We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Anthony Zolezzi . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Anthony below.

Anthony, appreciate you joining us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

There were many defining moments in my career but this one was especially important as a baseline “virtue” for the rest of my career. It was early in my career, I was on a 10-year training program to become a CEO of one of the many subsidiaries of the St Louis-based Ralston Purina Company, which included working in each of the subsidiaries for a six-month period. 

The company had subsidiaries in poultry, pork, global animal feed, pet food, vegetables and vegetable proteins as well as cereal, so I would get many unique and different assignments.  This one was to see if I could find a source of freeze-dried strawberries for a new cereal launch.  So, I headed out to the so-called “Strawberry Capital” of Watsonville, Calif., to meet with strawberry growers. I met with multiple growers, but the defining moment came when I was meeting with one whose strawberry rows in the field all had signs on them. When asked about the signs, he said it was to determine when they were sprayed with pesticides and when they would be available to harvest. I went to pick a strawberry from the row of bushes in front of me and he said, “No don’t eat that.” I was aghast. I asked, “Do you and your family eat these strawberries?” and he said no. I couldn’t believe it— then I looked at the soil, and it was as if motor oil was spilled on it. I asked him where he gets the strawberries for his family and he gave me directions to the farm he recommended, which was only a couple of miles. 

I found the farm and told the manager who had sent me, and we discussed his growing practices. I immediately noticed no stick peg signs in the field. I also noticed the soil was clumpy not compact. I asked if I could eat one from the strawberry plant and proceeded to pick a strawberry and he said yes. I was, “Wow! What is the difference here?” The grower said he did not use pesticides as a rule but used the soil to create a strong plant that insects could not get there mandible around. I was amazed. Then I noticed how fruit-forward the flavor of this strawberry was. He said he had always practiced biodynamic and organic agriculture, so that his strawberries, although not sold as organic, received a premium in the market because of taste. I took a small basket with me, eating them confidently on the road without washing and wondering why anybody would grow food for humans that’s not organic? Today everything I do is about “sustainability,” avoidance of using toxic chemicals (Including being a co-author of “Chemical Free Kids” and “Chemical Free Kids, The Organic Sequel”), practicing organic agriculture, and showing respect for Mother Nature. I have taken this virtue as a baseline to co-create a food brand called Eco Terra that celebrated growers who practiced integrated pest management versus using pesticides, a pet-food brand called Pet Promise Natural and Organic Pet Food, and the Code Blue/Greenopolis Recycling Company, as well as to do things like getting Horizon Organic Milk into Starbucks and establishing an antibiotic-free pork-supply chain for Chipotle. 

This sustainability virtue also has influenced my work as an asset manager and investment counselor to companies, since sustainability and health cannot be unlinked. While at Pegasus Capital Advisors, the first U.S. private equity fund manager accredited by the Green Climate Fund, I championed a significant investment in a cure for childhood infectious diarrhea and continue to look for and invest in products that are clean, nutritious and sustainable.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in an Italian fishing family in San Diego California. The Italian roots of the family required Catholic Mass on Sunday and family dinner for everyone at my nano and nana’s house. This dinner was where I learned a lot about a culture by watching as the women of the family served the men and then after dinner the men gathered in another room with cigars and either more wine or cognac. The conversations of the women, when I could get a listen, were always about the families and the nephews and nieces, whereas with the men the talk was all about the business with a dash of weather and the environment. Who in the industry was doing well? Was there going to be a “chabasco” or a big storm? Were water temperatures in certain places making them friendlier to fishermen?  Or did the Marietta need a new net.?  They would then talk about other related businesses, like why wasn’t the restaurant doing better? I would listen, laugh when they laughed, and get them anything they wanted without hesitation. As time went on, I realized how difficult an occupation deep-sea fishing actually was for the boat owners who had to mortgage everything to provide the fuel and food for the crew and head out to sea not knowing where the fish would be or even being able to see them. The women had to hold the families together on their own. To this day I cannot believe how my mother kept all four of us (for the most part) out of trouble, active in sports and continuing with the family traditions, even in the absence of the men in the family for months at a time. I really don’t remember my dad being home during my formative years very much at all. But my mom was a saint and did her best to make us feel like we were a family, and she did. Through this I learned three basic lessons: That women are the rock in any family or organization, that you need to respect Mother Nature, the source of everything you get in life, and that there is nothing wrong with wanting more as long as whatever you do to acquire it includes showing consideration for the planet and its inhabitants.

