How the founder of Nana Joes Granola learned to trust her own instincts and quiet confidence as she built something.

There is a black-and-white photograph on every bag of Nana Joes Granola. It shows two young people laughing after a home-cooked meal, taken in 1968. They are Michelle Pusateri’s parents. When she first put it on the packaging, more than a few advisors told her it was a mistake. Too personal, they said. Too niche. It wouldn’t connect with customers.

She kept it anyway.

That photograph is a good place to start when you’re trying to understand who Michelle is and what she has built over nearly 16 years with Nana Joes Granola.

It tells you something about where she comes from, what she values, and how she makes decisions. It also tells you something about the kind of founder she has become.

She is someone who has learned, over time, to trust herself.

From Pastry Chef to Granola Maker

Michelle grew up in the San Francisco area, and by her own account, the kitchen was always where she felt most at home.

She spent years bartending before taking a baking class at her local community college that changed everything. Within a week of starting, she was in love with the science of it. She went on to graduate from the Culinary Institute of America. She worked as a pastry chef at some of San Francisco’s most respected kitchens, including the Fairmont Hotel, the Four Seasons, Nopa, and Nopalito.

But the idea for Nana Joes Granola came from something more personal.

Michelle is an avid surfer, and she couldn’t find a granola on the market that met her standards: no refined sugars, no weird oils, no preservatives, and genuinely nutritious enough to sustain her through long sessions in the water.

So, she made her own.

She started selling at local farmers markets, then at Bi-Rite Market and Whole Foods, and eventually built what is now a certified gluten-free, vegan operation with nearly $2 million in annual sales and distribution across multiple states.

What she created is not just granola. It is granola with a point of view.

Every product uses certified organic ingredients. The oats are Purity Protocol gluten-free.

Nothing is sweetened with refined sugar — only pure maple syrup.

And the flavors she develops as a trained pastry chef go well beyond what you’d typically find on a grocery store shelf: Paleo Orange with Almond Butter and Pecan, a Sunset Blend with Pecan, Mulberry, and Coconut, an EPIC Chocolate Oat Blend, and a limited-edition collaboration with Diaspora Spice Co. featuring an Apricot Saffron Frangipane inspired by a family farm in Kashmir.

These are not flavors that come from a focus group.

What 16 Years Actually Looks Like

When I spoke with Michelle, one of the things that came through most clearly was how much confidence in her own voice she has grown over the years.

She did not start her business with the self-confidence evident today.

Early on, like most founders, she was listening to many voices telling her what to do and how to do it. Some of that advice was useful. Some of it would have diluted what made Nana Joes Granola special.

The photo on the packaging is the most visible example of her holding her ground.

But it runs deeper than branding. She has consistently refused to compromise on ingredient quality, even when the economics of doing so might have made the business easier to run. Certified organic costs more. Premium gluten-free oats cost more.

Not using “natural flavorings” as a shortcut costs more. Michelle has absorbed those costs rather than passing them on to the product.

The reasoning is simple: the quality of the ingredients is the product. Change that, and you’ve changed everything.

This is not stubbornness for its own sake. It is a clarity about what the brand stands for and who it is for. And that clarity has taken time to develop.

The Michelle Pusateri who started Nana Joes Granola in 2010 in a rented kitchen at the San Francisco JCC is not the same person running the business today. She has been shaped by the experience of building something real, and by the people she has deliberately sought out along the way.

Seeking Advice Without Losing Your Voice

One of the more interesting things about Michelle’s story is that her growing confidence in her own perspective has not made her less open to outside input. If anything, the opposite is true. She is deliberate about seeking out people who have been where she is trying to go.

Most recently, she appeared on Guy Raz’s How I Built This Advice Line, where the episode’s founders featured were Angie and Dan Bastian, the husband-and-wife team behind Angie’s BOOMCHICKAPOP.

Michelle shared that the business is roughly one-third DTC and two-thirds retail. And that she has added other SKUs besides granola-to-granola bars, breakfast brownies, and some special bites.

The Bastians built their snack company from a kettle corn setup they ran out of their garage and eventually sold it for a reported $250 million to Conagra Brands.

On the show, Michelle brought a specific and honest question: how to think through the tradeoffs of accepting outside investment to scale her organic granola brand. It is exactly the kind of question that has no clean answer, and exactly the kind that benefits from the experience of someone who has actually navigated it.

The Bastians are a compelling pair to learn from. They built a brand in the same snack-food aisle where Michelle operates, stayed true to their own identity through growth, and found a way to scale without sacrificing what made the product worth buying in the first place.

