Jesse Merrill is an entrepreneur with 15+ years of experience across the food and beverage landscape. Specializing in building mission-led emerging growth brands, Jesse helped lead Honest Tea to an exit to Coke in 2011, and now is the Co-Founder & CEO of Good Culture, a disruptive mission-driven brand, that created loads of buzz when they shook up the cottage cheese category in 2015.

In 2024, Good Culture won Brand of the Year at the NOSH awards, and has been recently featured in Forbes, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal for being the category disruptor and turning cottage cheese into a snacking 2.0 occasion. Good Culture is now in over 16k stores; is one of the top selling brands across several key retailers; and in the past year is growing more than 5X faster than the category, positioning them as the leading growth brand in the cottage cheese space. Good Culture has also created relevance with new consumer segments, bringing millennials and Gen Z into the category.

Jesse recognized that cottage cheese was a sleepy category, ripe for disruption. He also considered cottage cheese an overlooked superfood that needed to be reimagined. The Good Culture simple ingredient proposition was further strengthened by Jesse's belief in food as medicine after healing a severe autoimmune gut condition with real food, including Good Culture. Jesse brought his vision to life by creating a line of cottage cheese products using only high-quality clean ingredients with dairy sourced from family farms, with no gums, thickeners, stabilizers, or additives.

Good Culture is dedicated to continued best-in-class innovation across their growing portfolio of cultured foods. The overwhelming success of their flagship product led to expansion into other cultured food offerings including live and active culture-rich sour cream and cream cheese.

Good Culture is a proud partner of 1% for the Planet, supporting pasture access for animals and regenerative agriculture and is a Certified B-Corporation.