Home Snack: How Kirati Amin Turned Memory into a Brand

Thank you to Kirati Amin, founder of Let Me Snack, for sharing her perspectives on being an immigrant and business owner living in the United States. The views expressed in this post are those of Kirati and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Enthuse Foundation.  

I moved to the US from India in 2015 for a master's degree in engineering — stereotypical, I know. I didn't come here planning to start a food company. I came here to study, to build a career, to figure out what my life in the United States could look like.

One of the things I missed most from home was something small, water lily seeds, a traditional Indian snack. You couldn't find them in the U.S., at least not the way I knew them. Eventually, I decided to bring my favorite snack here.

That’s how Let Me Snack was born.

The Mint Masala, the Himalayan Sunrise, the turmeric and chaat masala run through everything I make — none of that came from a trend report or a brand strategy session. It came from muscle memory. Growing up somewhere where these flavors were just the air you breathed.

For me, being an immigrant means carrying something with you that doesn't always have a clear place in American culture. Part of the work is convincing people that it could.

I didn't sit down and decide to make "culturally inspired" snacks. I made what I knew and loved. It turned out other people loved it too.

My upbringing also gave me something less obvious: a business education I didn't realize I was getting. I grew up in a part of South Asia that was densely populated by business owners. Dinner conversations were about how a company made it big or how a few wrong decisions could end it. I basically had an MBA before I even went to college.

But my story is different from many of those case studies discussed during dinner. As an immigrant, I’m building Let Me Snack from scratch in ways that go beyond the business itself.

There's no grad school friend who owns a store and can carry my product. No family member close by to help navigate logistics. No distant relative who knows an angel investor and can make a warm introduction.

No one has gone through this before me.

I’m learning the unwritten rules of American business while also trying to run a CPG company. You don't know what you don’t know. And there's no built-in safety net to catch you when you find out.

Besides my own self-doubt, I also must manage perceptions from the outside. My sales associate, Daryl, and I were working at a Christmas market. People kept walking up to her, an American woman, assuming she was the business owner. They'd ask her questions she didn't know the answers to. She would redirect them to me. We didn't make a big deal of it in the moment and just kept going.

However, it doesn’t go unnoticed.

As we celebrate National Immigrant Heritage Month, I think about all the founders who showed up before me and made space for me to walk into. I feel a genuine debt to them. I hope what I'm building does something similar for whoever comes next. It’s a reminder that what you brought to the U.S. matters and there is room for it.

Let Me Snack is a South Asian-owned brand. It is not a brand just for South Asians. The snack was born from my culture, but food doesn't have a nationality. It is always meant for everyone's table. The brand is a bridge between where I'm from and where I am now. I think that's the most honest way I know how to run it.

Kirati Amin is a Houston-based entrepreneur with a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and over a decade of experience in power electronics and R&D, including roles at ABB and MPS Industries. In 2024, she founded Let Me Snack, a South Asian-inspired snack brand built around water lily seeds.