In this episode, we talk neem oil, biology, and international business with the founder of Terramera. Their products can increase crop yields over conventional and current organic pesticides, bee health and public health applications by harnessing the power of natural plant defenses and innovative chemistry. Checkout their PROOF® Spray at Walmart and Target. This is important stuff: Karn Manhas recently traveled to Washington to talk with the Obama's about it! And have you ever had bedbugs? Karn...
Oct 27, 2016•31 min
Marlo Giudice landed in San Francisco by way of New York City and years of work in relationship management at digital marketing & Ad Tech companies. Once relocating, she quickly realized that her passion actually lay in baking and enrolled in a professional pastry education program. Today, she has expanded that recipe and Marlo's now sells five flavors of the contemporary twist on traditional biscotti across 10 SKUs. We had a great time talking about biscotti, the ups and downs of being entrepre...
Oct 20, 2016•32 min
“Any time more than two people mention something, you know that it is something to consider.” Corey Hill is the founder and CEO of Indie Food Hub, a resource providing services to small and medium sized food businesses. He is driven to change the food system for the better, creating greater access for independent producers. Indie Food Hub is in the bay area and recently launched Vittle Bus to help food startups with one of the two most difficult problems: delivery logistics. The other is money, ...
Oct 13, 2016•25 min
"I've made a lot of people wealthy, but what about me? What do l love to do?" Susan MacTavish Best creates interesting and engaging salons that have brought together some of the most creative minds of this century, from Tim Ferriss to Michael Pollan to food companies like Hampton Creek. The salons cover topics ranging from LSD to the future of death, and more. Susan also has an all-encompassing lifestyle brand, Living MacTavish. It is not unlike Martha Stewart, but well, more accessible. And not...
Oct 06, 2016•41 min
“Buy the ticket, take the ride.” -Hunter S. Thompson He took an adventure against doctor’s orders and it changed his life. Back to another Ohio startup (what up LeBron!), Inca Tea does not disappoint. As you'll learn today, Ryan Florio is a contrarian thinker. He does not take things at face value, which gives him an advantage in business and life. The story of Inca Tea began when Ryan and his friends hiked a treacherous Peruvian mountain trail with the help of their Sherpa Edgar. Edgar introduc...
Sep 29, 2016•36 min
" You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. " - Steve Jobs Kellee James exemplifies this quote. Looking at her experience, one can connect the dots and trace why she was able to start a food commodities exchange. Mercaris allows buyers and sellers of raw commodities to meet and trade online. Customers include Whole Foods Market, Michael Foods, Perdue Farms, and others. They make...
Sep 22, 2016•35 min
Richard Willis and Bob Pierson saw the trend of food trucks before most. From their website: "The Macclenny based company is cooking up a thriving business of customizing food trucks and trailers. They have capitalized upon the public’s insatiable appetite for mobile food, the steady online buzz, and the testimonies of satisfied customers – nearly tripling their annual revenue to $1 million within the last year. Fed by reality television shows, social media, and a demand for increasingly creativ...
Sep 15, 2016•23 min
" After the tour, I started meeting with him regularly to do Harley trips, and over a bottle of whiskey we both talked about doing something together, starting a business ... Let’s make a coffee machine that’s connected, that uses your patent. " If you're into coffee, you may own a variety of equipment: grinder, coffee dripper, french press, an expresso machine .. what if it could all be replaced by one, smart machine? Roderick de Rode is making it a reality with his Spinn machine. ( Check out t...
Sep 08, 2016•26 min
Tim Joseph had no farming experience. He had never even milked a cow. In 2004, he received a fast education when sixty-four cows stepped off the trailers onto his land. Thrown into the fire, Tim and his wife Laura started selling milk while Tim worked a full-time corporate job from home. In 2009, they went "all in", opened a storefront and transitioned to making dairy products, like yogurt and cheese. And the company started to grow.. Over a two-year span from 2011-2013, Maple Hill Creamery went...
Sep 01, 2016•41 min
Tim Heydon started at Shenandoah Growers via an unusual route: along with a few classmates, he wrote a case study on the company while doing his MBA nearby at James Madison University. This was 1998. Tim joined the company as CEO and has grown Shenandoah into 350 employees across 300,000 square feet of growing/packing facilities in Virginia, Texas, Indiana, and Georgia. Today, Shenandoah is the leading organic herbs supplier in the Eastern United States. How did they get here? To start, Tim is a...
