Ep.32 / Vanessa Phillips, Founder & CEO Feel Good Foods
From Celiac Disease to Feel Good Foods:
In this episode of Professional Jealousy, host Natasha Jakubowski chats with Vanessa Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Feel Good Foods — the gluten-free, all-natural frozen food brand now sold in over 18,000 grocery stores.
Vanessa shares how a celiac disease diagnosis in college, and doctors telling her to give up on the food industry entirely, set her on a path from opening the restaurant Friedman's in Chelsea Market to building a national frozen food brand from a Ziploc bag of gluten-free pot stickers she mailed to Whole Foods. She talks candidly about bootstrapping the early years, the biggest mistake of her career (and the 25,000 hand-stamped cartons that fixed it), the mentor who shaped her mindset, and what she's learned about grit, scaling, and staying true to a brand as it grows.
Key Themes:
From diagnosis to mission: How a celiac disease diagnosis and a doctor's grim prognosis became the founding spark for Feel Good Foods.
Category creation: Building the gluten-free/natural frozen snacks category from scratch when it didn't exist on grocery shelves, and convincing retailers to make room for it.
Scrappy beginnings: Demoing pot stickers twice a day at Whole Foods for four months, bootstrapping with friends and family before a formal capital raise.
Learning from failure: The infamous first production run where a missing "cover pan with lid" instruction turned dumplings to mush — and the hand-stamped fix.
Founder mindset: Her father's three-word mantra, "Yes, I can," and how it carried her through recurring self-doubt.
Evolving with the consumer: How Feel Good Foods grew from serving a niche gluten-free customer to a broader "curious consumer" who just wants something simple, convenient, and delicious.
Founder to CEO: Why she still feels like the same scrappy founder even as the business has scaled, and the hardest tradeoffs in deciding which product ideas make it to market.
Personal growth tools: Working with a business coach, using movement as her form of meditation, and staying grounded while running a company that never really clocks out.
When asked to close the episode with who she's professionally jealous of, Vanessa named her father — though she noted she'd already spoken about him at length throughout the conversation — before landing on Emma Grede, co-founder of Skims. Vanessa admires how Grede has built a brand that speaks directly to women and makes them feel empowered in their bodies, calling out the way she connects with consumers so directly. It's a quality Vanessa says she wants to bring to Feel Good Foods as it continues to grow.
Check out https: https://feel-good-foods.com/
Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction and welcome
00:48 – The elevator pitch for Feel Good Foods
01:59 – Growing up in the restaurant business and the celiac diagnosis
05:18 – The transition from Friedman's to Feel Good Foods
07:22 – Sending pot stickers to Whole Foods in a Ziploc bag
12:20 – Raising money and bootstrapping the early years
15:34 – Convincing retailers that natural, gluten-free deserved shelf space
17:09 – Advice for founders creating a brand-new category
19:31 – The parts of the business she loves vs. the parts she had to learn
21:17 – Her father's influence and the "Yes, I can" mantra
26:31 – The hardest scaling decisions and falling in love with products that don't ship
28:40 – How the product innovation process has evolved
30:35 – How the Feel Good Foods consumer has changed over time
33:17 – What mainstream food brands get wrong about her customers
34:19 – Trends she's watching and building a "timeless" brand
35:25 – What makes a good brand, in her view
36:45 – Her marketing strategy and why word of mouth wins
37:46 – Ambitions for where the brand goes next
39:21 – Mistakes, lessons, and learning on the job instead of business school
42:49 – Personal tools for growth: a business coach and daily movement
45:42 – Quick-fire round: desert island food, best and worst career advice
51:01 – Who is Vanessa is professionally jealous of?
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