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Annie of Annie's Mac and Cheese
- bluedino 6y agoI’ve bought a couple diffferent flavors of Annie’s Mac and cheese and me and my wife did not especially like it. We prefer Kraft, Velveeta, or Cracker Barrel boxed macaroni and cheese (the last one is great, you should try it). Even the store brand with the liquid cheese pouch is good. Maybe it’s organic or something which makes people like it. Kind of the same with with Amy’s frozen meals. They are all so bland. I’ve never found one I liked more than the “regular” frozen brands, which says a lot as none of those are really very good.
- city41 6y agoSome similarities between Annie and Burt of Burt's Bees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Shavitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Shavitz
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThat's a great story. She sounds like a cool woman. I get tired of the tales of the rapacious and deplorable behavior of so many people in business, so it's refreshing to hear stories like this.
- zucked 6y agoI can totally respect the desire to step back and do your own thing at your own speed. Rock on, Annie - do what fills your bucket.
- itomato 6y agoI remember when the boxes had bumper stickers in them and my health food store customers complained about potential toxicity. Good times.
- jessaustin 6y agoIs mac and cheese really health food?
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoIt's food. It's nutrition. Food isn't medicine. All food is healthy if you eat it in reasonable amounts and you make sure to get all the nutrients you need. If you're consuming an overabundance of carbohydrates then you're not eating healthy, but that's not a problem with the food, it's a problem with your behavior and food choices.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> All food is healthy if you eat it in reasonable amounts That is true if one is speaking about the basic categories like "fats/carbs/sugars" etc., but the concern is really about certain additives in processed foods. When ingesting a carcinogen, sure it is repeated exposure that raises one’s odds of developing cancer, but all it might really take is just a single time. That is why additives are sometimes banned from country to country: because there might not even be a "reasonable amount" greater than zero.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoThis is exactly what Coca-Cola wants us to believe about food. e.g. > “Beating obesity will take action by all of us, based on one simple common-sense fact: All calories count, no matter where they come from, including Coca-Cola and everything else with calories,” the female announcer said. “And if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you’ll gain weight.” There's obviously no difference between the foods and everything that compromises us is just due to personal failure.
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoWhat they said is correct. If you eat more than you burn, you gain weight. That's how it works. If you believe different you're unlikely to maintain a healthy weight. Dieting and maintaining a healthy weight is all about energy balance and personal behavior. I've lost weight and kept it off for four years now.
- rurp 6y agoI worked at a niche health food grocery store many years ago that got a fair share of weird customers. The store introduced checkout scanners while I was there; previously the employee at the register would simply type in the price of each item. Most customers didn't care but a very vocal minority was outraged about how toxic and dangerous the little scanner lights were.
- lightlyused 6y agoMy kids have never had Kraft mac&cheese. Annie's was $1 a box at Kroger and had more variety.
- reaperducer 6y agoGood for you. You're better than everyone else on the planet. Have a cookie.
- rnd0 6y ago>Good for you No, good for them -the kids, I mean.
- lightlyused 6y agoI don't understand your reply calling me better than everyone else on the planet. I don't think that kind is a very kind comment (one of the sites guidelines). Aren't you even curious why I said what I said? Well here is why: I could get Annie's for $1 a box at Kroger. Why would I pay more and it is basically the same product with more variety. I've edited my comment to reflect that.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't be an asshole on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: We've had to ask you this surprisingly many times. I don't want to ban you, but after years of this I think it's reasonable to expect you to know the rules and follow them.
- medicineman 6y agoI bet you don't have a tv too!
- distrill 6y agothey are gravely missing out
- samatman 6y agoEh. They probably have, when visiting friends, and just didn't tell you about it. Source: my Mom was neurotic about food stuff as well.
- Finnucane 6y agoIn the last year our consumption of Annie's m&c has increased fairly substantially.
- blisterpeanuts 6y agoif allowed to, my teenager would subsist solely on Annie's M&C. As I discovered when I bought several packages on sale. When there's no Annie's, she fixes herself a Ramen. We try to feed her protein and greens and fruit, but... not an easy task. Kids seem to gravitate to salty wheat carbs.
- decafninja 6y agoI loved the Mexican flavored mac & cheese growing up. Sadly I think they've discontinued it as I haven't seen it on store shelves in more than a decade, and don't see it in their product lineup on their web site either.
- sjg007 6y agoSounds like a startup!
