Healthy Living Natural Food Retailer Hailed as Outstanding Vermont Business
Healthy Living, an independent natural foods retailer, was named as the 32nd recipient of the Deane C. Davis Outstanding Business of the Year Award by Vermont Business Magazine and the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.
The award honors sustained growth and “an acute awareness of what makes Vermont unique.”
“Like Davis himself — former [Vermont] governor, president of National Life of Vermont, and environmentalist — each finalist reflects Vermont’s diverse nature and, at the same time, radiates a savvy business sense,” John Boutin, publisher of VermontBiz and co-presenter of the award, said in his publication.
Healthy Living has long embodied the values honored in the award; when Katy Lesser opened the South Burlington store in 1986, she wanted to bring healthy, natural foods to the family table. In the three decades since, the brand has expanded to include locations in Williston and Saratoga, N.Y.
Lesser co-owns Healthy Living with her children, Eli and Nina Lesser-Goldsmith, who serve as CEO and COO, respectively. Together they have created 350 jobs, supported the economies of Vermont and New York, and worked tirelessly to fuel a passion for great food, health and well-being and establishing a sense of place where people gather to shop, eat, and work.
The company gives back to nonprofits quarterly and just this year became one of the first retailers to join the Northeast Organic Family Farm Partnership, encouraging shoppers to buy local and support participating producers.
Healthy Living’s dedicated, expert staff bring ready-to-eat meals, groceries and wellness items to shoppers each day — with everything sold held to the store’s strict ingredient standards.
“This award means so much to us, because it acknowledges our core values and celebrates them,” Lesser said. “Deane C. Davis became governor at age 68, which shows that you really can switch careers and make an impact. That’s what I did as a young mom in the 1980s, and I’m still learning every day.”
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Standard Meat Promotes Tom Allen to Chief Operating Officer
Eight-year Standard Meat Company veteran Tom Allen is the new chief operating officer, said Ben Rosenthal, co-president and CEO of the Dallas-Fort Worth-based meat company.
Standard Meat is a family-owned meat processing and packaging company with plants in Dallas, Fort Worth, Saginaw and Ponder, Texas. The company is a global supplier of custom meat portioning and packaging solutions for the foodservice and retail industries.
“Tom has done an incredible job with our Saginaw facility,” said Rosenthal. “Beginning in 2014, he served as the vice president and general manager of the facility, during which sales have almost quadrupled. His experience led us to tremendous growth in Saginaw; now, his insight and vision will focus on our entire operation and not a single facility.”
As chief operating officer, Allen will oversee all company operations. His focus will ensure the facilities operate efficiently and effectively and are on track with Standard Meat’s strategic goals.
As part of senior leadership, Allen will lead the development of Standard Meat’s five-year strategic growth plan. He will ensure the company’s ongoing and future success across all facilities and within individual departments.
“Tom had extraordinary experience in the meat industry before joining us at Standard Meat Company,” said Ashli Rosenthal Blumenfeld, co-president. “He has worked in many of the most important meat-producing locations across North America. His stellar performance in Saginaw is only a preview of what he will do as chief operating officer.”
Before joining Standard Meat, Allen worked for Cargill, ultimately leading a pair of beef processing facilities. In those facilities, he supervised thousands of employees and oversaw harvesting as many as 6,000-head of cattle per day. Allen holds a bachelor of science in business degree from Oklahoma State University.
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Novel Farms Reveals First Marbled Cultivated Pork Loin
Novel Farms, Inc., a food technology startup based in Berkeley, Calif., has unveiled what it says is the first-ever marbled cultivated pork loin.
Cultivated meat is poised to help relieve the strain on our food system by providing a supply of animal protein while offering human health, environmental, and animal welfare benefitsm, according to the company.
While the vast majority of cultivated meat companies focus on making sausages or burgers, producing meat that mimics conventional meat cuts is currently extremely difficult — only a handful of companies in the world have been able to showcase pork or beef structured prototypes. Novel Farms now joins this select group by creating a cultivated pork loin that displays the marbling and texture of a real muscle cut.
Novel Farms solves the structuring problem by developing a proprietary microbial fermentation approach to produce low-cost, edible, and highly customizable scaffolds. Its tissue development platform gives an important and unique advantage by not only providing the company with the capability to structure meat from any animal species, but also doing it in a very cost-effective way.
While scaffolding biomaterials such as alginate need to undergo costly functionalization to ensure effective cell attachment, their scaffolding process completely bypasses this step, reducing production costs by 99.27 percent and thus accelerating the path to the commercialization of their products at price parity, accoring to the company.
The founder team, Nieves Martinez Marshall and Michelle Lu, met while working as postdoctoral scientists in the Molecular and Cell Biology department at the University of California at Berkeley prior to launching the company in 2020. Their combined experience of over 30 years in research was key in the ideation of an elegant and unique structuring approach for producing cultivated meat, which has been awarded a highly competitive grant from the National Science Foundation through the SmallBusiness Innovation Research (SBIR) Program (phase I) in 2021.
“Our goal is to accelerate the widespread adoption of cultivated meat and its benefits by producing ‘hard-to-resist’ whole muscle cuts,” said Marshall. “Therefore, we need to be able to fulfill consumer demand by delivering cultivated meat with the same fibrous texture and mouthfeel as conventional cuts from an animal.”
Novel Farms has raised $1.4 million in a pre-seed round with participation of Big Idea Ventures Joyance, Social Starts, Sustainable Food Ventures, Good Startup, CULT foods and strategic angel investors.
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