Aishwarya Iyer & Ellis Singer McCue Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. Each week, we feature interviews with the most interesting culinary personalities around. For today's show, I have interviews with two very different CEOs in the food world.
Aishwarya Iyer is the founder of Brightland, a beautiful company known for its olive oils and other pantry items. Aishwarya and I have known each other for a long time, full disclosure, because she was my intern back when I worked at Lancôme, the French beauty brand. Aishwarya will tell us more in just a minute.
Later in the show, I'm joined by Ellis Singer McCue, CEO of Territory Foods, the healthy meal delivery service that I have relied on more than a few times. I love how Ellis thinks about business and systems, and the future of food, so stay tuned.
Are you looking for some great gifts for family members and friends this holiday season? Well, team Cherry Bombe has some fun gift guides for you. The first two are on our site right now. Our gift guide for the at-home chef, presented by Chronicle Books, has nifty tools, pantry staples, and books you'll love like Abra Beren's Grist and Katherine Pauline's A Dish for All Seasons. We also have a gift guide for the cheese lover, presented by Cypress Grove, which includes beautiful boards and a variety of specialty cheeses like two of my faves, Cypress Grove's Humboldt Fog and Midnight Moon. To explore the gift guides, head over to cherrybombe.com.
What else? Well, I hope you've all checked out our special baking mini series called She's My Cherry Pie. Our host, cookbook author Jessie Sheehan, talks to some of the best bakers around, including Cheryl Day of Back in the Day Bakery in Savannah, and Lisa Ludwinski of Sister Pie in Detroit. Get all their tips, tricks, and secrets just in time for your holiday baking. We drop a new episode every Saturday, so make sure you are subscribed to Radio Cherry Bombe so you don't miss a single episode. And thanks to the sponsor of She's My Cherry Pie, California Prunes.
Now, let's check in with our first guest. Aishwarya Iyer, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Kerry, I'm so excited to be here.
Kerry Diamond:
I am so excited. How long has it been since we've seen each other?
Aishwarya Iyer:
I think it's been at least four to five years. And fun fact that I think everyone needs to know, I used to work for Kerry back in 2007.
Kerry Diamond:
As?
Aishwarya Iyer:
As an intern at L'Oreal, specifically Lancôme, and Kerry was six levels above me. There was a coordinator and then a senior coordinator, then a manager, then a VP, and then an SVP, and then there was Kerry. To this day, some of the notes that you gave me about success and business, and you really set the standard for me for what it means to be poised and gracious.
You may now have known it or seen it, or even noticed that I noticed, but I noticed everything. It's just really wonderful and really special to be back here in this way.
Kerry Diamond:
Aishwarya, you're going to make me cry. I'm sure a lot of folks listening have no idea I had a previous life in the beauty industry. I was the head of PR for North America for Lancôme, the beauty brand, and we had a great time working there. We worked with some really fantastic people.
Anyway, welcome. I have watched what you have done with so much pride and amazement, and neither of us ever thought we'd be on the paths that we found ourselves on.
Aishwarya Iyer:
No, absolutely not. 10 years ago, I would've never thought I'd be where I am now, but now looking at it, I think to myself, "Yeah, it makes sense." The interest in food, and food as such a central part of every family conversation, and part of my family and where I come from and what we talked about, I'm not surprised in some ways.
Kerry Diamond:
When I was doing my research on you and Brightland this weekend, and I saw that the official launch was 2019, I was like, "How is possible that Brightland has only been around for three years?" I feel like you've done such a good job getting the brand out there and getting into people's pantries. But three years? For some reason thought you'd been around for a decade.
Aishwarya Iyer:
That is such a compliment and so nice to hear. But it's also crazy because it also means that three years has gone by, people are used to seeing us, which means we have to keep reinventing who we are too.
Kerry Diamond:
And we wrote one of the first articles about you so I knew it wasn't a decade. But you know what? I think it's these pandemic years. They're like dog years.
Aishwarya Iyer:
They are.
Kerry Diamond:
Multiply them all by seven.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yeah. And the foundation for what it means to start a brand, everything has shifted too. You have every type of person, whether it's an influencer or just an aficionado of a certain topic or subject, they're all starting their own companies.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, you've teed up the next question very nicely for me. Thank you, Aishwarya. I would love to know from your perspective, why have we seen such an explosion in young women launching food and drink projects?
Aishwarya Iyer:
So I think that, one, the optimistic side of me says, "Well, I think it's because you need to see it to believe it," so when you start seeing other entrepreneurs who've been doing this for a while, who are amazing women who are a few years ahead of you, you start saying, "Okay, maybe I can do that too." I think there's the seeing to believing.
I think that there's been a movement towards, if you look at almost every industry, whether it's beauty, whether it's home, fashion, lifestyle, you look at every industry and there's been some disruption. Emily Weiss really is a great example of somebody who just took beauty and turned it on its head.
Kerry Diamond:
Emily, the founder of Glossier.
Aishwarya Iyer:
The founder of Glossier, yes. And I think that we're seeing that in a slew of industries, and food and beverage is no different. And I think that we have young, bright-eyed, really incredible entrepreneurs walking through grocery shelves saying, "Why have things been done this way?"
I think there's a representation element. If you're a woman of color, person of color, and you're saying, "Why were these foods and these staples that I use in my home," or this entire massive culture community uses in their home, and you're not seeing it represented on the mainstream shelves, "Why can't my ingredients and my sort of heritage and culture show up as the demographics and psychographics of this country are changing?" So I think there's all of that. Then there's also the fundamental fact that the barrier to entry to start a business has actually come down a ton.
Kerry Diamond:
That I would like to know more about. Explain what that means.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Fifteen, 20 years ago, if you wanted to start a food and beverage company, first of all, there was no D2C, like, "We're going to go directly to consumer consumers by our own website."
Kerry Diamond:
And I should define all these terms you've been using. D2C is direct to consumer.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yeah. And 15, 20 years ago, there wasn't really an opportunity to build a website that then would have people coming to it. Maybe 10 years ago, there was, but from what I hear 10 years ago, the folks that were starting D2C brands, like the founder of Bonobos, the menswear company, or Warby Parker, the eyeglass company, they spent almost $1 million on just their website.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, yeah. I don't remember exactly what years this happened at Lancôme, but when we had to rebuild the Lancôme site, that was a multimillion dollar project. And when we had the websites for our restaurants, it was tens of thousands of dollars. Today, you get a Squarespace account and it costs you maybe a few hundred dollars a year if you get the top tier account.
Aishwarya Iyer:
That's right. Exactly. You nailed it. Well, first, from a distribution standpoint, 15, 20 years ago, you had to play the old school grocery game from day one. Really there was a lot of gatekeeping. There was no way to even get in.
And then direct to consumer has brought some of those barriers down. But then something like a Shopify. For a consumable or a brand that needs to sell things, it's the equivalent of Squarespace. It's super reasonably priced and you can work with a designer and come up with something.
