Episodes
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Firefly Chocolate's business model is not necessarily about scaling up. Small batch processing is important to what founder and CEO Jonas Ketterle calls the "Elemental Alchemy of Transformation, bringing in Fire, Earth, Air, and Water." Jonas processes the cacao that he sources from permaculture rainforest farms. The farmers that trade with Firefly through a collaborative of growers and craft-chocolate buyers earn far better than fair trade prices for their produce.
Firefly -- soon to rebrand as Firefly Cacao -- produces cacao discs that made to be melted in a hot liquid -- an efficient method of dosing oneself with the powerful medicinal properties of cacao that has been handled with care and respect for its powers.
The "ceremonial" grade of cacao denotes a potent, pure, ethically produced food. Its powers are at once based in human neurochemistry and in the mystical, spiritual potential of the cacao plant. Firefly epitomizes an intersection of capitalist enterprise with ancient cultures that knew many things we have yet to learn. It's a unique food disruption. -
Craft chocolate makers in the U.S. are sort of where the craft beer industry was 25 years ago. There were only about 200 craft chocolatiers in the U.S. when Jonas (German pronunciation: "Yonas") Ketterle launched Firefly Chocolate in 2014. Now these small businesses number in the thousands.
Firefly's product is 100% cacao and is marketed as Ceremonial Cacao. The cacao is processed in small batches at their small operation in Windsor, California. Much of the machinery was designed, built, and/or hacked by Jonas, a mechanical engineer..
The cacao is roasted, winnowed, ground, and conched to Jonas' exacting standards -- we're talking micron-level precision -- for utterly smooth, delicious discs that melt into a transformative drinking experience.
What makes Firefly Chocolate truly disruptive is their wholistic approach to the mesh of a capitalist enterprise with deep-seated values of respect for nature and our human connection -- physical and spiritual -- with the ecosystems that feed us. As Jonas puts it, business to him is like his training as an engineer -- it provides a toolset to create thriving relationships.
Firefly cacao is sourced from small farmers who practice permaculture to raise cacao plants in Belize, Guatemala, and Tanzania. One of the challenges presented by Firefly's business model is maintaining connection with hundreds of these farmers, and working with them to sustainably produce and ferment superior cacao beans. Firefly producers earn far better returns even than those provided by Fair Trade contracts.
It is this cycle of respect for the ecosystems in which cacao naturally grows, connection with the humans whose lives revolve around cacao cultivation, and respect for the cacao plant itself that makes Firefly a disruptive entrant into the chocolate sector of American food ways. Firefly's 100% cacao is a product utterly different from the commodified, plantation-grown, adulterated, highly processed sugary candy that most Americans think of as chocolate.
The cycle of connectedness represented by Firefly's sourcing and processing (they are pushing the sustainability envelope on packaging and distribution, too) extends to and through consumers of their cacao. Jonas regards his product as much more than a delicious, enjoyable food. Firefly cacao epitomizes the concept of food-as-medicine. In this episode of The Food Disruptors, Jonas and I talk about some of the bio-evolutionary possibilities that make cacao such a good food for humans. We talk about the anthropological role of cacao in Central American civilizations. And Jonas speaks knowledgeably about the chemical properties of cacao that profoundly affect our neurochemistry and gut biome.
Check out Firefly's informative website.
For more info, check out this article from Chocolate Connoisseur magazine. -
Missing episodes?
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While there is no such thing as an ordinary Food Disruptor, Clarence Saunders was one colorful capitalist. He bootstrapped his way to a grand fortune, with Piggly Wiggly, the first self-service grocery store chain. All the while he touted his good-ole-boy Tennessee roots. He appealed directly to shoppers' concerns with folksy, funny media saturation. (See Episode 50.)
And when he decided to fight against short sellers of the newly listed Piggly Wiggly stock, he made national news with the Last Great Corner on Wall Street. He lost that battle, but not the hearts and minds of his loyal shoppers who rooted for their flamboyant underdog all the way.
With one fortune lost, he set about to make another with the world's first automated grocery store, Keedoozle. He was as far ahead of his time as Ada Lovelace was ahead of hers. He never made back his fortune, but it's a fun story. -
If you think grocery shopping is a hassle, be glad you are not a harried worker of 1916 trying to grab fixings for dinner on your way home. Then, as today, you would be jostled by hangry hordes. But a hundred years ago, everybody would be trying to avoid horse poop and mud in the walkways. You would have to dodge fast-moving horse-drawn carts, jitneys, and streetcars, as well as poorly controlled automobiles driving helter-skelter.
And then, when you tumbled off the streetcar near the markets, you would have to go to the green grocer, the baker, the butcher, and the dry goods merchant. At each locale, you would have to cram your way towards the front counter, taking several elbows in the process, and then clamor for the attention of the clerk.
