Meaningful Marketplace Podcast

Jenn Toplif was baking with her daughter at her parents house years ago. Her parents were in the food business when Jenn told her Mom she was going to get ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, her Mom commented, "That's SO pedestrian. Why don't you do something more interesting like macaroons?". It was seven years of perfecting the recipe of gluten-free macaroons, but after heart-to-he...

Jeannine Mills just decided to jump into a pool of jam, sink or swim. Living in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, Jeannine realized there was a plethora of fresh fruit, wine and alcohol brewing and put them all together. She's gone from the kitchen to co-packing but is now on a mission to build a radical new kitchen in the mid-range co-packing area - brand new. A combination of crowdfunding and pri...

Growing up in Detroit, Lisa's Dad used to take her to the eastern market, where she had some of her fondest memories of the personal touch between people and the food they eat. She remembers the cheese munger who would hand slice a piece of cheese and hand it to her. And the fresh grapefruit and the glassed in butcher shop at the center of the market. It made an impression. Although she started co...

Yana Yakhens started out at a baking company in Portland, Oregon, but always wanted to break out on her own. She had been experimenting with chocolate for some time and loved it for its qualities as well as the taste. The fat and oils help it maintain its taste through processing and makes it a favorite for food product developers. Her first idea was the HeartBreaker that she produced for Valentin...

Pure nut butter and delicious. Gluten free, no processed sugar and no peanuts, cashew and almond nuts only - not an easy task. But Julie and Carolyn slaved in the kitchen experimenting, getting friends and family taste testing until the first recipes were developed. And the variety of flavored nut butters is impressive, including lavender honey. And now they're authors, having just finished their...

Growing up in China, Qian Deng started as a biological engineer, working on fermentation that utilized e coli! Of course, that' a four-letter word in the food world, but in pharmaceutical research, it's pretty routine. But food science had a bigger appeal to Qian and the fermentation of both baking bread and making soy sauce became much more interesting to her. And creating foods with extra antiox...

Blossom vinegars are culinary vinegars and mixers for soda water and cocktails. The vinegars are for salads and additions, the mixers are a new generation. No added sugar makes the mixers stand out on the shelf. But people need recipes, and when Connie Rawlings Dristas recognized that, it turned things in an upward direction for the company. A mentor to other budding food entrepreneurs, including...

The Ryan family started their business out of necessity. Julie Ueland of Ryan's Juice recounts the story of how David Ryan began the company. David Ryan's father died suddenly when David was 15, and the family had a farm that grew a lot of apples. A doctor had given David's mother an apple pressing machine and she started making cider. The children sold it door-to-door, unpasteurized. When the mot...

In the beginning of her food journey, Laura Taylor has produced plant based meal accompaniments that are colorful, tasteful and mimic their mainstream counterparts beautifully. They are, as the website says, "mindful alternatives" to processed sauces, salad dressings and sweet additives. Even though the company is young, Laura's branding and organization for her distributors and retailer...

Katie McCarron's son had just graduated from college and jumped in to help the family business get started the first year. The background story: The family's dog, Rosie, was 14 at the time, and had started to go downhill, losing weight and energy. Katie started doing some research and began creating Rosie's food at home. Rosie began a remarkable recovery, gaining weight, getting stronger and livin...

Starting as a fisheries research biologist Idaho, Judy Goodman was a big outdoors person. Going on a hike with some friends, she took her homemade energy bars with her and her friends told her she had a dynamite breakfast bar recipe. Since it was the 80's and breakfast bars were only beginning to be accepted, Judy was ahead of the curve with her backpacker superbars. She made those for years, then...

Not originally a food guy, Michael Pan began his professional career as an engineer at Motorola. It taught him teamwork and controls to business, a great foundation for founding his company. While visiting family in Malaysia, his cousin gave him a bowl of delicious food that Michael thought was a dried pork product. When told that the dish was actually a vegetarian food that fit with his religion...

Named after her two grandfathers, Jacoba Gundle co-founded Mindful Proteins to produce a line of high-protein foods and beverages using clean ingredients. Sounds like a lofty goal? Well, it is, but their first product, restore is a protein water. Beautifully packaged, this original idea was inspired by Jacoba's enthusiastic exercise and yoga regimen. Getting protein in the body within 45 minutes o...

Author of the cookbook, "Cooking With My Mother", Haitian born Elsy Dinvil really didn't have a choice to be in the kitchen, it was expected of the women in the culture. So she cooked and cooked until illness struck her in 2005. For the next six years, she underwent tests and surgeries until she decided to take charge of her own diet and body. She developed her own recipes and figured ou...

It REALLY was a class program. In the University of Oregon's MBA program, Red Duck Ketchup was a project for Shannon Oliver (hope she got an "A"). Over a basket of Tater Tots, the idea was hatched. The Tots were flavored but the ketchup was definitely not and the idea of coming up with a sauce that matched the spicy food. Now in over 5,000 stores and expanding to barbeque sauce, cocktail...

Pretty straightforward beginning, Junea Rocha and her husband decided to bring their Brazilian cheese bread to the US market in 2011. But nothing stays straightforward. Junea went to Oregon State University's Food Innovation Center's "Recipe to Market" class that gave them a big boost developing a product to show to a buyer in 12 weeks. They were excited with their start, but it was a fu...

It's all about mung beans. To solve the long standing problem of lackluster flavor and texture in veggie burgers, Vivian Lee saw the mung bean as the golden ticket. And along the way, give people who want plant based food alongside their animal proteins. Mung Dynasty Foods is an infant company and Vivian is just now getting her veggie burgers in stores. Vivian is a child of Korean immigrants who l...

Cows are not cows at TMK, they're "Cowlebrities". Treating the cows with tender loving care and showing them at fairs and winning ribbons is part of getting the best natural milk on the planet. And it goes into fabulous cheese, soft serve ice cream - and vodka too. Tessa and Todd Koch also involve the community. They have tours seven days a week and show off the farm so they are transpar...

Starting after the last econ crash, around 2009, Lucinda left her vegetarian restaurant on Oregon's Coast to sell her packaged food products. Great Life By Lucinda offers butters and cream cheeses of imaginative flavors in the cold section of the grocery store. The dry products are the latest and becoming the greatest. You just add water to her veggie burger mix and you have a meatless meat produc...

Holistic health tonics. That's what Valeri Roth, of Mind Your Manna produces. Under the product name of Fire Brew (great name!) these all-natural drinks are distilled from plant nutrients and are akin to "drinking your daily vitamins". People take these power shots usually in two-ounce doses, each bottle contains about four shots. Drink with some sparkling water, mix it in with your food...

With Sarah Masoni at the Fancy Foods meeting with a Food Innovation Center contingent, Sarah Marshall talks with Yvonne Fide and Ian Levy In their third year in business, Momo Cocoa innovating and pushing forward. A new product in the brewing cocoa category, their tea is made with whole bean cacao, ground with a bit of black tea added. It is then roasted similarly to coffee beans, and is then brew...

Now we switch roles, Masoni interviews Marshall. Sarah Marshall's first food experience was her Mom's homemade approach to meals. Referring to her as a Hippie Mom, Marshall remembers her Mom's home-baked bread in a coffee can. Although not all that practical because it tended to crumble and had too many seeds, it was sweet and comforting and was a family activity. And it lead Marshall to the local...

The show hosts interview each other so you can get to know the them in depth; their background, experience, attitudes and ethics. In this episode, Sarah Marshall, founder of Marshall's Haute Sauce interviews her past mentor and now friend, Sarah Masoni of Oregon State University's Food Innovation Center. Masoni's mission is to help food entrepreneurs take their product to market successfully, or g...