Episode 2: Carla Vernón on Leadership, Equity, and Scaling Good Food

Leadership, Equity, and Scaling Good Food

Carla Vernón is a Good Food icon, and is the former President of General Mills Natural and Organic Business Unit, where she stewarded brands such as Annie’s, Muir Glen, Cascadian Farms, Epic and more. Carla spent over 20 years with General Mills and worked on many of their household brand names in progressively larger areas of oversight and responsibility. Carla has also recently been named a Trustee of Princeton University. Carla shares her first hand experience growing and leading large-scale Organic and natural foods companies with The Checkout’s Host, Errol Schweizer. We discuss how Carla chose her career path and how she excelled, how diversity and inclusion policies can drive better products, business and social outcomes, and how the vast opportunities around regenerative farming may save the food system.

Episode #2 Notes

1:00 - What led you into the food industry?

3:30 - How did your family influence your career trajectory?

5:30 - What did you study in college?

7:30 - What were some of your initial experience working your way up a large food company?

9:50 - Did you feel like you faced additional challenges as a woman of color in the food industry?

13:45 - How do you think the natural products industry got so white? And what do we need to do to change that?

26:30 - Do you think the diversity, inclusion, and equity policies that have been applied to some procurement departments can ultimately help black farmers who have been disenfranchised?

33:30 - What inspired you to move into Organic foods?

37:45 - Under you leadership at General Mills, it embraced regenerative agriculture and responsiveness to climate change. How did you hustle that?

43:15 - What kinds of impacts do you think these progressive policies around sustainability was General Mills hoping to have?

48:45 - Are you seeing other players evolve along these same lines towards more sustainability and regenerative practices?

51:30 - How do you think large food companies are responding to a greater need for food security and food access in the COVID landscape?

57:00 - You’ve been a visible Black Lives Matter supporter at a high level in the food industry. How has this been received by your peer group in the food industry?

103:00 - Black people have been historically disenfranchised by the food system. What does a food system designed by Carla Vernon look like?

110:00 - What are three things you would recommend to a food industry leader to reverse the legacy of inequity and injustice in the food system?

114:00 - What’s on your reading list?

The Odyssey, Homer

Night, Elie Wiesel

Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis