Dear Linda

I may have been able to start my business without you, but I know I wouldn’t have been able to keep sane if you and the whey cool girls weren’t such an important part of what we are doing.  Thanks to you we actually have women investing in teraswhey!  I am convinced that part of how we are going to make the world more sustainable is by having more women investing in other women–owned businesses.  Someday we will all have time to look back and reflect, and understand why I say this.

I remember when I first met you.  You knew about whey protein already but what made you so passionate about this business was its local roots.  These high value whey’s could only come from this location in southern Wisconsin – we had the small family farms, clean water, and specialty cheese makers making specialty cheeses with specialty whey by-products.  As the company progressed, you realized that you had personal health reasons to be passionate about it.

While we were still building the plant, you shared with me your intention to do bariatric surgery.  Many years in a high stress profession, you thought, had led you to gain over 100 lbs since you began practicing law.  Still young, you had already had two hip surgeries.  Diets, meditation, and exercise never worked, and you were concerned about having a future of more health issues.  So you decided to do the surgery.  One of the first things that happened was you saw a nutritionist who talked to you about how to eat before and after the surgery.  You were going to need 80g of protein per day, something that is very difficult without a high quality protein supplement.  By then you were a part owner of the most natural whey protein brand in the country.  Now that you’ve had the surgery, teraswhey is a part of your daily diet.  You tell me you feel bereft of energy when you don’t have it.  I’ve had bariatric surgery nutritionists compliment us on the quality of our protein for their patients, and the privilege of talking to other bariatric surgery recovery patients who, like you, now have teraswhey as a fixture in their daily lives.

There are no accidents in this world.  You were meant to be a part of teraswhey even though neither of us really knew why at the time you invested.  It’s one of my greatest rewards to know that the company I created is making such a positive difference each day in the lives of real people like you who go out and make more positive change happen in this world.  We get to be the pebble that causes the ripple that changes the world…

With love and admiration,

Tera

We're a Real Company Now

It was Expo West last week, the biggest tradeshow of the industry.  In the past I would have been terrible at savoring the moment; now that I’m more present in my life I’m getting better at this.

It was one of the first times I felt like the thing that started as an idea in my head has grown to be a real company.  Last year I was there by myself.  Four days of crushingly busy booth traffic and meetings before and after.  I could barely stand up by the time the show was done.  Product flew into the hands of random people; I managed to talk to very few store buyers.  But we were there and people were seeing us for the first time.

This time we had three people at the show from the company.  Amazing.  I could go to the bathroom, walk the show, talk to industry colleagues.  And people were coming up to us who were already customers.  Store buyers saying their customers love our product and want more sku’s.  People loving the branding, packaging, website.  I even met the guy who founded Clif Bar. Wow. It felt like a long way from an idea in my head.

The best thing about this show for me was the stories, most of which, not surprisingly I guess, came from women.   Two women from a rural area in CA described how they started selling teraswhey in their little community’s health club.  At first people either wanted the cheap stuff or didn’t know what whey protein was.  Gradually, even the guys who were used to the cheap stuff have started to convert to our organic. Apparently they think it works better and want to be a part of shifting away from a global food system.  The women smiled and said it felt like teraswhey was changing their entire community.

Another woman came up and said she was a devoted customer and loved what we are doing.  She was my age.  She started talking about how important she thinks it is that I am doing this, that is, that a woman created this company and the brand not a man.  Like me, she is of a generation of women who had to work hard to prove that we could do anything a man could do in the business world and elsewhere.  We are the generation that paved the way for the younger women following us.  I have two daughters and because women like us have done what we have, my daughters know that they can do anything they want to do in this world.

The show had a poignant moment too.  I woke up to a worried call from home the day the Tsunami was due to hit the California coast.  It reminded me of being on a trade show floor in London on 9/11 and getting a call to tell me my kid’s Dad’s house had a fire the night before and while they were fine, the house was not habitable until it was fixed.  Then the planes hit the towers and I was stuck in London for almost a week, no longer able to even call my kids.  Now my kids are grown, two living in California.  I hung up from the call from my boyfriend at home and got on the phone to talk to each of my kids.  The Tsunami warning turned out to be a non-event, and I felt really grateful for having a person in my life at home who was concerned enough to call me that morning.

Dear Brett

Dear Brett,

I went to high school and college from 1976 – 82.  I was a figure skater and for a bunch of reasons knew a lot of people who worked in the fashion industry in New York.  I grew up around gay people and had many as friends.

I remember hearing a few years after I graduated from College, after the birth of my first child, that one of my friends in high school had died of Aids.  He contracted it from a blood transfusion.  Then I heard that another friend from College had also died.  He was a brilliant man who spoke three languages, majored in biochemistry and was on his way to a top medical school.  He had come out as a gay man while we were in College. 

