Bringing healthy food to the masses, one delivery at a time (published in 2022)

As a kid growing up in the suburbs of Minneapolis in the ’90s, Nick Green’s kitchen cabinets weren’t like his friends’ kitchen cabinets. There were no salty snacks, no sweet cereals, no soft drinks. Even Honey Nut Cheerios were banned.

His mother, who was part of a large Mexican-American family, had seen how the modern diet led to so many health problems for her relatives, and decided to raise her own children on as little processed food as possible.

Mr Green said it was frustrating not to be able to get traditional sweets and snacks – and that he raided his friends’ kitchens when he got the chance – but that he was ultimately grateful for the strict diet at a young age, believing that it brought him good habits and good habits. health.

It also gave Mr. Green the basis of a billion-dollar idea.

After graduating from Harvard College, working briefly for McKinsey & Company and selling a test prep company he founded, Mr. Green and a few other like-minded entrepreneurs founded Thrive Market, an online marketplace for healthy and eco-friendly food and household goods, in 2013.

Today, Thrive, which is still privately owned, has more than a million members who pay $60 a year for the privilege of ordering chickpea pasta, plant-based cleaning products, and organic wine.

This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.

How was your childhood and your family’s diet?

I grew up middle class in Minnesota. It was the era of not only the food pyramid with bread at the bottom, but also spiked junk food, two-liter bottles of soda at the dinner table, things like that. And I had a completely different household. My mother came from a large Mexican-American family. And she watched family members struggle with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer.

She was really obsessed with changing that trajectory for our family, and I saw how hard she had to work to do it. There was no healthy shopkeeper around. So we were that weird house in the neighborhood that had no sugary cereal, no good snacks, no soda.

Didn’t that drive you crazy as a child and teenager?

Yes. I was the total glutton when I went to a friend’s house.

Were you professionally focused on food from the start?

There was a period when I moved out of the house that I was absolutely not focused on. I wouldn’t call my college years particularly healthy. But when I got into my twenties and started working hard, I realized very well how much diet and exercise made a difference in my ability to maintain that pace. I did Paleo in 2007 before it was a thing. I was fasting.

What is the biggest professional mistake you’ve ever made and what have you learned from it?

The biggest professional mistake I’ve ever made was actually the summer I decided to get a real job. After my junior year at Harvard, everyone was doing consulting or investment banking, and I decided I had to do that too. So I spent the summer at McKinsey and the people were great. The work was interesting, but it just didn’t inspire me the way entrepreneurship did. So it was actually the mistake that clarified my path the most because if I could go to a place with the family tree, it had great people and was intellectually stimulating and it still didn’t fill me up, I knew I had to start something myself.

What happened when the pandemic hit? Many companies fell off the cliff.

The acute phase of the pandemic was truly a unique moment. You went from some people thinking about their health to literally everyone thinking about health. You went from some people shopping online to everyone shopping online. So we had to respond by scaling.

One of the big challenges initially was: how do we keep our fulfillment centers running and our employees safe? Two-thirds of our employees are in those fulfillment centers, and they really were the heroes of that acute phase.

Aside from all the madness of that acute phase, the pandemic has accelerated the secular trends that we as a company were already betting on. People are more socially attuned and more environmental oriented, more health conscious today than they were two years ago. And then ecommerce. We’ve had two years where people have become more and more accustomed to online shopping. And I think a lot of that behavior has stuck.

What do you think is the biggest obstacle to getting people to eat healthy in America today?

There are several obstacles. One is just the cost. Organic and natural products are often expensive. Another is geography. Half of Americans do not live within driving distance of a healthy retailer. But I think the biggest are more emotional barriers. Where do I begin? Can I trust these products? It’s overwhelming. It’s intimidating. If you go to Amazon and search for almond butter, you will find 9,000 results. Where should I go with that?

We want to break down each of the barriers to conscious living. We want to make it affordable. We also want to make it very easy and seamless.

I’m surprised you didn’t mention the fast food industry and the relentless marketing of unhealthy foods.

Look, that’s coming. These are big companies with a lot of money and they can dominate the airwaves. What’s encouraging to me is that despite this, you have this shift in attitude. You have more people who want to get healthy and you have more people who are becoming more aware of social and environmental issues. And that awakening isn’t just on the coasts or just among affluent consumers.

Are you aware of any kind of partisan or political dynamics among your membership?

That’s honestly not important to us. I think getting healthy transcends political lines. Everyone wants their families, their communities to do better. And the charities we let our members shop with also tend to transcend politics. Some, such as local, family-owned and kosher, are even traditionally associated with more conservative values. We consider ourselves really a platform. It’s not about imposing our political values ​​or serving one type of group. It’s about getting people to vote with their money for what they care about the most.

You’ve hired quite a bit in the last 20 months and this is a mission-driven company. How do you make sure you bring in the right people if you can’t meet them?

Getting the right people into our fulfillment centers is very important. We don’t want to be a revolving door. We want to provide long-term work and that means good pay, but also good benefits, an opportunity to earn equity, a culture where they feel respected and valued. I think that’s really unique to typical fulfillment center jobs, and it’s given us a great advantage in attracting really talented people who are really connected and work hard for us and stay.

As for how do you hire someone if you’re not going to meet them in person? It’s extremely difficult. You just don’t build relationships over email and Slack. And there’s something, we believe, that’s really important about actually being physically present.

What do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions people have about what constitutes good leadership today?

The importance of decisiveness and action is probably overemphasized. Both are very important as a leader. But I think very often, just as important is listening and looking for perspectives. I’ve had some humble mistakes I’ve made, most of which were because I moved too fast and thought I had the answer. And I’m constantly amazed when I go into the organization to get feedback, how insightful and how much knowledge and understanding and perspective there is when you listen to your people.

How do you explain the anti-vaccine, anti-authoritarian conspiracy theories among some wellness influencers? Where does that come from?

I think it has less to do with health and more to do with politics. Unfortunately, some of these topics that should be issues of personal health or public health have become embroiled in politics and become issues of freedom and just the political dynamics. The whole thing, you know, mask versus no mask, vaccine versus no vaccine, it’s really sad that these are issues where we’re not looking at efficacy and facts, but instead at political leanings and tribalism.

Is that “Collapse” by Jared Diamond on your bookshelf?

Yes. I read that ten years ago and I think it’s relevant again.

In what specific way? Environmental collapse? Or are you thinking, for example, of the state of our democracy?

All of the above. Not to say we’re about to be in one of those dimensions, but I think it’s a reminder that things that seem like they could go on forever don’t necessarily have to be. I think we’re seeing some of that with where things have gone politically in our country. I think we certainly see it with environmental threats.