Look, at the end of the day, there are still barriers and there are financial barriers. Of course, it's not just, "I spent $500 and put the site up." People are still spending thousands of dollars, but it's not millions of dollars.
Kerry Diamond:
That is such a great point. The website platforms, the shopping platforms, the Etsy's, the Shopify's, even what social media has done in terms of letting you do marketing, although that has changed and we'll probably talk about that because of the much discussed algorithm.
The part that I wonder have the barriers come down is in the making of the actual product and the making of the bottles, the boxes, the shipping, whatever your specific product is, going out and actually getting the olive oil made, getting the breakfast cereal made, getting the gummies, whatever your product might be.
Aishwarya Iyer:
That's an amazing question. I ask myself this all the time because I'm not sure how everyone is able to source and start these brands, to be honest.
I would say for certain industries, like beauty for example, it is easier than ever because... Well, for every industry it's easier than ever because of Google. You can Google almost anything and find some manufacturer. If you are looking for, let's say beauty again just for fun, and you need eye cream lids, you can find 100,000 of them on Alibaba.
So places like Google and Alibaba that didn't exist, now exist, so it's a lot easier.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk specifically about how Brightland came to be. Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur one day?
Aishwarya Iyer:
No, I didn't. I definitely was not one of those. I didn't have the lemonade stand. I wasn't sitting there dreaming up business ideas or thought I would even go to business school. I wanted to go to business school because I thought maybe it would make my parents proud of me because I didn't become a doctor. But it wasn't predicated around me becoming an entrepreneur of any kind.
It really came from just cooking at home a ton, realizing that I didn't know where a lot of the foundational foods that I was eating where they were coming from, how they were made, getting intrigued by olive oil specifically, and going down a deep rabbit hole.
And then honestly, Kerry, I had a lot of self-doubt. I was like, "I'm not an influencer. I'm not famous. I'm not a chef. I'm not in food."
It was a lot of what I'm not, and then I had to do a lot of my own unlearning of, "Why am I just talking about what I'm not? How about what I am? I am pretty creative. I am a pretty good storyteller. Why can't I lean into the things that I'm good at?"
Kerry Diamond:
Tell me what you were doing professionally at the time.
Aishwarya Iyer:
I was working at a tech company in corporate communications and public affairs.
Kerry Diamond:
And you had worked at a few companies like that.
Aishwarya Iyer:
I had. Yeah, exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
What drew you to that?
Aishwarya Iyer:
I think the storytelling element. I loved working at start-ups. I got my first start-up job in 2009, I think, and it was so addicting. It was amazing.
I joined at 30 people and we went up to 200 people, saw the ups and downs, saw the company eventually get acquired, just saw the whole thing. And I saw how fast we were able to move and I couldn't believe it, and so I said, "Oh, I always want to be around that." I knew that for sure.
Kerry Diamond:
So you knew in your head you could handle certain levels of complexity and speed?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes. And agility. Speed, agility, nimble, being scrappy, all of those words I think for some people are a drain, and for me it's energizing to even hear it.
Kerry Diamond:
When you decided, "Okay, I'm going to start to explore what it would take to launch an olive oil brand," did you think this would be a full-time thing one day or a side hustle?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Side hustle. Definitely a side hustle. And at first, I thought it would be a certification program. I didn't even think product because again, I came from tech. I never worked with a tangible tactile product before. I worked mostly in FinTech and then was working at a consumer technology company. So it went from B2B, business to business, to B2C, business to consumer, but it still was tech. And so I didn't think I had the chops to think about a physical good that you need to ship in some way. And so I was like, "Oh, maybe there's a techy component to this like certification or a tech system of some sort."
But then I started visiting these small mom and pop olive farms in California, because we had moved to L.A. I started visiting these small farms. They had olive groves. Some of them had vineyards too, but I focused on the ones that were predominantly doing olive oil, and A, I tried really beautiful olive oil for the first time. Besides I had studied abroad in Italy, but I was most of the time drinking too much wine and didn't pay attention to the olive oil I was eating. But this was the first time I really paid attention, was blown away by the process. They were educating us a lot.
And then I was also really amazed and intrigued by their business model. They were telling us, "Honestly, we're not really making any money and we're thinking about maybe pivoting into almonds or avocados because growing olives and selling them in California as olive oil is not a super fruitful prospect." I was like...
Kerry Diamond:
No pun intended.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yeah, no. No pun intended. I was like, "Wait, but why is that?" And it hit me...
Kerry Diamond:
Because they had such a beautiful product.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
Can we go back one step though? You didn't just show up on their doorsteps and start asking questions?
Aishwarya Iyer:
I did.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, you did?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Because I was going to say how did you even get access to them, to going to meet them, to walking their property, trying their product?
Aishwarya Iyer:
I just went on those tours that anyone can go on, initially. And then eventually, I started saying, "I'm working on a project, I'd love to speak with you." But initially all of these sorts of learnings and the puzzle pieces coming together, I was just a rando going in when they did Saturday farm tours and things like that. I would spend the weekend going to five, six farms at a time.
Kerry Diamond:
Dragging your husband?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Dragging my husband, and then just taking notes.
Kerry Diamond:
And were they receptive when you came back the second time or the third time?
Aishwarya Iyer:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay.
Aishwarya Iyer:
No. When I said I'm working on a project, that's when people were like, "Okay, goodbye." And then I took a class at the UC Davis Olive Center, I should add that too. And there was some foundational education. Even today, I don't call myself an olive expert. I would never want anyone to be like, "She thinks she's an expert." I am not at all. I know nothing about it. Very little, but at least I'd like to be able to speak about it a tad bit intelligent.
Kerry Diamond:
So tell us about this UC Davis program. That must have been fun.
Aishwarya Iyer:
It was amazing. It was basically an education around the sensory and chemical evaluation of olive oil, really digging into what does it mean to taste olive oil and understand all of its qualities, how to taste and identify bad olive oil. So we tasted olive oil that was musty, and fusty, and rancid, and had been infested with olive flies and larva that they had...
Kerry Diamond:
Good times.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yeah. It was fascinating. And then we also understood a bit of the chemical analysis like how important is a polyphenol count or a fatty acid count, and things like that.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, on behalf of your fans, and you know I am one of them, thank you for trying all that bad olive oil so that we could have beautiful Brightland olive oil.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
So you decide at some point, "I'm going to move forward with this, and I'm going the bootstrap the whole thing."
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
I remember when we launched Cherry Bombe, there was no business plan, barely a website. We did a Kickstarter. I was really not thinking beyond one, maybe two issues of a magazine. Where was your head at the time?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Similar. So my time in tech made me think, "Well, I don't think I want to raise venture money," because I'd worked only at venture backed start-ups, like a start-up that had raised $65 million, another start-up that had raised $20 to $30 million. And so I said, "I don't think I want to go down that road, especially with a napkin in my hand doing the napkin business idea thing."
