Recipe for Greatness
Recipe for Greatness
Crafting a New Era in Personalised Nutrition with Melissa Snover
Uncover the inspiring entrepreneurial journey of Melissa Snover, the visionary founder and CEO of Nourished, as she takes us on a ride from her unexpected start in business to pioneering innovations in the world of personalised nutrition. Melissa's passion for creating a vegetarian gummy candy led her to experiment with plant-based ingredients and develop a vegan gummy using Gellan gum. Throughout this episode, Melissa opens up about the challenges she faced in scaling her businesses, from branding to international logistics, and how her dedication to food technology continues to break new ground in the industry.
Explore the art of strategic partnerships and business growth through Melissa's insights into the fine balance between knowing when to pivot and the power of aligning with the right partners. Highlighting a successful collaboration with Magic Candy Factory and industry giants like Colgate, Melissa illustrates how mutual innovation and value addition can propel a company's vision forward. This episode also offers effective strategies for raising brand awareness, emphasising tailored marketing approaches that honour the unique attributes of each product, and showcasing practical examples from Nourished's successful launch.
Melissa also shares her wisdom on building confidence as an entrepreneur through delegation and strategic marketing. Learn about the importance of trust and clear communication in empowering team members and the impact of public relations in fostering consumer trust. By balancing intuition with data-driven decision-making, Melissa navigates the complexities of managing a growing team and creating unprecedented technology. Her journey is a testament to perseverance and dedication, encouraging aspiring entrepreneurs to consider their personal circumstances while pursuing their dreams. Listen in to be inspired by Melissa's commitment to innovation and her trailblasing contributions to the industry.
3, 2, 1, 0, and liftoff Liftoff, no. Hello and welcome to the Recipe for Greatness podcast, where I interview the founders behind some of the best brands in the UK. Now, today's episode. We're thrilled to have Melissa Snoveron, the founder and CEO of Nourished, a trailblazer in the personalised nutrition space. After starting her entrepreneurial journey fresh out of university, melissa has been pushing the boundaries in the food technology industry. Her company, nourished, uses patented 3D printing technology to create bespoke nutrition gummies tailored to individuals' health needs and made from vegan, eco-friendly materials. Under her leadership, nourished has flourished, successfully securing over £15 million in funding and expanding its impact globally. Melissa is an award-winning entrepreneur with many awards to her name and a staunch advocate for women in technology and business. Melissa, welcome to the podcast.
Melissa Snover:Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Jay Greenwood:So I wanted to jump in and talk about when you left university, that you came over to the UK to a management school and you sort of I don't know if you fell into entrepreneurship or this was always your goal, but in your dissertation you ended up setting up a business around the finance space. What was that experience like, and was it something you planned to get into entrepreneurship or did you kind of just go into it?
Melissa Snover:Yeah, I think I am really the definition of an accidental entrepreneur. Now that I've been an entrepreneur for as long as I have, I think I always exhibited entrepreneurial character traits, but that was never my original plan. While in that program at Lancaster, we had a project we had to basically beta test a business idea, and so I picked something which I thought was really obvious and ripe for innovation and improvement and and that I thought I would be able to get an A in the class. And so, yeah, once I started doing it and saw how successful it was and how much more I could do, I decided after I finished to continue to run that could do. I decided after I finished to continue to run that and I ended up doing it for around five years before selling it on to start really passion projects that have really led the rest of my career.
Jay Greenwood:And what was the pull for? Kind of the consumer sweet space, what was it sort of? Maybe your background or some insights you had that made you sort of follow that route?
Melissa Snover:Yeah, absolutely so. When I started the first food brand, goody Good Stuff, I actually was being rather selfish, but I think a lot of great ideas start this way. I have been a vegetarian since the mid to late 90s way before you know, there was the free for a mile and plant based was on all of the products. And I'm also like one of the only people I know that is not really a fan of chocolate. I don't hate chocolate. So you know, it's not like I'm a weirdo, but it's just I'm not. I'm not a massive fan of it, I don't crave it, but I do crave gummy candy, and I found giving up gummy candy being the hardest thing about going vegetarian. And so when I took the sale of the first business and I had a bit of money, I thought because I had no idea what I was doing I want to caveat with that oh, I have this amount of money, which was now when I look kitchen did a ton of online research, attended lectures that I wasn't enrolled in around hydrocoids technology, biochemistry and food science, and basically started messing around in my kitchen, a bit like mad science, with different types of gelling agents that were coming from plants, and so I played with, you know, agar, agar and pectin that comes from apples and citrus fruit, and I ended up landing on a recipe that was based in an ingredient called Jalan gum.
