What is the MegaFood Way?
| Ashley Larochelle |
At MegaFood, we exist to nourish a world in nutritional crisis. We envision a world without nutritional poverty — a planet where everyone is truly nourished. We work hard & take bold action to ensure that vision becomes a reality in our lifetime.
That’s our mission, the “why” of what we do.
This blog is about “how” we behave as we go about fulfilling this mission. We call it the “MegaFood Way” and it goes like this:
We are brave, trustworthy, grateful & fun. We understand, act, and evolve with responsible urgency to advance our cause.
The MegaFood Way ensures that staff on our four campuses and in the field share a common culture, whether they’re traveling across the country working with our customers or partners, or producing and marketing our products in one of our New Hampshire facilities.
So, how does the Way work in real life? Here’s a quick primer (with actual examples) of the “Way” in action.
Brave
We value candor in our professional relationships because it shows more genuine respect than eggshells. We shoot for the moon and don’t let fear of failure hurt us. In fact, we’re willing to say we celebrate mistakes as long as they are made in the spirit of thinking boldly and creatively and doing the right thing. We once launched a powdered supplement because we wanted to push our boundaries. It was a great product but bombed due to a less than wonderful flavor profile. We treated the product’s internal champions as heroes and then set out to reformulate a new product. We recently received B Corp status, an honor that required us to put our whole company profile out there to see how we measured up against the best of the best.
Maybe the bravest thing we’ve done has been to create MegaFood Blue, an experiment in “moonshot thinking” that began in February of 2018. Although it’s technically separate from MegaFood and led by our entrepreneur in residence Andrew Brandeis (who reports to Robert Craven), Blue’s mission is to explore exciting, cutting-edge opportunities for MegaFood that fall outside our normal course of business but that support MegaFood’s goal of ending our global nutritional crisis. Examples of these moonshots might include DNA/genetics, personalized wellness, silicon-valley partnerships, new agricultural technologies and off-the-wall new channel or product opportunities. Talk about going where no vitamin company has gone before!
Trustworthy
We do what we say and take radical ownership for what we do. We’ll put a MegaFood product on backorder — and take a financial hit — rather than ship something that doesn’t meet our high standards. We post the results of our third-party audits on our website, livestream videos from our production rooms, and introduce the people who grow the food that goes into our ingredients. We also work to instill trust among ourselves by holding company-wide “Townhalls” four times a year that include report outs from our executive leadership team. And every month the company communicates out on our financial goals.
Grateful
As with candidness, showing gratitude shows respect for the people we are privileged to work with. It’s great to feel it but far more powerful to share the love by writing notecards to one another for a meeting well run, a project well managed, an interaction with a customer well received or — you get the picture! Our leadership team are encouraged to write several thank you notes a week.
Fun
The road to curing the nutritional crisis is a long one, so we have to make sure we have fun along the way! For example, we find that almost anything worth doing well is worth doing with food present. This might include anything from a Friday Cookie Swap, to a Super Bowl Week potluck, or just fueling up for an afternoon meeting. Constructive fun also sparks creativity. At a recent Town Hall, which is MegaFood’s entertaining version of the typically dreaded all staff meeting, we had a Mt. Everest theme complete with hundreds of fleece snowballs to help “break the ice” and work off some nervous energy with our colleagues with before knuckling down to discuss some major changes at the company, including our game-changing direct to consumer focus. Our company even has a Culture Club and Wellness Warriors whose charter is to nourish our staff’s personal and professional health and wellness.
I wanted to get through this blog without saying, “We at MegaFood work hard but know how to have fun…,” which is something you hear a lot. So, let me end by saying that we at MegaFood have a “way” of working that rewards people who are brave, trustworthy, grateful and fun, and let it go at that. What do you think? Sound like you?