Firefly Chocolate's business model is not necessarily about scaling up. Small batch processing is important to what founder and CEO Jonas Ketterle calls the "Elemental Alchemy of Transformation, bringing in Fire, Earth, Air, and Water.

Craft chocolate makers in the U.S. are sort of where the craft beer industry was 25 years ago. There were only about 200 craft chocolatiers in the U.S. when Jonas (German pronunciation: "Yonas") Ketterle launched Firefly Chocolate in 2014.

While there is no such thing as an ordinary Food Disruptor, Clarence Saunders was one colorful capitalist. He bootstrapped his way to a grand fortune, with Piggly Wiggly, the first self-service grocery store chain.

If you think grocery shopping is a hassle, be glad you are not a harried worker of 1916 trying to grab fixings for dinner on your way home. Then, as today, you would be jostled by hangry hordes. But a hundred years ago,

  - "There’s nothing more interesting than a brewery in terms of a combination of chemistry, physics, biochemistry, engineering. It’s a wonderworld of basic science. And in fact, much of modern science came out of breweries." -- Fritz Maytag, 2017

Today, those of us who enjoy beer expect to plop down at our neighborhood brew pub and order up a cold, fresh, tasty craft beer. We do not realize how endangered was this alcoholic refreshment option. During the twentieth century,

  - The Past is Prologue. Courtesy of a Molé Mama podcast that aired June 28, 2019, this episode of The Food Disruptors continues our two-part look at how the history of our food system informs our food ways today, and points to where we are going.

A few weeks ago, a great podcast, Molé Mama: Cooking With Love, featured Theresa as co-host of The Food Disruptors. This gave me the opportunity to tell The Food Disruptors origin story and take a step back to view the grand,

Henry Crowell turned a bland commodity that most Americans considered horse food into a ubiquitous, go-to breakfast food. He brought Quaker Oats to prominence through unrelenting marketing, including the famous Quaker Oats Special train,

Henry Crowell (1855-1944) gave us Quaker Oats for breakfast. Before he began mass-marketing a commodity, oats were generally regarded as horse food. The occasional immigrant housewife (Irish, Scottish, or German) might cook chopped oats into a porridge...