Andrea Xu

umamicart

Andrea Xu is the CEO and co-founder of Umamicart. Born in Spain to Chinese immigrant parents, Andrea’s diverse upbringing influenced her passion for the two-fold problem that Umamicart is solving – on the one-hand, building a online experience for customers to seamlessly access an expansive selection of delicious products across Asian cuisines; on the other, providing a new digital window for mom-and-pop, immigrant-led businesses to reach consumers and have the space to tell their story.

With Umamicart, Andrea is building an online shopping experience with Asian cuisine lovers at the very center of the company. Though her passion has always been entrepreneurship, Andrea comes from a rigorous background in Principal Investments at Goldman Sachs. She attended New York University (BA) and MIT Sloan (MBA). She now lives in Brooklyn.

What inspired you/your team to create this company?
The inspiration came from my personal connection to the painpoint. I decided to go through it because I felt passionate about the mission that Umamicart could work towards.

When it comes to grocery shopping, there wasn’t a solution that was truly addressing my needs. A shopping experience with someone like me in mind – a young third-culture woman with Asian heritage, that loves to cook Asian food, has high career ambitions, and values convenience, quality, and representation. After hearing the same complaint from many Asian friends, I decided to take a leap of faith and built it myself.

The idea of not being X-enough or not following X-tradition enough, has been a defining thread in my life, and embracing my third-culture-ness and identity was not always obvious. The joy that comes with celebrating your own unique mix of traditions is a powerful feeling, and that’s what I intend to share with others with Umamicart.

Umamicart isn’t a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean grocery store. It certainly isn’t your ethnic aisle at a large chain. Umamicart is uniquely Asian American; brings together different traditions, celebrates new takes on staples and does so with no compromises.

What distinguishes your company and product in the market?
You can currently find online grocery e-commerce companies that mostly carry Chinese products, Japanese products, or Korean products.

The ambition at Umamicart is to build the reversed – we are not building starting from a “traditional” identity first, we are building from the evolving Asian American identity first. Our ambition is to carry ingredients and food products that are most loved by Asian American consumers – this includes old-time staples, but it also includes new CPG brands by Asian American founders that can’t be defined as Chinese, or Japanese.

This ambition also impacts the type of digital product that we build: millennial friendly, with intuitive UI/UX, and a lot of context for the products and ingredients that we carry.”