Two Young CT Entrepreneurs Launch Ethiopian Inspired ChaCha Butter

ChaCha Butter founders, Yeabsera Agonfer (right) and Caroline Ferra

Two friends teaming up to start a business together may seem like a story you’ve heard before. But when’s the last time you heard about anyone, let alone a pair, starting a butter business? In the case of Yeabsera Agonfer and Caroline Ferra, they’ve done just that with their Ethiopian inspired clarified butter brand, ChaCha Butter, that’s making waves well beyond Connecticut, but also here, too.

Their story starts outside of Toronto in Kitchener-Waterloo, a city in Ontario, when they were in high school. The two of them even said they had dreams back then of working together in some capacity. They figured, all those years ago, that they would start a charity together.

While teenage dreams of philanthropy didn’t come to fruition, butter did, and the idea largely stems from Agonfer’s Ethiopian culture and further influenced by their exposure to many different cultures growing up in that part of Canada.

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After high school, they’d go their separate ways.

“I went to school for biology, but I moved out of my parent’s house and cooked for myself, so I fell in love with that,” Ferra says. “I decided to move to New York in 2018 and go to culinary school. I worked in kitchens first, then I went private because it made more sense for a better way of life and better pay. I worked at Lilia, at Olmsted under Greg Baxtrom, helped launch restaurants in Miami, and staged at a bunch like Blue Hill and One White Street.”

As for Agonfer, getting into grad school at Yale Divinity School proved to be serendipitous as it would bring her geographically closer to her friend in NYC.

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“I dabbled in different things,” Agonfer says. “My undergrad is in religious studies and sociology.  I got my masters in arts and religion. I had roles in marketing, public relations, in community development projects. I was an early career artist. Photography was my medium in which I brought people together through.”

Being on the funding team at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, combined with her friend, Ferra, being a train ride away, really got Agonfer’s entrepreneurial brain going.

“I really wanted to be part of the innovation ecosystem,” Agonfer says. “I’m really passionate about it, about reorganizing the way funding works, what projects get funding, and encouraging entrepreneurs from non-STEM backgrounds to get involved. In the mission of trying to do that, I realized I wanted to take a bet on myself and start something. Caroline is detail oriented, creative, and everything she does is pristine. She’s always helping people bring their dreams to life, so she should get her own piece of the pie. She has this restaurant handbook of ideas; it’s beautiful and a great business plan, so it’d be a dream to start something with her because she would bring that energy into anything that we did. I brought it to her and said, ‘What do you think about starting something together?’”

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The idea Agonfer brought forth was something from her heritage, something foundational to Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine called niter kibbeh, a clarified butter (done to remove milk solids and water) infused with seasonings.

The duo quickly realized that there simply wasn’t much on the market in terms of a premium brand of ghee, so they got to work on creating one of their own.

“I always want to be creative with food,” Ferra says. “We originally wanted to do Ethiopian spices since they aren’t as available, but there’s already a brand doing that responsibly called Brundo Spice Company, then Yeabsera told me about niter kibbeh. We had a meeting at a café and I remember telling the person I was seeing at the time that I think we can do this, that Yeabsera is such a driven person, she knows so many people, she makes things happen, and I think we can do it as a team. We have the chops.”

Excited to play around with Yeabsera’s dad’s recipe for niter kibbeh, Ferra’s culinary skills came in handy as she got to try different ingredients—some of which she hadn’t had much or any experience with previously—to infused into clarified butter.

Part of what ChaCha Butter is all about is community, culture, and connection.

“A lot of people in Canada are from different places,” Agonfer says. “We wanted to explore that through food, that cultural exchange, building community through food. I find that really moving. French and Italian are so well respected. And French butter is so expensive. Most of the time, Asian food especially, falls into the cheap eats category. We wanted to do something innovative and pay homage to that. Food brings people together.”

Some next steps in their research and development process were nailing down the proper texture, making sure their different flavors were on point, and creating a safe shelf stable product. Instrumental during this time was the New Haven-based CitySeed and their food business incubator and commercial kitchen where Agonfer and Ferra were able to develop and refine ChaCha Butter. CitySeed’s support, including tossing them a few free kitchen use days, allowed them make their idea a tangible one. And, to this day, it’s still where ChaCha Butter is produced.

