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The WorkWell Podcast™ is back and I am so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing.
Hi, I am Jen Fisher, host, bestselling author and influential speaker in the corporate wellbeing movement and the first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer in the professional services industry. On this show, I sit down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations on all things wellbeing at work. Wellbeing is the future of work. This podcast will help you as an individual, but also support you in being part of the movement for change in your own organizations and communities. Wellbeing can be the outcome of work well designed. And we all have a role to play in this critical transformation!
This podcast provides general information and discussions about health and wellness. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The podcast owner, producer and any sponsors are not liable for any health-related claims or decisions made based on the information presented or discussed.
Jen Fisher (Jen): Hi WorkWell listeners. I'm really excited to share that my book, Work Better Together is officially out. Conversations with WorkWell guests and feedback from listeners like you inspired this book. It's all about how to create a more human-centered workplace. As we return to the office, for many of us, this book can help you move forward into post-pandemic life with strategies and tools to strengthen your relationships and focus on your well-being. It's available now from your favorite book retailer. You've probably heard the proverbial saying, “You are what you eat,” and it's true because the nutrients from the food we eat impact every cell in our body, but in a world focused on convenience and speed, how can we ensure we're feeding our body with foods that help us be our best every single day? This is the WorkWell Podcast Series live from the World Happiness Summit in Miami, Florida. Hi, I'm Jen Fisher, Chief Well-Being Officer for Deloitte, and I'm so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things, well-being. I'm here with Shannon Allen. She's the creator of Grown, the first ever 100% USDA organic certified fast-food restaurant with a drive thru on the East Coast. Shannon created Grown after searching unsuccessfully for an organic, nutrient-dense meal on-the-go for her children, including middle son Walker, who lives with type 1 diabetes. The Grown concept has also evolved in part from her television show the Pre-Game Meal, which was inspired by 18 years of preparing optimal game-day meals for her husband, Ray, a two-time NBA champion.
Shannon, welcome to the show.
Shannon Allen (Shannon): Thanks for having me Jen.
Jen: Absolutely. So, I want to learn about you. Tell us who you are, where you grew up, all that good stuff, and then how you became passionate about food.
Shannon: Oh my gosh, where do I start? My name is Shannon Allen. I'm from Middletown, Connecticut, which is right in the middle of the state. Oldest of three girls. My mom owned and operated the number one independently owned real estate company in central Connecticut, black woman, total barracuda. Pretty amazing actually, her story. My dad was a schoolteacher for years and grew an organic garden in our backyard, was a woodworker, restored old boats, kind of a jack of all trades, master of nothing, but truly really like an artistic soul. I grew up a singer and an actress. I went to Northeastern University. I was in the girl group on Motown Records.
Jen: Wow.
Shannon: Done a ton of TV and film stuff. I was even the owner of the Pink Dog on Blue’s Clues and some way along the way, in my journey I met and fell in love with my husband Ray, who is arguably the
greatest three-point shooter in NBA history. Who's arguing? He is. You are not going to argue with me, right?
Jen: No not at all. I agree with you.
Shannon: We're in agreement. I learned very quickly that food was essential to get him to his next athletic performance, and I being a star in my household and didn't know anything about food, I could make a mean tuna fish sandwich and foil and awesome cup of hot tea, but that was about it. I went to the experts, so I became like his mom's sous chef, and I learned all the family recipes and then I'd go back to my dad and my mom and my grandmother and my aunties and begged them to teach me about this incredible expression of love. That's when I really fell in love with the rocking of the knife, but I didn't become a, “foodtrepreneur,” which is something I never would have chosen for myself.
Jen: Did you coined that term or is that like a..?
Shannon: I use it a lot.
Jen: OK.
Shannon: So, I must have heard it from somewhere. I'm pretty good about giving credit where credit is due. I like saying it because it definitely makes sense. But I had no desire to be a foodtrepreneur. Certainly, I definitely worked as a waitress in between music and acting gigs. It’s a very ungratifying work, certainly, and not glamorous at all, but necessary work, essential work, right? We've learned in the past couple of years, but when our middle child Walker was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2008, it changed me. It changed the dynamic in our family, and it changed my personal trajectory and set me on this passionate mission to reinvent fast food, and that's what I'm doing now.