Melissa Snover:Jalan gum is is comes from the um, the membrane on the bottom of a lily pad that stops the lily pad from falling into the water, and it actually makes a really lovely bouncy gummy. It's all natural, it's obviously plant based, and I was able to use that ingredient with a combination of other things to create a super bouncy, realistic gummy, but which was vegan, kosher, halal, free from every major allergen. And then, yeah, and then I had my next problem, which was, oh, I have no factory in which to make this, and so I had to literally go knocking on the doors of factories trying to find someone to help us to make it. And luckily, I had a lot of help along the way and we were able to find a great partner to get the business up and running.
Jay Greenwood:And you mentioned that at Cootie Good Food. That was your second business and it scaled it really well. It was a big business. So what were some of the main things you took away from that experience of like taking, you know, just an idea like, say, all that research that you put in and then sort of scaling? I think it was at 40,000 stores when it was its peak, before you decided to maybe do something else.
Melissa Snover:Yeah, absolutely, you're right.
Melissa Snover:Basically, with Goodie Good Stuff, I had, I think, the largest education of my career, and that's like a really polite, very positively framed way of saying I had the most pain in having to learn everything from the ground up.
Melissa Snover:I had to learn how to do branding, how to make packaging, how to source packaging, how to do a cutter, how to set up international logistics, what is an HS code, how to do back, how to source packaging, how to do a cutter, how to set up international logistics, what is an HS code, how to do back-of-pack labeling, how to pitch a retailer, how to organize a promotional plan, how to build a P&L.
Melissa Snover:And because I had very little money, I had to do a lot of that myself. I flew all over the world I think at one point I was traveling close to 250 days a year. Every single retailer that we secured, I pitched them directly and that was kind of a baptism of fire in education on how to create a brand, get it into retail and basically get consumers to pick it up off a shelf and buy it. And so, yeah, in a very short space of time I was able to grow it to a really substantial level of distribution, which got a lot of interest from major global players in the confectionery and snacking space, and that is what led us to go into a formal process, with the support of PwC, to sell the business.
Jay Greenwood:And then that leads me on to the next section of how does, then, 3d printing enter the space? And I guess what I'm curious about is, like it's almost that maybe there's a thread that themes of being able to see a trend or a gap in the market, because you mentioned that sort of like the free from movement. You sort of spotted that early with Good is Good Food. So how does 3D printing enter the space and sort of, how did you first get exposed to it?
Melissa Snover:So how does 3D printing enter the space and sort of, how did you first get exposed to it? So yeah, that's a great question. It was a weird flex, I think, when you look at it from the outside. And when I was doing goody, good stuff, I was working in some of the biggest and most well-known, well-renowned gummy manufacturing factories in the world in the world and I was extremely impressed by the scale, the quality, just the sheer magnitude of these operations and the amount of product that they were able to make. But what I was extremely frustrated by was the inflexibility and lack of agility that exist in pretty much all manufacturing models of a scale, and so when I sold that business, I had the opportunity to look at alternatives to basically make manufacturing more flexible and more responsive, to be able to handle the changing trends and consumer demands In a perfect world.
Melissa Snover:My altruistic idea was I want consumers to be able to make whatever product they want at that moment, and so, having no experience really in 3D printing at that time, I had read a lot about it. It had just come out of patent protection with industrial use. So the basic technology for rip-rap printing came out of patent protection in 2012, I believe, and I started to get really stuck into reading about it. I bought 3D printers off the internet, I took them apart, put them back together, almost lost my mind.
