C‑Suite to Main Street: Building a Company for a Niche Consumer, Featuring Feel Good Foods Co-Founder

When Vanessa Phillips first began experimenting with gluten-free cooking, it was not to disrupt the frozen food aisle. She just wanted to eat a dumpling again. 

In this installment of CO—’s C-Suite to Main Street series, Vice President and Editor-in-Chief Jeanette Mulvey speaks with Vanessa Phillips, Co-Founder of Feel Good Foods, to trace her path from a celiac diagnosis in college to creating a multimillion-dollar frozen food brand carried in more than 25,000 grocery stores nationwide. Along the way, Phillips offers candid lessons on bootstrapping, forging consumer connections, and resilience. 

Solve a problem you understand 

Phillips’ entrepreneurial journey began long before she launched Feel Good Foods. Growing up in New York City, she was surrounded by food from an early age. Her family owned Chinese restaurants and bagel shops, and she was always confident that her career would follow a similar direction. However, things were unexpectedly interrupted with a celiac diagnosis that upended her ability to eat foods she enjoyed most. 

Rather than cutting half of her diet and begrudgingly moving on, Phillips became fixated on recreating her favorite delicacies— mozzarella sticks, dumplings, and French toast sticks. It was all the nostalgia and satiation, but without the stomach-turning ingredients. Years later, that infatuation became the foundation of Feel Good Foods.

"It was kind of like a light bulb moment for me," she said. "I was sort of mourning those foods that I loved so much as a kid, but then quickly went into problem-solving mode."

From day one, Phillips held the product to a single standard. It had to taste better than anything people remembered, not just better than other gluten-free options. That bet paid off. Today, roughly 85% of Feel Good Foods consumers do not even realize the products are gluten-free. They are not buying it for dietary reasons, but for the taste. 

Experiment whenever possible 

Before Feel Good Foods, there was Friedman's. Phillips and her co-founder, chef Tryg Siverson, opened the quick-service cafe in New York, where every item on the menu was available gluten-free. It was also where Phillips finally had a kitchen to test and develop new recipes. 

Gluten-free potstickers were the product Phillips wanted most to perfect. It took years of experimentation with dinner specials before she felt confident enough to take the next step. When she did, the approach was not traditional.

"With absolutely no knowledge of retail CPG [consumer packaged goods] at all, we put the dumplings in a Ziploc bag and sent them off to Whole Foods," she recalled.

Whole Foods said yes. They piloted the product in 27 stores. That was just the beginning.

Get close to your customer

After landing the Whole Foods deal, Phillips and Siverson did not hire a marketing team or run a campaign. They showed up in person. Every day for four months, twice a day, they demoed their products in Whole Foods stores. They would be there from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and then again from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

“We were very bootstrapped and scrappy,” Phillips said. “Our only job was to spread the word.”

The direct consumer feedback she gathered during those months proved invaluable, sharpening the brand's positioning in ways no focus group could have uncovered.

"It was really where I learned the most about the consumer," Phillips said. "It was pretty priceless."

Eliminate the ego

For Phillips, one of the hardest lessons of entrepreneurship has been learning to separate personal setbacks from the larger mission. She speaks about that reality plainly. There is no path protected from criticism and rejection. And Phillips encountered plenty of it, but was able to channel it into fuel. 

"The one reason I never did give up is that I believed in this brand. Nobody in the world was going to change my perspective on that."

That conviction was not blind faith. It was grounded in years of work, recipe testing, and listening closely to customers who kept coming back. When you believe in something that strongly, the no's become much easier to absorb.

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