Jen: I love it. Let's talk about organic food and organic fast food and why that's so important for all of us.
Shannon: Well, first of all I think the most important thing for people to be doing is eating real food. Single ingredient, nutrient-dense foods, right? We've been conditioned to believe that things in shiny packages are food, and they're really food-like substances. Real food, single ingredient foods, real fast food are things like a banana, you peel it and eat it… an orange. Things that your great-grandmother would recognize as food, broccoli, cucumber…
Jen: Strawberries, my favorite fast food.
Shannon: Yeah. Handful of rice. Boneless, skinless, chicken breast. This is real food. These are single ingredient, nutrient-dense foods, and this is what our body is desperate for to power us and to fuel our mind, our spirit and the world, really. When you really dig into single ingredient, nutrient-dense foods, then you realize that there's another layer, and that's how is the food actually being grown and there are conventionally grown foods, which in my opinion is a misnomer. Because when you hear the word conventional you think, “Oh, this is the way it's supposed to be done.”
Jen: Right.
Shannon: It's conventionally done, but what that really means is sprayed with intense pesticides and typically a very serious chemical which is a known carcinogen. On the other side of the table are organic foods, and organic foods are grown the way mother nature intended, which is lots of sunlight, loving hands and water. Those foods are the ones that are really amazing for you. They're amazing for your cell
health, for your mental health, for your physical health and well-being, and for the planet. Because we're not over irradiating our soil and contributing to greenhouse gases and staring down the mother of all messes, which is what we're starting with our planet right now. So those are kinds of the differences and very easy way to explain to everyone to understand, but that's big stuff.
Jen: I mean, it's important.
Shannon: It is for me. I'm a mother of five and I have a child with a serious medical condition. He's living with an autoimmune disease and absolutely thriving, but a lot of that has to do with: A) We're very fortunate to have access to doctors in the U.S. B) We have access to insulin, which most people do not. We have insurance which most people do not. I have the ability to afford to buy him organic foods, and I have the time to cook him those foods. So, these are all luxuries that most people don't have and I'm hyper aware of that.
Jen: How is it changing the way that you eat or prepare food? How's it affected your other children? What's that like in the family?
Shannon: Well, fortunately I've always eaten this way. Before I became a mom, I really decided that I wanted to run an organic kitchen and mostly a gluten-free kitchen as well.
Jen: So, they're used to it.
Shannon: Yeah, and I grew up on this kind of food. I mean my mom and dad were hippies. My dad had a huge garden in our backyard and grew tomatoes and peppers and onions and corn and mushrooms in the whole bed. My parents never bought marinara sauce. If my dad was going to make bolognese or sumbratu or some kind of a really cool stew or shepherd’s pie or something? He'd say, “Shannon, go in basement and get me a jar of tomatoes,” which is what most people did. They canned and jarred their own stuff. So, this was definitely a part of my DNA and my ancestral DNA. My mom’s families were all farmers, Cape Verdeans from Massachusetts, and so it feels good to eat like that. It fills my soul.
Jen: Do you have your kids ever said, “Well, my friends get to eat whatever junk food and I don't.”
Shannon: Well, my kids get to eat junk food. I mean I'm a real mom.
Jen: Well, I'm thinking to myself, “OK, how does she get around this with their kids?” OK, so you don't. Good, you've just made a whole bunch of other moms feel much better.
Shannon: One of our slogans I've grown is, “Eliminating mom guilt.” You're welcome. Because we have enough things to feel bad about, the parentry doesn't need to be one of them.
Jen: Right
Shannon: But I would say 90% of the times my kids eat organic meals that I made and then God only knows what they're eating at school lunches, right? Holy cow, and then I'm a basketball mom. My kids all play AAU basketball. When we're on the road and there's no Grown in town, I'm relegated to whatever comes out of that drive thru window. So, we need more Growns in towns.
Jen: We need more Growns in town. I agree. So, let's talk about Grown. What inspired you to go from preparing meals for your husband and your family, getting them ready for game time and just life and your son, to creating Grown for the rest of us to benefit from your wisdom and your food.