The Old Way of Buying Groceries
Once you were attended by a clerk, your desired items were likely to be read from your list like a proclamation among your fellow townsfolk. Then, while you waited for the clerk to go to the back of the store to obtain your items, you might be subjected to small talk such as, "Two pounds of butter and five of sugar, is it Mrs. Brown? How do you find that new fangled diet is doing for you?" Finally, the clerk would return, wrap up the goods, tally the costs, probably write them up on your account, and you'd fight your way to the next store.
Clarence Saunders (1881-1953), an experienced Memphis grocery wholesaler, figured there had to be a better way. Saunders had already applied new-fangled efficiencies to grocery operations. He was among the first to conduct business on a cash-only basis, getting rid of the overhead of credit account management, the cost of float, and the costs of the inevitable bad accounts.
Clarence Saunders
Moreover, he put together a chain of stores that used their combined purchasing power to bring down the cost of goods sold. His forte, perhaps, was print advertising, where he realized big savings by using the same ads for all stores, and getting deals on volume purchases.
His disruptive idea was to get grocery customers to serve themselves. It is hard for consumers of today to realized just how innovative was this concept. Nobody reached to take off the store shelves the items they wished to purchase. What seems like "duh" to shoppers today, required a huge cultural shift of the collective consumer mindset.
Saunders made it easy by designing and building grocery store interiors expressly to facilitate self-service shopping. Customers would enter through a turnstile on the left side of a deep, rectangular store interior. A handy arm basket would be provided. They would file down a narrow aisle lined on each side with groceries. Then back up the next aisle. The flow was uni-directional, ending at a cash register. Clerks there, would tally the items and, in another breakthrough innovation, hand the customer the tape from the adding machine.
Original Patented Piggly Wiggly Store Design
The new method was not only more efficient, but thought to be more sanitary, and more honest. You could weigh your bulk items yourself and not worry about the clerk's finger on the scale. He also devised a transparent method of posting prices -- tags were hung on hooks in front of the items and could be easily changed out. Before Saunders, grocery clerks occasionally would charge different customers different prices. -
"There’s nothing more interesting than a brewery in terms of a combination of chemistry, physics, biochemistry, engineering. It’s a wonderworld of basic science. And in fact, much of modern science came out of breweries." -- Fritz Maytag, 2017
Fritz Maytag disrupted the huge market for industrially processed, pale lager beer in the 1970s. Father of the microbrewery (a term he coined) movement, he created Anchor Steam Beer as the first craft beer in America after decades of consolidation in the industry.
Like many a Food Disruptor of old, Maytag was an autodidact, in his case in the beer industry.
He purchased the nearly defunct Anchor Brewing company of San Francisco in 1965, more or less on a lark. But almost immediately, he fell in love with the ancient brewery, and more, with the process of brewing. The small business he acquired used medieval processes, and the resulting brews were frequently contaminated.
To revive Anchor Brewing, before anybody had heard of "craft beer," Maytag ferreted out old methods, often from ancient books, and brought modern equipment and science to bear on his brewing process. In his early days as brewmaster, he had to cobble together equipment, since there was no craft brewing infrastructure.
He not only heeded the science behind a great brew, but also taste. Cuing off of the approach of the small but growing ranks of wine connoisseurs in California, he developed rich, flavorful beer designed not just to flatter tastebuds, but to surprise and delight them.
Fritz Maytag
So much for the art. Keeping Anchor Brewing alive presented Maytag with huge risk. To build a modern brewery, he levered his personal stock holdings to the hilt, and then had to watch the financial horror show of the mid-seventies as his stock declined in value and interest rates approached 20 percent. Many an entrepreneur has folded under less pressure.
Anchor Brewing changed the beer-drinking culture of America. At an annual U.S. beer consumption of 6.3 billion gallons and counting, that's a big cultural dial to move. Notably, Maytag succeeded by emphasizing quality over quantity. And after a nearly a century of mass-marketing by Big Food and Big Beer, Maytag took a low-key, word-of-mouth approach and built his distribution and loyal following beer-by-beer.
Check out this Prime Rate timeline 1974-1980. It was scary to live through.
The U.S. Prime Rate Reached an All-Time High 21.5% in 1980
The Alchemist of Anchor Steam, INC. Magazine, 1983
BeerHistory.com -
Today, those of us who enjoy beer expect to plop down at our neighborhood brew pub and order up a cold, fresh, tasty craft beer. We do not realize how endangered was this alcoholic refreshment option. During the twentieth century, economic and political pressures resulted in massive consolidation in the beer industry.
