Inside Cajou Creamery, chef Dwight Campbell chats with a customer while scooping dairy-free kulfi, an Indian dessert of coconut and cardamom, and mango lassi.
The shelves behind him in the Westside shop are adorned with tropical plants, matching the global inspiration for the high-quality, superfood ingredients that the shop’s flavors are made with.
“Everything about Cajou is a confluence of our family’s passions,” said co-owner and CEO Nicole Foster, a defense and public health attorney with raw food certifications who is Campbell’s wife. “We’re passionate about public health; travel; and healthy, international cuisine.”
Unlike other dairy alternatives, Cajou’s silky-smooth ice cream is free of artificial chemicals and made from scratch with cashew milk, pure cane sugar and nutrient-rich and responsibly-sourced ingredients.
Since 2018, Cajou (which means “cashew” in French) has sold its handmade pints at farmer’s markets in Baltimore and dozens of restaurants, hotels and gourmet grocery stores across the region.
While the pandemic has disproportionately affected Black-owned businesses, the nation’s historic reckoning with racial injustice has in part fueled a push to support them.
“It shouldn’t have taken that for people to pay attention to the breadth of businesses that people of African descent have worked on for centuries, but it did, and this is where we are now,” Foster said. “It’s a beautiful time for us to be celebrated for our achievements and for our contributions to food and culture.”
At the beginning of 2020, Campbell and Foster won a year of free rent in a competition for a space on Howard Row, a new mixed-use project on the 400 block of North Howard Street. Following delays due to COVID-19, they opened Cajou’s first brick-and-mortar shop at the end of August.
The duo started making the ice cream after learning that their son was lactose intolerant, and their experiment quickly grew into a full-fledged business.
Up to 80% of Black people, Foster said, are lactose intolerant. The rate is similarly high for many racial groups from outside Northern Europe.
Among Black people, diet can contribute to generational health disparities, such as diabetes and heart disease.
“The people in my community are suffering and dying from diet-related diseases,” Foster said. “It’s something that we’ve got the power to help eliminate.”
Cajou is located in a food-insecure area. In Baltimore, due to decades of racist policies, predominantly white neighborhoods tend to have more supermarkets, whereas predominantly Black ones tend to have more convenience stores with few fresh or healthy food options.
Foster also hopes to reduce harm from the criminal justice system by hiring and training those transitioning back to their neighborhoods. Within a year or so, the business plans to open a manufacturing facility and evolve into a worker-owned collective.
“Many of my clients were returning citizens, and I’ve listened to their stories of indignity after indignity, how they’re offered a job just to have that job rescinded once a background check is done,” she said. “Part of our goal is to help change this community that’s been stricken by a criminal justice system that’s left people unable to thrive after a period of incarceration.”
“What I’ve experienced myself,” she added, “is that this is a population of some of the most talented, beautiful human beings in the world. They need a second chance.”
Employers are often less likely to hire formerly incarcerated people, particularly minorities. Such structural inequities leave Black returning citizens more likely to end up back in prison.
As of 2018, Black people comprise 33% of the American prison population, compared to only 12% of the U.S. population. In Maryland, Black people represent more than 70% of Maryland’s prison population, despite making up 31% of the state population.
About one-third of incarcerated Marylanders are from Baltimore.
Despite these racial and economic disparities, Foster stressed that there are many Black entrepreneurs and creatives in the food industry “doing amazing things” in Baltimore. In 2018, she and her family moved here from Reston, Va., after falling in love with the city.
“D.C. was a very underground, creative, fun space when I lived there in the 90s,” she said, referring to her time as an undergraduate and master’s student at George Washington University. “But gradually, as it became gentrified, it lost a lot of its culture, color and beauty. I saw much of what I experienced in D.C. in the 90s here in Baltimore.”
“Baltimore has embraced us so warmly,” she said. “There are so many opportunities here that would have never happened in Reston or D.C.”
Foster is optimistic that Cajou will help restore the historically Black area – near the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower and the Hippodrome Theatre – to its original charm.
“Black entrepreneurship is not new. Black industry is not new. Black people are extremely industrious and innovative,” she said. “A number of opportunities are opening up for Black entrepreneurs, and it’s a game changer for all of us — not only for the actual makers, producers and creatives, but for the clients and customers and for the communities that are built as a result of our work being celebrated.”
