Onye Ahanotu - Founder of Ikenga Wines

Today’s Biofounder is Onye Ahanotu—scientist, artist, scholar, home chef, material architect, and founder of Ikenga Wines, a company reimagining palm wine, a drink with thousands of years of cultural depth in the global south.

Onye previously worked at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and remains an active board member of the Counter Culture Lab in Oakland.

In today’s episode, we talk about:

1. How his former interdisciplinary experiences shaped Ikenga wines

2. How palm wine is actually made and supply chain resilience

3. Balancing traditional with progressive knowledge in the wine industry

4. Why he was using GPT tech before ChatGPT was launched

5. Brand positioning and business model for Ikenga

6. Why he’s choosing to build his brand slow and methodically, as opposed to going the “build fast and break things” route

7. Challenges approaching foodtech VCs with a truly unconventional product

8. Owning a small niche vs going for a well tested and huge market (Blue Ocean strategy)

Biofounders: fun conversations with unconventional founders, biohackers, CEOs, and investors you haven’t met yet, but definitely should | Follow along on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram

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Timestamps

• 00:00–01:58 Intro: BioFounders, Biopunk, and Onye Ahanotu

• 02:01–03:50 Interdisciplinary Product & Brand Thinking

• 03:51–06:59 Founding Origins & Prior Experience

• 7:00–09:00 Challenges of Palm Wine Commercialization

• 09:01–12:00 From Biology to Wine Chemistry

• 12:01–14:00 Supply Chain Resilience

• 14:01–15:30 Sensory Design & Winemaking Philosophy

• 15:31–16:55 On Using GPT Before ChatGPT

• 17:46–20:22 Brand Positioning & Target Customers

• 20:23–21:49 Business Model: DTC, Preorders, Wine Club

• 21:50–24:14 Social Media & Brand Expression

• 24:15–26:30 Line between engineered and natural wine

• 26:33–28:16 Why Not Make Grape Wine?

• 28:18–31:14 Climate Change as an Opportunity for Leapfrogging

• 31:15–35:09 VC Challenges & Blue Ocean Strategy

• 35:10–36:47 Food Trends, Cultural Shifts & Future Bet

• 36:48–End Closing Remarks & Founder Advice