that don’t compromise on nutrition or flavor, Yummy Greens helps consumers eat well and feel good, while enjoying every bite along the way.
Recently, Yummy Greens has taken its next step in providing quick and healthy meals across Cameroon and Francophone Africa with the launch of its first food truck. The launch of this first food truck enables Ruti to bring her business to her hometown of Douala, and stands as a capstone to five years of hard work transforming Yummy Greens from a side hustle to a vehicle for service and impact.
Ruti first developed the idea for Yummy Greens in 2020 while visiting her home in Cameroon and struggling to find options for convenient yet nutritious meals. It soon became clear to Ruti that this was not an isolated concern, but a common struggle among Cameroonian students and professionals. She recognized that it was a challenge for everyone to eat both healthily and quickly during busy days.
“It’s not just a question of convenience,” Ruti explains. “For lots of people, eating healthy food is the first step to taking action to improve their overall health. The challenge is making those healthier options available to people on-the-go.”
For Ruti and the Yummy Greens team, offering delicious and nutritious meals is as much about supporting local communities as it is about providing a convenient product. Ruti has noted a surge in entrepreneurial activity within Cameroon, with many people who were studying or living abroad returning to the country with a renewed sense of opportunity. Operating within that community of motivated entrepreneurs, Ruti sees the potential Yummy Greens to become a major part of both the health and economic ecosystems of Cameroon.
“The entrepreneurial community in Cameroon is very supportive of each other,” Ruti says. “We’re connected by our desire to respond directly to the real challenges we see in our communities, and we all share this feeling that we don’t want to wait for change to come, we want to create it ourselves.”
That philosophy of proactively creating change and solving real challenges made launching a food truck the ideal kind of expansion for Yummy Greens, as it would allow the team to stay mobile and meet their customers where they are. The flexibility of a food truck aligned perfectly with the company’s mission of helping people fit healthy meals into their busy lives.
Her engagement with the entrepreneurial community and resources at Tufts played a major role in helping Ruti take Yummy Greens from her mother’s kitchen to Cameroon’s first healthy fast-casual food truck. In 2022, while earning her Master’s in International Business from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, Ruti entered the Tufts Ideas Competition. Yummy Greens took home 3rd place in the Ideas Competition and carried that momentum into the 2023 Tufts New Ventures Competition, hosted by the Derby Entrepreneurship Center. Competing in the Social Impact track, Yummy Greens earned another 3rd place prize.
While the prize money from both competitions helped Ruti continue to grow Yummy Greens, she recognized that the greatest benefit of competing were the connections and mentorship opportunities she discovered. The experience of meeting fellow entrepreneurs and receiving direct feedback from competition judges and the Derby Entrepreneurship Center’s Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs) inspired Ruti to apply for the 2023 Tufts Venture Accelerator.
It was during that summer’s accelerator that Ruti felt her skills and knowledge as an entrepreneur really leveled up.
“The Tufts Venture Accelerator was one of the best things to ever happen to me and Yummy Greens,” she shares. “On top of giving me a whole new set of business skills, the Accelerator taught me to speak about my venture with pride and joy, to be confident and comfortable pitching my business. That’s been the biggest help in making my goals into reality.”
Ruti credits the Derby Entrepreneurship Center’s EIRs and its director, Elaine Chen, with helping her operationalize her dreams and chart a course toward accomplishing her goals. However, Ruti’s connection to the Tufts entrepreneurial community didn’t end after graduation. Elaine was one of the first people Ruti reached out to upon deciding to pursue launching a food truck, who then connected Ruti with other entrepreneurs across the Tufts network who had launched food trucks of their own or had other insights into the process. Those connections proved to be an invaluable resource for Ruti’s own journey.
When looking ahead to the future of Yummy Greens, Ruti aims to expand the brand across all of Francophone Africa, becoming a leading health and wellness company in the region. As the business continues to grow, Ruti and her team maintain their commitment to Yummy Greens’ core values: improving access to quick, healthy, and sustainable meals, supporting local community growth, and economically empowering young women.
Ruti plans for Yummy Greens and its nutritious on-the-go meals to become a regional staple, not just a passing trend.