Edible-Alpha® Podcast

The type of entity you form and the type of legal protections you undertake matters in terms of your strategic path to grow and what kinds of money you are able to raise to support that growth. When raising equity, find legal counsel that understands what you need to do to comply with securities law and its required disclosures to investors or potential investors.

Bill Anderson of Creme de la Coulee is a Wisconsin local artisan cheese maker who uses a CSA model through a cheese of the month club to connect directly with consumers. He talks about what it takes to grow a local artisan cheese company and what you have to consider when thinking about scaling that up.

Matt D'Amour of Yumbutter talks about the challenges in growing a national food brand and it is important to raise the right amount of money (usually more than you think) to support the roll-out of your national brand in grocery stores. It is important for your brand to have multiple pillars to remain defensibly unique.

Matt D'Amour, Co-Founder and Chief of Yumbutter™, talks about the concept of a brand in general and the importance of having multiple things that distinguish your food brand so you can remain defensibly unique. There are many challenges in growing a national food brand and it is important to raise the right amount of money (usually more than you think) to support the roll-out of your national brand in grocery stores. Matt also talks about the social impact of Yumbutter™ and how that is hardwired into their DNA as a certified B-Corp, something that other brands lack. However, he talked about their customers first and foremost caring about the quality of their product and how the social impact of what they do figures in to the hierarchy of their messaging to consumers.

The Food Finance Institute and Edible-Alpha® are launching the Edible-Alpha® podcast!

Edible-Alpha® is a digital resource hub providing people with actionable insights, training, resources and tools so they can build and fund the next generation of profitable food, beverage and value-added farm businesses.

There are, unfortunately, many bad business ideas being circulated on the internet. And right now there is a huge gap online in reliable, actionable resources around food and beverage profitability. That’s why we only collaborate with people working in the trenches to build and fund profitable food businesses, including consultants, lenders, investors and entrepreneurs to develop and curate content for Edible-Alpha®.

Edible-Alpha® will include free educational content for the general public about best financial practices of food, beverage and value-added farm businesses in the form of articles, videos, podcasts and other online resources. Edible-Alpha® will also include premium (paid) content, digital training and access to a community of practitioners who can help the next generation of food and beverage businesses get profitable and raise money. Over time, the platform will include a curated collection of resources, developed in coordination with other contributors, which share best practices about how food entrepreneurs can make enough money to cause extraordinary change in a sustainable manner.

Tera Johnson, founder of teraswhey® and Director of the Food Finance Institute is the host of the Edible-Alpha podcast. The podcast will be taken from interviews with food entrepreneurs, food business consultants, food business technical assistance providers, bankers, investors and other stakeholders in the food entrepreneur ecosystem.