From his childhood travels throughout Africa, Jacob Stewart (Kellogg ’25, Pritzker ’25) knew rural farmers in the continent had the skillset to break into the avocado industry but lacked the infrastructure to access foreign buyers.
Years later, to address the gap, he founded Avocado Farm Trade. The business helps East African farmers produce and export avocados to lucrative markets abroad by running a network of commercial farms and managing distribution, and he got it off the ground while studying at the Kellogg School of Management.
Stewart and other Kellogg students have used the school’s expansive web of financial and professional resources to support their entrepreneurial journeys.
Student founders described how the Kellogg environment, from challenges and competitions to mentorship and training programs, taught them to apply what they learned in the classroom to their own ventures.
At Kellogg, Stewart took specialized classes on operating businesses in foreign markets alongside classmates who would eventually become investors in his startup and create their own businesses.
Stewart acquired funding and mentorship by joining the Zell Fellows program, a competitive entrepreneurship pathway that helps student founders get their business up and running by graduation. He also received a Levy Inspiration Grant, which supports founders seeking funds to do preliminary research on their market.
Additionally, Stewart took part in the school’s Social Impact and Sustainability program designed for student ventures focused on social and environmental issues.
He said he believes these funding opportunities were critical to getting Avocado Trade Farm off the ground.
“When you’re running a business in a foreign country, investments are not going to come easy,” Stewart said. “Getting the support from these programs helped prove the concept and show our investors that this is not just an idea, but this is a real business that we’re operating.”
During their years at Kellogg, classmates Neha Mehta (Kellogg ’25) and Catherine Malloy (Kellogg ’25) built Rora, a business that sells consumer products designed for treating menopause symptoms, as they spread awareness around women’s health.
Like Stewart, Mehta and Malloy were Zell Fellows, Levy Grant winners and semifinalists in the 2025 VentureCat 2025 competition, which provides tens of thousands of dollars in funding to student businesses.
Mehta said the culture of open-mindedness at Kellogg helped Rora flourish.
“Women’s wellness and health care can be overlooked and stigmatized, but the entire Kellogg ecosystem has been supportive and generous with its time and energy to help propel us forward,” Mehta said. “Kellogg creates structure for people when they’re just starting off, and it gives them building blocks so that they feel like they’re making progress.”
Second-year Kellogg student Angie Mercurio (McCormick M.S. ’17) uses many similar tools at Kellogg to scale out her business, called nLab, which sells pocket-sized electronics labs.
She was also a Zell Fellow and placed third in VentureCat 2025. Over the summer, nLab was selected to collaborate with The Garage, NU’s entrepreneurial hub and community, which provides funding and mentorship through a selective program called Jumpstart.
Mercurio said the financial support that she received from these programs was useful when nLab faced early challenges.
“When you inevitably make mistakes as a startup founder, you don’t go bankrupt,” Mercurio said. “If it weren’t for Kellogg and Northwestern’s encouragement and mentorship, and certainly the funding and resources, we would have been belly up a while ago.”
With a passion for reducing pollution, Sarah Pinner (McCormick M.S. ’22, Kellogg ’22) developed the idea for Beni, a free browser extension that helps shoppers identify secondhand versions of clothes they want to buy. Pinner was a Zell Fellow, competed in VentureCat and worked in The Garage.
While studying at Kellogg, Pinner said the school provided her essential support when she was just starting Beni.
“It’s hard to pull apart Beni’s success from (the fact) that it started at Kellogg,” Pinner said. “You have so many questions when you’re building a startup, so it was helpful to have some structure around what is the biggest question that you need to answer.”
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