Chinonso is a Nigerian American founder who moved to the United States at 13, carrying with her a deep appreciation for culture, tradition, and connection. She built a career in finance, including stints at Goldman Sachs and Citi, where she worked in operations, risk, and governance. But her real passion lived somewhere else.
In 2018, she traveled to Kenya to learn more about tea farming after discovering that Kenyan producers grow one of the best teas in the world. What she expected to be a research trip became the beginning of Chixotic.
On a tea farm tour, she discovered a tea unlike anything she had tasted before. Smooth, refreshing, lightly aromatic, and grown in the highlands of Mt. Kenya. When brewed with citrus, it shifts to a striking natural pink. When she returned to the U.S., she searched for it and came up almost empty. What she did find never tasted quite the same.
That gap became the idea. Chinonso started Chixotic to bring this rare tea directly from the farmers who grow it to the people in the U.S., with no middlemen and no compromise on what makes it special. Her background in operations, risk, and governance now shapes how she runs the business, from sourcing and quality to long term farmer relationships.