Aug 25, 2016•28 min
In today's interview we talk about the paradox of choice and the power of data. As Sam Slover mentioned in the interview: "If you think of a grocery store with a huge aisle of 60+ yogurts to choose from, but each of those yogurts has a slightly different (nutritional) profile", how do you choose the healthiest yogurt to eat? Sam's company, the Sage Project, is working to make in-store recommendations based on your dietary needs and help to decipher product transparency to the end consumer. Food ...
Aug 18, 2016•31 min
Self-driving cars, IBM's Watson, and Google's search algorithm are just a few examples of AI (Artificial Intelligence) .. it is already here. And it is rapidly becoming a bigger part of our lives. AI will change food. Listen to this quick overview as a starting point for AI Awareness, how you can start thinking about AI business ideas and some examples of AI in food startups. We'll interview some of them in the next few weeks. Don't worry, you can learn about it even if you're not technically in...
Aug 12, 2016•8 min
Kristen Hawley is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and editor focusing on chefs and restaurants + digital and social technology. Like a lot of freelancers, she leads a fascinating life. She has worked on creative projects with OpenTable, the National Restaurant Association, TechTable Summit, SF's Nopa restaurant, SALIDO, Upserve, and more and has a background in traditional magazine publishing (Country Living, Delish). In 2013, she started the Chefs + Tech newsletter to share news, ideas, ...
Aug 04, 2016•21 min
85 dollars is the most I ever paid for a book. Not a textbook, but book. I had to have it. And it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I am a better thinker and food entrepreneur because of it. The most important takeaway from the book was the importance of having a latticework of mental models in decision making. Mental models are the key concepts from main disciplines you'll need in business - psychology, economics, finance, physics, evolution (biology) accounting, marketing, etc. In les...
Jul 28, 2016•11 min
Evan Delahanty is one of the few people I know who has lived in the the middle of the Amazon Rainforest. I mean taking a canoe 3 hours UP river. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Suriname, he learned a language that only 26,000 people speak (Saramaccan)! After completing his mission, he was looking for a way to stay in touch and help the community. He choose Açaí as the vehicle to accomplish that. Evan founded Peaceful Fruits, a snack company that makes delicious organic fruit snacks that create job...
Jul 21, 2016•27 min
Seth Goldman co-founded Honest® Tea in 1998 with Professor Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management. Thirteen years later they were acquired and are now a $160 million division of Coca-Cola. Today, Honest Tea is the nation’s top selling ready-to-drink organic bottled tea and Honest Kids® is the nation’s top-selling organic children/youth beverage. The brands are carried in more than 100,000 outlets in the United States, including all Wendy’s and Chik-fil-A restaurants. It was a long, toug...
Jul 14, 2016•35 min
It's been almost three years since we started the show. Today we finally reached a milestone. Triple digits! All this time we have spent - interviewing experts, talking to listeners, and going through the trials and tribulations of a food startup ourselves - we have picked up a lot of ideas on how to succeed. This knowledge needs to be shared. So I synthesized all of this feedback and advice into recommendations on how to get in front of buyers and sell to them over a long-term relationship. Enj...
Jun 30, 2016•14 min
Over the last 6 months, we have had many listener requests for a packaging/branding episode. It took a while, but I finally found the experts. Jordan Hill and Fed Pacheco met when in the design program at the University of North Texas. Upon graduation they took separate paths as art directors in different global ad agencies, working on global and national accounts. A move to New York in 2014 reignited the spark to partner once again, and Hungry Studio was formed over the love of a good meal and ...
Jun 23, 2016•32 min
The original title was "Growth Stories from Blue Crabs to the Bronx to Brooklyn to Boston".. full of alliteration but a bit too long. Sean Butler has been slowly moving north through his life, adding skills and experiences. The current stop of his journey is VP of Growth at one of the hottest startups in New England. Sean joined LeanBox pre-revenue, and has grown with the company as it expanded from 3 to 42 employees in two years. LeanBox delivers customized inventories of meals, salads, sandwic...
Jun 16, 2016•43 min
Pietro Guerrera and Filippo Lubrano reached breakeven in 2015 with their European venture. But they are thinking BIG. They recently launched in the U.S. with a new subscription box business model. Eattiamo brings exclusive, gourmet Italian products to your doorstep. On the outside, the products are fantastic and the design is beautiful. On the inside, like most startups, they are putting in serious WORK. Sourcing, importing, storage, logistics, marketing and sampling .. the hustle is on.Starting...
