JJ and Catherine Jaxon are not food industry veterans. Their backgrounds are very different: Catherine was a journalist and JJ was in finance. When they had their first child, the pediatrician told them to not give their infant any nuts until she was 3 years old.
They followed that rule, and at 3 she had her first nut, which was a walnut. She had an anaphylactic reaction that completely caught them by surprise. It changed everything, including taking them down the path to Mission Mighty Me, which aims to expose kids to nuts earlier, more often and as part of an ongoing lifelong diet.
You went through quite the journey with your children before the company started.
JJ: When you have a young child who has a food allergy, you have to be watchful about what they’re eating — and even where they’re going — because of the severity and danger that is surrounding them anytime there’s food in the environment. We adjusted like parents do, and went on with life. Then her little brother was born in 2015, and this groundbreaking research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It showed that withholding nuts from diets is the wrong thing to do. If we get nuts into diets super early and keep them in the diet, then most nut allergies never develop.
We were looking at our infant son, and we were very frustrated that we did the wrong things with our daughter. But now we knew something that we could do for our son to hopefully prevent him from having nut allergies.
In the year 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics published official guidelines that nuts should be avoided until kids are 3 years old. The thinking at the time was maybe if we let immune systems develop a little further before they have nuts then it will be protective. But evidence now suggests that this had the opposite effect as immune systems are learning as they’re developing. So if you can get nuts in diets, immune systems learn that it’s a great food. Parents should work in consultation with their child’s pediatrician before introducing new foods into their diets.
And then you found Dr. Gideon Lack’s research.
JJ: He started a research project with clinical trials because he had a hunch that including nuts consistently until children are 5 years old may help prevent nut allergies. We were excited because we thought this was something we could do for our infant son, but we were also excited just at the impact this could make. The problem was that it sounded so simple — until we had a 6 month old with no teeth. We were trying to get walnuts into his diet three times a week. It was a lot harder than we thought. We had the Cuisinart out, bought nuts and tried to find nut butters. We were buying rice puffs that babies and toddlers eat by the case load.
Then Catherine had the ‘aha moment?’
JJ: My wife was holding rice puffs and a jar of this mixed nut butter. She said, ‘Why can’t somebody just put this together?’ There needs to be something that makes this really simple. It needs to not feel like medicine. There’s so many things that you have to think about when you have an infant. We didn’t want it to feel prescriptive or to put it in our calendars to ‘give him a dose.’ Food is food. Tree nuts are just wonderful, nutritious foods for children when they’re little but also to have access to their whole lives. We wanted it to be easy, fun and delicious.
Can you talk about why you included walnut flour in the Mixed Nut Butter Puffs?
JJ: We always felt our dream product as parents would include all the tree nuts. Our dream product was a puff that would have tree nuts, because tree nuts are what our daughter is allergic to. We reached out to Dr. Lack and collaborated with him — he is very focused on ensuring that kids are able to get enough of the proteins in the product to match his findings:
- You can’t just give the product to kids once and introduce it and never give it to them again. It has to be consistently a part of the diet over the first few years of life.
- It can’t be trivial amounts. His research was clear that you need about 2 grams of protein for each of the nuts per week to be very confident that the child is getting enough for prevention to work. So we narrowed it down to five nuts through a lot of trial and error with product development and formulation. We felt like we could get 1 gram of protein from each of the nuts in every pouch of our mixed nut puff pouch.
What advice would you give other product developers when they want to use walnuts in their products?
JJ: I encourage people to be creative on the kind of products that can be made. Walnuts are a wonderful plant-based protein that we believe has such a place in the American diet and around the world. You’d be surprised at the ways that these nut flours can be used as a replacement for traditional grains and so forth. In some cases they may be preferred for a flavor profile, but sometimes they don’t have to be. You can in some cases create your own product with a walnut flour that is actually fairly neutral to the taste, which gives a blank canvas that works.