And then on top of it, maybe it was that self-talk of who I was and who I wasn't. I was like, "No one's going to want to invest in this because I didn't work at a D2C brand or I didn't come from food, so why would anyone invest?" So I think all of those things together made me say "I'm not, unless there's actual..."
To me, there needed to be product market fit, so that's where I put the tech hat on of, "I want to identify solid product market fit and if I can, then maybe I will think about what it means to raise money, because I don't come from endless amounts of money so there was no way that I could just keep self sustaining this forever."
Kerry Diamond:
Did you look at the initial run as a test?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes, exactly. So it was 1,000 bottles, and I was like, "Great..."
Kerry Diamond:
You're not going to make money off 1,000 bottles.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Right. And I said, "Great, I'm going to put my all into creating the best website I can create, best photography." I worked with Casey Dobins and Julia Stokes, they are incredible food stylist, food photographer in LA. Y'all, they're so talented, and they really brought the brand to life. I said, "Here are the areas that I'm going to invest in and these are also the things that I feel comfortable having a strong point of view in." I always tell people it's never apples to apples. You have to lean into your strengths, and I felt like these were my strengths.
And then coming from that corporate comms background, I understood PR to a certain extent so I said, "Okay, well I don't know anyone in food so I can't ask anyone, but maybe I can find a food PR firm that'll want to work with me." And I cold emailed BeccaPR, and they took a meeting with me, which is crazy now to even think about how it all played out.
We all happened to really get along and we decided to start working together. And so I entered this era armed with 1,000 bottles, a website, good photography, and Becca PR at my side.
Kerry Diamond:
Did they think you had higher aspirations than you did at the time? Did you reveal to them how small you actually were?
Aishwarya Iyer:
No. They knew how small I was because they were like, "Well, we should send product to all these people," and I was like, "I don't have enough product." I think that they definitely were like, "What is going on here?" But they were really patient and kind, and I will forever be grateful to their generosity at that time.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. So you're with Becca, you've got 1,000 bottles to play with. Were you D2C or did you have wholesale accounts in the beginning?
Aishwarya Iyer:
The day we launched, we got outreached by our first wholesale customer, reached out, a store in Brooklyn and they said, "Oh, we'd love to carry you."
Kerry Diamond:
Which store?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Regular Visitors.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Oh, Regular Visitors. They carried Cherry Bombe too. They were up the block from my restaurants.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Well, they were a wonderful, wonderful space. They reached out, but I didn't go into it pre-launch thinking much about wholesale. I visited the Fancy Food Show. So for anyone in CPG brand world, I'm sure this Fancy Food Show, this part of the Specialty Food Association. I visited them about six months before Brightland started and I walked away just very overwhelmed, very in awe and humbled.
Kerry Diamond:
I've gone to that as a journalist just once and was so overwhelmed.
Aishwarya Iyer:
What did you think?
Kerry Diamond:
I was completely overwhelmed. It's just thousands of products, and products you've never ever seen.
Aishwarya Iyer:
And the hustle that everyone has. I stood in a corner and watched Natasha [Case] from Coolhaus talking to these brokers and distributors, and just hustling her way, looking like such a boss.
Kerry Diamond:
She's such a pro.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes. And I remember just stepping back, being like gulp.
Kerry Diamond:
And it's expensive to participate in those things. That's another barrier to entry for a lot of folks.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Thousands and thousands.
Kerry Diamond:
So you self-funded the whole thing in the beginning.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes. To start.
Kerry Diamond:
You didn't do a Kickstarter, you didn't do anything like that?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Didn't do a Kickstarter. I had worked in tech for a while and I started this company in my 30s, so I also want to point out to folks I had saved money. I also am married, so my husband and I both, he's not involved in Brightland at all, but we sat down and looked at our finances together. I came to the table I think with certain privileges and said, "Okay, I feel comfortable spending up to X amount of our savings on this endeavor."
And at some point then we also had the conversation of like, "Well I also need to get paid and this is not. We can't do this." And at that point, it had been about a year of Brightland. I kept having to say no to opportunities because I didn't have enough money for inventory or for PR purposes, or someone would say, "Do you want to do an event?" And I'd be like, "Well, I can't afford to pay the plane ticket to do that." And it got really old to say no.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you have to keep dipping into your personal resources?
Aishwarya Iyer:
I didn't. After the first time that I dipped into it, I didn't dip in again.
Kerry Diamond:
You were smart.
Aishwarya Iyer:
And I actually paid myself back from it.
Kerry Diamond:
You did the opposite that I did. Broke the 401ks, the credit cards, all the stuff you're not supposed to do.
Aishwarya Iyer:
But in the long run, who's to say? I immediately, my brain went into, "Okay, now I think it's time to go into investor mode." So I raised a round of funding from angel investors, a couple of funds. It was such a shit show and so hard.
Kerry Diamond:
How so?
Aishwarya Iyer:
It's so hard. Some founders are really good at it. They are just so...
A, the amount of time and energy that it requires, nobody talks about that. It is a full-time job on top of running your company, and you have to be on top of it. And then B, nine out of 10, it's a no, and so you have to be able to dust yourself off and keep going because you got to find the folks that are going to say yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Can you say how much you raised?
Aishwarya Iyer:
I'm not sharing that.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. But it was enough?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
But you had to stop self-funding.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes, exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
And that you could pay yourself a salary?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes. And hire, most importantly.
Kerry Diamond:
Next question. How big is your team today?
Aishwarya Iyer:
So the team is now 12 of us full time. We're still lean, but having 12 full-time amazing people to work with, it's been the best part of this journey, honestly.
Kerry Diamond:
What is your vision for Brightland today?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Oh, my God. I think there's the investor pitch version of, "We want to be X, Y, Z," but honestly, talking to you about it, Kerry, I just want us to continue building and creating really amazing products that people are really delighted by and happy to have in their homes, in their kitchens. That's probably the number one thing.
And I want us to have fun doing it because I think so much of it is people are taking themselves so seriously and we're included in that, and sometimes I just want to take a step back and be like, "We are so lucky to be able to do what we do. This is fun, y'all."
Kerry Diamond:
One of the evolutions I've noticed with your brand is you started as an olive oil company obviously, but with the extensions that you've done into things like vinegars, it's become this celebration of California produce.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes. Going into it, I was focused on olive oil, but in the back of my mind, I wanted to be so much more, but I wasn't sure what so much more meant, so I was like, "Let me let the customers tell us."
And so a lot of customers were emailing us and asking us about infused olive oil, so then we started introducing infused olive oils. And so much of Brightland has been about collaborations. We partnered with artists for our labels, for the infused oils. We've just had a lot of fun in those ways.
And then in terms of next extension, we kept hearing, "What kind of vinegar do you think I should use?"