Melissa Snover:It was very, very difficult to do, taught myself decoding, and then I had an opportunity to work with a leading expert in gelification science to develop a totally new type of material that would be 3D printable. And so, for those people who don't know, when you make gummy in large factories, you heat it up to a hugely high level it's around 300 degrees plus and when it's deposited into the molds, it's extremely hot and very, very liquid. Okay, maybe not water, but not far off water, it's super, super liquid. So you can imagine you put that into a 3D printer, you're making a puddle of nothing. And so what I had to do was I had to find a way to get material to go from solid to liquid to solid in, you know, almost instantaneously, and so during that work, we were able to also develop and patent a really powerful material science technology that we still use today in the nourish business.
Jay Greenwood:And I think that again going back to like a thread that I noticed from the journey, is basically it's your ability to see a problem, and I think I read like heard you say that when you were approaching people about these 3d printers, saying, oh, can we do food, they were like no, it's not possible, not possible. And then, referencing back to the start of the conversation, it was kind of with the, the vegan gummies and making them all free from. They were like no, it's not possible. But you just basically did a deep dive and was like right, I'm gonna figure this out on it. I think I heard an interview said that your mum, when you were younger you, when it was someone would say like you can't be done. She'd then say to you like well, no, let's look at it, let's see how it can be done. Is that kind of the process you take for every single challenge you have now?
Melissa Snover:yeah, absolutely, and I think yeah, that's probably the kind of overarching message of my entire career. I think when people tell you that it can't be done, it shouldn't be done, it can't be done in less than 10 years, um, that just makes me want to figure it out more.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, and so how does then, like nourished and remedy health sort of arc into sort of this 3d printing journey, because I'm right thinking that you were spending a long time sort of developing this machine and everything like that. So how did you know sort of what the vision of the company was? Or was it more just figuring out the technology and then finding a commercial use for it after?
Melissa Snover:No, that's a great question. So when we were developing it at first, I was coming from the confectionery industry. I was still focused on confectionery industry. I was still focused on confectionery and I was really interested in making the creation of a product live and making the consumer a part of it. And so the first printers that we developed we actually got certified to be used in live consumer environments, which the level of scrutiny on a machine that's used in a consumer environment is extremely high for safety reasons. And we launched those printers all over the world in Dylan's Candy Bar, hong Kong, duty Free, candylicious, dubai, warner Brothers World, universal Studios. Like they're still there. There's still some of them out there and you know we went around the world launching them, training people, building them, because we built all of our own equipment.
Melissa Snover:And you know, at a certain point in that journey probably about I think about it as midway through, but from a timeline, it was probably about 18 months in I started to realize that two things were changing. One I was getting older, I had children. I didn't want to sell sugar anymore. I wanted to focus on developing products that were adding health value to people. I was also very, very avidly focused on it for myself.
Melissa Snover:And then, secondarily, I realized that the technology was so much more powerful than the area where we pointed it. There was nothing wrong with what we did, it was awesome, it was a leap forward for 3D printing of food, educational, delightful, and I'm really proud of it. But the technology itself was so much powerful than that and I realized if we could actually optimize and add to this platform and use it to personalize nutrition and curative health, we could make an absolutely massive difference in people's lives and potentially change global health. And that was kind of the light bulb moment when I went back to my team and said, ok, I want to do feasibility tests on converting our technology to use it for health. And that was really where the idea came.
Jay Greenwood:And what are you doing in the background to sort of listen to those signals that you think actually this is maybe the new direction, so basically change the whole business direction in somewhere else, because I guess some entrepreneurs they start business and they think, right, I've got to keep going this direction, no matter what. Like this is the goal. How, what do you do and what signals do you listen to to maybe see different opportunities in other spaces?
Melissa Snover:Yes, so that's a very good point that you make and I totally agree with you. I think one of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur is stop doing what you originally thought you would be doing because you fell in love with it. You have to be in love with what you're doing while you're doing it, and to say that I'm no longer in love with it. I need to be in love with something else is really difficult to do because it goes against your natural way, which is just keep going, don't give up. Don't give up Right.