“We sent it to Cornell Food Venture Center to make sure it was safe,” Agonfer explains. “We also had to have lots of people try it. One of our biggest critics was Barry Nalebuff, a professor at the Yale School of Management and the co-founder of Honest Tea. He said the original butter just wasn’t doing it. My mom and others tried it and it just wasn’t hitting. We got the recommendation to try it with rosemary and it became a thing. It was like a year of R&D; sending it out, letting people try it. We played with the textures a lot because niter kibbeh tends to be traditionally grainy. We wanted to create a spreadable texture. Caroline—who I joke is half Cuban and half Ethiopian—found a way to do it naturally without additives. But we didn’t want it to be watered down in any way. It had to still be culturally appropriate, so we sent it out to aunties and everyone. We had to find a balance because it’s an everyday cooking fat.”

“It’s our business, but we want everyone to love it,” Ferra says. “This is new generations taking something and doing our thing without changing it completely.”

Agonfer continues, “My family really does love it. They buy it full price, no discount.”

Now with a product launch to the public, ChaCha Butter has popped up at farmers markets in NYC and it’s already available to order online, and in places like Atticus Market in New Haven; Nelly’s Grocery & Wine in Savannah, Georgia; Big Night in Brooklyn; and at Brundo Spice Company in Oakland, California, which makes sense considering ChaCha Butter is flavored with spices from exclusively from Brundo.

So far, the three flavors of ChaCha Butter are:

Rosemary is their OG butter

Rosemary - fresh rosemary, shallots, garlic, and ginger, then layered with Ethiopian cardamom and black cumin. They like it on steaks, chicken, and roasted veggies.

Caroline’s idea was to make a spicy version, especially because they both enjoy spicy food. Habanero became the pepper of choice after lots of development for a few reasons other than just taste, including the pepper being named after Havana since it was heavily traded and distributed through their ports, appealing to Caroline’s culture.

“Yeabsera wanted a pepper that represented the diaspora migration and movement. You cant put your finger on what culture the habanero belongs to,” she says. even Cuban culture but Habanero was named after Havana. I said it would be great if it was spicy with shallots and garlic, so you don’t have to spend time chopping those. It’s great for a flavorful meal and fast for home cooks.”

Habanero - dried habanero peppers, shallots, garlic, ginger, and Ethiopian cardamom and black cumin. They like cooking eggs in it, as a finishing butter to pasta or stews, and on seafood and to jazz up plain rice.

On pancakes, waffles, bread, or pastry? I pitched the idea to Yeabsera and Caroline of washing a bourbon with it. Safe to say that got a big “OOOHHH!”

Vanilla-Honey – browned butter infused with real vanilla bean, raw honey from the Catskills, and korerima, a rare cardamom from Ethiopia, that’s great on bread, pancakes, or waffles.

While it’s still early in ChaCha Butter’s inception, both Agonfer and Ferra say it’s been validating to have their product sell out when they did their first market, and more so that they’re seeing familiar faces returning to grab a jar of ChaCha.

If they needed further validation, they got it when their pitch won at Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale Demo Day, earning them a $20,000 fellowship to test if ChaCha can translate into a growing business.

“It was something like 1,000 competitive applications,” Agonfer says. “We’re a consumer product against a lot of tech and AI ideas. What sold them wasn’t our early traction, it’s the people. Get our product in front of chefs and make people believe in what we’re building. I think it was a big indicator for them thinking we could take it this far.”

“It was fun to see,” Ferra says. “They were all super impressive, but people just love food.”

Coming up for ChaCha Butter is a focus on expanding the brand with collaborations, working on branding and marketing strategies that highlight the product, and trying to get into more retail stores.

And the two friends haven’t forgotten about their first idea back when they were 13 about charity either.

“Building ChaCha Butter is about building a community; it’s fun, culture, and an expression of love,” Agonfer says. “Food is a pathway to creating a more equitable world. It’s fulfilling building this and we want to bring people on the journey, host community events, and bring them into that.”

Ferra picks up her friend’s thought, “Finding ways to give back is a goal of ours,” she says. “Part of our business is to be charitable, to make it more than just being profit driven. It’s cool that we wanted to do that back then and we’re together all these years later doing this.”

Find ChaCha Butter online at chachabutter.com and on Instagram @chacha.butter