Rita Musa, 9, attends Monroe Elementary School and in her spare time likes to draw and read the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book series.
She’s also the CEO of Musa’s Lemonade, a new brand showing up around Des Moines, everywhere from Lua Brewing, xBk, Lachele’s Fine Foods and Manhattan Deli to name a few.
There are currently two flavors of the lemonade — strawberry and classic — and they are Rita Musa’s recipes.
“[I] like making people [have] happy smiles and getting good reactions from them,” she said, adding that her favorite lemonade is strawberry lemonade. “It’s sweet and can be cold on a really hot day.”
Her brother, Ahmed Musa, 27, runs the day-to-day of the business, the “behind-the-scenes” work, and he recently went full time. But make no mistake. She is the leader.
“I’m just trying to grow and scale for her,” he said. “She does … the end-goal consulting, where it’s like, ‘Hey, this is [the] direction we want to go. What do you think? What are your thoughts?’ And she’s … the end all, be all. So if she doesn’t like it, we go … a different direction. She does like it, then we try to implement it and see what her thoughts are as well.”
Musa’s Lemonade kicked off at the Drake Relays in 2022, when the family set up a lemonade stand and sold out in two hours. They moved to selling lemonade in pouches at farmers markets and events. The next step in their evolution was upgrading to cans, the design of which are based on their mother’s clothing.
Ahmed Musa said the company worked with Project7 Design to design the cans, taking pieces of his mother’s clothing as inspiration.
“I was like, ‘This is what I want her can to look like,’” he said. “And we emulated it.”
Through the company’s “Sip to Save” initiative, it donates 7% of its profits to help refugees, honoring the family’s own journey as South Sudanese refugees. The organizations it donates to include the Refugee Alliance of Central Iowa, as well as organizations in Juba in South Sudan and across the Midwest as well, he said.
The next question is how to grow and scale, said Ahmed Musa during an Entrepreneur Field Days presentation put on recently by the Greater Des Moines Partnership.
“We’re in 20 to 23 locations,” he said. “Our next step is to nearly double that just using different outlets, different places and organizations that we’re working with and then from there, upscale our minimum orders to a certain number.”
Ahmed Musa said he lives in a state of optimism where “anything is possible, anything can happen. Just put your mind to it.”
As for Rita Musa, Ahmed said that the family will let her decide if and when she wants to take over the business full time.
“We’re putting it on her, she has the opportunity to either be hands-on or just continue to live her life and just still be the owner and just keep continuing to consult,” he said.
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