Board Spotlight: Kobla Asamoah, Board Treasurer 

Kobla Asamoah is not a baker by trade, but his expertise in business and finance is critical to the success of many bakeries and bakers, including those in the Guild. He has an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from NYU’s Stern School of Business and a BA in International Relations from Tufts University. By day, he is a Managing Partner at Caminus Ventures, helping underrepresented entrepreneurs in food and beverage to access capital and networks to grow their businesses. In his spare time, he serves as the Guild’s Board of Directors Treasurer.  

We recently spoke with Kobla about his work supporting diversity in entrepreneurship and how that led him to the Guild.  

It started when he met Hot Bread Kitchen (HBK) founder Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez; at the time, he was looking to start an incubator program in Brooklyn. The conversation turned into an interview, Kobla told the Guild, and he ended up joining HBK as Director of the impactful HBK Incubates. HBK asked Kobla to grow the incubator operations and see how the organization could serve more businesses. 

“I was really interested in the idea of incubators as a shared resource that made it more possible to lower the barrier of entry,” Kobla said. “Because I was physically housed in a bakery…I was able to really understand the business of a bakery, the opportunities, the challenges of, particularly, bread, and the economics of it.” 

The Guild’s Executive Director, Karen Bornarth, was also at HBK at that time and working on developing their Quality Jobs Initiative. She combined her baking and workforce background with Kobla’s background in business and entrepreneurship to formulate a distinct approach to assisting small bakery businesses and their teams. 

“I could pull Karen as a real-life kind of specialist on operational efficiencies and topics like scaling a recipe…things that the food entrepreneur needs to do in order to grow their business, and we could strategize together around other initiatives, programs, classes, and things like that,” Kobla said. “We were really able to deploy that experience to help businesses and women in the program.” 

When Karen left HBK after almost eight years for the Guild, Kobla said he knew he wanted to continue their work together. The Guild’s Bakery Leadership Circle is a continuation and expansion, in part, of that work.  

“So many folks are great at baking...but don’t have the businesses administration to wrap around it,” Kobla said. “So, what if we were this resource that was able to provide support, make them stronger and help make their ventures sustainable?” 

The Guild’s mission is expanding as bakers and businesses grow and change. Kobla says there’s an opportunity there to support even more bakers. The Bakery Leadership Circle does just that, but on a nationwide scale. 

“Historically the focus may have been about nerd-ing out in baking, right?” Kobla said. “But it’s also about having these enterprises grow and be successful and be good employers...that’s the part I’m in it for.” 

His work at Caminus Ventures is an extension of the work at Hot Bread Kitchen, “Just that now we are targeting businesses that are further along and have need for more substantial funding.” 

“I’m migrating towards the capital side of things, and there are some interesting venture funds committed to equity within the lens of food and food business,” Kobla said. “They’re investing in innovative food concepts, food technologies in agriculture, and addressing the lack of diversity within entrepreneurship, particularly in the food space.” 

Asked who his mentors are, Kobla points to Ethiopian-Swedish Chef and businessman Marcus Samuelsson. 

“He’s showcasing the foods of the African diaspora, and that is commendable and exciting,” Kobla said. “He’s opened the way for a lot of other chefs to unapologetically focus on that genre of food.” 

He also names the people behind Convive Brands, which owns New York's Little Beet, Le Pain Quotidien, and other restaurants.  

When he thinks about his greatest influence that brought him to this intersection of baking and entrepreneurship, he thinks of his Aunt Victoria who started her own bakery in Ghana, West Africa.  

“She and her husband grew that bakery to the point she ended up expanding into catering, and now has a dedicated restaurant that does much of the catering for University of Ghana,” Kobla said. “She didn’t have to go to Harvard to build this successful business. She also gave anyone who needed it a job to work. I think it was that model that made me excited about entrepreneurship and has become this force behind what I’m doing.”