And so we met these vinegar farmers in California. It's a husband and wife, and they make really incredible blackberry balsamic, citrus champagne, really amazing vinegars, and we said, "Oh, my God, why don't we introduce these into the mix too?"
Kerry Diamond:
You called them vinegar farmers?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yeah. They are. They call themselves vinegar farmers and vinegar fermentors.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, wow. And do they grow the produce…
Aishwarya Iyer:
They do.
Kerry Diamond:
That they then turn into these things.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. That's so exciting. I have to commend you on how you ship your products because I have ordered your products and I'm so disappointed when I get something and it's just a sea of unrecyclable packaging. I don't know how you do it. You're like Diaspora [Co.] in that you've got this origami cardboard situation. It arrives at my house. It's not broken miraculously, but it's all cardboard. How'd that come about?
Aishwarya Iyer:
It was exactly what you said. I didn't want the sea of bubble wrap. And we weren't doing that from day one. I used to ship every box for a while.
Originally, we did this very cute thing and the bottles weren't breaking, but the packaging itself was falling apart. So then we said, "Okay, I'm going to start wrapping it in that paper and adding some sustainable, quote unquote," I'm putting it in quotes, "Sustainable wrapping."
But that still wasn't cutting it. It still didn't feel like the right move, and so when I made my first hire, our director of operations, I was explaining to her and so she worked with our corrugated paper supplier and our box supplier, and together, we came up with this solution and I'm really, really pleased with it because it cuts down a lot of waste.
Kerry Diamond:
That's great, and I hope other folks follow suit. How have you changed during this journey?
Aishwarya Iyer:
I think I'll look back on it in a few years and probably be able to identify things. I've always been a relentless optimist and a little bit of that has gotten chipped away from me, I have to tell you. Part of me just isn't as optimistic as I used to be and I miss that a little bit.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm still optimistic but I am not as naive as I was in the beginning.
Aishwarya Iyer:
And that naivete though is so lovely. If I knew what I knew now, I would not have even started this.
Kerry Diamond:
See, I think I still would have.
Aishwarya Iyer:
You would have?
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. There are definitely mistakes I would prefer I didn't make and things I would like to do differently. Now that I know what I know, and how much I love Cherry Bombe, I think it would break my heart.
Aishwarya Iyer:
That's true, if it didn't exist. In that sense, yes.
Kerry Diamond:
All right. How are you taking care of yourself mentally and physically these days, if at all? And I hope you are.
Aishwarya Iyer:
I do. I put my phone away a lot, so I don't spend that much time on my phone on the weekends. I don't really work on the weekends.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, my God. You got to tell me how you do that.
Aishwarya Iyer:
It's just I refuse because I don't want to ever resent it.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you work out? Do you meditate?
Aishwarya Iyer:
Yes I do. I jump rope. I want to get into meditation a little bit more. I have two dogs so I go on really long walks with them. I cook a lot on the weekends.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, I am so proud of you. I have no idea how you wound up as my intern all those years ago, but I am grateful.
Aishwarya Iyer:
I can't tell you how instrumental you've been, whether you know it or not, in my career and just becoming who I am. It's much appreciated.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you again. It's so good to see you, and I've just been cheering for you ever since I found out you were doing this project.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Thank you so much, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
And good luck with what comes next.
Aishwarya Iyer:
Thank you. Thank you for having me today.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you so much to Aishwarya for joining me. If you'd like to learn more about Brightland products, head to brightland.co. Now let's check in with Ellis Singer McCue from Territory Foods.
Ellis McCue, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Thank you so much for having me.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's jump right into this. Where did you grow up?
Ellis Singer McCue:
I grew up in a really small rural community that's between Boston and Providence and Western Massachusetts, so it's a nowhere land, and grew up on acres and acres, so 20 acres of farmland, really beautiful and just an interesting community, super rural.
In high school age, I used to go down to Providence, Rhode Island all the time. I went to high school there. And it's such an interesting thing to be a young person with the urban rural dichotomy and just the difference in art, music, literature, what people do, how they build themselves. So uniquely privileged to have experienced both, but now that I'm in my mid-30s, I'm longing for space.
Such an urban dweller from age 16 on, and now I'm like, "I wonder how many acres I can buy somewhere and have a farmhouse." I feel like you end up where you start.
Kerry Diamond:
Was it a working farm?
Ellis Singer McCue:
It was not, no. My parents bought it. It was a former farm and it was a budding conservation land. They built a farmhouse in the middle of it and then let all of the shrubbery, the greenery regrow. And so as a kid, we used to plant a garden. For sure, it was one of the earliest things I remember with my dad. I would just take a walk. I would just walk around and get lost in the woods and all these things, no cell phones, no tracking devices, parents didn't know where I was. It's a different world.
Kerry Diamond:
Same. I think about that. My mother had no idea where I was walking through the woods and down by the beach. It's a miracle I wasn't kidnapped.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Totally. And growing up in a rural area that's economically pretty depressed, I think it gives you a unique perspective of how you build a business and things like that.
My parents they would never have called themselves entrepreneurs because that's a very millennial thing to say quite frankly. My dad was a dentist. My mom ran his office, and every single night they worked after dinner building their business. Every single weekend we all worked in the office together. And when I was nine years old, I knew how to do dental medical billing, and things like that.
Kerry Diamond:
Wait, now I'm looking at your teeth, which are hiding behind the mic.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Perfection.
Kerry Diamond:
You have very nice teeth.
Ellis Singer McCue:
I have dental kid teeth for sure. But it's so funny because I think it cemented my work ethic for a really long time, that's just, "Are you building something bigger?"
And my dad and my mom both, they did a ton of community service and give back, and because we were in a rural area, there's this great family story where my dad traded somebody a lot of dental work, which is expensive and not usually covered by insurance, for a pig. And it shows up on my mom's birthday and she's like, "I did not want a pig for my birthday," And he's like, "We have this pig now," and she's like, "I don't want this." So they were...
Kerry Diamond:
Wait, for a second I thought he had to do dental work on the pig, but no pig was the...
Ellis Singer McCue:
Traded.
Kerry Diamond:
Got it.
Ellis Singer McCue:
He traded because he was about health access.
Kerry Diamond:
I think that's amazing.
Ellis Singer McCue:
They were on the Navajo Indian reservation in the '70s and I think it really cemented just the idea of equity of health and giving back to the community, and so they plopped us in this really rural area where he just wanted to build a really good community. It's the foundation of how I view entrepreneurship, for sure.
Kerry Diamond:
I can see all these seeds being planted and just knowing what you're like today. What were your favorite childhood foods?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Oh, man. Lox. I'm a lox and bagels girl. My family's here in Brooklyn, lower East Side and everything like that, and I can put down lox like you've never seen before.
And now the best part is my three year old daughter takes it down so much. She will eat four ounces of lox for dinner. It's a very expensive habit. But my favorite food growing up was probably lox and bagels.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Toasted?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Oh, yeah. Toasted and scooped out pumpernickel, capers, onions.
