Food and Courage With Rachel Bieber

On this episode of the Ask Brien Show, our hosts Brien Johnson and Alex Grossman speak with Rachel Bieber about her cookie company, Food and Courage. Rachel shares about her culinary background and how she started Food and Courage out of her apartment in San Francisco. Brien and Alex talk with Rachel about how she went door to door selling her first cookies and how her passion, courage and tenacity helped to grow her business. She also talks about the importance of giving back and how she donates a portion of all her profits to help rescue children from human trafficking.

 IN THIS EPISODE:

• [04:00] Rachel is introduced
• [05:46] The message behind “Food & Courage”
• [08:05] How did Food & Courage start
• [11:29] The courage it takes to cold pitch
• [13:25] The team behind Food & Courage
• [15:37] Supply chain
• [16:56] Why cookies
• [18:41] The aha moment
• [21:45] Passion or Tenacity?
• [25:20] Business plan and growth
• [30:11] Giving back
• [32:10] How to face rejection and challenges

 KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Rachel started Food and Courage out of a desire to build something bigger than herself, as a way to have a sustainable impact. A portion of all profits go to raise awareness and raise money to help free people from human trafficking.
• In the beginning, Rachel went door to door pitching and selling her cookies to local cafes and stores.
• The skill of an entrepreneur is really how many times you can bounce back from a no. It’s so hard to get out there, but the more you do it, the easier it gets.
• Your why is excruciatingly important for entrepreneurs and for what someone does every single day.
• A startup can be all consuming. It’s important to have other key relationships, routines and community – things that are unmatched from the startup. Otherwise, failure in the startup is all consuming.

Links Mentioned:

https://foodandcourage.com/

BIO:

The founder, Rachel Bieber, has been passionate about helping end human trafficking ever since she became aware of its existence. That’s why 10% of all of their profits from Food & Courage go directly to organizations focused on ending this global crisis like Thorn.

They have created their artisan cookies using ONLY ingredients that aren’t harmful to us. Their gluten-free, dairy-free & natural sugar Chocolate Chunk Cookies are handcrafted without using processed sugar, dairy, or gluten and baked to perfection with courage. They have developed their cookie with this specific intent when they realized that the leading causes of death in America are all directly related to processed sugar and high cholesterol.