Meet Our Team: Alex Waite, Product Developer

You might have received Public Goods products in a black box, but we don’t want you to feel like our company is one.

Our members and potential customers have a right to know more about our team, the people who are behind the vision and operation of Public Goods.

We realized that some faces and names on our Kickstarter page wasn’t enough information. To help you really get acquainted with our team, we decided to launch a series of employee Q&As.

This time we featured Alex Waite, one of our product developers. Here’s what she had to say about her career and Public Goods:

Public Goods: Tell us a bit about your background. What led you to Public Goods?

Alex Waite: I’m a Northern California girl at heart, having lived there for most of my life until being recruited to come out to the East Coast where I currently reside in Boston. I went to school at Chico State, once deemed the number one party school in the nation!

All partying aside, I studied Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, and progressed with a master’s degree in Nutrition Education where I focused on community research. Upon graduating I stumbled into the food industry through a series of really interesting events (I’ll save that for another day), making my way up to being Director of R&D for Mary’s Gone Crackers, which is where my product development history began.

At that company, I focused on creating healthy, allergen free snack food items from scratch (ie benchtop) and scaling the recipes to factories so they could be sold nationwide. This is where I fell in love with the food industry and what lead me to Public Goods where my focus is to source and launch healthy food products that really align with our company vision!

As someone who loves working with startups, I was attracted to Public Goods for the fast-paced, pushing the envelope environment that really supports my desire to impart change in the most Millennial kind-of way. But hey, I own it!

PG: What does sustainability mean to you?

AW: Sustainability is ever evolving for me. There’s so many concerns and issues to address that it often feels overwhelming when we really just want things to be done differently, to be better for people and the planet. And while I feel like being overwhelmed can be a driving factor in some ways (to be more educated, to do more, to be more involved), I often found myself feeling paralyzed in that I just didn’t know where to start.

Sometimes, I tend to be too black in white in my thinking, which translated to needing to be perfect in all aspects of sustainability to feel like I was doing enough. And while I believe there’s always room for improvement, I don’t think sustainability is as black and white.

Because of this reality, I think it’s incredibly important to take an honest look at yourself without judgement — your lifestyle, your habits, your beliefs — and ask, “Am I really doing the best I can?” Chances are, the answer will be no, and you’ve gotta push yourself to break that barrier and be better….you know, evolve.

And maybe one day in my lifetime, we won’t have to try so hard to consciously make those choices because all the available options will just be the best options! A girl can dream, right?!

PG: What’s always on your desk?

AW: My desk is littered with product samples! My job is to find the best of the best, which involves lots of testing and trying new things.

I’m not complaining one bit! My desk is otherwise fairly tidy as it helps me feel more zen to keep a tight ship around the house a la Marie Kondo style.