Kerry Diamond:
Scooped out?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Scooped out. My grandfather, I don't know why he would always scoop out his bagel, and I just picked it up as a habit.
Ess-a-Bagel, one of my favorites on 2nd Avenue, you walk in, you're like, "Can I get it toasted, scooped out?" And they're like, "No." They will toast it for you when you get out.
Kerry Diamond:
It's got to be toasted.
Ellis Singer McCue:
It's got to be pumpernickel also. It's an underrated food, pumpernickel.
Kerry Diamond:
You know what? Maybe I'll get that for my next... I don't eat a ton of bagels, but boy do I love cream cheese and lox on a bagel.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Oh, my God. It's so good.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you cook as a kid?
Ellis Singer McCue:
I cooked for myself a lot. My mom worked full time and I was killer at making SpaghettiOs out of the can. One of my college favorite foods is cold Chef Boyardee out of a can. Revolting stuff. I cooked a lot.
My mom actually is a phenomenal cook. She cooked all Middle Eastern food growing up. She's not Middle Eastern but it's her favorite palette, so she educated herself a lot and had tons of cookbooks. She makes the best baklava in the entire world. I've not had better baklava in my life, and I crave her baklava from my childhood. It's so good.
But she cooked a lot and we ate a really clean diet, very microbiotic. We didn't eat a lot of meat. We ate a ton of fish. I think we had red meat on the table maybe once a month, and that's because it was very much just part of the ethos that she had behind eating. And then when I became older, I would cook for myself. I started thinking about health and wellness a lot and for me, health and wellness is science, and so I would always experiment with different ways of eating and different inputs and things like that.
And then in college I was broke, so then you cook for efficiency and utility. And I'll tell you one jar of peanut butter, soy sauce and ramen noodles, just amazing.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, you made the leap for me so, let's talk about, you went to Johns Hopkins?
Ellis Singer McCue:
I did, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Why did you go there? What did you study?
Ellis Singer McCue:
It's an interesting story. I looked at 36 colleges.
Kerry Diamond:
36 colleges?
Ellis Singer McCue:
It's a lot of colleges.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, my God. We're so different from each other. 36 colleges. Oh, my god.
Ellis Singer McCue:
I think I applied to 24.
Kerry Diamond:
It's expensive.
Ellis Singer McCue:
It is expensive. But I think for me, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in the international space from the beginning. I love cross-cultural everything.
My grandparents in the '70s traveled all around the world and they retired early and then just lived this fabulous life, and so I grew up with these slideshows of India, and Iraq, and Iran and all these places that were not standard. And we would sit through them, my cousins and I, and we'd all be like, "Oh, my God, when will these be over?"
But it gave us this or gave me, especially, this wanderlust around finding multicultural experiences and a sense that you should always be moving and always be looking for something really different. I went to Johns Hopkins for International Studies. It's the best international studies program in the world, I would say. My husband loves to make fun of me because he says you went to the best engineering college in the entire world and you didn't study engineering.
I studied East Asian studies, international studies with a double minor in econ and history. So I love school and Johns Hopkins is a great place to go. And I also wanted to get out of the Northeast. I found it really stifling from a community environment perspective. And I didn't want to be in New York. I wanted to experience something different. I didn't go that far, but it's a great university.
Kerry Diamond:
Did your dad want you to be a dentist?
Ellis Singer McCue:
No, he would never wish that on anybody. He actually went to school for astrophysics, Carnegie Mellon in the '70s and then his dad was a dentist, so he became a dentist.
I think he would've loved for me to have gone into that trade. Looking back, I have a really good friend who's a kick ass female dentist in San Bruno, California. She's a great life. I don't think it gave him joy. I think being a business owner gave him joy. He felt a lot of responsibility to his employees and everything like that, but I think the teeth itself was not his thing.
Kerry Diamond:
Got it. I love my dentist. Shout out to all the dental hygienists out there, you all have a tough job.
Ellis Singer McCue:
That's true.
Kerry Diamond:
All right, so no food career yet, even though you're a foodie. You love to eat.
Ellis Singer McCue:
No, I just love to eat. I love to eat.
Kerry Diamond:
You work at Deloitte. I know what Deloitte is, kind of don't know what Deloitte is. Tell us what Deloitte is.
Ellis Singer McCue:
So I graduated right at the beginning of the recession or early stage of the recession, and I actually had wanted to do capital markets research for Bank of America or something like that in college. So I was going down that track.
I had this amazing internship where I was doing research on the retail sector. I've always loved retail and fashion. And my mentor who was this amazing guy who had been in Wall Street in the '80s and then lives in Baltimore and had a single shingle shop, it was great.
Kerry Diamond:
A single shingle shop. Say that three times faster.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Just him and nobody else. He basically was like, "Hey, the whole market's going to crash." This is 2006/7. He was like, "Don't go into banking. It's going to be bad if you go in." And I was like, "I don't know. All my friends are going into banking." And he was like, "No, no, no."
I started to look around for careers and I saw these consulting info sessions, and I went to the one for Deloitte. And as the technology practice, Deloitte Consulting Technology Division is best in class, and it's about basically bringing technology to businesses and organizations, and helping them solve their business problems. And I basically said, "Man, if I can learn how to speak Mandarin Chinese, I can probably learn to code SQL [structured query language]. It can't be that much harder."
I went to the partner, Dan Collins, who's still at Deloitte, he's a fantastic guy, and I basically just convinced him to give me a chance. I was the only non-engineer that started that year, which was really interesting. And the best part about Johns Hopkins is it's full of engineering people and they're all so nice, and by the time they're done with Johns Hopkins, they're so ready to do something else, and so we're best friends still today.
And we all started in 2008. The market was crashing. It was totally crazy, and it was this interesting moment to do something really different. It's nice to be fresh out of college because you have green eyes on everything. For me, because I come from a non-technology background, but have a mind for systems, I started to think structurally about how technology it kept people out. If you didn't have the money to go to an engineering school or the guidance to know that's what you like, it kept people out. And so I started to say, "How do we make this more inclusive?"
So when I was at Deloitte, I worked largely in large scale Oracle ERP [enterprise resource planning] implementation. It's the most boring technology ever, but what it is is a standard set of business processes, so how you do financials, how you do procurement, how you do your supply chain.
And what would happen is we'd deploy $10 million of software and Deloitte's the best. Nobody's better. We'd deploy $10 million of software and then they'd be like, "I'd to customize this for another $20 million." I was like, "Why?" Deloitte is like, "Sell the work. Just get the work sold."
But for me it was this really interesting moment of if you have something that's out of the box and the standard way to do something, why do you make it more complex than it needs to be? It was just interesting to me to hear from people what they thought was special about their business and why they said, "I need my APD [appliance parts distribution] process this way, or my inventory has to flow that way."
