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 roles at Goldman Sachs and Citi, where she worked in operations, risk, and governance. But her real passion lived somewhere else.
Chinonso has always been drawn to real tea and the traditions built around it. In 2018, she traveled to Kenya to learn more about tea farming after discovering that Kenya produces some of the best tea in the world. What she expected to be a research trip became the beginning of Chixotic.
On a tea farm tour, she came across a tea she had never seen before: deep purple in color, grown in the highlands of Mt. Kenya. She tried it there. When she returned to the US, she searched everywhere for it and came up almost empty. The one place she eventually found something labeled purple tea tasted noticeably different, as if it had been blended or cut with something else.
That gap became the idea. Chinonso started Chixotic to bring this rare tea directly from the farmers who grow it to tea drinkers in the US, 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.