So, when I got out into the real world this learning served me very well. First and foremost, I recognized the importance of strong women like my mom in any situation. Secondly, I learned that if you want to live life to its fullest, it will take resources and hard work like my grandfather, father and uncles always emphasized when they were together, mostly during Christmas Holidays. Underlying all that was the fact that they were never happy standing still. At those Sunday cigar sessions, for example, they talked about how they could grow their business by acquiring new boats and getting more fuel. They talked about how to bring more people into the restaurants they supplied. They collectively had a thirst for more and they could get there because they had a group of wives who were the real “rock” of the family.

So out of college my first job was at Foodmaker in San Diego which was the parent of Jack in the Box. I was a quantity-control technician primarily working the taco line. I really didn’t want anyone in the family to know that was my job. My cousins were becoming more and more accomplished in the tuna business and the family was prospering, so I had to do more. I began by befriending the receptionist whose name was Dorothy. She didn’t know it, but because of my upbringing I knew what an important person she really was, greeting everyone that came to visit Foodmaker and more importantly having an uncanny knowledge of every single senior executive from the CEO and the entire C suite. So, every day when I got off work, I would sit in the lobby and observe Dorothy and ask her questions. I would ask her who the executives were and what she knew about them, and she was just incredible. Like my mother, she was a “rock,” and I knew she would help me get a job my family and I could be proud of— and she did. One afternoon in the fall she gave to me this card. When I said, “What’s this,” she replied that it was for the football pool the executives played every week, and if I were to win it, I would get their attention. I studied each game, and realized it was extremely difficult because they were primarily Saturday college games, which were unpredictable for the most part. I gave it a go. thanking Dorothy incessantly, and she turned it in. On Monday afternoon I walked into the lobby. and she said with a huge smile, “Guess what? –the “lobby boy” won the pool. I couldn’t believe it, but also was curious about being referred to as the “lobby boy.”  That’s how they refer to you in the Executive Suite, she replied. 

I didn’t keep that nickname for long, however, because through that lucky happenstance, I got my break—a real office job out and a salary versus a $3.30 per hour wage. Man, I thought, it didn’t get any better than that. I worked diligently and pretty much gave my whole being to my job, just as I saw my dad doing. I knew I had the eye of several executives and was finally invited to a cocktail party at one of those sea-food restaurants I was familiar with in San Diego called the Boat House on Shelter Island. An older executive came up to me, asked me my name and what I thought of Jack in the Box at headquarters. I proceeded to tell him that I came from a family business and that no one I had observed in the company really worked that hard. I went on to discuss specific things I would do differently. He looked at me, nodded and proceeded to work the room. Later I found out he was the vice chairman of the Jack in the Box parent company, Paul Corneilson. Two weeks later my boss called me in and told me I was going to be offered a training program at the headquarters, reporting to Paul Corneilson if I wanted to commit to the company. 

The next week I flew on a Falcon jet by myself with two pilots and a flight attendant. Once in St Louis, I was on a training program to become a CEO of one of the company’s many subsidiaries. There was meat, pork, chicken, etc., and I was going to learn all of them — and I did, spending six months in the office of every CEO or division president, reporting to the vice chairman, flying on company jets, all of which was fundamental in my learning how to be a CEO.  But so was respecting and understanding the importance of everyone in an organization from the janitor to the receptionist, which I had learned from my mom. This baseline of knowledge was an incredible gift from my family and everyone around me and has been the basis for co-founding 10 new businesses and occupying CEO roles in five others, as well as four corporate turnarounds and investments in 10-plus companies, the purpose of all of them having always been the betterment of the planet and its inhabitants.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I

