Good Spread: an interview with co-founder Alex Cox
When we discovered Good Spread peanut butter, we immediately fell in love! We are huge peanut butter lovers, so how could we turn down the delicious peanut butter & honey spread that also gives back?! With so many children suffering from malnutrition, a completely curable disease, Good Spread founders, Mark and Alex, were inspired to find a way to help. They partnered with MANA, a company that produces Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF). So, for every Good Spread jar of peanut butter that you buy, you are helping donate packets of RUTF to children in need. :)
If you haven’t tried Good Spread yet, trust us, you need to get your hands on some ASAP! Now, if only we can find some world-changing jelly and bread...
(pictured: Good Spread peanut butter & honey packets from Spring 2015 CAUSEBOX)
Let's hear the Good Spread story — who are you? Who is your co-founder? Why Peanut Butter? How did you get your start?
Good Spread started when Alex and Mark were recruited to do a marketing campaign for a therapeutic food producer known as MANA. We purchased a 1971 Winnebago and drove around the country equipped with mustaches, 8 tracks and a fun story about eradicating severe malnutrition. After making our way from East Coast to West Coast...the Winnebago had a friction issue in the rear brakes, caught fire and exploded. After that event, we decided to finish our campaign via hitchhiking the remaining 2,500 miles. After putting our friendship through the flames (literally) and hitchhiking back across the country, we knew we needed to do something bigger and more sustainable. A buy one, give one peanut butter brand seemed like a logical next step and here we are four years later.
Any secret recipes involving Good Spread that we should know about?
Aside from natural peanut butter and honey, there is a secret ingredient. It's magic. The details around that are hard to explain to muggles so don't worry about it.
Your giveback model is a one-for-one, which makes it really easy to appreciate the magnitude of the impact us customers are able to have just by switching to a new brand of peanut butter.... can you say a little bit about MANA and why you chose it as the [give] rather than, say, providing a meal or something of that nature, which we see fairly often in charitably minded food startups?
Donating meals, though well intentioned, is not usually sustainable. Dropping off packets of fortified peanut butter and milk formula (RUTF) may not sound sustainable either but our mission is extremely specific. Even though we blew up their Winnebago, we have a very good partnership with RUTF producer, MANA. We target children in their first five years of life who are in a crucial stage of development. If they are severely undernourished then they aren't receiving the nutrients they need for brain and immune system to properly develop. If an intervention doesn't take place immediately, they either die or have negative effects that are permanent for the rest of their lives. It has major ripple effects for health and education. A treatment of MANA consists of three 90 gram packets of RUTF per day and usually lasts around four weeks with a more than 92% revival rate. Developed brains and immune systems are a basic necessity moving forward for any person in this world. The best way to think about it is to consider RUTF a vaccine for severe malnutrition; a treatment that very tangibly saves lives.
What excites you most about waking up and working on Good Spread?
Without question it's the smell of peanut butter... But really, the fact that there are over 2 million kids in this world suffering from a totally curable disease gets us out of bed. It's a bittersweet reality. It's a terrible statistic to hear but one little word in that stat changes everything: curable. It's a major challenge and there are intense logistics to pull it off, but the fact is, it is absolutely possible to cure every kid with severe acute malnutrition. We have the privilege of being a part of an amazing global community that has the audacity to face the challenge. The people at MANA inspire us like crazy. What Plumpy'Nut is doing is incredible. There are several other consumer brands out there giving RUTF as their give component as well and every one of those companies is amazing. We are going to see severe acute malnutrition eradicated from our world and if that doesn't get you out of bed in the morning...then maybe the smell of peanut butter will.
Any chance we'll ever see Good Jelly or Good Bread? (Thinking high impact PB&J's, sorry it's just where our minds went).
We're definitely scoping out other nut butters and have an eye on a greater snack category but jelly and bread have not come up...yet.
(pictured: 2 children who have received MANA RUTF packets from the help of Good Spread)
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