San Francisco based Good Food Foundation does so, so many things. Support is the one word that comes to mind, but hardly begins to enumerate this multi-faceted organization and the impact they are having on helping America eat better. Their website says it best in their mission, that they exist of help the “passionate and engaged, yet often overlooked” food entrepreneurs who are being authentic and responsible “in order to humanize and reform our American food culture.”. Now that’s a big idea, but it takes follow up. The Good Food Foundation supports all those passionate and engaged people with five big, key programs that build incredible awareness for those folks. First is the awards program, a rigorous process by which the winners receive huge awareness and publicity. Second is the nearly 500-member guild, where membership is based on meeting high standards and is an amazing arena in which to talk shop. Fifty percent of American food dollars are spent in the grocery store, and the Merchants Alliance is where those store owners practice putting only the best food on their shelves. The Mercantile program is the grand trade show series, which includes the big NYC show and a Traveling Mercantile. These shows bring 350-800 retailers and media to meet with 200 crafters to show their stuff, each in the same size booth. The Fund program is a work in progress, to intensify innovative programs to unite crafters and merchants to keep good food in front of consumers. Their work has given immeasurable help to growers, ranchers, makers and merchants who buck the big corporate trend. How did this great effort get started? The Executive Director, Sarah Weiner (yes, there are three Sarah’s on this episode; try not to get confused) jumped into the fray fresh out of college. As Director of Communications for the Slow Food International Office, Italy, she became a staunch leader for the food movement. Moving then to California, USA, she became Alice Waters’ (famous author and national public policy advocate for universal access to healthy, organic foods) “Girl Friday”. Sarah then went on to produce a cavalcade of successful event; Slow Food Nation with 85,000 guests, Organic Food Festival with 20,000 attendees and Sips and Suppers, a fundraiser launched with Alice Waters, Joan Nathan and Jose Andres. These events evolved into bigger visions and missions, including Farm to Desk in Washington, D.C. organizing gardening, classroom and cafeteria programs in public schools where food topics were part of the curriculum. It was the Good Food Awards Project that really blossomed. The first event in San Francisco drew 2,000 entries from all 50 states and from there the team launched project after project, which ultimately became the current five programs of the organization. And the foundation of each of those programs is based on those two important themes: Authentic and responsible. Social media: @goodfoodfdn. Website: goodfoodfdn.org. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall, Sarah Masoni LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-masoni-67182a23/.

#126 Supporting All Those Rebels Swimming Upstream - Sarah Weiner, Good Food Foundation

“You gotta make a buck” is the driver for entrepreneurs in Hannah Jodoin’s view. Her parents were always involved in restaurants and loved food, and always took the family to popcorn and kettle corn booths for snacks so popcorn became a family staple. Then, a friend suggested that popcorn wasn’t that hard of a way to make a buck as a side hustle, and that spurred her on to set up a kiosk in a local mall. With an small, electric movie-style popper, it took two batches to fill a bag, so it was a terrific lesson on how important production was to a business and its revenue. They then moved up to festival sized equipment with propane heat and started serving their popular treats on a large scale, making more revenue and profit in a shorter time frame. This led to their first breakthrough, the Portland Farmer’s Market. There they developed a loyal clientele and also a big buy in from the community who gave them great suggestions on new flavors, which the family, in turn, produced. Miss Hannah’s Gourmet Popcorn took off. As we have mentioned many times before, our host Sarah Masoni had a hand in helping the company get off the ground with her advice and wisdom. Early on, Hannah’s parents took some of the popcorn to Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center of which Sarah is the Director to get her opinion on the commercial appeal of their product. Sarah’s positive review and encouragement was pivotal in the company having the confidence to dream bigger. Hannah’s involvement has been from the beginning, obviously, but there was a detour in her life. Her college degree was going to lead to a profession in the Christian ministry, but she came back to work in the business for a summer and that led to a unique job title for her. She was in charge of figuring out how the business could operate without a family member always being present to produce and sell the popcorn. At the time, their storefront was a kiosk and Hannah put together all the procedures and training so that employees could operate the kiosk successfully and free up the family members to work on marketing and sales. They now are focused on opening up distribution on more grocery stores to keep spreading the brand name. Along the way, Hannah has dug into how popcorn is grown and become somewhat of an expert as to the pollination of the crop and how large popcorn is developed. You can buy Miss Hannah’s Popcorn at their storefront in the high-end Bridgeport Village in Lake Grove, Oregon, or their manufacturing facility in Newberg, Oregon, also the heart of Oregon’s wine country. There also are various retailers across the Pacific Northwest, including our sponsor Market of Choice. For those not in the area, order online. And their gift boxes really are a work of art so think about Miss Hannah’s for a special surprise present. Website: https://www.misshannahspopcorn.com/contact, Twitter - @Hannahspopcorn, Instagram - @misshannahspopcorn, Facebook - @misshannahspopcorncorn, Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall

