Lisa Curtis says Kuli Kuli will let retail shelves run out before Amazon

Amazon has become the customer you don’t disappoint, even when the customer is supposedly Whole Foods. Lisa Curtis, founder and CEO of Kuli Kuli Foods, told Young and Profiting that her company now protects Amazon inventory so aggressively it will let retail customers run out first.

That is not how a wholesome superfood origin story is supposed to go. Kuli Kuli is the moringa company with the Peace Corps backstory, the small-farmer supply chain, the 10 percent profit reinvestment pledge, the B Corp talk, the whole mission-driven grocery shelf aura. But the sharpest business lesson Curtis offered was pure marketplace capitalism: if you anger the Amazon algorithm, the aisle can wait.

annual revenue we’re you know over 10 million in revenue. Thank you. Um and Amazon is still pretty small. So we’ll do about a million in Amazon this year.

That number makes the claim weirder and more useful. Curtis said Kuli Kuli is still over 80 percent retail, with products in Whole Foods, Walmart, Amazon, and thousands of natural food stores. Amazon is not the biggest piece of the business. It is the piece she cannot afford to let blink.

The Amazon flywheel eats the grocery aisle

I mean, honestly, we have now been prioritizing keeping Amazon in stock over retail. So, we will out of stock our retail customers to keep Amazon in stock because it’s hit us so hard that like we must have Amazon in stock at all times.

There it is, the unvarnished part of the conference-floor gospel. A brand can have a Whole Foods origin story, a Walmart footprint, and a farmer network stretching from West Africa to Nicaragua, and still make inventory decisions around Amazon’s mood swings. Curtis called out the reason herself, the marketplace is a flywheel. If you go out of stock, you do not simply miss a few orders. You risk losing search position, ad efficiency, review velocity, and the invisible confidence of a system that rewards the always-available.

Is that self-serving? Sure, this was recorded at Amazon Accelerate, inside a special seller series with enough Amazon love to make the logo blush. But it is also believable because Curtis does not dress it up as empowerment poetry. She says the quiet part cleanly: Amazon stockouts hurt. So the company behaves accordingly.

The broader Curtis doctrine is also more ruthless than the brand packaging might suggest. Kuli Kuli began with moringa, a plant most American shoppers could not identify if it bonked them on the head in the supplement aisle. Curtis’s first instinct was to sell the mission, women farmers, social impact, better sourcing. Then the market did what the market does. It shrugged.

Nobody goes onto Amazon or walks into a grocery store and is like, “What is the most impactful plant I could buy or what is the most impactful product I can buy? What’s the what’s the best product for the mission for the world? No, they’re saying, you know, what is the best product for my health? What’s the product that’s going to taste good? What product will my kids like? What my husband eat? Whatever.

Curtis has the useful convert’s zeal of someone who had to unlearn her own pitch. She still talks about sourcing directly from small farmers and reinvesting in communities, but the sales copy now leads with energy, digestion, taste, convenience. Her line for it is clean enough to put on a founder hoodie: “no market, no mission.” In other words, the clean water project in Uganda does not happen if the gummy looks too dark on Amazon.

The customers are writing the product roadmap

Curtis’s best examples were small, almost embarrassingly practical. Kuli Kuli learned that some moringa buyers wanted bigger bags, not dainty starter packs for the moringa-curious. It learned that an ube latte was being discovered by people who wanted ube for baking. It learned that the color of sea moss and blue spirulina gummies mattered because shoppers compared the gummy to the package, not to a lab report.

we found that people weren’t like people were searching for ube and they were finding ours as a latte and they were that was not the use case they were looking for. They were looking for it as a baking product. So, we’re actually relaunching it in new packaging as an ube mix.

This is where the Amazon dependency becomes more than a sales-channel story. Amazon is not just where Kuli Kuli sells. It is where the company watches people misunderstand, improvise, complain, bulk-buy, and accidentally reveal what the next SKU should be. Curtis said she uses Product Opportunity Explorer, reviews, Vine feedback, competitor data, and search behavior to decide what to tweak before committing to a bigger production run.

The result is a funny little inversion of the founder myth. Curtis may have discovered moringa in Niger, but Kuli Kuli’s current product strategy is being co-authored by Amazon search boxes, TikTok comments, and people who want a larger bag because apparently they are living that moringa life by the pound.

Now she says brands have to sell to bots too

Curtis also offered a second, very 2026-ish claim: product education is no longer only for humans. She said Kuli Kuli redesigned its Amazon product detail pages with AI search behavior in mind, because shoppers are asking Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Alexa, and seller tools questions in different language than they would type into a traditional search bar.

And so when you think about education, it’s like it’s not for humans anymore. We’re educating bots.

That sounds a little like every AI conference badge lanyard got dumped into a blender, but the underlying point is right. If discovery shifts from “moringa powder” to “what supplement gives steady energy without caffeine,” brands have to answer in full sentences, not just stuff keywords into a listing like it is 2014 and everyone is still pretending SEO is elegant.

The credible part of Curtis’s argument is not that every brand needs to sprint into AI theater. It is that consumer brands are being squeezed into a new operating reality: TikTok creates the spike, Amazon captures the purchase, reviews rewrite the packaging, and stockouts punish you after the party. If Kuli Kuli’s Amazon business really grows from $1 million to the $10 million target Curtis named for 2029, the lesson for smaller founders is not romantic. Keep the platform fed, or the platform forgets you.