Hi! It is hard for me to believe it has been already 5 years since I cashed in my retirement savings to start the Melt® business, working three jobs and figuring out the food industry on the side. I had no prior experience in the food industry (or business!), with my education and professional experience in fluvial geomorphology (sub-discipline of geology in river processes). My husband and I packed everything to move from Seattle, WA to Hailey, ID with a dream of a better life. I feel very lucky to live in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho, mountain biking and skiing as much as time allows. Have you ever thought of starting a business? If so, I can understand your trepidation: startup takes an abundance of courage, tenacity, and willingness to grow on a personal level. While the learning curve seems at times infinite, here are a few tips I have learned along the way:  

It is critically important to use challenges and obstacles as opportunities for finding better solutions and outcomes. This pulls your attention and energy in the most productive direction and if you don’t, then you miss out on better solutions and outcomes.

It takes a village to build a business; take a moment to express your gratitude and appreciation for your village.

If your product is an authentic expression of who you are and solves a genuine need in an innovative way, that grounding will see you through the nay-sayers. If the product truly works for you by solving a problem that is unaddressed in the marketplace, then it probably works for a lot of people.

Coachability is critical for attracting the mentors and connections you need to move forward.

How much money do you need to raise? Triple that number and you may be closer to reality.

Your management team is the most important part of your business – with an outstanding team, any problem or challenge is potentially overcome. Without it you will eventually fail.

The book I wish I read before starting this business: “Eating the Big Fish” by Adam Morgan.

Please feel free to share your thoughts either here or on our facebook page: 

–Cygnia, Founder of Prosperity Organic Foods

In Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Mr. Pollen asserts “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” Of course the rules are that eating healthy is really a matter of eating “real foods.” Junk food or what we think of junk foods tends to be highly processed. In a New York Time Review talking about eating junk food, Pollen clarifies, “One of our problems is that foods that are labor or money intensive have gotten very cheap and easy to procure. French fries are a great example. They are a tremendous pain to make. Wash the potatoes, fry potatoes, get rid of the oil, clean up the mess. If you made them yourself you’d have them about once a month, and that’s probably about right. The fact that labor has been removed from special occasion food has made us treat it as everyday food. One way to curb that and still enjoy those foods is to make them.” (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/michael-pollan-offers-64-ways-to-eat-food/)

If you make the cakes, cookies, ice cream, fried chicken and donuts at home, you’ll know exactly what is in each of them. In the time it takes to cut, chop, mix, heat, fry, batter, and fill those kinds of foods, you’ll realize you won’t want to make them every day and then you won’t eat them every day. One option to making treats healthier is to substitute Melt® – a great tasting organic butter alternative – for margarines or butter.

Melt contains the perfect blend of the healthiest fats and oils that are good for you! Melt is the first to feature organic virgin coconut oil as its leading ingredient combined with organic flaxseed oil, providing an optimal 2:1 balance of Omega-6s and Omega-3s. Each serving of Melt is a rich source of the “good Fats” (Medium Chain Fatty Acids) that are not immediately stored as fat but burned as energy, and has 425 mg of Omega-e ALA (26% RDA) and Vitamin E (15% RDA). Melt spreads, cooks, bakes and melts just like butter but with half the saturated fat (from a rich, plant-based source of MCFAs) and fewer calories. For more information, visit Melt 

In Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, he recommends that you can “eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.”  The idea behind this is that if you make the cakes, cookies, ice cream, fried chicken and donuts at home, you’ll know exactly what is in each of them.  You’ll also find that before the food industries made manufactured foods inexpensive and easy to find, junk food was hard to prepare.  In the time it takes to cut, chop, mix, heat, fry, batter, and fill those kinds of foods, you’ll realize you won’t want to make them every day.  And then you won’t eat them every day.

But there is nothing wrong with having some sugars and fats in your diet.  Remember the food pyramid and how all the good-tasting food was up at the top under use sparingly? As long as portion control is kept in mind, and exercise is a part of your lifestyle, a donut isn’t going to hurt every once in awhile.

And if you make all those tasty treats at home, you can make them with a butter substitute like Melt, which doesn’t have the same fat content as butter and has all the coconut oil health benefits.  Melt is the perfect alternative to butter in baking all those delicious cookies and cakes, as long as it’s not every day!