Yanni Hufnagel is the CEO of Lemon Perfect, a company that provides organic lemons and other citrus fruits to the home. In this interview, Hufnagel discusses his journey to entrepreneurship, including what it was like to start Lemon Perfect in the early days of the Internet.
Yanni Hufnagel was on 1982. He was born in Canada and moved to Israel when he was 13. Hufnagel learned to play the piano as a child and worked as a musician in high school. Immediately after high school, he started his first business. He discovered that many people were using stacks of books from machines at kiosks to stamp music programs.
After graduating high school, Hufnagel traveled the world with his fiancee through Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico before returning to Canada. He started a business making and selling T-shirts. In 1996, he enrolled at the University of Toronto to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in computer science. He met his wife at the university, and they both graduated in 2000.
Hufnagel was working at an investment banking company when the dot-com bubble burst. His company laid off a third of their workforce, and Hufnagel decided to pursue a second degree—this time in Finance—because he wanted to get back into the job market sooner than four years in an attempt to save his career. He received his Master’s Degree from York University with high distinction.
After graduating from York University, Hufnagel started a company printing and distributing T-shirts for hockey teams. The company was short on funds, and he could not pay the bills. He paid his employees through an online funding platform. Hufnagel encountered many problems with credit card processing, involving the banks freezing accounts and the customer service centers closing at night after long workdays. He decided to change his business model.
Hufnagel decided to start a company called Lemon Perfect to make lemonade from lemons as a tribute to his Jewish mother, who died of cancer. Hufnagel says he wanted to make “healthy alternative” lemonade during the era of the invention of sugary alternative drinks and zero-calorie soft drinks. He asked his wife for help, but she suggested he try it independently.