Shannon: Gosh. Well, it was definitely like people always say necessity is the mother of invention. In this case mother was the necessity of invention. In 2008, my husband Ray, was competing with the Boston Celtics against the LA Lakers, the late great Kobe Bryant, may he rest in peace. We were in LA for the championship. We've never been to the Big Dance before and here we were, so excited. There are like 35 of us in our family. My mother-in-law was at swap meet, looking for green jeans which is really hard to find in gold and purple make, but we were all really excited. We were on like high vibrational energy times thousand. We're so happy for Ray, but between Monday and Friday, my middle child Walker, who was only 17 months old, taught himself how to say, “Juice mommy,” because he was so excessively thirsty, and this was a mostly breast-fed little guy. I breastfed all my boys till they were three, and Walker had about 50 words in his vocabulary, but juice wasn't one of them. So, I started noticing he was drinking all the time, he was peeing through his diaper, and then by Friday he was wetting the bed and then he was also vomiting. I was thinking, “Oh this is crappy hotel food.” I wasn't so worried. I don't know if it's like your third child, it's kind of like they can run with knives and you don't care. If it’s the first child you’re like…arrrah.
Jen: See you're the oldest of three. I'm the youngest of three. So, I understand that. By the time my parents got to me, they're like, yeah, “Do whatever you want.”
Shannon: She’s on fire. Don't worry about it. She knows stop drop and roll, totally. So, I wasn't super worried, but Ray, my husband Ray, who was in the middle of the biggest moment of his life. This is really amazing. it's a testament to him and his ability to have this focus mechanism that he can turn on and off. He said to me Friday morning, and this was after hitting eight 3-pointers in game five, he scored 24 points in the fourth quarter that had never been done before to win this game five in the final game, so he had a lot going on, and he looks at me on Friday and says, “Shan, I think there's something really wrong with Walker.” I was like, “You think so? I mean, I think maybe he's got like a bug or a baby flu or something, but I don't think he's sick, sick.” He's like, “No, I think something is really wrong. If you wake up tomorrow morning and he's off, promise me, we'll take him in.”
Of course, I said yes and that next morning I woke up in a pool of Walker’s urine. He had peed through his diapers, soaked me, soaked the bed, put him in the tub. He was a wet noodle. I called the hotel and asked if they had a doctor that they were affiliated with. I knew no one in LA. I get on the phone with this doctor that's affiliated with the hotel, and he gives me this piece of advice that I will never forget and literally changed my life forever. He said, “Sounds like a flu, maybe a little bit of food poisoning, but you're never going to know unless you get a blood test. Take him in. Promise me you don't leave without a blood test.” I said, “Okay but what am I looking for?” He's said, “I have no idea.”
Jen: But they’ll tell you.
Shannon: “Anything really scary, you can rule out with a blood test.” So, I went to the hospital and for 25 minutes I was trying to convince the people in the hospital that Walker was sick and everyone there was saying, “We know really sick kids. This kid isn't sick. He's probably got a virus. Take him home, give him Pedialyte. Give him a couple of popsicles. He's going to be great.” That sounded good to me because I had a basketball game to go to, but that sentence from the doctor was burned in my soul.
Jen: I'm getting a blood test. I'm going to stand right here.
Shannon: Yes, and Jen that's exactly what happened. I started asking because I've been asking, and then I just demanded it. I'm not leaving without it, and 20 minutes later a doctor came in the room, white as a ghost, tears streaming down her face, and she said, “Your blood sugar is supposed to be between 70 and 120. Walker's is 639. He has type 1 diabetes and he's entered a phase of diabetes called diabetic ketoacidosis, which means his blood sugar is poisoning him to death, and if he doesn't get insulin soon, you're going to lose him.”
Jen: Oh my God.
Shannon: That was the moment that changed everything, and in a flash, I became an activist, an advocate, a warrior, and I just looked at her and said, “Hey listen, you know I'm not leaving here without him. I don't know what insulin is. I don't know anything about diabetes, but I'm not leaving here without my baby, so let's hook him up.”
