(To follow my day-to-day organic food adventures, please be sure to add me on Snapchat: maxorganic)

At first glance, it might seem like an outlandish statement to say that The Organic Coup is one of the organic industry’s most important companies. After all, it only has two locations and was started by people who have never run a restaurant before.

But when you understand just who these individuals are and the concept they have launched, you’ll come to see that this is not hyperbole in the slightest.

Based in California, The Organic Coup is the country’s first certified organic fast-food restaurant and was founded by Erica Welton and Dennis Hoover, two of the most influential organic food executives in the U.S. Read more »

If you are a big believer in the power of flowers, which I certainly am, and are looking for something special and unique for Mother’s Day, the flower essences and elixirs from Lotus Wei are the perfect gift.

Founded by Katie Hess, who has over 13 years of experience in working one-on-one with clients using flower remedies, Lotus Wei creates flower elixirs and essences that evoke the precise feelings you want to experience. Read more »

In the summer of 2001, after being on Prozac for more than a decade, I made the life-altering decision to go off of antidepressants.

Despite what doctors and nearly everyone else around me were saying – that I had a chemical imbalance and that antidepressants were essential to keep me going – I believed otherwise. Intuitively, I knew that there was a better way to live, yet almost no one in my support system was in agreement with this line of thinking.

For the millions of people facing depression and who have similar doubts about medication being the only answer, a book has arrived that completely validates our concerns.

In the New York Times best-seller A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives, Dr. Kelly Brogan, an MIT and Cornell-trained psychiatrist, gives us the hard facts about antidepressants and busts all of the widely believed myths about this class of drugs.

In fact, the medical community is so terrified of the truth being exposed in A Mind of Your Own that Dr. Brogan and this book have been blacklisted by the mainstream media. Yes, blacklisted!  Why? Read more »

Over the last few years, there has been a lot of buzz, mystery and intrigue surrounding a secret company in Silicon Valley called Juicero. Not only has it raised more than $100M from venture capitalists, but it has been called “the future of juice” and “the biggest tech start-up you’ve never heard of”.

Well, as of this morning, the company is no longer in stealth mode and has officially launched to the public.

And what you will find is something that I believe to be the most disruptive juicing technology since Norman Walker invented the Norwalk cold-press juicer in the early 20th century.

Founded by former Organic Avenue CEO Doug Evans and backed by blue chip investors such as Kleiner Perkins and GV (formerly Google Ventures), the company aims to do to juicing what Apple’s iTunes did to music – to create an entire ecosystem that will completely change the way we juice at home. Read more »

Do you ever walk into a major pharmacy and get ill looking at the “health” products on the shelves, nearly all of which that contain a laundry list of artificial and synthetic ingredients?

If so, you are definitely not alone.

And that is why I became so excited when I came across Maty’s Organic Cough Syrup – the first certified organic cough syrup that I have ever seen.

Like many of us who come to organic, Founder Carolyn Harrington got into holistic living because of a serious family illness. Read more »

While many of us try to buy as much local as we can, I am not opposed to purchasing organic foods that come from far away, such as coffee, cacao, acai, and quinoa.

For the most part, these items are just not grown in the continental U.S.

Or, so I thought.

Recently, I was sent a bag of Lundberg Family Farms’ organic tri-color quinoa and did a complete double-take when I saw that it was grown in California. I had absolutely no idea that quinoa was produced in this country and thought that it was exclusively harvested in the Andes in South America. (My assumption wasn’t too far off as Peru and Bolivia account for roughly 90% of the world’s quinoa production.)

Having witnessed quinoa explode in popularity – U.S. imports grew from 7.3 million pounds in 2007 to nearly 70 million pounds in 2013 – Lundberg decided to make a go of it here. Read more »

When I got wind that Alain Coumont, founder of the mega-successful Le Pain Quotidien, had opened up a new organic concept on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I knew that I had to check it out immediately.

So, last Saturday, I headed uptown and had dinner at his latest venture called Le Botaniste. And it just so happened that Alain Coumont was there that evening, and he spent the entire night with us, bringing out dish after dish and sharing his vision for this new venue. Read more »