Meet Ozi Manning, née Igbokwe

Ozi Manning is the founder of Helical Healing Habitat and inventor behind EscarGrow, a patent-pending sealed heliciculture bioreactor that turns organic food waste into three things at once: clean protein, biofertilizer, and cosmetic-grade snail mucin. She leads Helical Healing Habitat, the 501(c)(3) she founded to build food-system resilience from the ground up.

Her path to snails started with smoke. Ozi grew up between the United States and Amuzi, her father's village in southeastern Nigeria, where her grandmother cooked over an open fire and where escargot was ordinary Sunday food — locally raised, humble, unremarkable. That memory of food tied to place, and of nothing going to waste, became the seed of her life's work.

Before founding HHH, Ozi spent roughly a decade as a product designer, working with brands like Fidelity and Jeep and serving as founding designer of wellness ventures including Chill Jane, VGN AF, and ELXRCo. Along the way she learned that people don't just use products — they live with them. She brought that discipline to EscarGrow: composting reimagined as a sealed, elegant system that works like nature and belongs in a classroom or a kitchen rather than banished to a shed. Under her leadership, EscarGrow was named a 2026 EarthShot Prize nominee.

Ozi works at the intersection of regenerative design, circular economy, and community care — with a conviction that the tools for a more resilient food future should be beautiful, teachable, and within everyone's reach.