Melissa Snover:And there's there is a huge difference between giving up and shifting gears or pivoting, and I think for me I started to look at it's been the same in each one of my, my businesses. I get to a point where I feel like there's not much more I can do in this area where I can add value. And okay, you could argue, I feel a little bit bored, but also I feel like now I'm not making a difference, I'm not using my time to the best of my ability to, you know, to change the world, to help people, to make, you know, to make improvements. And so I began to feel that way with Magic Candy Factory and I realized that you know, I could have shifted to a totally new idea, but I realized what we had as a baseline was so strong and actually we had an opportunity to not completely change but actually shift our focus to a different area and apply the technology and build on it.
Jay Greenwood:And you're a sole founder in this business. I think, and one trend I notice, is your ability to partner with people and find those people who can really help accelerate the vision of the company. So how do you go about finding those right partners and how do you convince them that you know your vision is the right vision and they should actually support you on it?
Melissa Snover:So, yeah, partners we have a ton of amazing partnerships currently with our business, nourish, and you know, most of the time they come to us, they come to us with an R&D challenge or an innovation goal and they've seen what we've done in our core business or with another partnership and they're looking for us to use our technology to help them to get to where they're going to where they want to go faster than potentially they could do on their own right, Because we have all these patents and we have a ton of you know, on the ground experience and doing rapid and agile innovation and new product development. What is the hardest thing for me as a CEO is choosing which of those partnerships to do, because we get actually a lot more inquiries than we take forward as partnerships and really, I think the main things I'm looking for are are we equally going to be able to add value to the partnership? I think that's a good lesson for any entrepreneur when looking at any partnership. If it is a one-sided relationship, it will never last in the long term, even if it feels like it's slated towards you in the beginning. It's very difficult to keep a relationship going for the long term if it's not mutually beneficial and both parties are not contributing something important to the overall outcome.
Melissa Snover:Also, I think good partnerships produce things that could not be produced with the sum of the parts individually right. So we work with, for example, colgate they're the world leader in oral care. They bring to us some amazing science and ingredients that they have pioneered for, you know, 50 years or longer, and then we use those ingredients in our technology solution to be able to create a product that neither one of us would have been able to do on our own. And I think if you have those two kind of elements nailed down, you can create partnerships that really not only help your business to generate revenue but also build awareness, social proof in an area which is extremely crowded, which is, you know, nutrition and health and supplements. Building that awareness and trust is a huge barrier for new entrants, and so doing that has really helped us to build that faster than we would have huge barrier for new entrants, and so doing that has really helped us to build that faster than we would have been able to on our own.
Jay Greenwood:And going to the launch of Nourished, I feel like as a consumer who is interested in space. Suddenly I just saw Nourished everywhere. How did you go about sort of raising awareness of Nourished? What was your effective strategy to let people know about it, Because it seemed like you guys did such a good job to just get out there and let it be known?
Melissa Snover:Yeah, I think it is. Every product is different and I think the strategy you employ has to be really based around your product. But I think for the nourish concept, we did a blend which is still the blend we use today in our kind of marketing mix. Our strongest pillar is PR. We focus on PR a lot because we have a ton of really credible editorial level stories that we can talk about that give us access to consumers in a very educational way, right, as opposed to sell, sell, sell, because our consumer that we're looking for does not want to be bombarded by sales messaging and, like me, I mean my customer is similar to me. I'm not buying things on Instagram, right. So it's more about how can we reach that person in the best way, and a lot of times, the best way to do that is through editorial content around a part of our business or something new that we've developed or something new that we're doing.
Melissa Snover:The second part is we did tons of out of home and if you're in London, that's maybe where you saw we did tons of like the tube takeovers and stuff, and I have to say, being American and coming to the UK and knowing the price of advertising in that way in both countries. The UK is extremely well priced. To do like nationwide out of home campaigns in the UK costs less than you know a city center campaign in New York city, Right? So it's it's incredible how far your money can go. So I think that's good value. And then we did a ton of sampling, because if your product tastes good, the best way to get people to buy it as to sample it. Yeah.
Jay Greenwood:So interesting having the reference point from like a US perspective versus a UK perspective, because I hear people say over here it's very expensive, but actually then reference it against another market. It's really different.