All would have informed Michelle of that experience.

This is what sophisticated founders do. They do not look for someone to tell them what to do. They look for people whose experience can sharpen their own thinking.

Michelle has been doing this for years, and it shows in how she talks about her business. She knows what she believes. She keeps looking for better ways to test and refine those beliefs against reality.

Three Lessons for Small Food and Beverage Founders

Michelle’s journey holds a few lessons that are directly relevant if you are building a small food or beverage brand and trying to figure out how to grow without losing what makes you worth buying.

1. Your constraints are your brand.

The ingredients Michelle refuses to compromise on are not just quality standards. They are a promise to her customers and a statement about what Nana Joes Granola is. Certified organic, no refined sugar, real whole food ingredients: these constraints narrow the market but deepen the relationship with the people who care. In a crowded category, the brands that win in the long term are usually the ones that stand for something specific.

The temptation to broaden the appeal by softening your standards is almost always a mistake. What looks like a limitation is often your most powerful differentiator.

2. Seek advice from people who have been where you want to go.

Not every advisor is the right one. Generic business advice can actually be dangerous for a small brand because the instinct it produces is usually to become more like everybody else.

The Bastians were the right people for Michelle to talk to because they had navigated the specific tension she is facing: how to grow without losing the product’s soul. Find people who have made the decisions you are about to make. Their experience is worth more than any framework.

• Brand identity takes years to clarify, and that’s okay.

Michelle did not walk into this with a brand strategy document. She built one through 16 years of decisions, some of which she second-guessed in the moment. The photograph on the packaging. The choice to stay certified organic when it hurt the margins. The decision was made to continue producing in San Francisco rather than move production to a cheaper location.

Each of those decisions was a vote for what Nana Joes Granola is. Over time, those votes add up to something coherent and hard to replicate. Do not expect to have clarity on day one. Build it through the choices you make.

What It All Adds Up To

The best food and beverage brands are almost always reflections of people with a clear point of view about how things should be done.

Nana Joes Granola is that. It is a brand built on the conviction that clean, real ingredients, handled with care, will always produce something worth eating. Michelle Pusateri has held that conviction for nearly 16 years, through the highs and what she herself calls the lowest of lows.

She listened to advice, absorbed what was useful, and left the rest.

The photograph of her parents is still in every bag. It was never a mistake.

Trusting your voice is not something you decide to do once. It is something you practice every time you are tempted to make an exception. Michelle Pusateri has been practicing it for 16 years, and Nana Joes Granola is the result.

Photos courtesy of Sarah Deragon

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call with me? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand and marketing needs.

Would you like to read some testimonials about my work? Click here.

If you want to learn more about my new offering, The Trusted Advisor Board, click here for details. Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

The post Michelle Pusateri Proves You Don’t Have to Be Loud to Build a Great Brand appeared first on The Marketing Sage.

How Don Sazon Turned a Family Spice Company into a Multi-Million Dollar Brand

There is a moment in every great brand story where the product and the person become inseparable.

Where the thing being sold is really just the container for everything the founder has lived through. That is the story of Don Sazon, a seasoning and spice company based in Pacoima, California.

And it is one of the most flavorful origin stories in the food business.

Antonio Salazar founded Don Sazon and has now passed into the hands of the second generation, his son Victor and daughter-in-law Denise, who have carried the company forward while keeping every one of Antonio’s original recipes intact.

And, to understand why this company matters, you have to go back further.

You have to start with a man named Antonio from Cuba.

Antonio, The Man Who Cooked for 500

Antonio Salazar was a Cuban entrepreneur who owned a small sandwich shop in Havana. Then, in 1962, Castro’s government nationalized private businesses and took the shop from him. No compensation. No recourse. Just gone.

When he went to grab the few dollars from the cash register, the police told him, “That belongs to Castro. Leave that money alone.”

When Antonio refused to work for the state, he was sent to a sugarcane labor camp for five years. Five years.

He didn’t disappear into that experience. He rose inside it.

Eventually, he became the head cook, responsible for feeding 500 men a day.

The ingredients were scarce. The circumstances were brutal. But the instinct to feed people well — to take whatever was at hand and make something worth eating — never left him. It just went underground, waiting for a better kitchen.

That instinct is what you taste when you open a jar of Don Sazon Meat Seasoning.

It was forged in a sugarcane camp in Cuba, carried through immigration to Los Angeles, and eventually turned into a business.

