People often ask me how Ditto Foods started.
The truth is, it didn't begin with hydroponics.
It began with losing everything I thought I had planned.
In 2020, I lost my job.
Like millions of others, I suddenly found myself standing still while the world seemed to stop spinning. For the first time in years, I wasn't racing from meeting to meeting or chasing the next promotion. I had something I rarely allowed myself to have.
Time.
Time to think. Time to listen. Time to ask myself one question:
What is the next right thing?
I knew whatever I built had to matter. Not just to me, but to someone else.
My dad has been telling me since I was a kid, "You're always trying to save the world."
He's probably right.
I've always answered him the same way. "If I save one person, I save the world."
Maybe that's naïve. Maybe it's ambitious. Or maybe it's simply how change has always worked.
I believe in the compound effect of kindness. One opportunity creates another. One person changes a family. One family changes a neighborhood. One neighborhood changes a community.
I've tried, more than once, to care less. To stop carrying everyone else's burdens. To focus only on myself.
It never lasts.
Service has never been something I do. It's who I am.
So I asked myself a different question. What if growing food could grow something much bigger?
That's where Ditto Foods was born. Not because of a pandemic. Because of a purpose.
I grew up in Ford Heights, Illinois — a place that's too often introduced by its hardships instead of its heart. A place where headlines have overshadowed hope for far too long.
When the idea came to put a hydroponic farm in my hometown, I wasn't thinking about lettuce. I was thinking about legacy.
I wanted someone to type "Ford Heights" into Google and discover possibility instead of pity. Innovation instead of assumptions. Pride instead of stereotypes.
The farm wasn't meant to be the destination. It was meant to be a signal. A declaration that extraordinary things can grow from places the world has underestimated.
What I didn't know was how much growing this dream would require of me personally.
The years that followed tested every part of our family.
We lost an entire crop to a farm disaster. Along with it went customers, revenue, momentum, and perhaps the hardest thing to rebuild — trust.
We started over.
Then our home caught fire. Overnight, our family of six and our dog found ourselves living in a hotel for nearly four months, trying to create a sense of normal in a single room while rebuilding the life we'd lost.
Before we had fully recovered, our youngest son was diagnosed with bone cancer.
Watching your child endure chemotherapy changes your understanding of strength forever.
He underwent surgery to replace his femur. He later required another surgery to remove a blood clot from his heart caused by the chemotherapy that was saving his life.
As if grief keeps its own calendar, more challenges arrived. Another job disappeared. One of our children experienced a serious mental health crisis.
At times, it felt as though life wasn't simply knocking us down. It was determined to keep us there.
There were moments I questioned everything. The dream. The timing. Even myself.
But every time I wanted to quit, something inside me whispered, Not yet.
There was still work to do. Not just in the farm. In me.
Looking back now, I can see what I couldn't see then. God wasn't delaying the mission. He was developing the messenger.
Every setback stripped away something I thought I needed and replaced it with something I actually did. Patience. Perspective. Compassion. Humility. Faith. Resilience.
My granny used to say, "You get what you want, but lose what you got."
For years, I thought those words were a warning. Now I hear them as wisdom.
Sometimes life removes what is familiar so it can make room for what is meaningful.
Today, Ditto Foods is still growing food. But that's no longer how I define what we do.
We grow capacity. We grow confidence. We grow careers. We grow classrooms. We grow healthier communities. We grow hope.
The lettuce just happens to be the first thing you see.
“God wasn't delaying the mission. He was developing the messenger.”