Building an Equally Ambitious and Intentional Business

Thelma Ferguson:

Let me ask the two of you: what could we, either individually or collectively as a society, do to ensure that we have the abundance of healthy, nutritious food for both our children and for our populations?

Sara Menker:

There’s this very famous quote that says, “Eating is an agricultural act.” Our interaction with our food systems and agricultural starts from the minute you wake up on your cotton sheets to the food that you eat, the fuel that’s in your car potentially because that’s ethanol or biofuels or biodiesel, whatever. It is so embedded in our lives and yet we completely live ignorant of it. As a company, one of the big strategic decisions I made, which was a very costly decision in the beginning but has paid off largely, really for us now, is we decided to be neutral. And that meant that we refused to take any capital from any investor that came from the agricultural industry.

Thelma Ferguson:

Which truly falls in line with some of the conversation you and I were having, Shazi, around education.

Shazi Visram:

So we just had this infant formula crisis, which should have never happened. And in our country here in the U.S., most foods’ secure. I don’t know if we all know this, but half of the babies born in our country are born into the WIC program. So that means that they rely on the government for nutrition, for maternal and infant health.

Thelma Ferguson:

These challenges are so monumental in so many ways. What keeps you up? What is it that gives you the most angst?

Shazi Visram:

There is a developmental health epidemic. Autism is gonna affect 1 in 44 babies born today, 1 in 6 children will get a developmental health diagnosis, ADHD is 1 in 10, asthma eczema, you name it. It’s what keeps me up.

Sara Menker:

For me, it’s just…the world we live in today and you think about the price of food and how much the price of food has gone up around the world. So, we have some structural disruptions that’ve happened back to back to back for the last 2 and a half years on the supply side. And on the demand side, we’ve had structural changes where population continues to grow in different parts of the world. And so demand actually has, regardless of these price changes, demand hasn’t receded. And so to me, my biggest worry is…we are just on the verge of some… economic shocks that are gonna get worse and worse. So I think the thing that keeps me up is how are we gonna rally the people that need to be rallied as fast as they need to be rallied to put some dent into this because the pain is real. Something that either weighs you down or it’s something that motivates you and I use it as…for every no I get as fuel to keep me going. So…and it’s worked thus far. It’s hard, but it works.

Thelma Ferguson:

What are you most proud of?

Sara Menker:

I think I’m most proud of the fact that we built a pretty significant business now that is respected as a brand in the industry that we serve without ever having to compromise our moral compass. And so it’s never been a tradeoff for me about wanting to be very ambitious about the scale of the business I wanted to build, but also the scale of-- the ambition of the impact that we wanna make.

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