The next Surgeon General wants to make Food Marketing obsolete
Why your startup might be hard to fund. Plus, how to show up on Reddit as a brand, USDA grants are back for Ag producers, and Shopify is hosting a celebrity brand conference
✅ Casey Means is tapped as Surgeon General and some people are mad about it. I covered what she and her brother / Trump advisor Calley Means are all about previously here.
TL;DR: Casey is the anti-establishment medical system drop-out founder of Levels, a metabolic health company. She’s a food-as medicine proponent and advocate for organic and regenerative agriculture that thinks America is sick because of ultra-processed foods. She wants to change from a society that treats symptoms to one that prevents disease.
So far so good.
But her nomination is drawing criticism because she doesn’t have an active medical license, for one —
I don’t know why this is such a big deal. When I have health questions I ask my M3 son, and if he doesn’t know he asks healthcare AI OpenEvidence.
Food becoming the hottest topic coming out of HHS — bigger than vaccines, food safety, and SNAP — feels right coming from Means who has very personal reasons for her views, views that include packaged food should come with warning labels from the Surgeon General (like with cigarettes) and that “claims on food, or ‘food marketing’, should become obsolete”.
Like so much in these first 100 days, we are told not to take everything literally. From Means’ book Good Energy are a list of recommended packaged foods:
Pre-revenue technical startups with long regulatory timelines or heavy R&D—and no experienced CPG operators—are the hardest to fund
✅ I’ve run across some exciting products and passionate, smart founders that aren’t getting funded because angels want market validation and executional competency.
Pre-revenue companies haven’t proven that consumers want (or will pay for) the product, and so investors can’t validate key assumptions around pricing, demand, or distribution, even on a small scale.
Similarly, if you don’t have someone on the leadership team that has been a startup CPG operator and has experience with retail relationships, margin management, manufacturing, supply chain, etc, you’ll have a harder time.
If this is you, try to get funding through academia or research grants and begin to build your audience. As you build your brand, start talking about the big thing you are working on. Then if it makes sense, launch a simpler product that will be immediately relevant to your audience. Getting some commercial traction, even small, will go a long way to prove to investors you can execute.
Are you on Reddit yet?
✅ 40% of Reddit posts mention products or brands and 25% of posts and comments specifically include a recommendation according to Reddit
But please, you have to know how to use Reddit or else you will ruin it for all of us. Please go on there to add value not thinking of it as a sales funnel. Use it for brand awareness and audience building. Employ social listening. Engage in conversations to educate and answer questions, and in turn get insights from your audience.
When brands tell me they want to do consumer research but have no budget this is one of the things I tell them to do.
You can also use the platform to inform product design. Ramen brand Immi used Reddit to inform R&D: “we found a bot online that would scrape all of Reddit and send a Slack notification when certain keywords were mentioned”
Ag producers — Grants are back!
✅ If you are a food producer you may qualify for between $25k - $1m in grant money from the USDA. Need a grant writer? Get in touch with Wooten Grants
Shopify is putting on a celebrity brand conference
✅ The Talent Commerce Summit will be for brands, investors, talent managers, creatives, and athletes involved in the creator/celebrity led economy. It’s free to attend but tickets are limited and acceptance is not guaranteed. All decisions are at the collective discretion of the Talent Commerce Summit committee. Priority will be given to talent-led brands, talent agencies, creatives, & entertainment executives.
Good luck!
All my best,
Jennifer
Great topic!