Jun 09, 2016•21 min
Produce going bad is no secret: 50% of the shelf life is already gone before you can visually detect that the fruit has gone bad. Fresh Surety is working on solving the problem with "real time freshness reporting anywhere in the world for a few cents per carton." It could really change the world. As we covered in the Bluecart episode , this startup is founded on 10X thinking. Over the past 30 years as founder and CEO Tom Schultz has guided multiple technology companies from concept to liquidity ...
Jun 02, 2016•23 min
Ryan Wiltse was working as a CPA. Common to many guests on the show, along with his cofounder, he realized that they wanted more than the status quo; a higher calling than the "cubicle finance life". So they founded a healthy snack food company out of Brooklyn. Their first product is named ProTings, A vegetable snack with 15 grams of protein per serving. Ryan explains the "why" behind the product, the problem they solve and how they are growing the company: Marketing at fitness and bodybuilding ...
May 26, 2016•24 min
"We've noticed that most restaurants don't put much effort into their menus, which is their most important tool for selling their food." Bite was founded in 2015 by two friends who set out to transform the way restaurants sell to their guest experience. They offer restaurants digital menus that can be easily updated, are more visually appealing, and do a better job of explaining the entrees. I learned a lot in this interview. Jeff educates us on their mission and strategy for getting Bite into t...
May 19, 2016•20 min
Hey FSP Community. The last 10 guests have a common theme. They solved either their own problem or a problem they saw in the world. I share my thoughts on each. This is a great refresher episode and a way to start exploring the last 10 guests. Have a listen! Selected Links From This Episode: Episode 92 – On Becoming a Rockstar Social Entrepreneur – Lisa of Kuli Kuli Episode 91 – Breaking the Rules to Better a Supply Chain – Karl of Direct Origin/Swillings Coffee Episode 90 – “Will you help me br...
May 12, 2016•12 min
Roughly six years ago, Lisa was in the Peace Corps in a remote village of Niger . Eating a limited vegetarian diet, she was feeling malnourished. On discovering the superfood moringa, she solved her "sluggish energy" problem. And she decided to use moringa as a vehicle to solve problems for others. Fast forward to today, her company Kuli Kuli foods is a thriving business making a positive social impact in West Africa and Haiti. Before Kuli Kuli, Lisa wrote political briefings for President Obama...
May 05, 2016•22 min
For every 20 lots of coffee Karl tastes, only 1 makes the cut for his final container. A direct trading coffee company requires work. It's not just visiting beautiful coffee farms. Karl Wienhold has some stories to tell. He frequently has to take longer routes to coffee farms to prevent contact with leftist guerrillas that have plagued the country for 60 years. My favorite story is Karl's effort to change a supply chain and involve rural farmers in Colombia. Learn about international trade and s...
Apr 28, 2016•20 min
The title of the episode is a question from Bkrong, an Ede (ethnic minority group) farmer from Vietnam. Bkrong was also the host mother of Linh, cofounder of XOI company. Linh Tran and Myron Lam met on a 2013 trip to Vietnam on a research grant from Brown university. There, they discovered the Gac fruit growing in Bkrong's backyard. Upon further research, they realized Gac fruit was packed with beta-carotene and lycopene; a new superfood was born. How could they bring the Gac fruit to the U.S. a...
Apr 21, 2016•30 min
Ashly Yashchin created Barley + Oats to solve a problem. She was pregnant and worried about her baby's health. So, she learned and practiced a healthy pregnancy diet. 9 in 10 women are micronutrient deficient, affecting their fertility, pregnancy and postpartum experience. Ashly is quickly establishing herself as an expert in the space. But first she had to become accepted by the community: Detailed customer profiling How to develop community trust Putting on successful events Understanding your...
Apr 14, 2016•24 min
NOMIKU was born from two successful Kickstarter campaigns that totaled over $1.3 million and have thousands of units in homes and restaurants around the world. Lisa Q. Fetterman, the co-founder and CEO, is equally gifted and inspiring. She launched the first home sous vide immersion circulator machine on the market. Yes, you've tried sous vide cooked food even if your not familiar with the term. I wasn't. Top restaurants, Chipotle, they all use this cooking method. Lisa has been featured in Wire...
Apr 07, 2016•22 min
Chad Rosen is nicknamed "Hemp Man" in New Castle, Kentucky. A California transplant, he is spearheading the movement for industrial grown US hemp. Watch the video (and support) his IndieGogo to learn why hemp is so important to the economic, environmental, and nutritional future of the United States. U.S. legislation is severely restricting the hemp movement. But not for long. Chad is on a mission for federal change. And it starts in Henry county, Kentucky which is on its' way to becoming the ag...
Mar 31, 2016•39 min