It was the mid-1990s. I had just come off three successful turnarounds of companies worth $500 million or more and creating the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, based on my having viewed the movie Forrest Gump and approaching Paramount for permission to use the name. I was on a roll that was incredible but was also making me somebody I wasn’t sure I wanted to be. I felt my successes were putting me in danger of losing the core components of me that said to respect the people and planet first. So, I needed to do something that brought me back. Organic agriculture was it. I had learned enough at Ralston Purina to know what I knew I didn’t want to do, and that was using chemicals in our food supply. So, I decided to go all in on organic, with an emphasis on children, by licensing again from Paramount, this time the Richard Scarry Busy Town characters, likenesses and images. We came out with a full line of organic graham crackers, cereal, everything a kid could want. It went crazy —Kroger took it in nationwide and we were on fire. I was feeling really good about everything we were doing. I want on morning shows all over the country talking about the chemicals that where in most commercial cereals and the growth hormones in milk and asking why you would you start your child’s day off with that. 

But then one day our customer service department was called by a Kroger buyer, who said they had gotten a complaint about the taste of our graham crackers. I asked that all the samples be brought out and we started tasting them, and it was soon evident that the oil was rancid. We had to do a recall.  I couldn’t believe this could happen. I needed to recall everything that contained oil, which was almost every product. This was a nightmare. I couldn’t sweep this under the rug; this was children we were talking about being given products with rancid oil, who might never eat organic again. We issued the voluntary recall, but not just the products that had oil came back— so did all the branded Busy Town products. The business was tanking. I had to face it and realize that this was a fail, a big fail, a $30- million-dollar fail —and it was on my watch, on my shoulders. It was devastating and painful to start receiving all the product back and having to pay additionally to dispose of it. I told the outside investor that I would turn the light off and that we would all have to own up to the losses; it just is what it is. I was crushed and had to really come to terms with how I could let all the employees down and those mothers that I had been pontificating to about better food for their children. It was humbling and embarrassing—but just exactly what I really needed to keep me from becoming become another arrogant and sanctimonious CEO. It was good to have this break and let me get back to what I was really supposed to do. Most importantly, to eat this humble pie slowly and learn from it. Which I did.

Then a friend named Mark Retzloff, the founder of Horizon Organic, knowing that I was distraught over the New Organics Company closing, threw me a life preserver: Could I come in and help him with figuring out the growth strategy for his company? This was such an important an incredible gesture by Mark, and I thank him immensely for giving me the opportunity and confidence to bounce back.
This led to many meetings with Starbucks and eventually every store had the small boxes of Horizon branded strawberry, vanilla and chocolate milk. This was a major accomplishment for an organic food brand now in thousands of locations sending, the organic message across the country. Most important to me, it was providing children with a nutritious and clean protein without growth hormones. I saw Howard Schultz years later in a restaurant in Seattle and told him I credited him and his vision for the Horizon organic brand in Starbucks as a marque moment in the building of the organic food industry and thanked him for that. It was onward from there to utilizing organic beef hearts and livers for Pet Promise, the first natural and organic pet food to be commercially available across the country.

We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.

I’d like to share what I learned from having led the sale of our pet food company Pet Promise, which I cofounded with Dave Carter, to Nestle Purina, and Code Blue Recycling, which I cofounded with Paul Wolff, to Waste Management. Both were small entrepreneurial companies that where disrupting the industry and the leader had to have the proprietary technology we developed. As a result, the work we thought we had behind us to build both these companies was only the beginning. The major players needed us to redo everything, so instead of adapting and scaling it was almost like the weight of the big companies was wearing us out. In both situations we were really outsiders. Think the real lesson from these experiences is that once you sell you are not in control of anything. You have to walk away, understanding that big companies have their own successful ways of doing things. You and your team simply have to change your paradigm because you are not going to get the lift or the benefit from the leader in the industry. While we all could celebrate the small victories of changing a supply chain on pet food and creating a new recycling stream at Waste Management, we also had to realize that we were no longer running the show and move on to the business of tackling another global problem—and that is what our team did.

Contact Info:

• Website: Zolezzi.coach
• Linkedin: Www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyzolezzi
• Twitter: @anthonyzolezzi
• Youtube: Anthony Zolezzi
• Other: www.anthonyzolezzi.com, www.zolezzi.coach, www.zolezzi.gallery,

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