Commercial breweries previously peaked at 4131 in 1873. That number reached a nadir in 1983, with 51 U.S. beer companies. Of those, the top six controlled 92 percent of the market. Today, less than four decades after the low point, the number of breweries in the U.S. exceeds its previous high. We owe this resurgence to the imaginative vision, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and persistence of one dedicated beer aficionado, Fritz Maytag.
In 1965, Maytag purchased a nearly defunct San Francisco brewery with a long history, a checkered ownership record, and a spotty reputation for consistent quality, although when Anchor Steam Beer was good, it was quite good. The equipment was old, the infrastructure gone, and the market microscopic. But Maytag saw -- or dreamt -- potential for a great craft beer, when almost nobody remembered when beer was local.
Many Food Disruptors in history have focused on making money with resultant food system changes an unplanned collateral effect. In contrast, before he focused on maximizing the monetary value of his investment in the old brewery, Maytag sought to change an important strand of food culture. He revitalized craft beer, which had all but gone extinct in the face of beer behemoths.
Big Beer made a light, commodity-like lager and pumped it out through a distribution network that they controlled. Nobody in the beer-drinking public thought to challenge the status quo until Maytag bought Anchor Steam. It took him nearly a decade to turn a profit, and even longer to realize a sustainable industry infrastructure, which we take for granted today.
The beer story continues to build with Big Beer following the market into the craft space via acquisitions. Not least, after interim ownership by Skye Vodka from 2010-2017, Anchor Brewing Company was sold to former Skyy Vodka executives. In 2017, Big Beer, in the form of Sapporo, acquired Anchor. For a bit of historical context, tune in to Part 1 of The Food Disruptors' quick tour of the Anchor Steam Beer Story.
Anchor Brewing
BeerHistory.com
How Beer Is Made
The Original San Francisco Steam Beer
Beer & the Swill Milk Scandal
Nutrition in Brewer's Yeast -
The Past is Prologue. Courtesy of a Molé Mama podcast that aired June 28, 2019, this episode of The Food Disruptors continues our two-part look at how the history of our food system informs our food ways today, and points to where we are going.
Consider these progressions, each phase the result of a food system disruption:
1) From local butchering to industrialized meat processing to refrigerated dressed meat to Confined Animal Feeding Operations to alternative protein.
2) From a USDA-sanctioned increase in carbohydrate consumption to a sharp rise in obesity and Type II Diabetes to consumer demand for less added sugar and more transparent food labeling.
3) From industrialized Big Ag and the prevalence of mono-cropping to an outcry against environmental degradation on land AND sea, and demands for a lower carbon footprint, fewer chemical inputs, and more diversity in our food supply.
We learn from the past. We learn from the decisions taken by Food Disruptors of the past -- both the right ones and, especially, those that turned out wrong for our society and our environment.
Our food system mess today is based largely in individual initiatives to accumulate personal wealth combined with a societal failure to identify and redress unintended consequences. However, United States food history is also rich with amazing technological advances that in their day promised better lives for more people.
Looking forward, we hope our market system, and the initiatives taken by future food disruptors, will bring us out of the unjust, environmentally damaging industrialized food system of the past. The capitalist system can work. But its outcomes and collateral effects are up to us. We have a much better chance of seeing where we are going with our food system if we heed how capitalism has intersected with our food culture in the past.
So please listen to The Food Disruptors, and send us your comments and suggestions for future topics!
Here are two interesting food podcasts -- each presents an opposite side of the meat v alternative protein controversy:
https://sustainabledish.com/podcasts/
https://heritageradionetwork.org/series/what-doesnt-kill-you/
Also, for great recipes, cultural insights, and wonderful interviews with amazing entrepreneurs who start out small in the food space but who have scalable potential:
https://www.molemama.com/mole-mama-cooking-with-love-podcast
And if you want to access easy, delicious Mexican-American cooking, check out:
https://www.molemama.com/all-cooking-videos -
A few weeks ago, a great podcast, Molé Mama: Cooking With Love, featured Theresa as co-host of The Food Disruptors. This gave me the opportunity to tell The Food Disruptors origin story and take a step back to view the grand, operative currents in our food system, past, present and future. If you missed the Molé Mama drop, here it is again on our home turf.
https://www.molemama.com/
https://www.molemama.com/all-cooking-videos
Johnson RJ et al. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2007
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Henry Crowell turned a bland commodity that most Americans considered horse food into a ubiquitous, go-to breakfast food. He brought Quaker Oats to prominence through unrelenting marketing, including the famous Quaker Oats Special train, which borrowed marketing concepts pioneered by patent medicine sellers.
