FORÇA'S STORY

A message from our founder:

I grew up in Brazil and was introduced to agriculture and crop production at an early age. Because of my father's career in agriculture, I had the opportunity to live in countries like Thailand, India, China, and the United States. Through this journey I fell in love with the industry and eventually went on to pursue an education in Plant Sciences at one of the top ag. schools in the world, UC Davis.

It was there that I got hands-on experience by working in organic farms, touring local nut orchards, and taking sustainable agriculture courses. I became deeply intrigued by the concept of water scarcity and how the food we grow affects the environment, natural water reservoirs, and the consumer's personal water footprint. From that point on, there was no looking back! I started taking a deeper look at my favorite snacks and began realizing that they all relied on extremely water-intensive ingredients like dairy, almonds, walnuts, and cashews. I was then determined to change that. I knew that there were better ways to craft delicious and healthy snacks without the use of these thirsty ingredients.

After extensive research, I was completely dumbfounded to learn that watermelon seeds (a seed that we've all been told to spit out) are rich in antioxidants, packed with protein, AND use 99% less water to grow than almonds! Thus Força and a mission to craft low water footprint snacks were born.

*¹Mekonnen, M.M. and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2010) The green, blue and grey water footprint of crops and derived crop products, Value of Water Research Report Series No. 47, UNESCO-IHE, Delft, the Netherlands