Then the trickle became a flood. I remember taking my kids to the beach house of a woman who was a friend and mentor to me.  She was one of the first women executives in the NY fashion industry.  She had a wall with snapshots on it at her house of all of her friends when they came to visit at her house.  She had started calling it her wall of the dead because so many of the pictures were of people who had died from complications resulting from Aids. The nature of the tragedy changed with the advent of a new generation of drugs.  People stopped dying and I stopped hearing about the tragedy.  I thought it was “under control”. 

What I didn’t realize until I met you was that the tragedy hadn’t gone away, but morphed into a hidden battle with chronic illness and slow physical deterioration.  You told me that living on anti retrovirals was like living on perpetual chemotherapy.  People struggled to eat, maintain weight, energy, they got sick, depressed, isolated, lonely.  They lost the ability to keep a job. They became poor, disabled, went on public assistance.  They needed help from people like you just to make it through the day.

It may not have to be this way.  This past spring an Epidemiologist from Albert Einstein hospital in New York came up to me at my booth at a tradeshow.  He said he had found my whey protein at whole foods in the city and started using it with some of the aids patients in their clinic.  They were doing better.  It helped them tolerate the drugs better, helped them retain body mass, seemed less prone to secondary infections. 

So I got onto PubMed and found that there is a body of research emerging that is documenting the benefits of whey protein for HIV positive patients.  The mechanism appears to related to whey’s ability to increase glutathione levels in HIV positive individuals.  HIV positive people tend to be glutathione deficient, which leaves their bodies without the major antioxidant they need to combat oxidative stress.  Both the disease and the meds HIV positive individuals take to combat the disease cause oxidative stress on their bodies, which means they need more not less glutathione.  There may be other elements of whey that are beneficial, including lactoferrin and immunoglobulins, but more research is needed to document this.

Could it be that HIV positive patients could use lower doses of their medications if they made whey protein a consistent part of their diet?  Could it help them better tolerate their meds, live more active lives, maybe even stay employed longer? 

The way the system works right now, indigent HIV positive patients have their medications covered by Medicare or Medicaid, but not things like whey protein.  Good quality whey protein is cost prohibitive.  The irony is that the lifetime cost of treating these people to society could be less if they had a way to get whey protein into their treatment regimes.

I so much admire the work you do, Brett, to help people with HIV and Aids cope with the litany of problems they face in their lives.  We seem to live in a world that demonizes the people around us who are most vulnerable and one of its effects is to perpetuate a disease abatement industry that costs ever more even as it steals people’s dignity from them.  People like you help them cope, but imagine actually being able to change their lives for the better at the cellular level. However improbable it seems at the moment, you and I get to always believe that it is possible that one day all of your patients can get access to teraswhey. 

With love always,

Tera

It's All About the Pie or Tera's View from Madison

I live in Madison, WI.  For the past week people I know around the country has been asking me whether these protests are as real as they appear on TV.  They ask me what I think about them; what would be ‘tera’s way’ of solving this.   Would I raise taxes on everyone? Cut spending?  Cut salaries?  Aren’t we just squeezing one side of the balloon only to have it pop out somewhere else? Isn’t this all just inevitable?

I think that all of this -the labor protests and the tea party counter protests and the anti-intellectual animosity, and the anti-science belief system, and the increasingly bellicose values system -  are just symptoms of a much, much bigger economic problem that we’ve been denying for years: our country’s economic competitiveness is eroding at an accelerated pace.   If we use the typical pie analogy, we live in a country where the pie is no longer getting appreciably bigger every year.  In fact, we’ve come out of a period where the pie actually shrank quite considerably and at the slow rates of growth we are going to be lucky to produce in the future, the pie may take years to get back to where it was, never mind get bigger.

So what happened when the pie was getting bigger?  It used to be that people in the highest income brackets could look forward to their wealth increasing every year at an accelerated pace.  Thanks to financial engineering, they could actually troll for investment deals that yielded 50% annual return.  They came to expect at least 30%.  Meanwhile the investor class in places in Asia were still entrepreneurs who were thrilled to see a 5% return and would work their hands to the bone to see these businesses succeed.  There were still entrepreneurial people like that in the US, but they had a hard time justifying the risk when they could work for someone else and make decent money and they had a hard time finding people to invest in their businesses.  The companies that started tended to be those with low upfront investment and high potential for leverage. Even the poor did better as a rising tide did in fact raise all boats.  Governments had increasing tax revenues without increasing tax rates and everyone seemed somewhat happy.

Then came the great unraveling.  Suddenly investor returns dropped for everyone.  The banks were in trouble.  The institutions that guaranteed the banks were in trouble.  The stock market – where most of the middle class had their 401k’s – fell.  The layoffs began.  The pay freezes and pay cuts began.  Meanwhile our population got older, used more expensive medical care.  The pie shrank.