Melissa Snover:Yeah, absolutely. And then I think you know obviously a lot has changed since when we started in relation to PPC. The entire industry has changed with all of the changes to iOS and the diminishment of cookies and so on and so forth. But I think you know if one thing remains true if people don't know about you, if you are brand brand, brand brand new, they're not going to search for you on Google. So you have to start with social media platforms. Tiktok is certainly pushing very hard to take over as the leading platform for that, but in the very beginning you've got to show your product to people. Then they will search for it on Google. But if you start with search, you will spend a ton of money and you won't get a lot of good results.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, and one of the interviews I heard you do you spoke about maybe one of the mistakes you did earlier in your career was doing too much yourself and not delegating, and a quote that I heard you say was people want to live up to good reputation. So how have you got comfortable as you've grown I mean the scale of nourish now? I think that on one of the interviews I read it was like 270 most recently, but it's probably even more now. So how have you got comfortable with delegating and how have you done it well?
Melissa Snover:I think delegation gets easier as you do it and it's successful. So it's kind of like self-proliferating. I think what's the hardest point is when you need to start to delegate for the first time, or, god forbid, you try to delegate something and then it doesn't go well, so the person that you've delegated to doesn't perform at the level that you need or doesn't understand the brief. I always start with the question did I communicate correctly? What could I present in my own management will start with themselves. Anyone that comes into my office blaming their team this is not okay with me. Your team are a result of you. My children are a result of me. You cannot expect your team to read your mind. You have to give clear directives. So I think that's the first thing I would say. Giving very clear directives, examples, a timeline, offering support and having regular, deliverable check-ins is a great way to start delegation and feel like you haven't completely lost control of something that might be quite important to you or your business at that earlier stage. As soon as someone does something for you on a delegated basis, you know more than three times correctly. You will trust them to do it and you will be able to. You know, look the other way and focus on something else, and that's where delegation starts to pay real dividends.
Melissa Snover:At the end of the day, if I had not done that I still am to a degree, but I definitely was when I did that original interview the biggest barrier to my company's growth was me, because I was involved and in charge of so many things. Yet I'm only one human being and there is a limit to even someone as motivated and diligent and determined and committed as I am there is. I do need to still sleep. I'm not a vampire, contrary to my team's belief. So you know, I think you have to. I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel like they need to do it. You actually need to shift your perspective and realize that you need to delegate to allow your business to reach its full potential and if you don't, it's not like martyrdom, like you're laying down on a sword. You're actually becoming the barrier to growth.
Jay Greenwood:And I wanted to go now back to the psychology of being a businesswoman, being a business person, and I heard you speak about sort of the inner voice and feeling quite sort of on the edge for a year and a half, and I'm curious how did you go about building confidence in yourself over a period of time? Because you sort of maybe mentioned at the beginning that maybe confidence wasn't the strongest thing you had.
Melissa Snover:Yeah, I think you earn confidence. You earn trust with others, you earn confidence in yourself, and I think they're very similar things. So when you are brand new and you have no experience and you are fresh out of university and you are being tossed into a bunch of situations where you have absolutely no idea what to do, it's very difficult. I think it would almost be foolhardy to be confident. That would be a little bit insane. Right as you grow and as you go through these experiences and my method, for better for worse, has been throw yourself in, fake it till you make it be in a meeting, hear a word or something and be like, yeah, no problem. And then looking it up, finding out what it is, figuring it out right.
Melissa Snover:I think everybody who's really good has done that. Anyone who tells you differently, I think is fibbing. But then after a while you will find that you have overcome some crazy challenges and achieve some really important and impressive things and you get to a point where actually, when a new challenge comes, it's probably a bigger challenge than what you've done before. That's certainly the case with me. I mean, I have a ton. I have more people working for me now than I ever imagined I would ever have working for me. The level and the size of the business is bigger than I thought I would ever have. But when we have challenges now, despite their size, my reaction is very different, because I have built a huge amount of confidence in my ability to be resilient, to be agile, to be able to handle what comes, and I also have a ton of trust and confidence in my team's ability to do that as well. And I think that has really changed. Not the fact that we don't have challenges we do but the way that we go through them.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, Because I guess as well, when I've been listening to all the interviews and just listening to like the things you've overcome, like the perseverance just seems a constant thread as well. Just figuring out things like you say the free from trend, the figuring out 3D printers how big has like perseverance been? The free from trend, the figuring out 3D printers, how big has like perseverance been? So I guess as well, underpinning that confidence because I guess is that if there's a challenge and you're just saying right, I'm going to face it on, does that sort of then build that confidence over time?