Henry Parsons Crowell (1855-1944) got in early on a new technology for processing oats: cutting them with special steel implements, then steaming them, then rolling them so they turned into flat, quick-cooking flakes. He also figured out that rather than scoop oats out of a barrel, where they might be mixed with rat and mouse droppings, bugs, stones, and maybe even a dead rodent, a grocery shopper might prefer to buy a neat, colorful, sanitary-looking household-sized carton of rolled oats.
He was the first grain marketer to take advantage of new paper processing methods that allowed for the cheap production of cardboard boxes. He decided to package his oats pre-measured into clearly branded cardboard cartons. The cartons were filled by a machine invented by one of his partners, which kept down labor costs. This played on the growing zeitgeist for "hygienic," inexpensive food for the masses.
Crowell observed the red-hot growth of the canned goods sector and saw that the winners in that crowded space were those who developed brand loyalty. The only way for a canner to signal to grocers and consumers the contents and provenance of a generic-looking can was with a colorful, memorable label. If the product passed muster, buyers were likely to come back to that same label for their next purchase. For label design, he went with his own gut reaction to the Quaker name and logo as a positive association for his commodity product.
Moreover, since the actual product was a commodity, Crowell recognized the potential for counterfeit products to ride the coattails of his pioneering marketing investments. So he added expensive, four-color printing to his cartons. The fat man in retro Revolutionary-times garb (a popular image after the 1876 Centennial), who proffered his box of "PURE" oats, served as a formidable guard against trademark infringement.
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Henry Crowell (1855-1944) gave us Quaker Oats for breakfast. Before he began mass-marketing a commodity, oats were generally regarded as horse food. The occasional immigrant housewife (Irish, Scottish, or German) might cook chopped oats into a porridge, if she cared to spend hours at it.
Ferdinand Schumacher 1822-1908
Henry Parsons Crowell 1855-1944
Rolled Oats
Steel-cut Oats
Among the first capitalists to try to persuade more people to eat wholesome, inexpensive oats for breakfast was a German immigrant, Ferdinand Schumacher (1822-1908). He ran a grocery story in Akron, Ohio. A strait-laced religious man (he hated alcohol, tobacco, and fun), he innovated a steel oat-cutter that made the oats easier to cook. Grocery customers loved these steel-cut oats.
Seeing an opportunity among the many millraces of Akron, Schumacher became a miller. Schumacher further developed his oat processing into a rolled oat product. In a few years, he ran the biggest oat mill in the country.
Schumacher still dominated, but then his mill burned to the ground. He carried no insurance (Schumacher's reasoned that calamities were his god's way of punishing sinners, therefore insurance was sinful since it sought to avoid the punishment).
Like Grandmother Donovan's Double Boiler for Making Oatmeal
Eventually, after much stubbornness and soul-searching, Schumacher merged with another Akron miller. Nevertheless, fierce price competition was driving all the oat millers into the ground. Enter a young innovator who had just bought the nearby Ravenna Quaker Mill that boasted Schumacher's innovative equipment. Henry Parsons Crowell proposed the formation of an oat trust to set prices.
After much under-handed dealing and double-crossing, and two failed trust formations, Crowell gained control of a unified company using the Quaker brand and differentiating their commodity by packaging it in brightly branded cardboard boxes. The rest is Quaker Oats History.
Quaker Oats Man Slims Down
The Oatmeal Wars
Ferdinand Schumacher story
Cosmopolitan Magazine, 1900s. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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Diana Silva aka Molé Mama with her Mama Rose.
Diana Silva comes from a line of brave, resilient women. Her grandmother, a Mexican immigrant, and Diana's mother built lives for themselves and the people they loved by working on California farms. This was long before the days of Caesar Chavez. Conditions in the fields were brutal, particularly for women. Workers' rights, per se, did not exist. They worked and lived under the long shadow of racist oppression. Nevertheless, these women celebrated the joy of work that kept their families fed, the joy of keeping loved ones close, and the joy of cooking as the gravitational center of their community.
Sometimes cows need help to calve.
Diana grew up helping her father manage a dairy farm in Central California. Through the lessons she learned doing hard farm chores as a little girl, she came to understand milk as a gift from cows. And grass-munching cows as gifts from the land.
At her mother's bidding, Diana would lug from the barn to the kitchen cream-rich buckets of raw milk. Her mother would skim some cream and make butter and cheese. Diana learned what real, whole food tastes like. She learned to cook at her mother's side, feeding a community of immigrant workers. And, from her immigrant roots, she learned to seize opportunity while staying connected to community through food.
One delightful upshot is Diana's podcast Mole Mama, Cooking with Love, which brings great Mexican cooking within reach to those of us who don't have a treasure of family recipes like Diana's. And Mole Mama also showcases inspiring entrepreneurs who, like Diana, have found niches in America's capitalist economy and are bringing amazing food and cultural treasures to market for the rest of us.