And I started to form this hypothesis really early in my career around complexity, and started to look at it more structurally and say, "Why are businesses complex?" Or if they are complex, how does that drive value for the end consumer? And are they getting paid appropriately to actually have that return on complexity investment, really early macro level business insight at a time when I'm deploying software.
And what I did with my insight both about consulting technology, and business was I invested myself a lot in Deloitte and I rebuilt the business technology analyst program so that it was more accessible for people coming from non-technical backgrounds.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, I'm going to jump to the next step in your career. The Gap.
Ellis Singer McCue:
I love The Gap, honestly. It's a great place to work. I spent six years at Deloitte, deployed Oracle systems all around the world, spent the last part of my career in Japan, Germany, Singapore, working with great multinational companies. And I realized that deploying Oracle was not my passion, no surprise.
I landed in San Francisco, and at that time in San Francisco it was the coolest time in retail. I love fashion forever, but I love the business of fashion. I've never been like somebody who's like, "I want to be a designer, a model or work in media." I've always said, "How do you make the system work better and how does it all come together?" So with all the cool start-ups, Everlane, Bonobos, Roth's, these cool start-ups in San Francisco at that time because it's 2013 timeframe, I went to The Gap.
And I went because I was scared of going to a start-up. And coming out of consulting, I'm like, "Do I have any skills? What is my worth?" Which I think a lot of women face at that 20-something timeframe where you're like, "Do I have skills or have I just been kidding myself this whole time?" I went to The Gap. My first day I cried because I was like, "I have made a huge mistake." And what I found was I came to a part of the business that was very, very tough because it was the 44 international markets that are all owned by franchisees.
So the way franchising works, is franchisee-franchisor relationship, is that Gap around the world is not wholly owned by Gap. It's run by people who are experts in their local markets. And the reason Gap takes this strategy across the five portfolio brands that it has is that these are places that are hard to maintain retail, meaning they don't want to have physical assets, they don't want to do the hiring, the firing, they don't have local language skills, whatever it is. But there's a place for the consumer brands.
The franchisees are amazing, but they're customers. You have two customers. You have a customer and a consumer customer. So it's double responsibility, small team. And the supply chain side of the house is run out of San Francisco, the business development side is out of London, and the merchandising and product side is out of New York, so we're culturally quite different, but an incredible business to be a part of at an incredible time.
Because the supply chain team in San Francisco had made the decision that everything needed to flow through Hong Kong or the U.K. to get better unit economics and efficiency on shipping, the whole business broke because all these people who are in the Middle East, great franchisees, all of a sudden had a month more time on the water and $0.60 more per piece.
And it's a great globalization story because it's very much how do you solve for the one versus the many, and how do you balance these things? So my first day I cried because it was just so much. And I started with finance and I just said, "What's broken here?" The team, the people, the culture are amazing at Gap, incredible, and they had just really entered this different space at a chaotic time.
Started with finance, then started to fix the supply chain. I bounced from finance to supply chain. I went overseas and I worked in London doing business development. We launched Gap India, Old Navy UAE [United Arab Emirates], and then we started to experiment, and it was at the time that e-commerce was getting really, really big.
And I remember Sean Kern who was the EVP of supply chain at that time, he's the COO now and he is top, he's amazing. I was sitting in his office and he was my mentor. So lucky the time that I got with him. And he said to me, he's like, "Ellis, I think e-commerce is going to be 35% of our sales this year." And I was like, "Yeah, in five years it's probably going to be 75%."
And it was this interesting moment of these age retailers that have inventory positions and they have stores and they have this older way of working, and then you have the modern consumer, and the modern consumer lives brands in three dimensions. They live it in content, they live it in what they see, they live it in social, they live it in touching and inventory and all these things.
And it's how do you change the whole retail ecosystem to serve that customer at the time when the consumership of the customer is accelerated? Because this is also when fast retailing took off and Zara and everything like that. Just a crazy time. And then sprinkle in the fact that it's international markets that you don't fully own on top of it. It's just a chaotic moment. But I loved it and just loved solving those problems, loved experimenting. And bless Gap because they let me do whatever I wanted to do. I think they saw entrepreneurship and were like, "We don't know what to do with this so we're just going to let it do its own thing."
Kerry Diamond:
So you can be entrepreneurial within the confines of a corporation?
Ellis Singer McCue:
You can and it takes such good senior talent. I have to say Michael Richardson who was my boss and he's the SVP of international, he's at Columbia Sportswear now, he's arguably the best boss I ever had because he was like, "I don't know what to do with you, but I do trust you."
Kerry Diamond:
We're going to take a big leap in time and jump to Territory Foods, which is where you are right now. You started as a VP of Strategic Finance, if I remember that correctly, and then you moved up to COO, and today you are the CEO.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us what Territory Foods is.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Territory Foods is a direct to consumer fresh food platform. What that means is that every week we connect to health seeking customers with delicious, healthy, fresh prepared meals and some select CPG goods made locally in their community. It's a really interesting business model. For anybody who knows technical architecture, it's many to many marketplace, which is the hardest kind to build. But it's really amazing because what we do is we bring together supply and demand for healthy, delicious products, and we do it in a way that's connected to the local community.
If you're looking for healthy food and you are in New York City, you can get it from a lot of places because you have a plethora of abundance in New York. But outside of New York, you're usually going through the mail, you're getting something delivered from City of Industry, California or Edison, New Jersey, and it shows up in a UPS box with a heinous carbon footprint behind it and it lands there, and then you eat your food.
And maybe you're eating healthfully because you want to lose weight or maybe you want to mitigate your blood pressure, maybe you have diabetes or maybe you're just like a working mom who has no time to cook, trying to do something a little bit better. And it's an interesting thing because the consumer need is there.
Convenience is so important in this environment, especially right now, especially post pandemic. To make the convenient choice a healthy one and to make it one that's good for the body, good for the climate, and good for the local community, that's really what we do. So we're the only ones out there doing it. We use a distributed supply chain. It's a very complex operating environment. It's all different chefs, restaurants, caterers and so on and so forth. And we bring it together through technology and operations
Kerry Diamond:
Your food is not being shipped from very far away. It's being made by people within a certain distance from where you are.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Territory, some of you if you're regular listeners, you'll know Territory was a sponsor of ours, thank you very much for supporting us. And I do try everything from our sponsors and I had never tried Territory until they'd reached out to us and I fell in love with the product. And I'm on the time saver side of the equation. It's a godsend when you're really busy and I really appreciated having something healthy. And you and I have had a lot of talks about the sustainability aspect of things like this, which we will talk about, but the food's super tasty. You all do a really good job with the curation.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Food is emotion, food is love, food is community, food is identity. If I tell you that to be healthy you have to eat steamed chicken and broccoli every single day, you're not going to do it. You're going to do it for a week, you'll lose the weight you want to lose or do whatever you want to do and then you'll just revert.
And I think that creating a healthy food identity that is diverse, that reaches all types of people and all types of tastes, is super important. But for me, it comes down to product acceptance. If you love the food, you will order again. If we create a great service for you, you will order again.