Melissa Snover:Yeah, absolutely. I think what we do things that nobody has ever done right. So we built technology that had never been built. We make products that have never been made.
Melissa Snover:There is no roadmap or case study or you know textbook that we can read to like get a guide on how we're going to do this, and it is very unnerving in the beginning, but as you, as you go through it over and over again, you realize that there are only two potential outcomes when you do that right.
Melissa Snover:So the first potential outcome is you achieve your goal and you are alone in your market, which is so rare it's so rare to not even Tesla's alone in their market. To be alone in your market to be able to do something that no one else can do is so huge, it's monumental right. The other alternative outcome, which is potentially more likely, is that you don't achieve it and instead you get an education and get to cross one of the options off on your list on your way to getting there right. And if you think about it like that, if all of the negative connotation to failure goes away, I often get asked what was your biggest failure? And my answer is you know, I, I don't see any of the things that I have done or that have happened to be failures. What I have had is a huge amount of education.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah and raising money you got. You've done an amazing job and I think there was a record that you raised the biggest female seed round. And one thing I really loved was in the interview said you know you hope you get beaten as quickly as possible because you want more funding in that space. And one thing I found really incredible and really enjoyed listening to on your interviews was just how concise and consistent your messaging was around the brand, what you're trying to achieve and the goals. And I'm curious is that something you had to learn and focus on that messaging to always deliver it, or is it just something that you just naturally do?
Melissa Snover:Um, no, the messaging and the values and the mission of the brand come from my heart and so, yeah, they are very much intrinsic to me as an individual. Certainly, other people within the business have helped me shape them, and you know, but at the end of the day, the vision and the mission for the company is something that I started with from the very beginning. The vision and the mission for the company is something that I started with from the very beginning. It's what keeps you going on the days when it's really tough, and you've got to have a really hold, a really close and tight hold on that in order to see it through.
Jay Greenwood:One thing I want to touch on as well was the conflict between following your gut and then following data, because I in an interview say sort of like the importance of following your gut but I guess as you've scaled maybe the data starts to become a more directional influence on the way to say the business. But is the gut still the big driving force?
Melissa Snover:it makes you sort of know which path to take yeah, that's a good question, I think, um, I I always actually have relied heavily on data. Luckily, in a D2C business, you get so much data. It's wonderful. It's really really, really rich with data. I will feel something and it will either get stronger or it will go away. If it gets stronger, then I will verify my feeling with data before making a decision, but it's usually my first inclination as to something is going on.
Melissa Snover:There are other things where there is no data that we can get so far. I mean maybe one day, but around personal relationships, relationships, team culture, there's no data that you can rely on for that. That is a feeling and that is that is about making sure that I make myself available for my team, that I have regular one-to-ones and that I am present in the factory, which I am every day. Right before I got on this call with you, I was in the factory with the team. Right before I got on this call with you, I was in the factory with the team hairnet, lab coat, you know because I think it's so important not to ever lose that connection to your entire team. Those people in there are the foundation of the business, doesn't matter how many high flying C-suite we end up getting, or how much investment we ever get. If those people are not fully committed to our goals, the business will never, ever achieve this, the ambitions that it has and how important is the foundational logic?
Jay Greenwood:because as the company scaled is like, say, it's got so many employees, it's a big business now, but you have the foundational logically built from the beginning, like, say, taking apart these 3d printers, learning g coding, how important is that for you to actually then to have that foundational knowledge, then scale the company as well because you have that foundation.
Melissa Snover:Yeah, I think it's really unique.
Melissa Snover:I think, as I've gone on in my journey and I've met more and more investors and peers, I think I've found that that's rather unique as a CEO, but I'm still every single week involved in new product development, formulations, technology, as along with all the other things finance, sales, fundraising, you know those types of things but I love the new product development, I love the technology development.
