Jaime Foster

Jaime Foster built a nut butter company in Chamblee, Georgia out of her grandfather's almond butter recipe from the 1970s.

Foster came into the McBastard Studios for the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast through the Georgia small brand crowd, and admitted she had spent the three months since their first conversation wondering what she was walking into. Brad promised it would not be off the wall. It helped that his daughter is a customer and that the almond butter is her favorite, which is the product Georgia Grinders launched with in 2012.

The philosophy is a short ingredient list. No added sugars, no oils, no emulsifiers, no preservatives. They source nuts for oil content, slow roast each variety on its own timing, grind them and add sea salt. The salt is a large particle and it is not evenly distributed, so you get bursts of it, which is what they have become known for. The pecans come from a fifth generation farmer. There are fourteen products and she will not name a favorite. At a market she walks a stranger through them like a wine flight: the original almond butter first because that is where it started, then the maple and the honey, then the pecan. One of her cocktails came out of a cheesecake that refused to set. She poured the gooey mess into a Vitamix with some liquor, and it was everyone's favorite part of the meal.

There was no investor money. She and her husband started in their home kitchen on the small grinder that had belonged to her grandfather. Co packers either could not handle nut butters or wanted a full eight hour run, which would have left them with pallets of product and nobody to sell it to, so they taught themselves manufacturing. Her husband made nut butter on Friday nights while she stayed home with the babies, and they sold it at the farmers market the next morning. She wore a business suit to her first Whole Foods meeting, sat down across from people in dreadlocks, and never wore one again. The pace cost her. She got so burnt out that when a vacation came round she wanted to stay home and do nothing, and that is not what she wanted her kids to see.

Her grandfather was an engineer, not a food man. Both his brothers died in their early fifties of cardiovascular disease, so he ignored the protocol his doctors gave him and rebuilt his diet instead. He lived to 97 and got to see what she did with the recipe. Twelve years in, she went and worked a farmers market a couple of weeks before this taping, the first one in about five years. Her production guys have been with her seven or eight years. She calls them salts of the earth.