12Radio.com Thursday nights at 6 pm, PT.
Molé Mama: A Memoir of Love, Cooking, and Loss
Molé Mama Blog
Molé Mama
Terry Hanson Mead Piloting Your Life Podcast: More (fascinating) info about Diana's career in Tech
Insta: Mole_Mama
Alicia's Delicias on Molé Mama
Here is a little round-up of opinions Pro and Con the consumption of cow's milk by humans: Is Drinking Milk Healthy for Humans? -
Diana Silva created and produces Molé Mama, a multi-media platform all about connecting with food and with family. Molé Mama qualifies as a Food Disruptor because she offers an accessible means for stepping out of the powerful currents of our industrial food system and planting a firm stake of community, around which other food disruptors, big and little, can grow.
Diana Silva with her Magical Molcajete
Molé Mama advocates for saving -- and of course cooking from -- family recipes. Not only is this a way to connect with people close to us, but family recipes can connect us over time and space, filling the void of absence. As Diana has said, the secret ingredient that makes all family recipes so special, even magical, is love.
But if you, like so many of us, lack an inherited treasure of handed-down recipes, do not despair. Molé Mama is just the forum you need to begin creating your own legacy of delicious connection. Diana's cooking videos take us right into her kitchen, where we can craft amazing Mexican food as only a Latina who grew up on a dairy farm on California's Central Coast knows how. Molé Mama offers us the real deal -- no twee extravagant or extraneous flourishes, just authentic, affordable, mouth-watering meals.
There is so much more to the Molé Mama community. Her lines of connection zip right through The Food Disruptors' nexus: Where Capitalism meets America's Food Culture. Many of Molé Mama Cooking With Love podcasts feature entrepreneurs in the food space. The unique and delightful spin is that many of these are boot-strapping Latinas who have gravitated to some aspect of their cultural heritage and brought to market food and objects related to food. These growing businesses, some of them alone, others as part of the broader culinary community into which Molé Mama is plugged, WILL shift our food system.
Much of The Food Disruptors historical stories relate to broad demographic shifts in the United States. As of 2018, 58.9 million residents of the U.S.-- nearly 20% of the population -- were of Latino descent. The math is easy; the coming hispanic-market food disruption will be major. Check out Molé Mama to get a big, delicious taste of what's coming.
12Radio.com Thursday nights at 6 pm, PT.
Molé Mama: A Memoir of Love, Cooking, and Loss
Molé Mama Blog
Molé Mama
Terry Hanson Mead Piloting Your Life Podcast: More (fascinating) info about Diana's career in Tech
Insta: Mole_Mama
Alicia's Delicias on Molé Mama
RADICAL ACCEPTANCE FOR ALL - HOW HIDING FROM LA MIGRA AS A TEN YEAR OLD CHILD CHANGED ME FOREVER
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Many of us grew up with a well-worn cookbook close at hand in the kitchen. In my case, it was my mom's Betty Crocker Cookbook, full of 1960s quick-and-easy family-favorite recipes with lots of highly processed ingredients. And long ago when my husband and I were budding young counter-culturistas, wanting different foods than what our mothers served up, our go-to was The Moosewood Cookbook.
What was yours? Did your mom chuckle over the chummy confidences tucked among the 900-plus pages of her Joy of Cooking tome, or did your she stick with grandma's favorite, which very well might have been The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, later republished as the Fannie Farmer Cookbook?
Fannie Farmer 1857-1915 The Mother of Level Measurements
Fannie Farmer reached wide and deep into American cooking culture. She was a century ahead of the Cooking Channel, but just about every millennial foodie can trace their culinary backgrounding to her influence.
Fannie Farmer had to self-publish the first edition of her cookbook because the publishing establishment didn't think it would sell. She sold advertising space in the back of the book to help foot the bill. Today, Fannie Farmer's Cookbook is still in print, and more than 3 million copies have sold. What made her cookbook so important that it is still being published today?
At the turn of the last century, she pulled an entire culinary tradition out of a complex jumble of industrial food processing and upheaval over immigration (sound familiar?) into an ordered universe of precise cookery. According to The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, if you measured things properly and followed instructions, things would turn out good. Or, at least your meal would. Where have you gone, Fannie Farmer?
Advertisement from the back pages of my friend's grandmother's Boston Cooking School Cookbook (pictured above).
https://briahistorica.com/2017/04/05/the-gilded-age-woman-who-put-the-original-joy-in-american-cooking/
Overlooked No More: Fannie Farmer, Modern Cookery's Pioneer
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Ellen Swallow Richards, 1842-1911, a brilliant chemist and progressive leader, founded the home economics movement. Home economics 140 years ago was not the prosaic domain of bored middle-school girls, but rather a powerful engine of social change, designed to kick human health onto a shining, new hygienic plane.
