Holiday book list! ...and Food is Politics

plus, startup lessons hard learned & my holiday wishes for you 🎄

In this post

• New book recs and books in review: holiday reading

• The risky things food founders do and what you can learn

• All food is political now so stop purchasing raw milk, okay?

• And lastly, my holiday wishes for you

Startup lessons learned

When I started my almond butter company I was married with four young children, a husband, and a house. Rex and I looked at each other and said how much money are we ok with never, ever seeing again — and that’s how much I had to start my business. Smart, right? When things went better than expected, and I needed more capital to grow, we “lent” it more money — and this is the trap most founders fall into, again and again, before they are ready.

Around that time I read a book, the first of it’s kind, about the bootstrapped founder Heather Hale of Oregon Chai, and I said I’d never make the mistakes she made, even though it all worked out in the end, like every Guy Raz episode of How I Built This.

Stupid things Oregon Chai founder did

• max out credit cards

• lie to her mom about needing money for grad school

• missed DSD windows because her Subaru kept breaking down

• sourced from unvetted suppliers

The thing is, while these lessons seem obvious and you’re tired of hearing them, when caught up in it all, they are hard to avoid. This book is almost 20 years old, but it’s my first pick for your holiday reading because you’ll see parts of yourself in the story.

On the other hand I give you Lynda Resnick, the self-described marketing genius behind Wonderful Pistachios, Pom Wonderful, and Fiji Water who created brand narratives that built dominant brands.

Take her access to endless capital and farmland aside, this book is worth the read. Other annoying tidbits:

• getting away with questionable health claims (remember when Pom compelled consumers to “cheat death”)

• aggressive business tactics - her husband is storied to have blown up the pistachio marketing order to dominate the industry with Paramount Farms

• environmentally fraught products - one word: water

Still, if you can stomach it, every marketer should read how brands are built.

Reading list continued below, but first:

Food is not just status — it’s politics

I was the mom that made my own apple sauce and brought homemade baby wipes to the park. Snacks were wrapped in wax paper, milk had a cream top. I belonged to a CSA. Santa Cruz hippie kind of stuff minus the homeschooling and flowy skirts. Looking back, I was being extra, on my way to almond mom.

So when one of my adult kids accused me of being on the wrong side of politics at Thanksgiving because of the raw milk in the fridge I was like, here it is, it really doesn’t matter what I’ve been doing my whole adult life, today, raw milk = dirty capitalism and it’s my fault! (For the record, I have stopped buying raw milk because, bird flu).

While we speculate what RFK is going to do on food & ag, no where is the politicizing of food more egregious than infant formula.

Reading the news, we will not have a secure supply of infant formula in the US because the future will be Made in America and it turns out the absence of free trade has been what stands in the way of babies getting fed properly and safely across the nation.

Is anyone paying attention to the timeline here?

The thing that happened to bring formula supply to a crisis was in 2022. Today, it is still a government bidding process that awards contracts in each state to the same big three — Abbott, Reckitt Benckiser, and Nestle Health Science. Those three dominate the shelf, where 50% of formula is purchased with food stamps (WIC).

A new breed of baby brands are ripe to disrupt this monopoly, but are up against bureaucratic politics. So while small producers wait on things like this bill for a tax credit which may or may not help them compete, bougie moms pay full boat to brands like Bobbie made with no corn syrup and made very hot by Molly Baz in Times Square.

We don’t need international baby brands, we need home grown competition.

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More holiday books:

I’ve recently heard from some of you that you can’t put Undressed down. So it makes the list. I wrote about it here

Here is a new one on preorder that calls out bad science and bad politics for influencing ag policy and I can’t believe the NYT published his opinion piece saying regenerative ag will be more destructive to the earth than industrial farming. By Michael Grunwald

From the opinion piece:

“[Ag] has already overrun about two of every five acres of land on the planet, and farmers are on track to clear an additional dozen Californias worth of forest by 2050”

followed by “factory farms are the best hope for producing the food we will need” and not by replacing it with regenerative agriculture, which he calls “a formula for agriculture to devour even more of the earth”

proposes ag tech solutions like miracle crops and genetic editing for what he calls better land ethics.

I have pre-ordered.

Other reads I have recommended on this substack:

• The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, by Mark Arax

• Raw Deal by Chloe Sorvino

• Ramping Your Brand by Dr. James Richardson

• Good Energy by Casey and Callie Means

• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

Happy reading!

🎄This holiday — be good to yourself, love one another, and make good decisions in business and life — and for heaven’s sake, eat what you want!

See you in 2025. It’s been a pleasure having you as a reader :)

All my best,

Jennifer