A group of young Halifax social entrepreneurs managed to do what many couldn’t – get funding from Dragons’ Den investors.
Dressed uniformly in bright green t-shirts, they walked into the Den hoping to secure a $10,000 loan to build a greenhouse that would allow them to cultivate herbs and vegetables year-round and boost production for their salad dressing business.
Their social enterprise, Hope Blooms, is led by Jessie Jollymore, a dietician from a community health centre in Halifax who wanted to address food security issues. Jollymore saw an opportunity to turn an abandoned site into a community garden for people to access healthy, organic food.
At Hope Blooms, youth learn to grow food, produce and market salad dressing, and run a business. Over 40 at-risk youth look after 27 plots in the community garden.
Hope Blooms salad dressings became so popular that they were selling out at local markets across communities in Halifax.
“We just cannot keep up with the demand. We turned down offers from local restaurants and stores,” said Mamadou Wade, one of the young entrepreneurs pitching to the Dragons.
Their sales to date, to the surprise of the Dragons, totaled over $26,000.
Each Hope Blooms dressing sells for $8. Profits from the business are either allocated to a scholarship fund for the young entrepreneurs, donated to different community charities of the youths’ choice, or reinvested into Hope Blooms in order to sustain the garden project, teaching others in the community how to grow food.
“We love growing a business because you don’t have to be a certain age or colour, and it doesn’t matter where you come from,” said Tiffany Calvin, another Hope Blooms entrepreneur.
After hearing the pitch, the teary-eyed Dragons made them an offer. Four of them – Arlene Dickinson, Bruce Coxon, David Chilton, and Jim Treliving – each gave $10,000. The Dragons passed on the initial deal that included a 5 percent royalty on the investment, deciding they wanted their money reinvested into the business.
But one Dragon – Kevin O’Leary – didn’t want any part in the investment.
“In the end, the great thing about being an entrepreneur is you make money for yourself but you can also give some back. That’s the key, you need both. For a business to be successful it has to be profitable – that’s the DNA of a business,” said O’Leary. “I have to make money as an investor, and you didn’t offer me that, so with a heavy heart I say I’m out.”
“But guys, not all investment returns are measured in money coming back to the investor. It can be impact in the community, all kinds of things. I have no issue with that,” said Chilton, offering a different perspective.
Putting the cherry on top of $40,000 in funding, Treliving, the chairman and founder of Boston Pizza restaurants, proposed to distribute Hope Blooms products in his company, and is currently working on getting the products inside Boston Pizza locations around Christmas.