Richards led 19th century women out of the morass of never-ending housework into a new realm of precision and efficiency in the domestic realm. She believed that the application of science to domestic work would give middle-class women more time for loftier pursuits.
Chemists like Richards deconstructed food into nutritional components. They identified dangerous adulterants added to manufactured food, well before there were any governmental checks on food safety.
As social historian Susan Strasser notes, "In 1900 [Richards] envisioned 'the home of 1920,' in which the kitchen would be connected by pneumatic tubes to a supply station that would distribute prepared foods." Move over Blue Apron.....
Richards, along with Mary Abel and Edward Atkinson, founded The New England Kitchen, which offered low-cost, nutritious food to poor immigrants. Part of the concept was to enable immigrants to assimilate faster, by eating -- and learning how to cook -- hygienically, efficiently prepared food that followed white, established middle-American norms.
If Ellen Richards was a teensie bit compulsive about putting things around her "to rights," she turned her desire for an ordered life outward to help others. Her brilliant, solidly scientific, pioneering work in water sanitation, food adulteration, and precise measurements for consistent, easily replicated food preparation laid the foundation for the federal Food and Drug Administration as well as the modern processed food industry. (Though she would have been horrified at how her well-meaning precepts morphed into systemic problems.)
Not least, she led women into a new era of equality. She smashed MIT's glass ceiling of the time, not by strident demands, but by kick-ass great intellectual achievements along with a friendly character that charmed the male chauvinists in their ivory tower and broke down their resistance to female colleagues in unexpected ways.
The First Female Student at MIT Started an All-Women Chemistry Lab and Fought for Food Safety
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Johannes Olejnik spent three years figuring out the logistics of turning tiny seedlings, the product of tissue-culture micro-propagation, into thriving hazelnut orchards that generate supplemental income for rural farming families in Bhutan. From a high-tech lab in China, through two climatically different greenhouses, and then across huge mountains and sometimes impassable roads, the seedlings make their way to the farmers.
Mountain Hazelnuts has a cadre of motorbike-riding horticulturists who connect with remote farmers by text and over farm roads to support the nurturing of the young hazelnut trees. Tree pick-up and harvest drop-off points accessible to farmers have been carefully plotted throughout the geographically challenging region.
Mountain Hazelnuts plans to plant millions of hazelnut trees on deforested mountain slopes. The enterprise increases Bhutanese farmers' economic independence by generating a high-value export crop for international markets. The company is dedicated to positive outcomes for its communities and the environment while generating a profit. This is what is known as a "triple bottom line" company.
Mountain Hazelnuts started from scratch in 2009 and is now that country's largest private-sector employer. It raises rural farm income by cultivating hazelnut trees on otherwise fallow land. It is expanding the export market for its hazelnut crop.
Ferrero (parent company of Nutella) is the world's biggest consumer of hazelnuts, and currently most of those are grown in Turkey.
Mountain Hazelnuts sees opportunities as Turkey's hazelnut industry is slowly losing its competitive advantages. As well, Mountain Hazelnuts is actively developing a customer base in China. And it is growing its trees and designing its logistics to work within Bhutan's challenging infrastructure. The company bases its strategy in respect for the integrity and strengths of the individual family farms with which it contracts. -
The United States lacks a coherent policy for shaping our food system. The 2019 Farm Bill proves this. A national food policy should ensure an adequate, safe, and sustainable food supply. It should support biodiversity as well as soil, water, and air conservation and regeneration. It should support public health. And it should be designed to uphold the social and economic structure of the agricultural producers, so that people are encouraged to farm.
U.S. ag policy contravenes just about every one of these points. Without getting into the thick weeds of the SNAP (Food Stamp) allocation of 75% of Farm Bill funding, actual farm supports paid for by taxpayers and consumers tend to favor highly profitable, industrial monoculture farms. According to Forbes, "since 2008....the top 10 farm subsidy recipients each received an average of $18.2 million – that’s $1.8 million annually, $150,000 per month, or $35,000 a week. With the median household income of $60,000 a year, these farmers received more than 30 times the average yearly income of U.S. families."
Here are some conservative thinkers on the 2019 Farm Bill, gathered by The American Enterprise Institute:
http://www.aei.org/multimedia/the-2018-farm-bill/
Why are we subsidizing Big Ag? Have we locked ourselves into an environmentally destructive system that is insulated from market demand?
Agricultural subsidies originated in the Great Depression because America's farm economy was collapsing due to severe weather and falling prices of commodities. It may be debated that small-to-medium sized family farms warrant some protections from huge swings in yield and global market prices that are beyond the scope of sound management. (Although many other businesses might make similar arguments.) The food supply, policy makers might suppose, is too precious to allow total systemic failure.