What is happening in Madison is a fight for the crumbs that are left as we race to the bottom.  We won’t hit the bottom overnight, but it will happen, because we are spending all of our energy fighting over our shares of a shrinking pie instead of grappling with the things that are causing the pie to shrink in the first place. 

We cannot do things the same way we’ve always done them when the rest of the world is doing them cheaper and better than we are.  We have to be innovative and create opportunities in emerging economic sectors, things like green energy and biotechnology.  So how have we done at this?  Our manufacturers of solar panels are moving to China.  The largest wind turbine companies in the world are not in the US.  China is pushing capital into the sector with the goal of becoming the global leader in a decade; we can’t even manage to create a predictable enough incentive system to encourage investment in the sector.  In biotechnology, places like Korea have made advances in biomedical research that cause our ethical stomachs to roil.  But instead of advancing our ability to drive the ethics of how the technologies are developing by being the technical leaders in the field, we refuse to allow the research here and surrender both the economic promise and ethical leadership to countries we already know we don’t feel comfortable with.  China and India will soon become the largest consumer markets in the world, the largest manufacturers.  When that happens, they will own us.  And you think the pie is shrinking now…

Meanwhile our leaders punish the most vulnerable among us.  Medicare and Medicaid benefits are set to be cut.  Already doctors are refusing to see more Medicare and Medicaid patients, so the most vulnerable among us are going with no medical care.  Our global competitors, not just in Europe but also the so-called developing world, have governments that cover basic care for all of their citizens.  The result is that US companies are less competitive because they have to cover expenses that governments cover elsewhere.  Why business leaders are so resistant to government-funded health care is beyond me. 

And why the rich are so angry is also beyond me.  The Gini coefficient in the US, which measures the distribution of income across income groups, shows that incomes in the US are more unequal and skewed toward the wealthiest among us than at any time in our entire history.  We look like a South American dictatorship. Private sector ideology about the role of government is as much at fault as government’s failures to do what’s right.

No one seems to be doing anything to help grow the pie.  In its zeal to fix the financial crisis, the SEC has imposed the same regulations on small community banks as it did on the big banks.  The only problem is that most of the lending that creates jobs in the US comes from smaller banks and they didn’t cause the problem in the first place.  Small banks are now disappearing at an alarming rate because they can’t recapitalize fast enough, taking their small business lending with them. 

Even the SBA, supposed to be an institution that supports entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, now has such onerous clauses buried in the unlimited personal guarantees they require of entrepreneurs that no one in their right mind would sign up for them.  Banks that have survived have added the same language.  Basically, the only way an entrepreneur can get a lender is to sign up for unlimited personal guarantees that now continue even if the entrepreneur no longer runs or even works in the company.  The bank can change the amount, term, interest rate of the loans without even consulting the guarantor as long as there is someone in the company that is authorized to sign for the company. 

Finally, investors are still more interested in chasing 50% returns even if they come from overseas rather than investing in companies that will create the jobs of the future at home. With all of this going on, what entrepreneur in their right mind would start a business in the US? The best and the brightest graduating from places like MIT are voting with their feet and moving overseas. 

It didn’t used to be this way and it doesn’t have to be this way now.

So what would I do in Madison?  It’s actually quite simple: equitably share the pain and address the real problem.  As long as the pie is shrinking, government will have to shrink with it.  We have to cut spending and raise taxes.  And if we want to stop this death march, we need to use every means at our disposal to create a climate that encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. 

We need to grow the pie again.

Dear Dode

Dear Dode,

I often do think of you.  You are my ex husband’s mother, one of the most truly generous, profoundly happy, and most courageous people I’ve ever met.  I’ve been truly blessed to have you in my life and in the lives of my children as a role model and grandma.

Last year (I think it was last year, time has blended into oblivion over the past few years) my kids told me you were having trouble swallowing.  You had half of your neck removed when you were a young, poor, single mom with thyroid cancer.  In those days they removed your entire thyroid and half your neck, then bombarded you with radiation.  You just wanted to live long enough to see your kids graduate from high school.  In fact you’ve lived long enough to see many of your grandchildren graduate from high school.  True to form, you refused to have the tests for throat cancer done because you didn’t want to have to survive the treatments.  Once is enough.  So you’ve stopped eating solid food unless you can, started living on a liquid diet, and lost a lot of weight.

When my kids told me about you, we agreed that you had to have teraswhey.  I hear you like it, and even saw me last week on the Dairy Heiresses show that featured me among other women leaders in the dairy industry in Wisconsin.  I hear you have stopped losing weight and that the predictions of imminent serious problems have not materialized.  You have a boyfriend and still inspire everyone who meets you.