Antonio was 65 when he started Don Sazon.

That’s when most people are thinking about slowing down. Antonio wasn’t thinking about slowing down. He was thinking about seasoning.

Antonio founded Don Sazon in Pacoima, California, in July 2000.

He started with a handful of recipes, an unshakeable commitment to quality, and a flat refusal to do what competing brands were doing: padding products with cheap salt to cut costs and inflate volume.

His seasonings were real seasonings. Better flavor. A product built on principle, not margin.

He was, in every sense of the word, the Don of Seasonings, AKA Don Sazon.

Victor, The Son Who Commuted for Nine Years

Victor Salazar built his career the methodical way. City National Bank. Human resources. McDonnell Douglas. Health Net. He was good at his work and understood organizations from the inside and how people operate, how businesses grow, and where the pressure points are.

None of that experience was wasted.

When his father started Don Sazon, Victor started helping to build the Northern California territory.

He took a leap of faith, left his HR career, and spent 9 years commuting between NorCal and Los Angeles to support his father’s growing operation. By the time he finally left the corporate world behind, Victor had built the NorCal route to $1 million in annual revenue on his own.

That kind of sustained commitment is rare. Nine years. Most people would have found a way to make the distance an excuse. Victor made it a foundation.

In 2017, when Antonio was 82 and ready to step back, Victor and Denise purchased the company. Antonio retired, knowing that the business he started at 65 was in the hands he trusted.

And Victor got to find out whether everything he’d built from the outside could hold up when he was running it from the inside.

It held up.

Denise, The Operator Behind the Growth

Denise Salazar spent 40 years in the banking industry. She built real expertise in contracts, sourcing, and pricing. She learned how money actually moves through a business, where the leverage points are, and what it costs when you get those details wrong. That last part matters most.

She left a well-paying career for something more meaningful. That is not a small thing. It is the kind of decision that tells you what a person actually values.

At Don Sazon, those four decades of financial discipline are evident in the way the company is structured.

The business is entirely self-funded. No outside investors. No debt chasing growth at any cost. Every decision has to make sense on its own terms. The financial rigor Denise brought from banking applies directly to the company’s choices every day, from ingredient sourcing to distribution strategy. When the books are clean and the margins are honest, you can make better bets.

A Multi-Million Business Built on Consistency

Don Sazon has a growing product line: original Meat Seasoning (Carne Asada), Chicken Seasoning, Fajita Seasoning, Adobo, and the Taco Truck line, which has become the fastest-growing product in the portfolio since its launch.

The retail business consists of sales through small, independent Hispanic specialty grocers across several states.

The Taco Truck line is worth a closer look.

It was designed to capture something specific, the bold, uncomplicated flavors you get from the best street food, what Victor describes as “from truck to table.”

The name does real work. It signals authenticity before anyone opens the jar.

None of the original products has changed. That is not an accident.

Antonio’s original recipes remain untouched. The ingredients are the same. The ratios are the same. A customer who bought Don Sazon Meat Seasoning twenty-five years ago will get the same result today. In a category where reformulations and cost-cutting are constant, such consistency is a competitive advantage. It is also simply a promise kept.

The low-sodium positioning matters here, too. Don Sazon doesn’t lean on salt the way many seasonings do. The flavor comes from actual spices, which means the products hold up on a health-conscious label read in a way that many competitors cannot. As more consumers scrutinize sodium content, that position gets more valuable, not less. The brand was ahead of the curve before the curve existed.

Eyes on Growth

Don Sazon is currently sold in nine states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington. They built that footprint the old-fashioned way, meat market by meat market, foodservice account by account, one route at a time.

Don Sazon has its sights set on growth opportunities that will lead to broader distribution of its seasonings, including at national chains. The product has earned that trajectory the hard way by consistently showing up on shelves, tasting great, and moving.

Victor and Denise are clear-eyed about what it means. The immediate margins on a national retail test are not the point. The point is what comes after. National retail exposure validates the brand and opens doors to other regional and national accounts. It also changes the purchasing power equation. When you buy ingredients in container quantities rather than cases, the cost structure of the entire business improves, and those savings can flow back into quality and growth.

That is a sophisticated way to think about a retail deal. It is the banker and the HR executive running a food business. The instincts are right and seasoned.

What the Seasoning Aisle Can Learn from Don Sazon

I think about Don Sazon the way I think about the best brands I’ve covered on this blog over the years.

