Meet Sarah Lynch of Mama Gaia Co
If someone told Sarah Lynch that she would be building an app & AI for her own business a few years ago, she would have run in the other direction. A Massachusetts born creative living in Colorado, Sarah studied English in college and for many years dreamed of becoming a journalist. As many do after graduation, though, Sarah found herself working a few different jobs to pay the bills—waitressing in a bustling restaurant and working for a small startup called Mama Gaia. At the time this business was owned by another woman and was comprised of a few refrigerated vending machines doling out healthy food options, along with a food truck to prepare the food and labels to package and market it. Sarah mostly worked in the food trucks to start out, whistling away while cooking up concoctions and then bringing them to the nearby apartment complexes and office parks where these vending machines lived. Sarah loved this little side-gig, not knowing that she would soon receive an email that would change her life. Suddenly, at 24 years old, she was offered to buy and own the company. Even though the original owner gave her a week to decide, Sarah immediately knew she would do it, despite what anyone might have told her. She took the offer and she took her time, slowly building Mama Gaia into what it is today.
A refrigerated vending machine company featuring goodies from local producers, Mama Gaia seeks to shorten the supply chain from creator to consumer. Local restaurants and food makers get prime real estate in these sleek and slender fridges, housed in larger building complexes where the hungry hover at every corner. This wasn’t always the business model, but was rather born out of the time Sarah took when she was starting out to determine what Mama Gaia was all about.
Taking the food trucks and label making out of the business altogether, Sarah simplified, and jokes that for her first few years she was basically a vending machine stocker. Walking to local food vendors down the street in Denver and taking their treats a few blocks over to the machines, where she’d happen upon a customer looking for a bite to eat, Sarah had her hands in every step of this localized food chain. She was building this community, step by step, and started to realize that she was really tapping into something that could grow. Throughout this time, Sarah saw problems within the current state of the food system—sourcing products from faraway lands, having them sit in warehouses and freezers before getting to the consumer, and then being thrown in landfills when not put to use—and created solutions with Mama Gaia. Not only are the products in her vending machines sourced locally; any leftovers are put back into the community and donated to food shelters.
While Sarah never thought of herself as a business owner, looking back she realizes that she had been fantasizing about starting something herself for years. Every time she walked into a restaurant she would point out what she would have done differently, but never imagined she would actually do it. She saw herself as a creative, not a CEO, and yet once Mama Gaia was in her hands, she was able to put those very skills to the test. It was her journalistic impulse at work when she talked to restaurant owners and community members, constantly seeking out stories from the people around her to figure out what they needed and what wasn’t working. Through years of trails and tribulations, learning each lesson step by step, Sarah started to turn this business model into something she could really scale. With the help of her two co-founders, a small team and some tech companies, Sarah began to build the technology behind these vending machines so that it was no longer in the hands of a third-party conglomerate. Again, something this creative writer and music enthusiast never would have predicted for herself in a million years. If she has learned anything in business, it’s that there are always going to be hurdles—like the time she broke a fridge while transporting it across town and had to put it back together herself—and you have to learn to be both resilient and patient.
Hearing Sarah speak about her business is both comforting and familiar, a story you hear from entrepreneurs world-over who happened into an industry, were thrown challenge after challenge, and just didn’t give up. In a week, Mama Gaia will be launching onto the market, to be featured in residential communities, universities and healthcare facilities, and eventually franchised to meal kit companies and scaled nationwide. While Sarah may not know exactly how she will get to that final step, she knows that all she needs to do is take the next one, and the path will unfold. Sarah gives me hope—that there’s no rush, that all of our creative impulses can find home in something successful, and that one day I will get a taste of this Colorado-based business myself, grabbing a fresh and healthy snack out of the vending machine on my way through my mom’s apartment complex.