The Food Disruptors

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...

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,...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...