Vanessa Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Feel Good Foods, joins Professional Jealousy to share how a celiac disease diagnosis in college — and a doctor's advice to give up on food entirely — became the origin story for one of the fastest-growing gluten-free frozen food brands in the country. Vanessa walks through her path from growing up in her family's New York bagel and Chinese restaurant business, to opening the gluten-free café Friedman's in Chelsea Market, to mailing homemade gluten-free pot stickers to Whole Foods in a Ziploc bag and landing a regional launch just months later.
In this conversation, Vanessa gets candid about the early bootstrapped years demoing product in Whole Foods aisles for months on end, the manufacturing mistake that nearly derailed the brand's first production run, and how she built a company culture around grit, generalist skill-building, and staying close to the consumer. She also opens up about the mentor who shaped her mindset, the tools she uses to stay grounded as a founder, and who she's most professionally jealous of today.
Whether you're building a CPG brand, working in food and beverage, or just love a founder story rooted in personal struggle turned purpose, this episode is packed with real, tactical lessons on category creation, scaling from founder to CEO, and building a brand that can grow with you instead of boxing you in.
**In this episode:**
- Building a gluten-free frozen food brand from a personal health diagnosis
- Creating a new grocery category from scratch
- Bootstrapping a CPG brand without outside capital
- Lessons from a costly early manufacturing mistake
- Mentorship, mindset, and staying grounded as a founder
- How the gluten-free consumer has evolved into the mainstream "curious consumer"
- Who Vanessa Phillips is professionally jealous of
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