We interviewed Zoë Geller of Fire Ox Foods to hear how she is rethinking the way that sustainable and eco-friendly foods are marketed, packaged, and shared with the world.
Zoë Geller is in charge of sales, marketing, and fundraising at Fire Ox Foods. Before creating Fire Ox, she was the third employee at a local food distributor startup called Common Market MidAtlantic where she helped grow sales of local food significantly. She has an MBA and Masters of Environmental Management from Yale University.
Your path to Fire Ox foods involved a bit of a personal revelation—tell us about that.
Initially, I started the company in business school with the goal of making delicious, nutritious food that was easy to prepare. My co-founder and I saw a real and personal need for that, as well as a market opportunity specifically in the frozen space. There had been little innovation in the frozen retail space, and yet a desire among people to cook, despite having very little time to do so. We created a frozen meal kit product that was ready in 10 minutes, and it was called Zoni Foods.
I realized that I created Zoni Foods not just for the desire to help people eat better, and the identification of a market opportunity, but from a desire to prove something to myself, to my family and to the world. I realized that the motivation was coming from a place of fear—a fear of not being enough. I think many people create things and do the work that they do out of fear. I went to school, and I wanted to prove that I was good enough and that I could be successful.
The new company, Fire Ox Foods, is coming from a completely different standpoint. While we are still aiming to bring people nourishing, delicious food, I am no longer doing it from a place of fear. It’s not about proving anything. I founded Fire Ox Foods to help people nourish themselves—my passion is to nourish myself and others by connecting people to good food and our earth. This passion comes from a love of food as well as my time in Americorps teaching kids where food comes from and how growing food helps us nurture ourselves and our relationship with the earth.
You are able to connect profound concerns about our planet and environment to a line of packaged goods—tell us about that. What is unique about your company’s values?
A founder is, in a way, an artist, and brands should be based on the founders’ values and beliefs. Fire Ox Foods is rooted in a deep set of my own personal values—I truly believe that both the body and the earth are home, and we need to take care of these homes. I have learned that eating real food from the earth (as in, whole plant-based and vegetable-based foods), is a much better way to nourish ourselves than eating a lot of meat, dairy, and processed foods. I believe that we are all a part of this very beautiful earth, and we have an opportunity to connect to that through food. While there are certainly other ways one might make that connection, food is the way that we, at Fire Ox, are helping people connect. Our thesis at Fire Ox Foods is that if we can create nourishing, delicious food that is easy to prepare, we can help wake people up to their bodies and to the importance of protecting the earth. Now is a more important time than ever to wake up to the environmental and climate crisis.
Tell us more about the ecological aspect of Fire Ox Foods—Why is your company so different from other brands that equate veganism with eco-consciousness?
A lot of this is about impact—every decision you make, every cup of coffee you buy, every plastic bag you use, everything you eat, has an impact. We are incredibly conscious of this reality in the decisions we make as a company, including the packaging we buy, the ingredients we source, and the way that we make our meals.
In terms of the food, in particular, eating plant-based food helps to divert CO2, save water, and save animals’ lives. With that said, we do not believe everyone should be vegan—I'm not vegan and neither is my cofounder. But we believe that we can help people eat more vegetables and plant-based foods and less meat and dairy, which is ultimately better for human health and better for the earth. We are not interested in converting people to veganism because we don’t think that way of eating is right for everyone’s body. Plus, many of the plant-based meat and cheese alternatives are highly processed and therefore, not nourishing. There is a big difference between vegetable-based and plant-based.
While a lot of brands talk about their quantitative efforts to reduce the impact on the environment, they often avoid a deeper articulation of values as it relates to the earth in their marketing materials. What sets you apart from other plant-based companies in that regard, and what is the power in acknowledging a deeper belief system?
Your question reminds me of a discussion I was having recently about how investors need to realize that, for small companies, it's really challenging to source sustainable packaging for many reasons. What I said was: If you are investing in a founder with sustainability as one of their core personal values, every decision they make for the company will take the environment into mind. And then the question about “this package” or “that package” doesn’t matter—that founder will make the best decision for the environment that will also be the best decision for the company over the long-term. Patagonia is a great example of this. I bring up this example to demonstrate why I believe holding our company values close and operating by these values is so important. I think of it like a tree—trees are rooted in the ground and do what they evolved to do—create beautiful blossoms, and eventually seeds that produce more trees. They don’t ask other plants and trees what kind of blossoms they should make or seeds they should create. There is power and beauty that comes in being deeply rooted in your company’s internal values, and this power persists and inspires. This power reminds me of Greta Thunberg’s power—she felt such a strong passion and indignation that she stepped up and let her voice be heard. We are letting our voices be heard. We are determined to have our voice ripple out and make change.
There is often a tension between what will do well in the market, and the necessary complexity of a truly mission-driven company. People want to get an impression of a brand quite quickly when they are shopping, which makes that complexity challenging. Have you experienced or dealt with that?
Yes, this is certainly something we have thought a lot about. When we sat down to think about our design, we thought about putting some language on the front and back of the package like “women-owned”, “vegan,” “gluten-free'' and “100% recycled paper.” We made a decision to be incredibly simple with our packaging call-outs. We are not trying to tell our whole story through the package itself. We are making that space on our website and on social media. Our website, blog and social media are where we can tell people our story—why we chose the ingredients we did, where our packaging comes from and who we are.
I think that you are correct that consumers want a quick read on a product when they are shopping. Lots of folks, as well as retail buyers, just want to see that a product is “vegan” or “gluten-free”, which I think is really unfortunate. There's this mass “nascar-ing” of food: “we're this! we're this! we're this!” as seen on the front of many food packages. Although I think this is lamentable for a variety of reasons, it is the reality of the retail food system today. So, we have thought a lot about how to design our package to stand out on the shelf in order to grab people’s attention, without it being shallow.
We don't think vegan, dairy-free or gluten-free is necessarily better—we believe it’s the quality of the food that matters. I believe quality is determined by the composition of the food and how it’s grown and made. You can’t read quality on a package per se, but you can certainly taste it. As far as our recipes go, we create food that we love and feel inspired by - food that is first and foremost delicious and nourishing.
Eating can be an anxious endeavor these days. A lot of people want clear, almost didactic answers. They are looking for a specific diet and a specific ultimate logic of how to eat that feels bulletproof. We all want a narrative for eating that makes sense to us, especially if the world around us feels chaotic.
That is very true. For us, we are trying to stay true to our values by creating food we love—food that is delicious, nourishing, and vegetable-based. We do not believe in promoting a specific diet—there is no bulletproof way of eating. All our bodies are different and need different things at different times in our life. Plus, our environment, food system, and culture changes, and these changes affect what we eat and the way we eat. Instead of looking outward for a narrative or logic, I hope that we start looking inward and trust our body and intuition, especially during times like these. I believe that our bodies know what they need and all we need to do is listen.