#127 "You Gotta Make a Buck" - Hannah Jodoin, Miss Hannah's Gourmet Popcorn

We need great food entrepreneurs, and they need great marketing and promotion. Enter Jyssica Leilani, marketing guru. She and our host Sarah Marshall met when Sarah was taking a business course through RAIN – Regional Accelerator and Innovation Network – where Jyssica was speaking on social media and all the available marketing channels for budding entrepreneurs. What Sarah particularly enjoyed was how Jyssica empowered her audience to find their own voice for their companies and to express it in a way to make it exciting, individual and interesting. Female entrepreneurs often “stand in our own way” as Sarah puts it, and Jyssica does a great job of coaching people through that. Sarah Masoni adds that women are often reluctant to do something unless they are 100% certain and it’s hard to be brave and take risks for many of them, which Jyssica tackles. She does all these wonderful things through her company, Style Opal, a social media and online agency for brands and entrepreneurs. That list of services covers social media management, email marketing, photo shoot and video content creation and influencer marketing. Jyssica’s background has helped her approach to her business. She grew up loving acting and singing, and having fun is part of her success and her client’s success. And singing is a natural foundation for finding a client’s voice as well. Acting also adds to her power to dig in and really understand the brand, the audience and get the feel of a product. Sarah Marshall makes the point that finding the voice means the voice of the product and what it says to the audience, not necessarily the voice of the entrepreneur. What counts is that the audience “gets it” and makes an informed decision to buy or not based on how it fills their needs. Jyssica says you do that by seeing your marketing as going to one person. Ask how that one person is receiving that Instagram or FB post. Analyze how they process the visuals, sound and words. Ask if you are conveying the benefits that make your product incredibly special and seemed to be custom made for that one person. Jyssica keeps close contact with clients with monthly touch-base calls; what’s new?, what’s exciting?, what’s changed? that help keep messaging fresh. And she asks the offbeat questions such as, “if you WERE a beverage, which one would you be?” to get more insight into the personalities behind the company. Jyssica also urges her clients to video themselves every time they make a product, to demonstrate the hands on craftsmanship of their product and then send it to her to create a reel or a story. Which goes to Sarah Marshall’s point that hiring a social media agency doesn’t mean they are taking that function away at all, they are making it more consistent and more meaningful. Visit Jyssica’s website for this freebee: A worksheet page from the Instagram Bootcamp workbook, her Ideal Follower Avatar Mad-Lib worksheet. The link to download that is bit.ly/followeravatar.   Website: www.styleopal.com. Listeners: You can save 20% on Jyssica’s self-paced, virtual Instagram Bootcamp course at www.styleopal.com/instagram-bootcamp, using the special code MARKET. @StyleOpalMedia, @UpperLeftLadies, @Jyssica.Leilani (her personal), Facebook Group: Upper Left Ladies for soul-led entrepreneurs and leaders, Pinterest @StyleOpalMedia. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall

#128 Let A Singer Help You Find Your Voice - Jyssica Yelas, Style Opal

Co-founder and Director of Operations Chris Baily saw a need in the local Portland community for offering co-packing along with the expertise to guide food entrepreneurs through the gauntlet of successful commercialization. Coincidently our guest, Hannah Kullberg, Business Development Director, was at the SBIC seeing the same gulf between food startups and becoming successful food companies. The need was definitely there to assist these fledgling companies and help guide them over the hurdles. They met, decided on a strategy of offering entrepreneurs co-packing, the first step between the entrepreneur’s kitchen and the grocery shelf, and additionally the experience of Hannah and Chris to fill the knowledge gap to success. Hannah had the background for certain. While co-founding and scaling The Better Bean Company from farmers markets to national distribution, she intimately experienced the barriers to success. Over nine years building Better Bean Company she held all roles in the business including business development, sales, marketing, HR, basic accounting and operations. While operations manager, Hannah implemented a HACCP program and supervised three-fold growth in production, adding equipment, new filling lines and hiring new team members. She took the business through Non-GMO and B-Corp certifications. As sales and marketing manager, she launched the product into several new regions growing sales and velocity. They applied for a grant from Business Oregon to launch and even talked about that on our show on Episode #29, January, 2020! And so was born Community Co-Pack, or COCO as those on the inside call it. Currently with about 10 clients, Hannah and Chris have worked out the kinks of their startup and are producing entrepreneurs. Hannah fields inquiries in a very efficient manner. Inquirers fill out a form which also links to a mutual NDA and her calendar to schedule a call. Then begins the screening process. Criteria are pretty simple, as COCO’s equipment and resources don’t fit everyone’s needs. However, referrals are a big part of COCO’s services, as they believe in helping everyone build a strong food community. COCO has a fryer for snacks, a pouch packer, a blender for beverages, can do light vegetable processing and can do fresh also. They want to offer more services, but they also stick to their knitting for the present. And they want to focus on their local community, even though they have been approached by potential clients from out of the area. Hannah stays true to her calling and her mission to collectively build an equitable, regenerative, resilient, regional food system. Website: https://www.communitycopacknw.com/ Instagram - @communitycopacknw @hannahkathrynkullberg Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall

#129 Co-Packing with the Whole Package - Hannah Kullberg, Community Co-Pack (COCO)

You have a delicious meal in front of you. You chew, you taste, you swallow and enjoy. You think nothing of it. But a huge group of over 25 million adults and children cannot perform this pleasant daily ritual without great pain because of a swallowing difficulty called dysphagia. This condition forces them to a diet of very soft or pureed foods that are bland or filled with sugar and with very limited choices, so add boring to the long list. Although not afflicted with the condition, Dr. Reva Barewal relates to the pain and suffering of all those who are. Born in India when babies were delivered via forceps, her jaw was crushed. Consequently, she did not eat well as a baby and her parents and doctors could not diagnose the cause. The family moved to Canada, where more advanced medical analysis revealed the reconstruction that needed to be done to her jaw. Dr. Barewal then spent her life from childhood up to the age of 17 either in a dental chair or the surgical suite, science teaching her jaw to grow to the correct shape. During that period her only choice of diet was soft food because of the pain she experienced with food of any real texture. That is when her experimentation began, trying to find soft foods that were enjoyable and delicious to eat. It’s also when she decided to help others with jaw configuration and chewing issues as she had experienced. But first, culinary school at age 16 to learn more about cooking those soft foods people with those issues could enjoy. Dr. Barewal went to Cordon Bleu from afternoon until evenings while attending dental school from morning until noon beforehand. Ambitious. She then decided to help people diagnosed with head and neck cancer, because when going through those treatments, the patients had severe chewing and swallowing issues and she was determined to help them. So she moved to the US and her company, Savorease, was born. Since her work with cancer patients, Dr. Barewal has discovered that people who have suffered a stroke and people diagnosed with dementia and many others also have trouble with chewing and swallowing, and her soft foods can help. There is another discovery: When people eat with their fingers and not utensils, they tend to eat more food. For those having trouble gaining weight or coming off trauma and needing to gain weight, her finger-food snacks are the perfect answer. The company’s product offering is extensive, which certainly helps prevent boredom for its audience. Recently launched is the vegan cheese snack and both the harvest chicken and popcorn are longtime favorites. Her pediatric line is extensive too and is famous for its soft, quick-dissolve characteristics. Sales have been through the website and institutional sales through entities such as hospitals, where her snacks are used to help stroke patients not only get nutrition in their bodies, but also using the finger-food aspect to teach them to chew and swallow again. Senior centers and memory care centers also are huge prospects for Savorease as she continues to expand her marketing plans. One challenge has been to overcome the misunderstanding of texture. Even though Dr. Barewal explains that her snacks do not need chewing, that they simply melt in people’s mouths, there is a suspicion built into every sales prospect. You can view the product line at her website, www.savorease.com and follow her on: Instagram, Facebook and Linked In. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall. Instagram - @masoniandmarshall

#130 You Don't Have to Chew to Swallow - Reva Barewal, Savorease

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. Yes, that’s backward from the original prose, but that was how Becca Christansen, Co-Founder of Portland Salt Co, and her partner got started. It was December, 2021, COVID/pandemic when things couldn’t look bleaker that they took the entrepreneurial plunge. Becca’s background is certainly tailor-made for business, having a finance and sales resume and 18 years in the fast-moving technology sector. She and partner Justin loved and lived to travel the globe and enjoy each culture through its local cuisine. Their passion helped them find their way into some of the world’s top restaurants and learn from famous chefs. They had always felt that the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean held the finest salts on the planet and so it became their hobby to harvest it and enhance it with spices to highlight the flavors in different foods. Their steak salt became famous in their circle of family and friends to the point of being asked for shipments of the condiment. But it was the worst of times - the lockdowns during COVID – that increased the frequency and quantities being requested to the point of propelling them into birthing their new business, The Portland Salt Co; the best of times. Much of the magic of the company is in the balancing of the purity of the Pacific sea salt with the added herbs and spices. Becca wants the cooks and chefs using their product to spend time and effort over the stove and not extra prep time blending and mixing spices and rubs. All this comes from Becca’s lifelong love affair with food as a lens into people’s enjoyment and culture. She loves to cook and entertain, so she definitely has her audience in mind when creating condiments and rubs to add to their ceremony of preparing meals for family and friends. Obviously, the company is young. And Becca’s time in hi-tech is not over, Portland Salt Co is a side-gig for now until it takes on more popularity. However, the couple has accomplished much in a relatively short time. You can find their products on select grocery store shelves in Oregon and Washington, including those of our sponsor, Market of Choice. Also, you can order from their website, which is very tastefully done. There are individual condiments, spices and rubs in addition to terrific looking gift packs. Their website reflects their philosophy of being in business: “Connecting through culinary experiences is our love language. We hope our products inspire your cooking and lead to delicious adventures and lasting memories of your own”. Website: https://portlandsaltco.com/ Instagram: @portlandsaltco Also on LinkedIn and Twitter. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall Instagram - @masoniandmarshall

#131 Definitely Pass the Salt - Becca Christansen, Portland Salt Co.

