Forbes Daily Briefing

In 2022, hungover one morning on New Year’s trip to Miami Beach, Meta engineer Steven Rofrano saw his friend Seth Goldstein, then working in private equity, eating a bunch of “not very high-quality” tortilla chips. Rofrano, who always tried to eat healthy but never really loved the better-for-you snack foods that were available, was appalled. “It was shocking to me to find one of my friends eating this seed oil pesticide slop,” the 31-year-old Rofrano says, recalling that he went on to describe his perfect chip: no additives, no pesticides, fried in grass-fed and -finished beef tallow, and finished with sea salt. The problem was, it didn’t exist—so Goldstein bet him that he couldn’t make it. 

Rofrano accepted the challenge. He soon began experimenting, frying organic corn tortillas in grass-fed beef tallow in a turkey fryer in his parents’ backyard and seasoning his extra crunchy creation with sea salt. Goldstein was impressed and the two decided to start a business. 

They spent $8,000 from their savings on an industrial fryer, a tortilla chopper and a pouch-sealing machine. Their first official batch of Masa chips was produced in July 2022 in a 400-square-foot commercial kitchen that summer and they pre-sold them online. The chips sold out in one day.

By Chloe Sorvino,

Forbes Staff
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For the citizens of Carrollton–a small city in west Georgia covered in lush trees and flanked by the Little Tallapoosa River–the name Richards, or at least Southwire, is instantly recognizable. Many of its 28,000 residents work for the company, which has been headquartered here for more than half a century. Southwire’s founder Roy Richards (d. 1985) was deeply involved in his hometown, serving as chairman of the Carroll City-County Hospital Authority; chairman of Peoples Bank of Carrollton; a past president of the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce; and a former director of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce. The University of West Georgia’s Richards College of Business in town is named after him, thanks to a gift to the school by his son Roy Richards, Jr., who set up a family foundation in 1990 to continue supporting the city and surrounding areas.

Southwire is also known for its highly celebrated 12 for Life program, a nearly two-decade partnership between the company and local schools that combines traditional classroom instruction with jobs inside a modified manufacturing environment and has boosted graduation rates at the city’s high schools to over 90%, up from 64% when the program kicked off in 2007.

By Simone Melvin
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Every week at the Crystal Hot Sauce factory, just north of New Orleans in Reserve, Louisiana, two train cars full of mashed cayenne peppers arrive on the tracks just outside the plant’s back door. The peppers are then pumped into four 20,000-gallon mixing tanks where the mash ferments under the sweltering Louisiana sun into a slurry. After water and salt are introduced, the slurry is ground into hot sauce that’s poured into glass at 125 bottles per minute.

“We are New Orleans in a bottle,” says Alvin Adam “Pepper” Baumer, the third-generation owner and CEO of Baumer Foods, maker of Crystal, from the floor of his plant where the scent of capsaicin (the chemical compound that makes peppers spicy) lingers in the air.

By Chloe Sorvino

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To celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, the 150-year-old seed giant Burpee has been selling seed collections inspired by the gardens of Thomas Jefferson and Martha Washington, giving modern Americans the chance to grow hot peppers, cucumbers and watermelons based on seed varieties that date back to the American Revolution. 

These seeds are thanks to George Ball, the 74-year-old chairman and owner of Burpee since 1991, who says “one of the most patriotic things you can do is plant a garden.”

Burpee, which was founded 100 years after the country, in 1876, is still a mail-order business with some 35% of its estimated more than $110 million in annual revenue coming from mail and online sales. Burpee still receives thousands of orders via post with physical order forms and checks every year through its annual catalog, which is “the lodestar of the company and an annual event for gardeners.” Its vegetable, herb and flower seeds are also sold at more than 24,000 locations in the U.S. and Canada including Walmart, Home Depot and Tractor Supply.

By Chloe Sorvino,

Forbes Staff
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Donald Trump has a long history of embellishment around his success as a businessman, for years lobbying Forbes to pump up its estimates of his net worth—occasionally while using the name John Barron, a persona he invented—and even outright lying about the size of his penthouse and other properties. And when it comes to his portfolio of golf courses, Trump can stretch the truth like a par-5.

Legal documents reveal that Trump has improperly tallied sunk costs, overvalued land and undervalued his membership liabilities—deposits he would have to return to his courses’ golfers if they leave the club—while the financial disclosure reports he has released as president and other public filings offer little in terms of how he arrived at the numbers.

Trump has also inflated the size of his golf courses’ real estate. For instance, while he long claimed in marketing materials that Trump National Doral was 800 acres, property records show the resort is less than 700.

By Brett Knight,

Assistant Managing Editor
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