by Brian Shilhavy
Healthy Traditions Press Release

In 2002 I started my ecommerce company Tropical Traditions, which began selling our Virgin Coconut Oil and other products we were producing in the Philippines to U.S. consumers through the Internet.

This was during the dot-com bust, and before Facebook even existed, and almost nobody had heard about Google back then, because Yahoo dominated the Internet search engines. Amazon.com was in its infancy and still mostly just selling books back then.

We were pioneers in selling food over the Internet, and even developed our own packaging to be able to ship glass and eggs without toxic plastic that contaminates our waste landfills. There were almost no stores selling coconut oil back then, and the few that were sold mass-produced and machine made refined coconut oil.

We leveraged the power of the Internet (my professional background was in technology) to bring products produced in the Philippines by small-scale family micro businesses directly to U.S. consumers.

Our biggest obstacle back then was convincing consumers that it was safe to order products over the Internet, as so few companies were doing it, and the ones that were mostly sold technology products, as nobody was shipping food at that time.

As the success of Virgin Coconut Oil in the U.S. market took off, we had to invest in more infrastructure on our family farm on Mt. Banahaw in the Philippines, and soon I was perceived as the “rich foreigner” living in a very rural, agricultural community.

After an attempted kidnapping of me and my children in the Philippines by a “kidnap for ransom” group, we moved to the U.S. at the end of 2002.

Back in the U.S. we expanded our business model by continuing to work together with small-scale family businesses, and developed new product lines.

We developed Grass-Fed Traditions working with mainly Amish families in Wisconsin to supply grass-fed beef, lamb, and pork, as well as pastured chickens and turkeys.

We also developed Household Traditions, selling non-toxic household cleaning supplies and other items used in the home.

After learning that most honey in the U.S. and Canada was contaminated with the herbicide glyphosate, as most honey sold in the U.S. is a byproduct of commercial bee operations who rent out their bees to fertilize commercial agriculture products which are heavily sprayed with toxic herbicides and pesticides, we began our Honey Traditions product line with honey that tested clean of these chemicals.

For years we sold honey that was harvested from bees located in the remote areas of Canada that tested clean of glyphosate, but unfortunately the day came where even their honey tested positive for glyphosate (probably coming from rain water), forcing us to look elsewhere.

We eventually found a source in Chile that harvested honey from the Andes Mountains and Rain Forests that tested clean of any herbicides and pesticides. See:

Honey is the World’s Healthiest Sweetener but the North American Honey Supply is Contaminated

In 2017 we changed the name of our store from “Tropical Traditions” to “Healthy Traditions” to more accurately describe the range of products we were now selling, which included grains grown in the U.S. that test to be free from glyphosate, the herbicide in RoundUp that contaminates almost the entire wheat supply in the U.S.

Prior to that, we had sold some organic grains from small-scale producers that we believed were healthy.

But in 2014, after studying the issue of glyphosate contaminating America’s wheat supply, we tested our own USDA certified organic grains and found out that they were also contaminated. We thought that our supplier was violating USDA organic policies, but as we looked into it we found out that the USDA NOP (National Organic Program) allowed for trace amounts of glyphosate even in certified “organic” grains. See:

ALERT: Certified Organic Food Grown in U.S. Found Contaminated with Glyphosate Herbicide

Big Food has Taken Over the USDA National Organic Program – Why I am no Longer Importing Certified Organic Food

Since that time, for over a decade, we have worked to find farms that grow grains, and preferably ancient heirloom grains, that test to be clean of these dangerous herbicides.

In the beginning, we mostly imported grains from Italy, where American herbicides are not as widely used as most other countries, due to Italians’ high value in clean food, particularly grains.

But today, we now have several suppliers that are U.S. based, and therefore not subject to import tariffs. They are all outside of the main grain producing states of the Dakotas and Montana, as we have never been able to find any grains from these states that test free of glyphosate. This is because in these northern states the common practice is to spray glyphosate on ripe grains to kill them before the first snow falls around harvest time, assuring that they can get their harvest completed before the first snow comes. See:

How Glyphosate Herbicide Has Destroyed America’s Wheat

Many people in the U.S. today are diagnosed with some kind of digestive problem, and gluten from wheat is usually blamed for these illnesses, which has launched an entire industry in recent years for “gluten free” products.

However, many believe that gluten is an innocent bystander, and that the real problem is that the presence of glyphosate and other dangerous contaminants in the America grain supply is the real culprit. See:

Is the Gluten Intolerance “Epidemic” as Bad as Claimed or a Clever Marketing Tool?

The Many Businesses and Venture Capitalists who Have Tried to Buy me out 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.

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.

I even had a Venture Capitalist (VC) who was a former head at Harvard Business School, and was at that time with a huge Christian organization that also had a branch in the Philippines, try to buy me out, by talking down to me and explaining that I was doing things wrong when we began to branch out to other products besides coconut oil.

But we had already saturated the PPC (pay per click) market on the Internet back then, with no other real ways to increase our market at that time through just the Internet. He had no solutions to that, and I found out later he just wanted to replace our small-scale producers in the Philippines with his own network with a Filipino woman who attended Harvard with him and was trying to start a business in the Philippines like ours.

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

However, I do now have an opportunity 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.

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.

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 produced by our grains, whether they are breads, crackers, snack foods, desserts, or any other grain-based 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).

But the other thing the investor would need to do is invest in human labor, as Healthy Traditions is not in a position to run huge bakery operations or other food production businesses. So our ideal investor would have to also find and/or develop the bakery production side, as we supply the grains and flours, along with our highly valued brand name that has been in the market for over 2 decades now and trusted by many millions of people.

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.

If you are a VC or other investor that has interest in this, you can apply at TastyTraditions.com.

For those who are not venture capitalists or investors, we are still offering our Reseller and Distributor program with minimal investments that we introduced last year. See:

Healthy Traditions Offers Up to a 20% Return on a $1000 Investment and Up to a 30% Return for $5000 Investment to Become Resellers of Long-term Storable Food Tested for GMOs and other Toxins

Other Future Potential Investment Opportunities

There are some other potential product lines we could sell off to investors in the future that can be scaled and be put into the mass market, but some of them involve our Virgin Coconut Oil, and right now we are still waiting to see if current tariffs on the Philippines, which were set to 19% most recently, are going to continue or eventually go away.

The other potential product line would be from our Mexican corn, as we have never been able to find corn grown in the U.S. that tests clean from GMOs. But again, we need to see how our farmers in Mexico are going to do with the new tariffs in place to know if we will have enough supplies to mass market them.

If you would like to be informed when these other product lines might be available to purchase, we have setup an Investor Inquiry page here.

DISCLAIMER: Brian Shilhavy is the Editor of Health Impact News, and the founder and CEO of Healthy Traditions. Everything published on the Health Impact News network is available to the public free of charge, with a Creative Commons license offered to all who wish to republish my articles, with attribution, free of charge, as I earn my income from Healthy Traditions.

Healthy Traditions, originally Tropical Traditions, has served customers in the U.S. for over 23 years. Learn more here about the obstacles we have overcome for over 2 decades:

Healthy Traditions: 20 Years of Demonstrating God’s Faithfulness in Offering an Alternative to Commodity Food and Products

Comment on this article at HealthImpactNews.com.

This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)

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