Jeni Britton says seed oil panic is too fad-like to build a frozen-fry brand around

The funniest thing about the anti-seed-oil economy is that it has made a frozen french fry sound like a Senate hearing. On How I Built This, Jeni Britton told Jesse Koenig of Jesse and Ben’s that his beef-tallow-and-avocado-oil fries should not build the whole brand around avoiding seed oils, because the science is still unsettled and the trend can smell a little faddish.

This is not the advice the internet wants. The internet wants a villain, preferably one that comes in a clear plastic bottle and has been quietly ruining your mitochondria since the Clinton administration. Britton gave him the less viral answer, which is usually the more useful one: sell the damn fry.

If you go super deep on the seed oil thing, that science has not reached consensus yet. So it can be fad-like right now. And so you don’t want to just be known for that.

Koenig’s company is a perfect stress test for the moment. Jesse and Ben’s makes frozen french fries with non-GMO potatoes, grass-fed beef tallow or avocado oil, salt, and seasonings. It is practically engineered for the grocery aisle in 2025, when one shopper is looking for crispiness, one is looking for nostalgia, and one is scanning for industrial seed oil like it’s a Red Scare pamphlet.

Britton didn’t tell him to ignore the ingredient advantage. She told him not to let the loudest corner of the food internet shrink the product. The anti-seed-oil people will read the bag. They always read the bag. They will find the tallow. They will find the avocado oil. They will probably post a freezer-aisle selfie and use the word ancestral.

The buyer is not your comments section

Britton’s sharper point was about consumer packaged goods, not nutrition. In grocery, the shopper matters, but the first customer is often the buyer deciding whether your bag earns shelf space next to the big red incumbents. That buyer does not care if your founder can win an Instagram argument about linoleic acid. The buyer wants proof that you expand the category.

People who follow that will find you. They’ll see tallow. They’ll see avocado oil and they’ll find you.

That is the useful cold shower here. The product’s most expandable promise is not, these fries are for people who have already sworn off canola oil. It is, these are frozen fries that taste like someone cared. Britton framed the opportunity as bringing in people who love fries but don’t believe grocery-store fries can be good at home. That is a much bigger congregation than the seed-oil exiles.

It’s also just people who love fries who just don’t think you can get good fries in the grocery store and you can’t make them at home.

Verdict: she is right. The anti-seed-oil movement is commercially powerful, but brittle as a brand foundation. Tie your identity to a health claim before the science has hardened and you inherit every future correction, backlash, and wellness-influencer pivot. Tie it to taste, and the tallow becomes evidence, not ideology.

Guy Raz mostly agreed, and nudged the company toward sampling. This was the least glamorous advice and probably the best one. Put an air fryer in a grocery store. Hand someone a hot fry. Let the product do what a 14-slide clean-label deck cannot. Fries are not supplements. Nobody wants to be educated into a french fry. They want to be seduced by one.

Jeni’s real food-startup doctrine

The same principle carried into Britton’s advice for Jaju Pierogi, a frozen Polish dumpling brand wondering whether it needed to raise a pile of capital to grow. Britton’s answer was basically: careful, because money arrives wearing nice shoes and carrying opinions.

it does feel like even now like like your success as an entrepreneur is not whether you’re actually selling or creating value for your customers it’s about whether you’ve gotten what round of funding you’re in and i’m so fundamentally against that

This is where Britton’s advice has a spine. She is not anti-growth, which would be a hilarious posture for the founder of a national ice cream brand sold in scoop shops and thousands of stores. She is anti-letting the financing story become the business story. Build the thing. Know why people buy it. Keep enough control that the brand still has a pulse when the professionals arrive.

And then the episode tacks on a little epilogue that makes the whole seed-oil warning feel less like scolding and more like strategy. Jesse and Ben’s apparently did not need to become The Official French Fry of Seed Oil Twitter to grow like crazy.

Jesse says that Jesse and Ben’s has grown from being in 400 stores to now being in more than 5,000 stores across chains like Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, and Costco.

If Britton’s right, the playbook for the next clean-label freezer brand is less righteous crusade, more hot sample on a toothpick. Let the internet argue about oils. You just need the shopper to reach into the freezer.