I started doing everything I could in the diabetes community. Sat on the International Board of Directors for the JDRF, the Joslin Diabetes Center, did the walks, did the rides, did the runs. What I became acutely aware of is that insulin is the most sold drug on the planet and pre-COVID diabetes was really the pandemic of our time. So, a lot of money is being spent and made keeping diabetes going. Not that researchers aren't looking for the cure because of course they are, but there's also pumps and meters and things that are saleable and contribute to the bottom line of people’s P&Ls. That's just real life. I own a business. It is what it is. So, I was very contemplative about this, and then one night I was on my way to the grocery store to buy stuff to make dinner, and Walker had an extremely low blood sugar in his car seat, and I pulled over on the side of the road and he was like 40 and falling. For anyone that's listening that has a loved one with type 1 or type 2, you go from 40 to 0, it's light’s out. I realized this and just left to the grocery store, was out the window and I need the food now. I started looking around the highway and it was like fast food, fast food, fast food, fast food, things that came out of shiny packages and went from the freezer to the fryer later and I realized Walker deserved better. He was only 17 months old, and he was already insulin dependent. I wanted like a whole organic free-range rotisserie chicken with broccoli and rice and an unsweetened iced tea, or like a bowl of chicken tortilla soup or a gluten-free panko crusted chicken tender and it pissed me off that I couldn't get that. So, I drove like a bat out of hell, the restaurant, like jumped over the counter. Diver friend that worked there. I was a maniac.
Jen: Did he know you were coming at least?
Shannon: I called him, and I got Walker a Sprite, which people would be surprised to know, very, very high in sugar content, lots of bubbles, got him out of the danger zone immediately, and then he had real food, and I went home, and I sat on my shower floor and for the first time since his diagnosis, I sobbed and I felt like a failure, like I failed my son. I had like a legit pity party like I felt really bad for myself. I got out of the shower and I looked in the mirror and I was like, “Look, you know what, no one is coming to save you, and if this is a problem for you, this is just a problem, period.” I called my husband Ray, who was on like a 21-day road trip and I was like, “Hey, guess what? If nobody has big enough … to reinvent fast food, I think I might have to do it.” That was the moment that Grown was born.
Jen: What was his reaction to that?
Shannon: He was like “Go for it, go for it.”
Jen: I love it.
Shannon: What do you say to the woman that's been in the stands screaming like a maniac for you for 25 years?
Jen: Go for it, go for it. Well, because he knew you could do it too.
Shannon: Together, yeah, we’d do it.
Jen: Let's talk about, I mean you talked a little bit earlier about nutrition and whole foods. Let's break it down how it truly impacts your physical and your mental health. I would say in particular probably your mental health. I think people are much more familiar with how it impacts your physical health. That doesn't mean they take all the right steps, including me, but more recently we've started to learn about the connection of food to our mental health.
Shannon: It's undeniable, the connection. I'm not a nutritionist or dietitian, so I wouldn't want anyone that's listening to say, “Shannon said for me to do this,” but in my own experience and in my own life, I found that when I eliminate highly processed foods and sugar, especially, I feel, look, think, sleep and have a better presence of mind. I'm entirely more focused and I feel like the best version of myself. I mean, people probably don't know this, but the average American consumes 183 pounds of sugar every year without ever adding a teaspoon of sugar to their food or drinks. Sugar is in everything.
Jen: It is in everything.
Shannon: It's in everything and people are wondering why we look and feel different than folks did 50 and 60 years ago. It's because of the enormous sugar content in bread, pasta, rice, sauces.
Jen: We’re all unknowingly addicted to it.
Shannon: Yeah, it's more addictive than cocaine. Most addictive substance on the planet. So, like one thing that I would say hey, “I want to harness a better physical, mental and spiritual version of myself, my physical body, what is one thing that I can do right now that will make me feel better?” Eliminate sugar.
Jen: How do you eliminate sugar?
Shannon: I do it.
Jen: OK, so tell us what that looks like?