A Pacific Northwest camper, hiker, fisher, and ocean swimmer. That’s the growing-up bio of Aiyesha Christian. And being the super outdoors person, Aiyesha also was obviously a big consumer of trail mix to keep her nutrition gauge from going empty. But the trail mix she found was just too dull; either too much salt or too much sugar, always the same ingredients and definitely not enough flavor. Aiyesha loved her outdoor life and wanted all the diversity, flavors, freshness and spirit to be reflected in the food she put into her body, especially when she was on the outdoor trails – being a nomad of course. She had the food background to begin her venture, having worked in restaurants and having tended bars. She began the grand experiments in her kitchen and her friends and family ooed and ahhed over her creations. Some of them also steered her to the Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center in Portland, Oregon and straight to the Director, our show host Sarah Masoni. Sarah was duly impressed with the great taste of the trail snacks and immediately encouraged Aiyesha to continue with the recipes and learn how to commercialize her products so that more people could share in her discovery and the Nomad company began to take shape. One of her first big wins was being part of the Food Innovation Center’s holiday markets, where she became introduced to Market of Choice, one of our show sponsors, and got signed on to be displayed on their shelves. Each flavor of Nomad mix has its own special story, Tide Pool to represent the coast, Forest for the woods and so forth. But Aiyesha has a guideline for each product and flavor. Each bag contains at least one type of seed, nut, fruit, and vegetable. It is gluten free, paleo, and almost vegan except for locally sourced honey as the only added sweetener. All the snacks are great to share with your pet, but Aiyesha is contemplating a pet line of snacks as well. So why this foyer into the saturated market of trail snacks, a market that is old, dominated by big food companies that bought up all the small ones years ago and have all the shelf space already taken? In one of her Masters of Business classes, Aiyesha was introduced to the book, Blue Ocean Strategies, that talked about finding new opportunities in old, stodgy markets. This gave her the insight to find her new opportunity and she is making the most of it. Her packaging is exquisite and truly reflects the mission of her company, and the website is impressive. Grocery store shopping is localized in the Pacific Northwest currently, but all products are available online. And in alignment with Aiyesha's love of the outdoors, Nomad gives a percentage of profits to partnered organizations that focus on the protection, rejuvenation, and integrity of our precious communities and environments. Website: www.nomadmix.com, questions: Info@nomadmix.com, IG: @nomadsnackmix. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.

#132 Happy Trails to You - Aiyesha Christian, Nomad Mix

How do you spell CAT? Wrong. It’s CATT, at least when you’re talking about Catt Fields White, the high-powered organizer, teacher, consultant, author, podcaster and believer in connecting farmers and those who believe in nutritious, creative foods through 21st century farmers’ markets. Her background prepared her well for this path, starting out as a food writer, then becoming a marketing consultant for restaurants, then a construction project manager for a company that built restaurants, then a turnaround consultant for restaurants. One of her turnaround clients, after receiving Catt’s advice, simply offered her their restaurant and so she operated it for a few years. Then she took all that accumulated knowledge and shared it with independent restaurant owners through a trade publication she started from scratch. But after the kids were grown and out of the house, Catt tired of the car-oriented life of Phoenix, AZ and moved to downtown San Diego, CA where almost everything was accessible on foot. The only thing missing was grocery shopping. The few Italian delis in Little Italy didn’t add up to a full shopping experience for fresh items, so she offered to the Little Italy Association to start a farmers’ market and with all her restaurant and purveyor contacts, began putting the pieces together. The idea was to split the profits and so everyone agreed. However, about six months into operation, the Association felt the traffic was too light, the market was an embarrassment to the neighborhood and wanted to shut it down. Catt convinced them to give it a little more time and that turned out to be the tipping point, success from then on. Dubbed the Little Italy Mercato in 2008, it has grown into the county’s largest weekly year-round farmers’ market, stretching over six city blocks, with 180 tents any given Saturday and around 22,000 attendees. They have added a Wednesday market so that local neighbors can shop without the crowds. Just as Catt shared her restaurant knowledge as a consultant and publisher, she began sharing the steps to her farmers’ market success with other farmers. She founded Farmers Market Pros to make the journey easier for small farmers, food makers and other market managers and to advocate for farmers markets’ critical place in local food systems. She usually worked in conjunction with community associations and business improvement organizations, stayed close to operations until managers could be transitioned in. Now with Farmers Market Pros, she consults all over the US and is headed soon to Canada and the UK as her fame and reputation keep growing. Farmers Market Pros is where Catt offers education to farmers through her Vendor 101 program series, a conference called InTents: A Farmers Market Conference, and her weekly podcast, Tent Talk. All meant to educate and help farmers be successful. Find out more at cattwhite.com, Instagram at @farmersmarketpros and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/FarmersMarketPros. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.

