Ever wish you could sit down with a super-accomplished person and ask, “What does it take to break into your industry? What’s it like to be you? And when you’re looking to hire someone, what does it take to impress you?”
With Pick My Brain, that’s exactly what we do. Enjoy this week’s installment featuring organic food producer and advisor Myra Goodman.
Question:
You’re the co-founder of a highly successful food company called Earthbound Farm Organic, with products sold in stores, worldwide. But it all started on a small farm… right in your backyard! What made you decide to go bigger? And how did it all happen?
[Myra]: My husband Drew and I knew virtually nothing about producing food when we moved onto our little raspberry farm in Carmel Valley, thirty years ago.
I was just twenty years old and Drew was twenty-four, and we had both grown up in New York City. Our time on the farm was just supposed to be a short stopover while I prepared to apply to graduate school for international relations.
Pretty soon, though, we both fell in love with living on the farm and we started growing greens and baby lettuces for local chefs — as well as for ourselves!
To save time, we started washing and bagging salad in individual zip-lock bags, so that making dinner each night could happen much faster.
Pre-washed salad in a bag…what a concept!
It may seem hard to believe, but back then, when you walked into a grocery store, grabbing a quick “salad in a bag” simply wasn’t an option. You could buy a big head of iceberg lettuce, and… that’s about it.
We were convinced that “salad in a bag” could be a revolutionary product, so off we went — innocently confident that we could tackle the huge challenges of bringing a whole new product to the marketplace. We never, ever guessed that packaged organic salads would eventually become a multi-billion dollar industry.
So, what made us decide to “go bigger?” Well, basically, we didn’t have a choice! We quickly outgrew our little backyard garden. The demand for packaged salads was bigger than we could handle all by ourselves, so we started to buy lettuces from nearby farmers to get the supply that we needed.
We took out no loans for a very long time and grew slowly, by investing our earnings.
Many years — and many salads — later, we grew to the next level by selling Earthbound Farm to an amazing organic food company called WhiteWave Foods, which also owns Silk (best known for their non-dairy milks) and Horizon Organic (a full line of organic dairy).
Drew and I are currently advisors to WhiteWave, and it feels like the company we started in our backyard has the perfect home to grow, while preserving its original values — beautiful food, grown by people who care.
Images: Myra Goodman.