Shannon: Well, I do not drink any soda. I drink sparkling water or water. I drink coffee with no sugar. I don't do any bread, pasta, rice, potatoes. I don't eat canned soups. I make my own soups and stews at home. That sounds like, oh that's hard, it's not. Things that contain high sugar content like ketchup, I don't use. I don't add sugar to anything. I have a gluten allergy, so I can't have cakes and pies. Every once in a blue moon, I'll have a piece of gluten-free sourdough toast, because I just really want that, but for the most part I don't do it. Jams and jellies, not for me. So, but that's me. That's my own personal journey. Someone that's listening to this, that's a nutritionist and dietician that maybe works with athletes will say this is completely wrong. You need complex carbohydrates in order to boom, boom, boom, boom, and boom. If I told Michael Phelps, “Hey I don't do sugar.” He would be like, “Well, guess what, you'd never be an Olympics swimmer, because I consume 4000 calories a day, and it's mostly
carbohydrates.” Everyone is different, and I think that Jen is a really big piece of this. Also, we are all biodiverse. All of our bodies are different. All of our blood types are different. Our ancestral DNA is different. Our epigenetics are different. We all have a completely unique physical makeup, and it's really important to listen to that. We all have different allergies and predispositions to things, so it's important to listen to your intuition about what kinds of choices you need to make for your pantry.
Jen: Yeah, and I think about that too. Just about everybody has a different relationship with food depending on, like you said, your culture, your upbringing, and also, I think especially as women, what we were taught to believe about diets. What we should eat, shouldn't eat and so what you're saying really resonates, but also just understanding our own unique relationship with food and how to make that a healthy one.
Shannon: I think for me, that's why when you're asking questions about what should we do, what shouldn't do, I always go back to real food, single-ingredient, nutrient-dense foods. The other thing that I say a lot of times when people ask me is I don't count calories, I count chemicals.
Jen: I love that, but there's a lot of chemicals in our food.
Shannon: Right. So, then it goes back to point A.
Jen: You’ll be counting a lot of chemicals.
Shannon: If we can't pronounce it, you probably shouldn't eat it.
Jen: Yeah, I’ve heard that before. How does Ray eat? Does he eat completely different than you?
Shannon: He's a pescatarian, and he doesn't eat any complex carbohydrates.
Jen: Really? As an athlete?
Shannon: He is in his playing weight. He is 46 or 47 years old. I never remember how old we are. Gosh! What does that mean?
Jen: That's a good thing, actually.
Shannon: Mental age of 17¾. Guys, don't judge me. Yeah, no he's a pescatarian. He doesn't do any red meat, chicken, pork, any of those things. He eats mostly fruits and vegetables, lots of seeds, lots of nuts. He's got a really meticulous diet still, even as a Hall of Famer, retired, top 75 of all time guy that could be doing whatever he wants, eating however he wants, laying on the couch with three cheeseburgers, not his life.
Jen: Did you influence that or was that something he did on his own?
Shannon: We did it together. Truly, I mean, again when we first fell in love, I was eating chicken tenders, fries every day in a music studio. He was eating the things that he grew up on. Of course, he was eating real food, also. His mom is an amazing cook and made incredible homespun meals for him, but yeah, he'd eat pancakes with syrup. That was part of his life and a part of our culture. Those are things that we would gravitate towards, as people, as black people. Now he eats very differently. He doesn't eat any gluten. The only complex carbohydrate that he consumes on a regular basis are sweet potatoes, but that's a vegetable, not a starch. He eats really, really well and it shows on him. I mean he has flawless skin. He still has a six pack.
Jen: So, do you by the way.
Shannon: Thank you. It’s crazy. He's a specimen literally. Every time he leaves the house, and I am like “Where are you going,” he is like “Shannon, to the grocery store to get your paper towels,” I am like “Okay.”
Jen: I love what you're saying too. Just because we talk about this so much in the world of well-being is, when you do something together with another person, whether your partners, whether your friends, whether your roommates, whatever, the relationship is, it makes it easier, it makes it more fun. You can hold each other accountable. You don't feel like you're doing this alone. It's just a lonely feeling to be like “Wow I'm the only person eating this way or I'm the only one.”
Shannon: I am eating tuna and lettuce at every meal, guys. It really hurts me to see eating lasagna. That's what’s so funny, like on my Instagram stories and for the restaurant, I make all these massive meals for my boys. I call them the Allen Frat house, because there's just so many of them. I make their pregame meal every day, and people are like, “Wow! You know how do you stay so like slim and fit and whatever like making four-cheese lasagna or kale soup and honey butter biscuits with this fried chicken and mashed potatoes and herb garlic broccoli?” I don't eat any of it. These are for growing boys their ages - 10 to 17. They need all this stuff to reach their full genetic potential. As we get older, things change. We don't require the same amount or the same kinds of foods that we used to.
