Most wellness routines begin with a pill, powder, gummy or bitter tincture. Alice Mushrooms began with a different question: what if the supplement were the part of your day you actually looked forward to?

On this episode of Hospitality Hangout’s Foodfluencers series, Charlotte Cruze, co-founder of Alice Mushrooms, joins Jimmy and Schatzy to talk about turning functional mushrooms into decadent daily chocolate supplements.

Charlotte shares how her background in media, branded storytelling and food studies eventually brought her together with co-founder Lindsay Goodstein, a former pharmaceutical executive searching for more approachable alternatives to traditional supplements. The two met during the pandemic, worked together across the country for months before meeting in person and began developing Alice around a simple insight: if something is unpleasant to take, people are unlikely to make it part of their routine.

Episode Credits:

• Produced by: Branded Hospitality Media
• Hosted by: Michael Schatzberg, Jimmy Frischling
• Producer: Julie Zucker
• Creative Director: Adam Levine
• Show Runner: Drewe Raimi
• Post Production: Three Cheers Media

www.thehospitalityhangout.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Billy Shore, founder and executive chair of Share Our Strength, joins Hospitality Hangout live from the Prosper Forum for a conversation about building the No Kid Hungry movement, bringing the restaurant industry together and what it means to spend a lifetime working on a problem bigger than yourself.

Billy and his sister Debbie founded Share Our Strength in 1984 with a $2,000 credit card advance. More than four decades later, the organization behind the No Kid Hungry campaign has raised more than $1 billion to fight hunger and poverty and built partnerships across restaurants, business, government, education, health care and entertainment.

But Billy says the real work is not simply raising money. It is getting more people to believe they can make a difference.

He explains why the restaurant industry has been part of Share Our Strength from the beginning. Chefs and restaurateurs already spend their lives feeding people, and Billy believes those skills, relationships and platforms can become powerful tools in the fight against childhood hunger.

Episode Credits:

• Produced by: Branded Hospitality Media
• Hosted by: Michael Schatzberg, Jimmy Frischling
• Producer: Julie Zucker
• Creative Director: Adam Levine
• Show Runner: Drewe Raimi
• Post Production: Three Cheers Media

www.thehospitalityhangout.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nick Wiseman, co-founder of Little Sesame, joins Hospitality Hangout’s Foodfluencers series to tell the story of how a tiny hummus pop-up in a Washington, D.C. basement grew into a national food brand.

Nick’s background is restaurants through and through. He started cooking professionally as a teenager, worked the fine-dining circuit in New York, and met future Little Sesame co-founder Ronen Tenne while working the fish station at a Michael White restaurant. Years later, they reunited in D.C. with the idea of bringing restaurant-level food to more people, with fewer rules and a lot more fun.

Little Sesame began in a 500-square-foot basement beneath DGS, a Jewish deli Nick was operating in D.C. The original goal was modest: serve a few dozen people a day and make better use of the space. Instead, customers immediately responded to the freshly spun hummus, and the pop-up began doing several times the volume the team expected.

Then COVID changed the business.

With downtown office traffic gone, Little Sesame started hand-packing pints of hummus and selling them out the front door. A few weeks later, a Whole Foods forager reached out. That opened a new challenge: how do you turn restaurant-quality hummus with a five-day shelf life into a grocery product without loading it with preservatives? Nick explains how the team spent about a year working through food science and eventually used high-pressure processing to preserve freshness while keeping the ingredient list clean.

Episode Credits:

• Produced by: Branded Hospitality Media
• Hosted by: Michael Schatzberg, Jimmy Frischling
• Producer: Julie Zucker
• Creative Director: Adam Levine
• Show Runner: Drewe Raimi
• Post Production: Three Cheers Media

www.thehospitalityhangout.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.