Melissa Snover:I think if I had to stop doing them, I would lose a little something, which would make it harder for me to do the rest. And I think understanding all of the individual areas of your business, at least at a base level, is key, because how can you manage something that you don't understand? I think that's because how can you manage something that you don't understand? I think that's maybe when you get into a huge, huge conglomerate, maybe, but even then I feel uncomfortable about it. I feel like I make sure all my managers work in the teams you know, on the ground before they get to start managing them, and I try and do the same, because you simply cannot manage something that you don't understand.
Jay Greenwood:And brings me on to my next point about advice for future founders. Because I think there's that sort of push and pull with you know, whether or not you go all in on an idea or a passion you have or whether or not you sort of keep it as a side project. And I guess I'm reflecting on your journey and just seeing the foundations just stacking up and up and up to make you almost the perfect person to build, nourish, like there's no one else who could have done it because of all the things. So how do you think about sort of the you know, if you have an idea going all in or sort of maybe having a step back and sort of building the foundation or just to make you the person to do it, like sort of maybe having a step back and sort of building the foundational just to make you the person to do it.
Melissa Snover:Like, what's your viewpoint on entrepreneurs and taking that next step? I think it all comes down to your own personal journey and your personal circumstances. So when I started my first business in university, I had no children, I had no mortgage. I think that was the easiest time to do it because you can. What was the worst thing that could have happened? It didn't work. Go get a job Right.
Melissa Snover:I think when it becomes more difficult and when it becomes a much more complex decision is when you have more responsibility around you. At that stage you need to go into your heart and you need to, you know, listen to your intuition. If you are not super unhappy in your current role and you can do a side hustle that gives you joy and makes you some extra money and that is enough for you. You will know that I have never really felt that way. I have always felt extremely driven and pulled to do something and I've also had very little.
Melissa Snover:I don't mean that I didn't have other options, but like when I go all in, I focus on it a hundred percent. Like when I built the first 3D printer for food. I did nothing else for 16 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for six months, because if I couldn't get it to work, bad, bad things would happen to me. Financially right, like it was, like it was really. But I think that's when you get the biggest results, because you have no choice, like you have to find a way. Now. It could either be because you love it so much you can't not do it, or it could be because you don't't have if something, if you don't do it, bad things will happen. But you've you've got to um decide between yourself, um in your heart, what, what makes you happy.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, well, I think that's um a brilliant place to end up the interview and I wanted to get your opinion as well on. You mentioned it with failures and I wanted to. I think it was one quote I'm just trying to find now that I think inspired by your mum the right way and the easy way are never the same way.
Melissa Snover:That's one of them.
Jay Greenwood:Go on as God's answer. Prayers are the ones that don't come true yeah, that's it.
Melissa Snover:so I think that's a lovely saying and it basically means like, sometimes you think you want something, you hope for it. You you think it's the best thing for you. You don't get it and then, after enough time has passed, you realize that the path that you got pushed onto instead of that, that dream that you wanted was actually the right, the right path, and I think it's the same thing with, it's the same thing when you're being educated. It's really really, really difficult, suffering and and education and growth is difficult, and you can never understand that while you're going through it. You can only see it once you've come out the other side and look back. And so, yeah, I try and think about that when things don't go my way. Yeah, but my mom is a she's a legend, she's full of these things. We have many of her sayings actually in my office on posters on the walls.
Jay Greenwood:Yeah, just from listening to the interviews I got inspiration, just from her. I've never met her, so, yeah, stephanie sounds an incredible person.
Jay Greenwood:well, that sounds a brilliant point to finish the interview and I want to thank you so much for, uh, one, just all the advice you've given us, but also, two, how amazing Norwich is like. I've been listening to you, know the future plans for and everything, and I think it's real game changer industry and it's gonna help a lot of people. So thank you for pushing on, persevering through everything and creating it oh, it's a pleasure.
Melissa Snover:thank you for pushing on, persevering through everything and creating it, oh, it's a pleasure.
Jay Greenwood:Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it, as always. Guys, thank you so much for listening, really appreciate the support and if you guys like it and you're enjoying what you're listening to, please like and subscribe and write a review. We'd really appreciate it again. We'll be back doing this weekly and, yeah, if you want to know more about starting a food business, head to wwwjgreenwoodcom. But, guys, as always, thank you and be great.