There’s a memory Jessica Zhu has carried with her for a long time. She’s a kid again, sitting in her grandfather’s kitchen in Hangzhou, China. He’s at the stove, taking the simplest ingredients and making them deeply satisfying. When she asks him his secret, he smiles.
“鲜,” he said. Xian. The Chinese word for a deep, savory, richness — what we call umami which is one of the five basic tastes alongside sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.
She didn’t know it then, but that answer would follow her across an ocean, through a new language, and into the halls of the University of Pennsylvania — where it eventually became a company. ZenBroth, a premium umami seasoning brand with a simple mission: to complement everything you eat with authentic, whole-food umami.
Jessica moved to the United States at 14. She adjusted, adapted, thrived. But something in the way food tasted never quite settled. “I found myself missing that deep, layered flavor I grew up with, even after visiting countless grocery stores and Asian restaurants,” she recalls, and “…as life got busier, my meals became quicker, more functional, and more repetitive. ZenBroth started as a very personal solution.”
By the time Jessica arrived at Penn as a master’s student, the idea had been quietly simmering. The University of Pennsylvania’s Venture Lab, the Baker Retailing Center, and the broader Wharton ecosystem gave her something she hadn’t expected: a place where the idea could actually become real. “Through club activities, speaker events, and hands-on opportunities, I learned that I love working with CPG brands and doing creative, zero-to-one building. That clarity is what ultimately pushed me to choose entrepreneurship and start ZenBroth.”
But clarity is different from ease. As an international student entering an unfamiliar industry, Jessica had to learn almost everything from the ground up: manufacturing, co-packers, food regulations, sourcing, retail distribution. English is her second language, and in the early days, she found herself nervous pitching to strangers at markets and pop-up events. “I had to reframe rejection,” she says. “If someone said no, they weren’t rejecting me as a person—it just meant I needed to understand their needs better and see if ZenBroth could truly help.“
The concept behind ZenBroth is simple on the surface: a premium umami seasoning made from whole-food ingredients, with controlled sodium and short ingredient lists. Something you add to whatever you’re already cooking, not to transform it, but to quietly make it better.
But the thinking behind it runs deeper than the label.
Jessica and her team spent time analyzing the umami seasoning market — studying nine brands across five dimensions: taste, clean-label integrity, nutrition, versatility, and price. What they found was a fragmented space full of products that solved part of the problem but not all of it. “Mass-market seasonings score well on price but rely heavily on salt and dehydrated ingredients, which limits nutritional value and everyday trust.”
ZenBroth was designed to sit in the middle of all five, and to do something else, too. The home bottles and portable formats aren’t just convenient. They are designed to keep ZenBroth physically present at the moment of eating, shifting seasoning from a situational choice into an everyday default.
The numbers behind ZenBroth didn’t come from guesswork. Jessica conducted over 1,000 surveys, interviews, and sampling events before settling on the brand’s core focus. Over and over, she heard the same three things: taste, nutrition, versatility. “That focus helps us make disciplined product decisions,” she says. It also helped her learn how to talk about umami, a concept that’s more sensory than verbal, in a way that could land in seconds at a market booth or a retail pitch.
Today, ZenBroth is in seven retail locations and has reached more than 30,000 customers. The brand was selected into Penn Venture Lab’s highly competitive VIP-X Accelerator — the only consumer packaged goods company in its cohort. It’s seeing great success, but Jessica is careful not to frame it as a straight line. “Almost every step has been surprising,” she says. “A quiet month can suddenly lead to an unexpected opportunity; a small event can turn into a pivotal partnership.“
Seven stores is not the finish line. Jessica knows that. She talks about ZenBroth the way founders talk about ideas they believe in before the world fully catches up — with patience, and with a clear sense of where it’s all pointing. “I’ve always seen ZenBroth as more than a seasoning,” she says. “It’s about helping people eat more deliciously, more healthfully, and more conveniently at the same time.”
The vision extends far beyond a single product. It’s about reimagining everyday meals—making flavor feel accessible, intuitive, and present even in life’s busiest moments. And for Jessica, that journey remains deeply personal: a continuation of the question she first asked in her grandfather’s kitchen, now carried forward through everything she’s building. She arrived at Penn with a memory; she leaves with a company—and a much larger answer still unfolding.