All the evidence says that it is your completely infectious positive attitude and joy in the face of all of life’s adversities that is keeping you with us.  I like to think that teraswhey is playing a small part as well.  All of that protein, in a highly bioavailable liquid form, is feeding your muscles and bones, so while you can’t always eat solid food, you are feeding your cells in a really positive way.  Cancer, aging, malnutrition, wasting have been associated with glutathione deficiencies that can be addressed by eating whey protein. Your body is busy converting cysteine to glutathione, and the glutathione is using a process known as conjugation to detoxify your body. Research has shown that the lactoferrin that is in whey can inhibit esophagus, lung, bladder, and tongue cancer in rats; it has not been tested in humans.

I’ve written this before in a letter to my Mom, but I’ll say it again to you. I wish there was a way for all of the women like you who face similar struggles in their later years to make teraswhey® part of their lives.  It says on my can that I created teraswhey® to cause extraordinary change.  That change happens one person, one shake at a time, and it starts with the people we love.

With love from your ex-daughter-in-law,

Tera

Dear Mom

Dear Mom,

It probably won’t surprise you that when I created teraswhey®, I wasn’t thinking of you specifically.  You were my mother at a distance, a person suffering from the isolation, economic deprivation, and health effects of decades of alcoholism and mental illness.  Now you are a functional, old, poor, beautiful, smart, and diabetic Mom, and one of a huge number of older people who are working hard to live out your years independently and with dignity in a country with a broken healthcare system, frayed social safety net, and a food system that’s making us all sick.

You and thousands of older women like you are struggling to live on social security checks that are $750 per month.  You qualify for $17/month in food stamps. After you pay your rent, you don’t have a lot of money left for food.  So you buy things that are cheap, most of which contain sugar and starches and carbohydrates and high fructose corn syrup that exacerbate your blood sugar problems.  You feel full until your blood sugar level collapses, and then you feel faint.  Your health care covers insulin testing supplies, but you can’t get in to see a doctor to help you figure out how much insulin you should be taking because physicians in the area cannot afford to take on new Medicare patients.  So you guess.

Many of the women who live in your building drink Ensure or Boost for a meal.  Its cheap, even recommended as a meal replacement by doctors and pharmacists.  The only problem is it contains several variations of sugar and high fructose corn syrup:  high carbs and low protein, exactly the opposite of what a diabetic should be eating.  I’ve always suspected that you drank alcohol because it was a way to self medicate your manic depressive mental states.  Now that your liver function has been damaged over the years, your body suffers from even more oxidative damage than most because it can’t efficiently detoxify.  So you suffer from a poor diet, diabetes, mental illness, and the inability to get adequate medical care.

You started using teraswhey® because I am your daughter and I gave it to you and told you it was good for you.  You like to look at my cans in your kitchen.  What you still don’t fully grasp is that my products have the power to not just feed you but also transform your life.  We talk about how the high protein, low carb, low glycemic index whey protein I give you has no fillers, additives, hormones, melamine, whatsoever.  Your eyes glaze over when I tell you that whey protein is one of the best dietary sources of cysteine and other precursors that your body converts to glutathione. Low levels of glutathione and high levels of oxidative stress have been associated with bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, liver disorders.  Sound familiar? As a diabetic, eating a high quality, high protein whey protein shake with low carbs and low glycemic index in the morning helps you regulate your blood sugar. With more work on your diet to take out sugar, I bet you would have a shot at getting off your insulin shots entirely, or at least maintain the low dosage you are currently taking. Your shakes are also feeding your body’s muscles and helping maintain and even build bone density.  All of these things are working to improve your underlying physical and mental health, which is now your only line of defense in the absence of access to adequate medical care. 

I wish there was a way for all of the women who face similar struggles in their later years to make teraswhey® part of their lives.  It says on my can that I created teraswhey® to cause extraordinary change.  That change happens one person, one shake at a time, and it starts with the people we love.

With love from your daughter,

Tera

Why I started teraswhey

teraswhey has always been a personal thing for me.  When my kids grew up and took flight to other parts of the country, I did the only sensible thing and started a company.  Now teraswhey is another teenager for me, and it too has grown and changed and become more and more independent from me.  I remember when it was a dream in my head; now I've got a management team and 25 people in the company and teraswhey cans on the shelves all over the country.  

I feel that empty nest gaping hole creeping into my life again. I stop to reflect. Why did I start teraswhey?  Over the next few weeks I'll be writing letters to the people around me and posting them, because I find that is the best way to capture why I did this.  These are the personal stories at the root of all of this. It is my hope that they will inspire others to create extraordinary change.  We live in a world that needs it.