Meet Amy Keller | Co-Founder & CEO, Climate Candy

We had the good fortune of connecting with Amy Keller and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Amy, every day, we about how much execution matters, but we think ideas matter as well. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
I grew up around candy, I come from a family that owns a candy factory, Spangler Candy Company. We make 2B DumDums every year along with many other nostalgic candies.

I got to witness the power candy has…. The ability to instill fun into any moment.

I wanted to push it further… extend it beyond simply our individual moments into something with even more lasting impact like my partners, Kevin Wall and Dr. Sue Smalley did for Live Earth with Al Gore.

My worlds collided when we were in Svalbard, Norway visiting the Global Seed Bank to learn about food security. I witnessed the United Nations installing generators due to climate change to keep the glacier refrigerated for all the back-up seeds of the world.

While on this trip, I was reading Drawdown by Paul Hawken and learned that 40% of food grown globally is wasted. So, I wrote the company business plan in the Arctic Circle for Climate Candy to create FAVES candy from imperfect fruits and vegetables for the health of people and the planet.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Increasingly, we expect our professional endeavors to line up with our values, interests, personal histories, and beliefs. I wanted to have a clear and deeply satisfying answer to the question, “Why did you spend all that time and effort producing that product or service or starting that company?

When I decided to create Climate Candy, I determined I wanted it to make a positive impact on people’s lives and health and the health of the planet. This business idea is consistent with my values and lifestyle, and it contributes to my personal goals and dreams. It directly and positively affects lives beyond mine and the world will be better off if I succeeded. It will have a positive environmental impact.

As a 7 time Ironman triathlete and having a career focused on climate change, I found that I enjoyed setting a goal and beating it. This is a very complicated world and people will only remember so much about us so we needed to be really clear on what we stand for. This is a world that is evolving faster than ever, we must rely on mission to unlock differentiation through our unique power to move people’s hearts and minds in a positive way. You may have the greatest product in the world, the greatest ideas, but if people can’t understand the problem they solve, they’ll never buy into it.

With the rise of health concerns like obesity and diabetes that inhibit the growth of the candy market, manufacturers have come up with sugar-free and low-calorie candies to tackle this situation. At Climate Candy we observed these improvements but realized we have much bigger challenge to face because we are not just trying to make zeroed out label or alternative sweetener candy – we are redefining the category of healthy candy to include high nutrition content.

Our goal is to recreate candy using fruits and vegetables, but keep all the nutrition intact. We have tested dozens of recipes, form factors and flavors of candy that can be congruent with our mission. And most importantly they all had to achieve high run rates at full scale factory operations to be sure our positive environmental and social impact is maximized.

When we started, SQF audited facilities and high run rate equipment were not ready for this challenge in the US. A huge differentiation we achieved in the candy market was engineering equipment that can handle plant based fibers and a product that provides that stealth nutrition through candy. We realize that the really exciting businesses are innovative and differentiated in categories that have yet to be disrupted and that is what we are bringing with FAVES. Climate Candy is part of a broader category with a lower carbon footprint, sustainable packaging and upcycled ingredients.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
If you only have one week to be in Hermosa Beach, California it would be during the AVP beach volleyball tournament during 4th of July week.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?

Kevin Wall is my mentor and the co-founder of Climate Candy. Having the opportunity to learn from such a fantastic leader like Kevin has given me the opportunity to excel in ways I never had imagined. His ambitious vision and support guiding me through my journey to lead this company is extraordinary.

Kevin Wall is the true definition of the American dream. Starting from his youth in rural Indiana at a family run roller rink, Kevin launched several successful companies in various aspects of the music business including a staging company, a television distribution company that represented concerts such as USA for Africa in 1985, Human Rights Now! and the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute in 1988.  Wall saw the power of the intersection of music and social change. He moved on to found a production company that produced hundreds of music events including in the 1980s including the Bob Dylan show at Madison Gardens, Freddy Mercury Aids Benefit in Wembley Stadium, and Pink Floyd Concert at the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Kevin Wall then became an executive producer of Live 8, a series of concerts around the world to raise money and awareness in the fight against poverty in Africa. Live 8’s live multi-feed webcast attracted an estimated audience of 2 billion people, a then-record for online viewership. As the executive producer of Live 8, Wall won the first Emmy for content delivered via the internet. This was later described as a “tipping point” and the “defining moment” in online content distribution.

In 2007, Wall and with former Vice President Al Gore, executive produced Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate Crisis, to raise awareness of the climate crisis.  Live Earth reached a total audience of nearly 1.5 billion people and set live streaming records, with 15 million streams initiated during the live event, and 100 million the following week.

These music related companies aligned well with this formation of an entertainment and wellness family fund, PTK Capital, to fund companies that in success would benefit the human condition.  The company helps entrepreneurs grow their dreams into successful businesses and examples of the successes include Dreamscape Immersive, a VR entertainment company, Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace, a roller skating company, and many others, including FAVES.

Website: www.climatecandy.com

Instagram: @climatecandy

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amygkeller/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijwjUA8HyfU