EatOkra’s mobile app lists nearby Black-owned restaurants.
Courtesy: EatOkra
When Anthony Edwards Jr. and his then-girlfriend, Janique, first moved to Brooklyn in 2016, they struggled to find food that was comfortable and familiar to them.
They explored their neighborhood, Edwards said, but had a hard time finding Black-owned restaurants nearby. There were few resources for doing so besides group chats and informal lists. So, with the encouragement of Janique, now his wife, he used his computer science degree to create a platform for users to find Black-owned eateries.
The two co-founded EatOkra, an app that now has 20,000 monthly active users and brought in about $700,000 in revenue in 2024.
“As we put it out there into the world, we saw people immediately gravitate and tell us frankly, ‘I’ve been looking for an app like this,’ and we still hear this to this day,” Edwards, EatOkra’s CEO and CTO, told…