#133 Real Pros Are Always Learning - Cat Fields White, Farmers Market Pros

You might say Eryn Domeyer and her husband got “hooked” on fishing originally as a hobby, then as a sport, before it became a business for them. After getting married, they moved back to the Pacific Northwest and were invited by friends to do some Albacore tuna fishing. They loved the excitement. Soon, they were keeping score with their friends in how many fish they could catch and even entered some fishing tournaments. Because they were good fishers, they had more catch than they could eat, so started giving it away to friends and family. After they had been told their fish was the best their friends had ever tasted, the entrepreneurial question popped up: “Would people actually PAY for our fish?”. So in 2014 they began fishing and selling Albacore, halibut and salmon out of Ilwaco, Washington. The trio offering is what spawned the name Tre-Fin; three kinds of fish. Then in 2019 they expanded their harvest to ling cod, rock fish, petrale and more. Commercial fishing for salmon did not work for them after awhile and the company switched to sablefish as a replacement. The company has an official designation as a Community Supported Fishery, CSF, making their fish on your dinner plate a hyper-local event. It works like this: Customers sign up as members of the CSF and pre-order and pre-pay for a certain amount of fish, usually in five or ten-pound boxes. This gives the fishers not only a goal of fish to catch so they don’t over-fish, it also gives the company and employees financial security for their season. Then from July through October, the Tre-Fin crew goes out on one boat, in and out each day. They line fish, meaning they only use a pole and catch one fish at a time. Each catch is brought into the boat using a gentle net, not a piercing gaff. Each fish is handled by a person, not a machine, and each is hand-cut, fresh frozen and sealed for the freshest meal possible. The boxes of fish delivered are of the same weight but not always the same number of cuts, or loins as they are called. Since no two fish are alike and since they are custom cut, they loins vary a bit in size and shape, but that is the hand touch, authenticity and specialness that customers are looking for from Tre-Fin. Members can order one kind of fish or an assortment and there are multiple pickup locations in Oregon and Washington during certain days and times to get their fish. Home deliveries also are possible. The stability of a CSF also allows Tre-Fin to deliver quality fish at a slightly lower price than other markets. The creed of Tre-Fin’s founders is simple: Sustainable fishing. They only catch the number of fish that have been ordered, they only fish for healthy stocks and they only fish their local waters. This is a very powerful concept that provides conscientious consumers with a mechanism to enjoy eating fish harvested in a responsible manner. Website: https://trefinfoods.com/. Instagram - @dayboattuna. Facebook -@Tre-Fin Foods. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.

#134 One Fish At A Time - Eryn Domeyer, Trefin Foods

It’s definitely a journey from working in the farm fields that provide the restaurant food to owning the restaurant itself, but that’s what the De Leon family of Portland, Oregon has done. The journey started in 1973, and this interview marks the grand opening of Lucy De Leon’s newest restaurant, Salsas Locas. They operated their first restaurant for 23 years before moving to the current Salsas Locas location. The business started, not surprisingly, in Mrs. De Leon’s kitchen Lucy De Leon’s Mother). She specialized in tamales and salsas for family and friends. Then the usual entrepreneur script played out; word of mouth made her delicacies popular and she and family realized a business could be created. In addition to serving these and more items in the restaurant, the De Leon enterprise sells the tamales, different flavored salsas and flavors of burritos to local grocery stores, including in our sponsor’s stores, Market of Choice. But the family has always been about community as well as commercialization. Their generous farm to school program serves the children. A written goal in Lucy’s office, she wanted tamales on children’s lunch plates and has had that dream come true. And it has come true thanks with help from another of our show’s sponsors, Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center. Their programs helped Lucy and team navigate the regulations and food formulations so that the meals could meet school standards. The family has also adjusted the tamale fillings to each particular school district. Districts with large Hispanic populations prefer meat tamales with red sauce. Others prefer vegan tamales, green chili and cheese and other combinations that the company has willingly accommodated. The story behind this is a typical one of “right place, right time”. Lucy was at a food show where Portland Public School personnel were also attending. The supplier of their tamales was a California company whose building had just burned down, leaving the PPS high and dry. So after the introduction, Lucy was asked if she could have 15,000 tamales ready in one week. Of course, every entrepreneur answers “Yes!” to the opportunity, then figures out how to deliver later. But Lucy figured it out, made good on the order and it has been a solid relationship since. Lucy’s parents started the business and while in college, Lucy decided to take a year off and join them. All went well but COVID forced her parents to retire and now it’s Lucy running the business with some part time help from her husband and her son when he’s not in college. The company currently employs 32 working the restaurant, wholesale, retail, school programs and catering businesses. Catering has its interesting story too. Lucy worked farmers’ markets for eight years promoting her products. It was tough, rigorous and sometimes disappointing work, but the exposure gave her gigs that got her brand out in the community and lead to her current success. Lucy credits her work ethic to her parents, migrant workers with a dream. One of her father’s sayings is, “The sun shines for everyone, but you have to go get it!”. Website: https://salsaslocas.com/. IG @salsaslocas. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.

