Answering a LinkedIn Comment About Food Innovation

I asked a simple question on LinkedIn: if you think your city or sector is not hiring, drop it in the comments. One response came back. Innovative food jobs within an hour of Wasatch County.

When someone reaches through the noise to say this is what I'm missing, I listen. So let's talk about food, innovation, and what the macro cycle is telling us today.

Women See Opportunities

When I think about innovation under pressure and food the first person that came to mind was Margaret Rudkin. Have you ever eaten a Milano Dark or Milk Chocolate cookie, Brussels, or Gingerman & Chessmen, then you can thank Margaret!

Rudkin was a pioneer and in the late 1930s, at the edge of the Depression, her son's severe asthma and allergies were being driven, what her doctor believed to be by over-processed food. Rudkin knew she could fix this. She went back to her grandmother's recipe, sourced stone-ground whole wheat, added whole milk, butter, honey, and molasses, and made a bread that was genuinely nutritious at a time when the industrial food system had stripped those qualities out in exchange for shelf life. Her doctor didn't just endorse it, he recommended it to patients.

She outgrew her kitchen, then her garage, then bought her first factory in 1940. The trick is the bread cost 25 cents when everything else cost 10 but she was able to sell it anyway.

Reader's Digest ran a feature that introduced Pepperidge Farm to readers across the U.S. and Canada. She hired women and offered them flexible working conditions at a time when that wasn't done. She firmly believed there was no job a man could do that a woman could not. Fortune named her one of its 50 most powerful businesswomen for an entire decade. She spoke at Harvard Business School three times. She sold Pepperidge Farm to Campbell Soup in 1961 for $28.2 million in stock and joined its board as its first female director.

The average annual growth rate of Pepperidge Farm was 53% across 26 years, that is outstanding! That is not luck. That is what happens when someone reads what the market needs, not what the market currently serves.

Wayne Gretzky quote is: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.

The Business Cycle and the Narrow Field We Are In

I have spent 30 years following macroeconomic trends as I see them, my career moves were informed by my reading of where the world was going before the crowd arrived.

The U.S. economy is contracting in meaningful areas. Not everywhere — but in enough places that the signal is clear. Consumer spending is softening. The casual dining sector has been one of the most visible canaries: TGI Fridays closed roughly 130 locations following its bankruptcy filing, and chains like Red Lobster and Rubio's shuttered hundreds of locations in the same cycle. The softening economy that took hold in the second half of 2025 pushed many already-struggling units past the point of viability, and a 2024 survey found that 68% of consumers were trading down from restaurant meals to cooking at home. That is a sign we need to take seriously. (https://whatnow.com/news/restaurants/major-restaurant-chains-that-closed-hundreds-of-locations-in-2025/ )

Right now, what I am seeing is the sectors that are expanding are narrow and specific. Mining, resources, critical minerals and defense as well as AI infrastructure.

Most recently, we saw quantum computing making headlines when the Trump administration committed to $2 billion in the CHIPS Act funding across nine quantum computing companies, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick framing it as building "thousands of high-paying American jobs while advancing American quantum capabilities." That's not a campaign promise. That's capital flowing into a specific lane. ( https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/05/department-commerce-announces-letters-intent-9-companies-2-billion )

At Myrtus, we are watching mining, resources, critical minerals, defense adjacent seriously as we love the commodities cycle gains strength. The contraction in some sectors and the concentrated expansion in others creates a narrow field. Narrow fields are exactly where the next Pepperidge Farm gets built. Not inside the industries and companies that are shrinking, but at the edges, where unmet demand meets someone willing to read the signal and take the leap.

What Contraction Actually Creates

When the cycle turns whether this is a soft landing or something harder the ground that clears is not empty. It creates a clean slate to build. The restaurant locations that went dark across the US, and across the Wasatch Front don't stay dark forever. The consumer demand for food hasn’t disappeared. What disappears is the version of food service that no longer fits the moment. With inflation we need more perceived value in our eating out experiences, this could come from novel restaurant ambiances or healthier food in an entirely new format. Varity is the spice of life, if you can make vegan, vegetarian or strict dietary requirement meal novel and different who isn’t going to want to try it.

The Depression didn't kill food innovation; it ended models that were not working and made room for new ideas. Rudkin didn't fight the existing bread industry. She made something the existing bread industry didn’t even consider and was then able to sell it at a premium.

Right now, within an hour of Wasatch County, there are people who can't find innovative food outlets and are sick of eating the same foods. This call for innovation will eventually create jobs but it will take an entrepreneur to take the risk.

More than a decade ago, I spent time in Singapore, and one thing stayed with me: food innovation itself became an economic engine. Entire districts and hawker centers built reputations around experimentation, creativity, and flavors people could not find anywhere else. People would literally fly into Singapore just to taste something new.

That innovation created demand, and demand created jobs, chefs, kitchen staff, specialty suppliers, hospitality workers, logistics, tourism, and entire ecosystems built around culinary discovery. The lesson was simple: when you create something people cannot experience anywhere else, you create the demand.

I think there is an underappreciated opportunity in places like the Wasatch corridor. People are hungry for novelty again. Not just another restaurant, but experiences, healthier formats, regional identity, dietary innovation, and environments that feel memorable enough to talk about. The next wave of food jobs may not come from copying existing chains. It may come from entrepreneurs willing to build something distinct enough that people will drive or travel just to experience it.

The Myrtus Signals framework exists to find exactly this. Sometimes innovation creates demand before the job market even realizes the category exists. Sometimes, the job you need doesn't exist yet and that's the most interesting signal of all.

Read the signal. Move first.

Sydnie Beckman is the founder of Myrtus, a career strategy platform for professionals using macroeconomic signals to pivot into structurally growing sectors. Based in Wyoming. Always reading the cycle. myrtushq.com. The information is for information and entertainment purposes only please do your own research.

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