But in 1984, New Zealand did roll the dice with their agricultural policy. Facing dire economic straits in every sector, they made the Hail Mary pass of cutting out all subsidies to farmers, cold-turkey. The near-term result was horribly difficult for the farmers whose lives were upended. But 35 years later, agricultural producers of New Zealand have listened to market demand (rather than following warped government incentives). The ag sector in NZ is now highly diversified and thriving.
It's a fair Food Disruptor challenge: how can the U.S. get from our warped, dysfunctional system of funding industrially farmed commodities to the New Zealand model of market-based, profitable agricultural diversity?
Lila Mae Lindeman c. 1930 Great Depression. Pile of corn to be burned to fuel when there was no money for coal. "It was a big day when the corn was poured into the basement."
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The Post saga is a linchpin story in American culinary history. Post failed again and again in business, but somehow scratched together enough money time and again to launch a new enterprise.
His restless, inventive mind jumped from innovation to innovation in fields far apart -- agricultural implements, men's clothing, residential real estate development, pianos, and finally, breakfast food.
C.W. Post hadn't spent his early career as a traveling salesman for nothing. He had a heartfelt manner that could get to the nub of what his customers wanted. In the case of the housewives who bought food, he zeroed in on their hidden desires for security, domestic harmony, ease of food preparation, and personal beauty. For the first several years of his juggernaut of a breakfast food company, he wrote all the ad copy.
C.W. innovated a grain-based coffee substitute, Postum, suspiciously similar to what was served at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where he had worked off his own medical bills by helping in the experimental kitchen. Postum, the coffee-replacement Post innovated, provided a hot beverage without the side effects of caffeine, which Post thoroughly villainized. He wrote advertisements that strongly suggested coffee was responsible for weakness, jangled nerves, and premature aging. Postum saved health and marriages.
The claims made for Grape Nuts were even more extravagant. The breakfast cereal could cure a hodge-podge of diseases, including malaria and appendicitis.
Post's secret ingredient for success turned out to be a genius for marketing, including retail promotions (driving traffic to grocery stores with free samples and Postum demos), and wholesale financing deals. Above all, he leveraged print advertising as it had never been leveraged before. And he became one of the richest men in America.
At the turn of the 20th century in the Progressive era, the U.S.A. was a newly rich, melting-pot country with an exponentially growing immigrant population. An industrial society was displacing an agrarian one. Social classes were becoming more fluid. Women's roles were changing. New discoveries about germs and health grabbed people's attention.
Post seized this unsettled economic moment. Food in colorful boxes accompanied by thrilling health claims and suggestive ad copy changed the American breakfast landscape to one of packaged cereals that dominated for 100 years.
A fierce competitor, Post went head-to-head with another eccentric food marketer, Will Keith Kellogg. Kellogg suspected Post of stealing the proprietary recipes of the Battle Creek Sanitarium (Kellogg had good reason.) The two men apparently learned to hate one another.
Post was on the leading edge and leveraged his competitive lead into one of the greatest fortunes in America. He could not innovate away his mental and physical pain, sadly, and he killed himself at the height of his powers.
His daughter, Marjorie Merriweather Post and E.F. Hutton, the second of her four husbands, Postum Cereals made a series of corporate acquisitions that included Jell-O, Minute Tapioca, Maxwell House Coffee, and Birdseye frozen foods. Eventually, the corporate name was changed to General Foods.
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C.W. Post (1854-1914) remains a slippery figure in U.S. culinary history. At age 37, he presented at the Battle Creek Sanitarium as a manic-depressive, chronically ill business failure so feeble and emaciated he had to be carried in on a stretcher.
He recovered, in a manner of speaking, and through ethically questionable means, brought to market some new breakfast foods. He, together with his arch-rival, Will Keith Kellogg, changed the way Americans ate breakfast, and the ways they responded to marketing. Post was a genius marketer. He figured out crowd-sourcing before it was a thing.
Fueled by "the power of positive thinking" he concocted a potion in a barn that -- through innovative marketing -- became a magic elixir. His Postum grain-based coffee replacement could undo the damage wrought from the evil "Mr. Coffee Nerves."
And like one of the great Tweeters of today, he did not hesitate to lie in order to get what he wanted -- in his case, sales. Post, who initially wrote his company's advertising copy, made wildly optimistic, unsubstantiated claims for his products. Postum made blood red. Grape Nuts cured appendicitis. And so forth.
The Trump connection comes around again in the twenty-first century: his daughter, Marjorie Merriweather Post, built a resort in Florida which she named, "Mar-A-Lago."
