By Brian Shilhavy - Founder of Healthy Traditions

Many Businesses and Venture Capitalists Have Tried to Purchase or Invest in Healthy Traditions Over the Years

Throughout the history of Tropical Traditions and Healthy Traditions, I have had very many offers from venture capitalists and other big name businesses to buy me out or invest in.

It started in 2003, when a popular magazine everyone sees when checking out at grocery stores ran a headline issue titled: The New Thyroid Cure. It featured women using Virgin Coconut Oil and the results they were seeing, and it included an interview with one of our customers who claimed that coconut oil had healed her of Hashimoto’s Disease.

Since we were the only real source to purchase Virgin Coconut Oil, this magazine printed our website name and address.

We were overwhelmed with the response nationwide, which crashed most of our systems, and orders were backed up for weeks before we could ship them. I had to literally design my own ecommerce system back then to handle the rapidly increasing Internet business.

This also led to many of the big health food chains contacting us and trying to buy us out or get exclusive rights to our coconut oil.

To us, it was not worth it, and we have always seen this business as a ministry. The only way to maintain our high standards was to build the business ourselves, the old fashioned way, by reinvesting the profits and expanding, rather than taking on new capital and debt.

Offers to purchase us happened again a few years later when we developed our poultry feed which was free from soy, and was used with small-scale family producers who raised the birds outdoors.

I clearly remember when an executive for Whole Foods contacted me, and wanted to view our birds raised in the summer on Wisconsin pastures. I told him he would have to sign an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) first, and he ridiculed me, saying that there was nothing proprietary about what we were doing and that they could figure it out for themselves.

We never communicated again, and of course he was technically correct. The formulas for our feed were not hard to ascertain, but I had something they did not: Human Labor.

I had a network of farmers who helped develop our Pastured Poultry operation that took me years to develop, whereas the big businesses grew all of their chickens in huge factory warehouses.

Today, once again I am being flooded with emails every week from businesses and VCs who want to buy our Healthy Traditions online store. They see value in it due to our long history in the market, and our brand reputation for high quality products.

However, the reasons I cannot sell Healthy Traditions are the same today. I need to maintain the quality control, and the types of products we produce and sell to the public are not the kind of products which one can just “scale” by simply providing more capital.

It takes time and an increase in human labor, and training that labor, to grow under this model that I have established for 25 years now.

During the past two decades I have said publicly that if we want to change this country and the way we produce food, we need to move away from the 1% of the population who produces our food today and move into a community-based local food production system.

This is what has traditionally made this country strong. When Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States, about 90% of the population was employed in agriculture.

By the time of the Civil War under Lincoln, it was still 50% of the population employed in agriculture.

If we went back to “traditional” ways of producing food, giving value to the people who work to produce it, rather than investing in Big Food and then subsidizing these corporations to mass produce everything to keep prices low, it would literally transform our economy, and eliminate the need to bring in migrants, most of whom are here illegally, to run our farms.

Tasty Traditions: Investing in the Healthy Traditions Brand and Supplying Healthy Food to America

Ancient Grains

However, I do now have opportunities for investors who wish to invest in this brand, and it is through a new product line I have wanted to start for years, but have never had the resources, especially human resources, to start.

This would be a new product line named Tasty Traditions. Tasty Traditions would be products produced from our ancient grains that are tested for the presence of glyphosate, as well as our Mexican corn products that are tested for GMO DNA.

Last year we invested in a grain mill to produce our own All-Purpose flours from our ancient grains. See our press release:

New Ancient Grain All-Purpose Flour Blends that are Glyphosate-Tested for Holiday Baking!

We don’t currently market any products produced by these grains, but we believe that we have sufficient suppliers who grow these grains in the U.S. that test free from glyphosate, to offer a new business opportunity for someone to get such products into the mass market.

Heirloom GMO-Tested Mexican Corn Chips

The other product line we have is our GMO-tested corn tortilla chips from small-scale Mexican families who live in areas of Mexico where GMO corn is banned.

This is one of the few consumer products that we actually produce and sell, as we use this amazing corn to make our very popular corn tortilla chips fried in our own Tropical Traditions coconut oil.

We have spent literally years trying to source corn in the U.S. that is NOT contaminated with GMO DNA, and to this date have never found a source.

We have even pulled corn products off the shelves of grocery stores that were labeled organic and had some kind of "Non-GMO" claim, but they all tested positive for GMO DNA.

So we expanded our search into Mexico, in provinces within Mexico that had banned GMO corn from the U.S. This has been a huge political battleground between Mexico and the U.S. for decades now, as Mexico is the birthplace of corn (maize), and many of their traditional heirloom varieties are being lost to American GMO corn seeds cross pollinating and contaminating their native varieties.

We believe our tortilla corn chips are unmatched in the U.S. market!

This current investment opportunity with our GMO-tested heirloom corn will increase the production of Mexican families growing this corn, giving them a fair value in their own country with no need to move to the U.S.

Our suppliers have said they can increase their production this next growing season, so we are looking for investors today to secure a larger supply for 2026.

As a technologist I have been able to grow the Healthy Traditions business through the power of the Internet for over 2 decades. But future growth is probably NOT going to be mainly on the Internet, as we have developed a highly technical society now that is built upon a very fragile system that depends on electricity and the Internet.

There is no guarantee that the Internet will remain stable in the years ahead, especially after the AI bubble bursts, and with the ever increasing cyberattacks happening every day now.

Add to that the fact that the younger generations, Gen Z and Millennials, are now starting movements nationwide to “unplug” and get OFF of the Internet, which is a movement that I see growing, and that I also encourage. See:

The Post-Technological Age is Drawing Closer as Gen Z Starts Unplugging

It is time now for us to seek to get our products into local communities where customers can purchase them WITHOUT having to use the Internet.

The Ideal Investor

The ideal VC investor we are looking for would be an investor who has the ability to get products into the mass market and grocery chains. This could be directly with the Big Box chains, or through distributors like United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI).

We also believe that there are opportunities to use the new Tasty Traditions brand to open up new businesses that could be franchised, such as Tasty Traditions Cafes or Coffee Shops.

We do have our own network of distributors nationwide, which can be seen here, and the investor would have access to them as well for distribution, and some of them might do production as well on a smaller, local level.

The investor would also have control of the TastyTraditions.com website, as well as non-exclusive rights to use any of our logos, including the new Tasty Traditions logo we are introducing here, which can be modified if a non-bakery type of business wanted to market other products made from our heirloom ancient grains tested to be free from glyphosate.

Read the full Press Release on a new Bakery line here.

Read the full Press Release on our existing Corn Tortilla Chips here.

If you are a VC or other investor that has interest in this, fill out the form below.