Clip of my discussion on @entrepreneur live about where I think the importance lays between a company’s mission vs. their products for food entrepreneurs.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see food entrepreneurs make are founders becoming super romantic about their mission of giving back, building wells, their specialized nutrients, etc. etc. and not focusing on taste. This is a critical mistake. Taste simply must come first.

Without focusing on the taste of your product, your mission will end in failure. Because if your product tastes like shit then no one will buy it. If no one buys it, then there is no mission because you’re out of business.

No matter how healthy your product is or how giving your mission is – it simply does not matter if no one eats what you make. I see this mistake repeated every year at #ExpoWest like clockwork.

Focus on taste first, then focus on your brand ‘s social story. That way both will succeed.

Mission is important. After all, Barnana is a B Corporation, upcycles bananas, builds water wells in the Amazon Rainforest, only makes organic products and has sustainability as a core tenant of ours.

However, if that is all that you are focused on you will go bankrupt.

The worst way to make your mission succeed in food is to focus on it too much.

The scale at which your sales can reach propels the mission to crazy heights.

My generation, the Millennial generation, of entrepreneurs are wooed by social causes.

This is amazing in many ways, but also creates the pitfall of only caring about that.

We chat with Nik Ingersöll, co-founder & CMO of Barnana, to hear his incredible story of growing up on a farm in rural Nebraska with no money to moving to California for college and eventually launching the line of organic healthy snacks that has everyone going bananas.

We also talk branding, fundraising, and scaling a successful product in today’s competitive CPG space!