- deedub 6y agoAnnie's is owned by General Mills. I wouldn't be surprised it if went away around the time of the acquisition. You could try asking them for it. :-)
- bluedino 6y agoBuy a bottle of “spicy BBQ rub”, and add it your favorite Mac and cheese.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoI liked their Pizza Pasta, long since discontinued. The current product lineup is pretty appalling. There's one (1) product, but in various different stages of pre-preparation.
- mvh 6y agoI went on Semester at Sea with her - when I was only 3! My dad was a professor on the ship. Apparently she was super nice, although, I don’t remember, since I was 3.
- m463 6y agoWhat a fascinating way to learn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semester_at_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semester_at_Sea "During the semester the ship circumnavigates the globe"...
- mc32 6y agoDifferent and interesting but a full college program is the 30-student Deep Springs College. For such a small institution it has an interesting list of graduates. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
- jerf 6y ago"She boiled elbow pasta from Kraft, measured an identical amount of white cheddar cheese as was in the Kraft packet, added butter and milk, and then... “Whoa!” was the summation of her first bites." I've done that too, with cheese powder from Amazon. It does seem incrementally better. If there's a "secret ingredient" to macaroni & cheese, it's just the cheese powder which you can readily buy by the pound, and then use for other things. Like putting it on your popcorn (add onion powder to really round it out). The nice thing is that you end up with a lot more versatility when your cheese powder isn't confined to a Mac&Cheese container. I also like to use it as part of cheese sauces for broccoli and such. It's not a staple in my kitchen, but I probably manage to go through a pound in about 6-9 months, and it still generally tastes good even at the end.
- w0mbat 6y agoKraft's own cheese powder is incredibly bland by comparison with Annie's. Whenever I happen to eat Kraft mac and cheese, I am surprised by how flavorless it is, but maybe some people like it that way.
- dualboot 6y agoNostalgia is funny that way.
- w0mbat 6y agoI think the formula for Kraft must be different in the UK where I grew up, vs the USA where I live now. I have already proved that US Kit Kats (made by Reese/Hershey) have almost no chocolate smell compared to Euro Kit Kats (made by Nestlé) which have a rich cocoa aroma.
- sp332 6y agoKraft did change their recipe drastically in 2016. https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/08/news/companies/kraft-mac-and-cheese-recipe/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/08/news/companies/kraft-mac-an... Despite the PR, it is noticeably different.
- krrrh 6y agoThe big surprise in this article is that she was also the founder of Smartfood which she sold to Frito-Lay for $15m. This afforded her the space to develop the mac and cheese business, which she partly sold to Solera capital who developed it into a business that eventually sold to General Mills for $820m. After the deal with Solera she put her time into selling vegetables at the local farmers market. It’s a nice profile, but I would really love to read more about how she took such a simple idea (replacing neon orange cheddar powder with white on two different product lines) and quickly developed them into massive businesses and brands. She says in the article that she didn’t like business, but one gets the impression that she was exceptionally good at it.
- draw_down 6y agoSometimes a person can be really good at something they don't really care for or care about. I can sympathize with her; "business" can mean a lot of things, including endless politicking, insincere communication, misplaced priorities, etc. And as you grow in importance you get lots more inbound attention (mostly undesirable), more decisions to make, and so on. Being a figurehead before peacing out completely was a good move.
- GordonS 6y agoI feel this, although on a much smaller and less financially beneficial level :) Every.single.time I write technical documentation, everyone tells me how wonderful it is. But I always feel like it took me forever to write, and the whole thing felt like a horrible, horrible chore; a total bore-fest. Later I read it back and I'm like: "meh, this is so dry and boring!". But of course, I wasn't writing prose - I was writing a reference document, so I suppose it's not meant to be anything but boring. And OK, while writing it I might of wished I was grating my face instead - but numerous people over a period of decades have told me how good I am at it, so I suppose I must be, even though I hate it.
- timr 6y agoWhat's amazing about this to me is less than she had two powdered-cheese-related food product hits, and more that she was able to make such a generic product, and have the segment to herself for long enough to make a windfall. These days, anyone who tried to make a product by purchasing the core ingredients from two major food suppliers would find their offering cloned within days of any kind of traction. Consider the hoverboard phenomenon, which is much more complex, and still didn't make it a year before there were dozens of identical products out of China.
- Johnny555 6y agoTo be honest, I didn't know there was a real Annie. I've seen, and even purchased, the product at Whole Foods, but figured that was just a corporate brand. She seems quite nice and business savvy -- built a good brand, then stepped away when it got bigger than she wanted to manage so she can focus on the things she really wants to do. And she's smart enough to not bad-mouth the new owners, when asked about how she thinks about General Mills.