The ones that last are rarely the ones with the most aggressive retail strategy or the highest media spend. They are the ones where the product, the story, and the commitment to quality are layered so tightly together that the brand becomes almost impossible to copy.

Anyone can make a seasoning blend. Not everyone can make Antonio Salazar’s seasoning blend.

The one he developed after losing his business to the government, surviving five years in a labor camp, immigrating to the United States, and then founding a company at 65. That backstory is not marketing. It is authentication. It is the reason the recipes have never changed and never will.

Victor and Denise are not trying to reinvent what Antonio built. They are trying to make sure the world finds it. That is the right instinct, and exactly the right job for this chapter of the company’s story.

Three Key Takeaways

1. The founding story is a competitive advantage, not a footnote. Antonio Salazar’s journey from a nationalized sandwich shop in Cuba to a sugarcane labor camp to founding a seasoning company at 65 is not background color. It is the reason the recipes have never changed, the reason quality is non-negotiable, and the reason customers who have been buying Don Sazon for 25 years keep buying it. That kind of provenance cannot be manufactured. It can only be inherited and honored.

2. Foodservice is a legitimate path to retail credibility. Don Sazon generated millions in annual foodservice revenue before the retail side reached scale. That sequence matters. Foodservice created manufacturing efficiency, distribution discipline, and real-world proof that the product performs under pressure. The product was ready for national retail because the business had already been tested in the hardest operating environment there is.

3. Self-funded discipline shapes better long-term decisions. Don Sazon has grown without outside capital, which means every decision has had to earn its place. The retail test is not structured for immediate margin. It is structured as an investment in exposure and purchasing power. That kind of patience comes from operators who have lived inside the numbers for a long time. Denise’s 40 years in banking and Victor’s decade of building a route from the outside are not incidental. They are the operating system.

Antonio Salazar cooked for 500 men a day in a sugarcane camp with almost nothing to work with. His son is about to serve meals in thousands of homes across America.

The family didn’t run from their history.

They seasoned it, bottled it, and put it on a shelf for the rest of us to find.

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand, marketing needs, and challenges.

Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

The post Don Sazon: The Family-Owned Seasoning Brand Built on a Remarkable Origin Story appeared first on The Marketing Sage.

 From your Uber driver, boss’s spouse, or your periodontist – everyone has an opinion on marketing

I want you to think about the last time someone questioned your accounting. Or pulled your CFO aside to say,

“I just feel like the depreciation schedule is off. My neighbor runs a landscaping business, and he does it differently.”

Never happens.

Nobody corners the head of manufacturing at a cocktail party to share their hot take on injection molding tolerances.

The general counsel doesn’t get unsolicited feedback from his college roommate about contract language.

But marketing?

Oh, marketing is different.

Marketing is everyone’s sport.

Because everyone has seen an ad, everyone has bought something. And apparently, those two facts are sufficient credentials to weigh in.

The CMO’s Husband Didn’t Like the Color – Is He a Marketing Expert?

I once sat in a packaging review where the CMO’s husband had looked at the label over dinner the night before. He found it “too busy.” He preferred the old one with its darker colors.

He was a periodontist. A good one, I’m told.

We redesigned nothing. But we spent two meetings discussing it. And of course, the periodontist never read the 12-page brief about the redesign.

Marketing advice from the boss’s spouse is the kind of market research no one asked for, and no one can ignore.

The spouse focus group.

The parent panel.

The “my daughter showed it to her friends, and they thought it was weird” usability study.

Here’s what those conversations have in common: the person sharing the feedback is not the target consumer.

They don’t know the strategy.

They haven’t seen the research.

And they have exactly zero accountability for the outcome.

But they have opinions, and those opinions travel upward at the speed of dinner conversation.

My Husband Didn’t Understand the Message

This one is a close relative of the first. The message wasn’t confusing. The message was clear to the 38-year-old female endurance athlete for whom it was written.

The message confused a 61-year-old man who doesn’t run and doesn’t buy this product, who was reading the ad on his wife’s phone while waiting for the game to start.

Good marketing is not supposed to speak to everyone. It is supposed to be spoken clearly to someone.

When it confuses people who aren’t that someone, that’s not a failure. That’s targeting working exactly as intended.

But try explaining that in a brand review when the VP of Sales says his wife showed the new campaign to her book club and “nobody got it.”

The book club wasn’t the audience.

The book club didn’t need to get it.

The book club, I say this with all due respect, was irrelevant.