Jen: Let's talk about you. You're a busy mom.
Shannon: Yes.
Jen: You're an entrepreneur. We were talking before that you're up at 2:30 in the morning, preparing meals for football teams. So, what does self-care look like for Shannon Allen?
Shannon: Well, the past few weeks, let me tell you. During COVID, I really re-harnessed self-care for myself because I had more time. The restaurant was only open 9:00 to 3:00 every day. We were just trying to keep open and keep everyone employed and our team members happy and that meant making things tighter and smaller and more intimate across the board. That actually gave me more free time with my family, which was a blessing really. I started running every day, two miles a day again, doing Pilates again every day or yoga every day, or just push-ups and sit-ups every day outside. I started a really intensive skin care regimen every night 20 minutes for myself, deep conditioning and coloring my own hair, doing my own nails. Things I'd forgotten that I was capable of doing because I didn't have the time to do them as a CEO of a startup. Now we're coming out, I hope God willing, I thick of this thing and our hours are increasing again. We have a lot more catering opportunities. We opened a new location on South Beach that's absolutely gorgeous, and so I'm back in the thick of it again where I'm sometimes working those 12- to 14-hour days and my self-care really has been slacking, I would say the last nine weeks, so right now, my self-care consists of, I'm being totally honest.
Jen: Please do. This is what makes you real.
Shannon: I only know how to tell the truth. My self-care right now is my non-negotiable morning cup of coffee. That's for me, that's my time. Making sure that I'm still eating the way that I know I need to eat for me, which is essentially the paleo diet, meat, chicken, fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts and then occasional days of fasting. I do a water fast three days out of every month and that is 100% for me. I
wouldn't recommend it to anyone because consult with your doctor before you do any fasting. Spending time with my loved ones is a big part of my self-care. Going to my kids’ games makes me feel alive. Spending time with my husband, sitting on the couch, him making me a bowl of popcorn. He knows my sweet spot as well. Home from a long day at work, and he's like got my popcorn ready. It's small stuff really. I still do my skin care at night, but it's not 20 minutes anymore. It's like four minutes, but I still get it in, because it's part of me feeling like myself is loving the way I look and feel. Maybe that sounds egotistical or selfish, but I'm a performer by nature. It's a big part of who I am. People often ask me, “How did you create Grown? How did you come up with this idea to reinvent fast food,” and obviously have a very strong why. Walker, my son, he's my why. I wanted to create the thing that I wished existed. I wanted to inspire people to eat real food cooked slow for fast people, and I wanted to help eliminate mom guilt.
Jen: I guess for people listening, I mean nutrition, I continue to find it is the number one thing that people struggle with because it's what you're trying to solve, right? It's confusing.
Shannon: There's so many different opinions about this concept.
Jen: Yeah, it's not easily accessible all the time. You end up eating what's available to you. So, do you have any favorite tips to tell people like pack a snack bag, like what are your go-to, “OK, we're going here, and we may or may not have access to the type of food that we want to eat or we want to consume.” How do you plan for those things?
Shannon: I would be very honest and tell you that I'm not a meal prepper. I don't have time for that. I envy people that on a Sunday night make all their meals for the whole week. I just don't have that bandwidth to do that.
Jen: I do it for about six weeks out of the year and then I'm like I can't do this anymore.
Shannon: Even that's amazing. Six weeks out of a year, my gosh! Wow. What I tend to do, which is like meal prep, is that I make enough food on any given night so that the next day when the boys come home from school, if they want something hot, there's still a couple leftover chicken breasts or a small portion of a stew that I might have made, or a corner of lasagna so that they don't have to take out or be scrambling for Ramen noodles, right because I've got stuff in the fridge. One of my biggest tricks, if this is a trick, and anyone can do this at most income levels with the exception of food deserts where there aren't real grocery stores, I keep a bowl of fruit on the counter. Some bananas, some apples. I have limes and lemons that I put in the fridge for lime and lemon water, avocado. People don't realize that that's actually a fruit. Maybe some grapes, and when we do that, which is consistently, our kids go for fruit first. They do. People will come to the house and be like, “Wow, I don't get it. Like you've got this whole amazing fully stocked pantry, but Walker just ate an orange.” I'm like, “Yeah, he's going to go for the orange first every single time.”