We work with so many amazing chefs and artisans, and they're true artisans. They're real chefs. They cook in small batches. They love the product. They love the food, and it really shows in the end
Kerry Diamond:
We'll talk food safety. I know that's a big part of what you do. How do you ensure that what's going out is safe?
Ellis Singer McCue:
That's the amazing thing about our business. We're an 11 year old start-up, which is categorically unsexy. Nobody wants to hear that we're an 11 year old start-up, but we are, and I don't hide it because I think our age makes us better. I think we're like fine wine. But what happens when you're an 11 year old start-up is you invest. You invest over time, and what we have built is a best in class food safety quality assurance program that operates entirely remotely in the chef's kitchen through digital tools, all the way through a cold chain that delivers it to your home.
And what we've done is we've used best practices from all different types of jurisdictions and things like that, and we get in the kitchen of the chef and we talk to them about what food safety is. And yes, we have standards that they have to operate to, of course, but then we are also constantly evolving how we bring safety to different formats and different units.
It's amazing to me because it's an investment that nobody wants to talk about and especially I would say consumer investors from 2016 through 2020 didn't want to have this conversation because they're just like, "Get the food out. Get the food out." But it's so important. It's just foundational because when you something in your mouth, it's the most risky thing that you could do. I'm super proud of the operation that we've built, and the investment that we've made, and the safety that we ensure for everyone who buys from Territory.
And then for me also, it's making the whole culinary community better. When we invest as Territory, the investment goes to our chefs and we help them with safety, we help them with HR, we help them with finance. God knows during the pandemic, they're calling me being like, "How do I get a PPP loan? Is that something I qualify for?" And that's the amazing thing about working with a network of small businesses.
36% of our chefs are BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color], LatinX owned businesses. 42% are women owned businesses, against an industry average of 7%. And it is my absolute pleasure to work with those businesses because if I can take even a tiny bit of the knowledge that I hold or the access that I have and bring it to them, they have a disproportionate right to win in their economy.
Kerry Diamond:
Are you always looking for new chefs to bring on?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Always. Love new chefs.
Kerry Diamond:
How can they come on board?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Go to our website. There's a link you can click to start going through the vetting process. One of the first things we do is we just meet you and we categorize you based on what type of food you cook, what kind of facility you have, expertise levels, things like that. We have a wait list as you can probably imagine, and then we just keep it friendly, and we keep you in the know about what we're doing.
We're always expanding. We're always bringing new chefs on. We're always bringing new culinary styles, cuisines, packaging types, everything like that. We like to keep it as a really dynamic supplier base, but we do invest in the relationships. This is not a DoorDash situation. We don't have people who just knock on your door.
Kerry Diamond:
I was in such a denim frame of mind from the Gap conversation. I thought you said Jordache.
Ellis Singer McCue:
No. Oh, I wish. Great brand.
Kerry Diamond:
DoorDash, yes.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Someone needs to rehab Jordache. That'd be amazing. But no, it's not like we just...
Kerry Diamond:
That'll be your next thing.
Ellis Singer McCue:
I know, right? But it's not like we just go and just meet restaurants and just get them to sign up for our software. It's a much bigger investment on our part because of that trust and because of that safety aspect to it. And we spend a tremendous amount of time with the food entrepreneurs with whom we work. And it's incredible. They're incredible businesses.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about the packaging, because you and I have talked about that before too. And it's an important thing for both of us. Territory of all the meal delivery things I've tried, it definitely was the least packaging.
Ellis Singer McCue:
It's the least packaging. It's the most sustainable. We don't put that on the outside of the box because it would be crazy to claim it, but we look at the sustainability of the whole business. We are in 100% curbside recyclable delivery materials. We're in recyclable ice.
Kerry Diamond:
What's recyclable ice?
Ellis Singer McCue:
You could put it back in your freezer again, or you can melt them and dump them down your drains, biodegradable.
Kerry Diamond:
Is that safe?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Mm-hmm. Ours is. It's biodegradable, but it's not safe for everybody so you do need to check the package. And of course, biodegradable ice is 2X the cost of non biodegradable ice. All these sustainability aspects to our packaging, like the meal container we're in, it's just much more expensive and we work with great vendors that are pushing the bounds of sustainability. But it's interesting for me because when it comes down to it, single use plastic is still the cheapest game.
For companies that are working on tight margins, for chefs, for things like that, there's such an incentive to make the cheaper choice, and especially because with food, you want to keep the money in the food. I want the food to be the highest quality, and so it is this push and pull. And I think there's so much investment going into upstream, especially in food.
I was on a panel yesterday with a guy who's developing drought resistant wheat. Amazing. What an incredible scientist. Tons of money going into his company and kudos to him, and I hope more goes in there. But when it comes down to it, it's 15 years from being live, but tomorrow you get a delivery with ice in it, and so it's how do we enable change in the everyday?
And for us, that's operating in a zero waste environment. No food is made and trashed. Everything is made to order. It's having sustainable materials. And then it is part of the local model because all of our competitors, they ship mostly through UPS, FedEx, which has a really tremendous carbon footprint on it. You're also shipping with 60 hours of cold keeping generally because it's got to sit for two days.
Kerry Diamond:
It's a long time.
Ellis Singer McCue:
It's a long time. It's a heavy package. And because we use a multi local model, we actually produce the food and distribute it locally using 3PLs [3rd party logistics] couriers and things like that, and so it spends less time on the road. It's packed with less ice. It's fresher to you. All the food is procured locally as well, so supports local farms, supports local cuisine, everything like that.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm sure you're thinking about this, but we both would love to see the day when everything is reusable, and we can send it back to the company. We can return those ice packs. We can return the packaging and it can be used again. It feels like we're a very long way away from that though.
Ellis Singer McCue:
We're not that far.
Kerry Diamond:
Good.
Ellis Singer McCue:
We're not that far. There are so many companies that are getting into this space. The problem is they're not scaled. A lot of these things are still ideas. And for us, because we operate on such a large scale, we have to think about how do we do it bigger? I have confidence we'll get to reusables. I really think that's the way to go.
Kerry Diamond:
Amazon has improved its packaging, I've noticed.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Yeah, Amazon has. And there was this beautiful start-up called Shop Olive. I'm not sure if they're still around any longer, but their whole idea was in retail packaging where you could do returns out of the same package and olive delivery date and things like that. And it was just such a great idea to say the consumer insight is I want less stuff in my home. I want to lower my carbon footprint. I want a smaller packaging footprint. And how do you actually do that?
The hard part is balancing it for urban, rural. And the hard part is how do you get it to the middle, honestly? And we see a lot of the venture-backed companies really focusing on the coast, but we try to take a much more inclusive view.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you have gift cards yet?
Ellis Singer McCue:
We do have gift cards.
Kerry Diamond:
You do finally have them?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Yeah, we have gift cards.
Kerry Diamond:
Fantastic.
Ellis Singer McCue:
We have gift cards.
Kerry Diamond:
Because I wanted to get one for Joe [Hazan], our engineer.
Ellis Singer McCue:
We'll send you gift cards, for sure.
Kerry Diamond:
Joe is a new dad. It is a great gift for someone, may be an illness, may be just a tough time, whatever. It's a nice thing to be able to give to someone.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Food is so intimate and it's so warm to feed somebody. We actually have a giant new mom's program because this is a huge gifting thing where people just want to send meals for new moms. So what we actually did is we have four dieticians and nutritionists on staff. We came up with a specialty curation that's specifically for new moms to help with the healing process, to help with breastfeeding, all that, and we made it just super easy to send it.
Kerry Diamond:
So what's next for you?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Wow. We are on fire right now. I don't know a better way to say that. We have just transformed everything that we do and are just rapidly scaling all parts of our business and bringing healthy food to so many more people. What's next for me is I hope one day I'm going to get a full eight hours of sleep. I just think...
Kerry Diamond:
So you have one little girl?
Ellis Singer McCue:
I do, yeah. She's three.
Kerry Diamond:
What's her name?
Ellis Singer McCue:
Parker. She's an angel. Sort of an angel. She's not sleeping right now, and if anybody is a mom of a three year old, I just feel terrible for you and for me.
But no. Actually I just think for me, I get so much energy from being focused and from building businesses and scaling businesses. We are at such an interesting nexus of food, food as medicine consumer that is super important to me that I work day and night to build my company, to build my team and to build everything that we do with the strong mission behind it, but also to change the world of healthy eating and to make sure that we can have healthy, equitable eating across the entire United States in an approachable way, in a delicious way, in a culturally relevant way.
And that's really what's fueling my passion right now, and I think driving my team crazy, probably, would be my answer.
Kerry Diamond:
I guess I've been involved in this space now for a little over a decade. I really feel the food as medicine thing coming down the pike a little faster. I know it's taken hold in plenty of places, but it has not taken hold as a national trend. I think we all have to be honest about that.
Ellis Singer McCue:
100%. It's super interesting. So food is medicine to me, if you think about healthy eating on a continuum, if you think about what healthy eating meant in the consumer space, so not medical, consumer space in the 1990s into the 2000s, it's heavily about dieting. And it's low fat or low calorie rate. It's all diet focused…
Kerry Diamond:
Low carb.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Low carb. Everything. And what happened in early 2000s is this move towards naturalistic eating, which is paleo primal, and this idea of abundance versus restriction.
And I think that critical inflection point was amazing because all of a sudden you have people... If you know who Mark Sisson is, he led the primal movement. He owns a company called Primal... Well, Primal Blueprint is his book but Primal Kitchen is his company. It was bought by Kraft in 2017.
And he really starts to usher in this movement of naturalistic eating for health and the idea that you can eat all the calories you want, just make sure that you're not eating inflammatory foods.
What happens then, I think in the early 2010s is in the working professional, wealthy cohort, there becomes this focus on naturalistic eating. And then in the super wealthy cohort, there's this emergent focus on living forever. Longevity tights are wild and they're real. And there are some interesting companies doing really interesting experimentation on how do you help people live to 100.
Mark Hyman, he's all over this. I think it's so cool. But if you think about from a sector who that touches, you're talking about the top 1%, you're talking about working professionals.
Then on the other side of the spectrum, you have this parallel movement in the world of medical where people finally believe, finally, that your diet impacts things like diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease, cancer. And it's just insane to me that we as a community don't accept those things. And I realize I'm speaking from a very specific point, but it's actually part of the reason I came to Territory.
So I lost my father to stage four glioblastoma when I was 21 years old, sprain cancer, with tons of cancer in my family. And I went to a doctor and I said, "Am I going to get cancer?" And she said, "Probably." And I was like, "Well, what do I do?" And she was like, "You can't do anything. If you smoke, you should stop smoking." And I didn't smoke, so I was like, "Well, what am I going to do?"
And at 21 years old to hear there's no options with your whole life ahead of you when you're emotionally afraid, is just an insane catalyst. So I started experimenting with my body and I started experimenting with different diets, inflammatory diets. And I was somebody who had always struggled with my weight up and down, everything like that, and it just helped me think about my body as a system and just started to say, "What are the inputs, what are the outputs?"
Inputs are air, they're sleep, they're food. What are the outputs? It's energy, it's work, it's movement. And how do you think about that system and how do you feed that system well? Fast forward to the late 2010s, what you have is super healthy folks largely coming out of fitness communities and super wellness, longevity communities. And then you have this movement, very slow movement on the medical side that says maybe diabetes can be controlled by diet, and not after diabetes, but actually before. And there are some startling statistics.
So I'm an elder millennial, I love that term. Elder millennials are 1981 to 1988 birth years. And for elder millennials, 44% of the elder millennial generation has already been diagnosed with at least one chronic condition they will have for the rest of their life, and that's rheumatoid arthritis, it's diabetes, all these things. And then of the same population between 2001 and 2017, there was a 95% increase in type 2 diabetes diagnosed for people under 20.
So when I look at my cohort, I see this massive trend. And if you go back in history as to why, it's because of all the restrictions that were taken off of food advertising to children in the '80s. So I grew up with Gushers commercials and Lunchables, and all those things, and the compounded impact of that is now we have a massive public health crisis coming and it's not somewhere far. It's a pandemic that is now, that's here.
And so I think coming through the pandemic, a lot more people are thinking about metabolic health in a different way, and they're saying, "I don't want to get COVID. I don't want to die. I want to think about my health more balanced." And so you have this big shift, and I think this is where food as medicine or food as health is really going. And for me, I see the spectrum, I see the pre-diabetic medical community, and I see the super wellness community, and what I'm hoping to do is merge and get into the middle.
How do we build something that's sustainable, that brings healthy food to everyone in a really accessible way? I'm not asking people to diet.I'm not asking them to do keto, although I would recommend it. I really just think that if you can make it easy and accessible to have that conversation around food as health and food as medicine with everyone, we can change the whole system.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, Ellis, we've run out of time. Obviously, we could talk to you for a very long time. I hope you run the universe one day because you clearly could handle it. You're just amazing. So thank you for everything you do. I know you're trying to make so many aspects of the food world better for everybody, and I appreciate it.
Ellis Singer McCue:
Thank you so much for having me.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Ellis Singer McCue of Territory Foods for joining me. Head over to territoryfoods.com to learn more.
If you enjoyed today's pod, check out past Radio Cherry Bombe episodes with other great entrepreneurs like Jaclyn Johnson of Maie Wines, and Dee Charlemagne of AVEC Drinks.
Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Our theme song is by the band, Tralala. Thanks to Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center, and to our assistant producer, Jenna Sadhu.
And thanks to you for listening. You are the Bombe.