Mr. Coffee Nerves
Postum claims
cultivator versus harrow
College of Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources, University of Missouri
A sulky plow c. 1872 was one of the farm implement innovations out of which C.W. Post tried and failed to make a business.
"Snake-Oil Salesmen Provided Entertainment and False Hope Throughout the 19th century. They were the precursors of the consumer marketing paradigm of the 20th century
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Tastemakers may be the most powerful drivers of change in our food system. It's hard to imagine in our digitized world, but in living memory the influencers of American culture came to us via the written word, in print media.
Even harder for most middle-class women today is imagining that not so very long ago, they didn't just have an equal-pay problem; they had a no-job-if-you're-female problem. As anyone on the receiving side of bigotry knows, it's hard, often impossible, to get past. One Disruptor who did prevail and manage to get her ideas heard was the amazing Jane Cunningham Croly (1829-1901).
Her pen name was "Jennie June." Her only entree into publishing was via a "women's page" in a major metropolitan newspaper, which until she came along had been run for men by men. Jennie June took what she could get and eventually become one of the most widely read syndicated columnists in the country in the mid-19th century.
Jane Cunningham Croly qualifies as a Food Disruptor because FOOD was so firmly in the cultural sphere of women. She wrote about household management and fashion, too, as well as ground-breaking subjects. She was a strong advocate for furthering the educational and economic opportunities available to women. Her advocacy manifested in the formation of the game-changing women's club movement, which allowed women their first step out of the confines of Home into the broader world where they could exercise their talents and connect with other bright minds and active people.
This week's episode of The Food Disruptors explores how culture, food, and the collective power of women are all wound up in the intricate knot of who we are as a society.
Jennie June's American Cookery Book: Containing Upwards of Twelve Hundred Choice and Carefully Tested Receipts, Embracing All the Popular Dishes, and ... Invalids, for Infants, One On Jewish Cookery, -
All those good, old saws about the right and best way to live -- "Waste not want not," "Necessity is the mother of invention," "You reap what you sow," etc. -- might have sprouted from the earth of the family farm. This week we hear Part 2 of my friend Janice's experiences growing up on a farm in the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts.
Her story covers much of the arc of food disruption throughout the history of America's food ways. She remembers riding the broad back of her grandfather's plow horse, which drew his hand-guided plow through the rich alluvium he farmed. His ingenuity and deep roots in Polish farming practices (along with his fellow farmer immigrants) helped to replenish thoroughly depleted soil, used up by decades of a mono-crop, broomcorn. (Their town, Hadley, for years reigned as the broom-manufacturing capital of the nation.)
Janice's father, who raised his family on the same farm and lived across the road from his parents, furthered the diversification of their farm, growing seasonal vegetables. Her grandfather tapped maples, as described in last week's episode. He raised honey bees to ensure pollination of the farm crops.
Every family member contributed to farm labor. From her childhood chores, Janice took away the lifelong gifts of valuing hard work, play in the fresh air, and family. She also learned to relish the extraordinary gifts of nature on the beautiful river bank that seasonally flooded the farm meadows and deposited rich nutrients in the soil.
The economic picture is one of classic entrepreneurship -- making something out of whatever one has at hand to work with, plus the talent to recognize a market need, plus the discipline to work hard. Listen to Janice tell of her mother, Natalie's, brilliant, disruptive idea that transformed butternut squash from food waste into the forerunner of packaged, pre-cut vegetables that are the profit center of every grocery-store produce section today. Natalie built and burnished her marketing network, ran the road-stand sales operation, and managed the farm's distribution relationships that connected them to the big market in Boston.
Nothing on Janice's family farm went to waste. Small potatoes became a profit center (with savvy word-of-mouth marketing). Her grandmother raised chicks, collected eggs, and "processed" non-laying hens. No fuss, no waste. Even the feathers were transformed into treasured, snugly featherbeds for all her children and grandchildren. As Janice puts it, "'Waste' was not in her vocabulary."
Vegetables that were not sold at the farm's roadside stand or to the local market or distributor were preserved, either in a cold storage bin or by canning. The way Janice puts it is, "Modest income, but rich in experience."
The childhood Janice describes sounds idyllic -- the way we wish we could raise our kids now -- with delicious, home-grown, home-preserved food, and nature close at hand. Belying the Rockwell-esque scenes were the hard times -- endless rain that ruined an already contracted-for summer crop; never-ending chores; the blights and brutal winters. Hope and ingenuity won out most of the time, however.
This glimpse of farm life, not even a generation away for many of us, and yet ages away in terms of our food system's evolution, helps us understand why we buy groceries the way we do today, and what it might take to get back into a closer relationship with the farmers struggling to bring us good food.
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