The business was founded by Gifty Serbeh-Dunn who grew up in Ghana. Gifty fervently believes that business can be a force for good and that doing business right means that everyone benefits; the women who make the Shea Butter, the natural environment, the people who buy and use the product, the distributors and retailers of the product and the workers and shareholders of Shea Butter Market Ltd.

Gifty grew up in northern Ghana in West Africa in the heart of what could be called the global Shea Butter capital. When she moved to Canada in 1980 she was amazed that North America did not know about Shea Butter. Over the years she became impassioned with the need to share Shea Butter with the world in a way that would benefit everyone, especially the women who made the Shea Butter and the people who would use the product.

In 1999 Gifty started experimenting with Shea Butter, adding essential oils and marketing products in little brown glass containers.

In 2003 Gifty travelled to Ghana and met the Tapko Widow's Group, a group of widows from a northern Ghana village who had banded together so they could help each other to better feed and educate their families. One of their main activities was gathering Shea Nuts and making them into Shea Butter. Gifty recognized the quality of their product and the rightness of their cause and on the spot she bought 1,000 pounds of Shea Butter and arranged to have it shipped to Canada. Her first commercial Shea Butter business, SheaCare, was launched with the intent of wholesaling raw Shea Butter in North America.

Working from her kitchen, Gifty also continued to combine Shea Butter with high quality essential oils and other natural materials to make special products for friends and family. The people who used her products kept telling her amazing stories about what it had done for them. Stories about soothing dry, cracked and bleeding skin, saving savaged lips and healing bedsores became commonplace. It seemed like everyone was telling her that a product this good, and that could provide so much help to West African women, should be marketed more broadly. After talking it over with family and friends, Gifty decided to create another business that develops and markets Shea Butter based products.
This was the start of Shea Butter Market.