#135 Go Get Your Sunshine - Lucy De Leon, Salsas Locas

It was tummy troubles for founder Julia Baker in the summer of 2018 that created the impetus for the company to be called Brothy. Or to put it far, far less delicately as Julia says, she spent a lot of 2018 “on the toilet”. The issue of gut health has been the inspiration and desperation that has caused the birth of many a new food product, and Brothy is a classic example. Her tumultuous journey lasted for about a year, trying traditional medicines to alleviate the condition without success. A naturopath friend suggested Julia had leaky gut and wondered if Julia had tried bone broth. And as we have seen in many of these shows, a desperate person will try anything so Julia started eating broth which turned out to be the magical cure. Julia stresses she was definitely not the stereotypical food entrepreneur. She didn’t grow up in the kitchen playing with recipes and delighting in serving a great food to a big table of family and friends. In fact, she grew up going to restaurants and leaving the cooking to others. Who knows what caused Julia’s abdominal problems, but the extreme discomfort and looking for relief has lead to becoming founder and CEO of her own company and reinforces that necessity is most assuredly the Mother of invention. But Julia didn’t just go to the store and get off the shelf broth. Absolutely not. She went to farmers’ markets, sourced high-quality, local ingredients and started experimenting and formulating her own recipes. After a couple of months, Julia began feeling better, much better. She continued to make bone broth a staple of her diet and soon began to share it with family and friends, always having a big mason jar of bone broth in the refrigerator. Then her story became a more traditional food startup story. The friends loved it, asked for more and so Julia took the plunge and started a business to introduce her broth to the world. About a year old now, the company is getting traction as many people are experiencing the healing power of broth. The healing power, in Julia’s opinion, comes from all the collagen that gets extracted from the bone and surrounding tissue. One of the amino acids related to good health, collagen is prominent in helping repair the leaky gut Julia’s naturopath friend had diagnosed. Not recognized by traditional medicine, leaky gut is thought to be caused by stress and a diet heavy in processed foods that tend to deteriorate the gut lining, causing leakage. This then disrupts food digestion, causes inflammation and leaves many people, “on the toilet”. The recipe for Julia’s bone broth is not traditional, she has her science down. The simmering will be 24 hours or so for chicken broth, up to 72 hours for beef bone broth. Julia’s broth, however, is made by roasting the bones with vegetables in avocado oil before they go into the simmering pot. This brings out a better flavor she has found. Brothy can be purchased at Portland, Oregon area farmers’ markets or their website and shipped to your home. You can find Brothy at, website: https://www.brothypdx.com/, IG: @brothypdx on Instagram. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.

#126 Supporting All Those Rebels Swimming Upstream - Sarah Weiner, Good Food Foundation

Meaningful Marketplace Podcast