Jen: Works right and that's what's out. Actually, there's a lot of research that if you put especially fruit. If you put it accessible, people will go for that and they won't necessarily go for the junk food that is available three feet behind it.
Shannon: Totally. So, we have fruit on the counter and then over by like my stove area, I have these little containers, and those all have nuts in them, so it's like if you go to a hotel, like an overnight stay
place, and they have like a continental breakfast downstairs, and you can press a button and peanuts come out. We've got cashews, chocolate-covered raisins, pecans, and almonds.
Jen: So, you just make it visible and accessible.
Shannon: Totally. Then when they say, “Mom, we want a snack,” I'll do something like homemade nachos with guacamole, right? People don't realize how good something like guacamole nachos actually really is for you.
Jen: I am getting hungry right now.
Shannon: I will stop talking about food Jen.
Jen: No, keep going. My mouth is watering.
Shannon: It's one of those things where yes, we can just have a bag of chips, but I could also make you quesadillas really quick or a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup. This stuff takes 3 minutes. The other thing I would say is for parents if parents have questions about how to get your kids eat broccoli and things like that. I don't have all the answers, but something that's worked in our house is that my kids all cook, and when I'm cooking, they want to be involved in the cooking experience, even if it's something simple like…
Jen: It's a family event.
Shannon: Yeah. When I'm in the kitchen, which is like my domain, right? I've got my music, I’ve got Shaday going, Bossa Nova, I've got candles lit and I'm like setting the mood for to start cooking. My two littles will run in and be like, “Mom, don't start without us.” They want to cut the broccoli. They want to smash the garlic. They want to break the spaghetti in half and even simple things like cinnamon rolls. It takes 3 minutes to do that with them, but when those cinnamon rolls come out of the oven, they feel like Zak the Baker.
Jen: Love it.
Shannon: Right? It’s really unusual for someone to not want to eat what they prepared.
Jen: I love that. What do you think? Are they going to get involved in the business? What is the future of Grown?
Shannon: It's interesting. My 10-year-old, he said to me the other day, “This is crazy.” His name is Wynstan and he's so smart. He plays this game sometimes where he wants to talk about what are the world's most recognizable brands which what 10-year-old wants to talk about the world’s most recognizable brands? Its wild. He said to me one day, “Mom, that's like a billion dollar company, right?” I’m like, “Absolutely.” How many locations do they have? 11,427. “Really, that many mom?” Yeah, they're all over the globe, Wynstan. They're in airports and hospitals and college campuses. They're just about everywhere. He said, “Do you think …. is the most recognizable fast-food restaurant in the country?” 100% yes, hands down. He goes, “Well, mom … is all over the globe and they're a multibillion-dollar business. Grown is next, because you're actually doing something great for people.
Jen: I love it.
Shannon: This is why I get up at 2:30 in the morning Jen.
Jen: That's the final word. I can't even ask you anything else after that.
Shannon: Mic drop. Thank you Wynstan.
Jen: Yes, thank you. Well thank you so much for being on the show.
Shannon: Thanks for having me.
Jen: So much richness and I'm smiling the whole time and we're at the World Happiness Summit. So, we got to spread that joy. The world needs the joy and the happiness and the good food.
Shannon: It does, and the good nutrient-dense food that contributes for immunity.
Jen: Thank you, we learned that. Thank you for being on the show and thank you for what you do.
Shannon: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jen: Absolutely.
Shannon: Stay safe and healthy everybody.
Jen: I'm so grateful Shannon could be with us today to talk about food and nutrition. Thank you to our producers, Revit 360 and our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on deloitte.com or you can visit various podcatchers using the keyword WorkWell, all one word, to hear more, and if you like the show, don't forget to subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. If you have a topic you'd like to hear on the WorkWell Podcast Series, or maybe a story you would like to share, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is under the name Jen Fisher or on Twitter, @jenfish23. We're always open to your recommendations and feedback. Of course, if you like what you hear, please share, post and like this podcast. Thank you and be well.