White Wave was founded in 1977 with a corporate mission to "creatively integrate soy into the average American diet." At that time it meant they made tofu, tempeh and something called "soysage."

I joined the company ten years later in 1987 as a regional sales manager and left in 1997 as marketing manager. During my almost ten year tenure there, I helped the company grow exponentially and introduced White Wave Silk, the first refrigerated soymilk in America. At last count, Silk is producing nearly $300 million in annual sales.

Working directly for Steve Demos, the company founder and "head bean" I was responsible for all package design, advertising, and point of purchase material production, new product development, supervising our graphic design and public relations firms, developing sales forecasts and tracking movement against plan, coordinating packaging with vendors, formulating sales promotion and marketing budgets and tracking the results against plan. In my spare time I specified and managed hardware and software systems company-wide.

While at White Wave my key customers included United Natural Foods (Rainbow Natural Foods, Mountain Peoples Warehouse), Tree of Life, Whole Foods Markets, Nature’s Best, Northeast Cooperative, Wild Oats, Safeway, King Soopers, Albertsons and Supervalu.