You can’t say that in a brand review. So instead, you nod, take notes, and quietly keep the campaign exactly as it was, or you spend three weeks revising it into beige.

The Uber Driver’s Restaurant Recommendation

I used to travel a lot. And I’ve noticed something. The moment I get into an Uber in a city I don’t know, my driver will recommend a restaurant. Confidently. Often immediately.

Now, I want to be fair. Sometimes the recommendation is excellent.

But here’s what my driver does not know: whether I eat meat, how much I want to spend, whether I’m eating alone or with clients, whether I’m exhausted or energized, whether I want something familiar or adventurous. He doesn’t know if I’m pescatarian, if I had Italian for lunch, or if I have a shellfish allergy.

He knows what he likes. And he is sharing that with certainty.

“Everybody loves this place. You should eat here. All the locals love it.”

I’m not everybody, and why should I take his advice on food when he knows my name and that I’m going to a Marriott Courtyard just outside the city?

This is, more or less, exactly how unsolicited marketing feedback works. It comes from a real place. It’s genuine. The person giving it is not trying to be difficult.

But it is based entirely on their own taste, their own frame of reference, and their own completely separate life situation. It has nothing to do with your consumer, your category, or your strategy.

And yet, when that same energy shows up in a conference room, we treat it like data.

Why This Happens to Marketing and Nobody Else – Everyone’s a Marketing Expert

Finance has a moat. The numbers are the numbers. Nobody looks at a balance sheet and says, “I just feel like this column should be on the left.”

Operations have complexity as a shield. Supply chain decisions involve enough variables that most people don’t even try.

Marketing has the misfortune of being visible. The output is a thing people can see and react to. Everyone interacts with brands every day. That creates the illusion of expertise.

It’s the same reason everyone thinks they can coach a sports team. You’ve watched the game your whole life. You understand what winning looks like. Surely the decisions can’t be that complicated.

They are, of course, complicated.

And what looks like a simple creative choice is usually the result of consumer research, positioning work, competitive analysis, channel strategy, and approximately forty-seven meetings.

But none of that is visible. Only the ad is visible. And the ad looks simple. So, the feedback comes.

The Chairman’s Cousin and Other Official Stakeholders

I’ve had campaigns reviewed by people who had no business being in the room. The founder’s college roommate. The board member’s daughter, who was visiting for the weekend. The customer service rep who “had some thoughts” after seeing a social post.

One time, at a small food brand I was advising, the company’s largest retail buyer mentioned that his kids hadn’t heard of it. His kids were eight and eleven.

The brand was targeted at adults over forty with disposable income and a preference for clean labels. His children were, with great affection, the least relevant sample population imaginable.

We spent an hour discussing youth awareness.

The thing is, you can’t always fight it. The chairman’s cousin is still the chairman’s cousin. The retail buyer is still the retail buyer. Some feedback arrives wearing a badge you have to take seriously, even when the feedback itself deserves none.

The skill isn’t in dismissing it. The skill is in thanking people warmly, writing things down with great ceremony, and then going back to what the strategy actually says.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Liking something is not the same as being the audience for it. The goal of great marketing is resonance with the right person, not universal approval. If your campaign is working on the target consumer, the fact that someone’s spouse found it confusing is a footnote, not a finding. Know who you’re talking to and measure against that. Everyone else’s reaction is interesting, but it isn’t the test.

2. Confidence is not expertise. The Uber driver gives the restaurant recommendation with the same certainty as a James Beard Award winner. In marketing, unsolicited opinions arrive with exactly the same energy regardless of the credentials behind them. Your job is to listen politely, then go back to the people who represent your actual consumers. Their opinion is data. Everyone else’s is noise dressed up as insight.

3. Strategy is the immune system. When the feedback starts flooding in from people who aren’t the target, who don’t know the strategy, and who aren’t accountable for the result, a documented strategy is what keeps you from redesigning everything into a product that offends no one and excites no one. Write down the strategy. Share it broadly. Point to it often. It is your professional defense against the well-meaning opinions that would otherwise drive every decision.

Everyone is a marketer until it’s time to be accountable for the result. That’s when the room gets very quiet, and the periodontist goes home.

What’s the most memorable piece of unsolicited marketing feedback you’ve ever received? Drop it in the comments. I have a feeling this thread is going to be very entertaining.

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call with me? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand and marketing needs.

Would you like to read some testimonials about my work? Click here.

If you want to learn more about my new offering, The Trusted Advisor Board, click here for details. Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your

Photo by Michael Kahn on Unsplash

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