- ravenstine 6y agoI've never had the regular Annie's mac and cheese, but both the rice and quinoa versions are pretty bomb. They're better than regular macaroni IMO.
- mikeg8 6y agoHow can you have an opinion that something is better without trying the thing you're comparing against?
- ravenstine 6y agoSorry, I meant better than wheat-based macaroni and cheese in general.
- darepublic 6y agoThis Annie's Mac and cheese is considerably better than Kraft imo
- ArkanExplorer 6y agoI don't understand why Americans buy these kind of (expensive) processed and branded food products. Why not just buy pasta, the cheese (grate it if you want) and some other seasoning, as the raw individual ingredients? From there you can add chicken and fresh herbs. If you have a modern electric pressure cooker these kind of things are super simple to make, and with glass tupperware you can store and eat it over the next several days. Or am I missing something - are these branded products somehow cheaper than these recipes? Note: I am from Ukraine.
- eloff 6y agoI eat Annie's on a regular basis. I just add meat of some kind for protein. It's the convenience factor. Same reason I love microwave burritos with greek yogurt on the side. Time is a short, I just want something quick to make that's got a decent protein content.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ketzo 6y agoYou can buy four servings of processed mac and cheese for about $2 USD. It's insanely cheap.
- incanus77 6y agoBesides laziness, which is never in short supply here, her product is shelf stable and keeps for a long time, unlike un-dehydrated fresh cheese. Also, cost probably is a factor. Even Annie's, which is more of a "premium" brand, can be had for around 1$ US per box, which could feed two people or so as part of a meal.
- sharkweek 6y agoSimpler than that: (and apologies in advance for confessing to having a basic palate here) boxed mac and cheese is pretty tasty.
- 6y ago
- boringg 6y agoSuper interesting - I really was waiting for the twist in the story about how they recently made a pledge to remove Phlates from their product lines. Was also curious if the article was going to ask Annie about that. That was such an incredibly disappointing thing (how they have dangerous compounds for children in Annies) that I learned as I have been feeding both my 1&3 year old Annies mac and cheese. I had such high expectations on Annie given its origins and stand against toxicity. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/business/annies-mac-cheese-plastic-phthalates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/business/annies-mac-chees...)
- boringg 6y agoNot sure but the article feels like a soft sell piece/corporate brand building on Annies as opposed to a reckoning on how such a wholesome brand could go awry.
- azinman2 6y agoWell we learned you can piece this together pretty easily yourself... get some pasta shells, powdered cheese, and add milk & butter. Probably not quite as easy but next step up and you have better control of the ingredients.
- sneak 6y ago> There’s been much debate and reporting about the ethical dilemmas that arise when an enormous company like General Mills acquires an ostensibly environmentally conscious, organic brand like Annie’s, whose mission is upholding “sustainable agriculture, organic ingredients, no artificial ingredients [and] support for farmers and communities.” This was an important point in this article for me. Trademarks (as well as copyrights) are abstractions that were arbitrarily invented (and then enforced via law) that few seem to question. This is just the way things are done. The idea that Annie can start a brand called Annie's, following Annie's (in the traditional sense, not Annie's(r)) principles and procedures, and then sell that brand to some other organization that has nothing to do with Annie, that is still sold and marketed as "Annie's(r)", seems a little bit crazy and perhaps wrong to me. If you remove the "(r)", putting the term "Annie's" on the box is now factually incorrect: it's not Annie doing it, and it's not Annie's. It's General Mills'. It is, in effect, a lie, even though under trademark and corporate law, everything is A-OK. There is a bug in this system somewhere.
- pnathan 6y agoThis is a really great success story for Annie! She's an incredibly successful founder in my eyes. We have a subscription to a 12-pack of mac n cheese; it is a reliable meal for our kid, who would subsist soley on them if we let him. I think there's an entirely different story to be written about how many of the organic companies from a different era have become simply brands of a few mega food corps; how one coop / organic food store looks like another one in its homogeneity. That worries me a lot. The food system is disturbingly opaque: having worked in it, it's opaque in ways that are slightly variant from the conventional organic stores' narrative, but I find equally, if not perhaps more disturbing.
- jjcm 6y agoIf you're a fan of the classic shells and cheddar, try stir frying some diced shishito peppers and adding them in next time. As I age I find straight mac and cheese a bit too heavy these days. The peppers compliment and add to the flavour, while lightening the carb/fat hit a bit.