Meghan Phillips and the distance between a farm and a story

To understand a cup of coffee, Meghan Phillips once went to a farm in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. A marketing assignment had taken her to the place where the product began. Before the packaging, before the campaign, there were people growing something. Getting there was part of learning how to describe it.

That journey is a useful introduction to the founder of Honey, the Sacramento design and marketing studio. Phillips works in a profession that turns other people’s labor into something an audience can recognize. Her particular interest is the stretch between the farm and the finished story. A great deal can disappear along the way.

Food and beverage gave her that interest early. Wine, coffee and groceries were the materials of her working life before she started an agency. They also gave her a recurring problem to solve: how do you make someone care about the people behind a product when the customer is busy choosing dinner?

The grocer’s daughter

Phillips grew up in Sonoma, surrounded by vineyards and winemaking families. Her father worked for Safeway. The combination offered two views of the same business: the craft that goes into making food and drink, and the decisions people make when they buy it. A vineyard has a story. So does the grocery aisle.

She studied marketing at Sonoma State University, taking wine-focused courses, and worked for Safeway during college. Her early winery work involved direct-to-consumer marketing and wine clubs at an Italian-focused Sonoma winery. These are businesses built on getting people to return. The relationship has to last longer than the first attractive bottle.

Coffee followed wine. The geography widened, and questions about farming became part of the work. Her career was giving her experience on both sides of a brand: what a producer wanted to communicate and what a customer might understand. Somewhere between those perspectives, she saw room for a different kind of agency.

A former boss, Paolo Mancini, supplied advice she still remembers: “write it down” and “pick up the phone.” They traveled the country together and shared meals with clients. His influence was deliberately analog. A telephone does lack the decorative possibilities of a presentation deck. It has the compensating advantage of another person on the line.

A brand brief with dirt on its shoes

Phillips founded Honey in 2008, putting design and marketing under one roof. The premise was practical. The people deciding what a company should say could work closely with the people deciding how it should look. Food, beverage and agriculture gave the studio a focus, rather than an invitation to be interested in absolutely everything.

That focus requires more than knowing the vocabulary of wine or the appearance of a field. Phillips has described the value of entering the places where clients work, from vineyards to cultivation greenhouses. The coffee-farm visit belongs to that habit. A producer’s daily experience contains details that a questionnaire can miss.

“You sometimes can’t experience how they see things without walking the walk with them.”

Meghan Phillips

The approach gives a designer something specific to work with. A family’s history, a growing practice or a way of making a product can become a decision about language, imagery or packaging. The responsibility is considerable. Someone else has spent years building the business whose identity the agency is now helping to express.

Specialization also brings homework. When Honey moved into cannabis branding, Phillips described learning the regulatory landscape before committing more fully to the category. Work on the California Bureau of Cannabis Control’s identity gave the team a way to understand compliance requirements. The attractive package still had to function in the world it would enter.

One small piece of Honey’s work made a memorable impression on a California Lawyers Association writer: Phillips’s business card. He remarked on its unusual thickness while praising the new branding she and Rodseth had developed for the organization. A card is a modest object to carry the weight of an identity. This one apparently took the instruction seriously.

A niche big enough for a business

Honey’s specialized approach brought Phillips into Adam Davidson’s book The Passion Economy. In 2022, she joined Davidson and accountant Jason Blumer at SXSW. A creative-studio owner, an economist and an accountant make an instructive panel: enthusiasm gets a seat, but somebody is going to ask how the business works.

The questions around Honey have included internal process and team culture as well as creative output. Phillips discussed specialization and agency processes on The Businessology Show, returning for a separate conversation about building culture. These are less photogenic subjects than finished packaging. They help determine whether there will be finished packaging next year.

Recognition arrived along the way. Phillips was named to the Sacramento Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 in 2017. Honey received the Sacramento Metro Chamber’s Small Business of the Year recognition in 2020. Those milestones mark different stages of a company whose original idea has required years of everyday execution.

In January 2025, Maggie Giordanengo became Honey’s president after more than a decade at the studio. Phillips remained founder and CEO, with a focus on strategy and industry relationships. Ash Rodseth, the creative director, expanded her oversight across design and marketing. The responsibilities changed around the same integrated premise Phillips had started with.

Her pride in the business includes the room it makes for people’s lives. She has spoken about women being able to pursue creative careers while raising families, and about colleagues who have stayed for a decade or longer. A company’s culture becomes easier to assess when people have had time to decide whether to remain.

The summer-camp spreadsheet rebellion

Phillips’s interest in useful connections also produced a business outside the agency. She and fellow parent DJ Waldow were trying to coordinate summer camps for their children, who had become friends. Finding the information and matching the schedules was difficult enough to suggest an opportunity. Summer had acquired an administrative department.

With another Sacramento-area parent, they built Simple Summers. The company dates its beginnings to 2018. Its directory let families search and filter camps rather than assemble their own scattered collections of dates, prices and locations. Honey designed the website. Phillips was applying her professional skills to a problem that had already made itself unwelcome at home.

The service’s appeal lay in the decisions it helped parents make. Which dates worked? What could they afford? Where would their children go? These questions are ordinary, which is precisely why a useful answer matters. A family planning its summer has little interest in admiring the complexity of the search.

That chapter has moved on. Simple Summers’ current account of its history says Melissa Strong took over in 2026. Phillips remains part of the founding story. The venture is a revealing companion to Honey: both began with attention to a gap between available information and something people could actually use.

The table gets bigger

Food has a domestic place in Phillips’s story, too. In 2014, her family kept backyard chickens, with a coop built by her husband and eggs collected by the children. She described learning from parents who fed four children on a tight budget and treated dinner as time together. The connections were quite literal.

Her civic work carried those interests beyond her household. She served on the Food Literacy Center board and the Sacramento Metro Chamber board, and her public biography lists a current Valley Vision board role. Food and agriculture policy papers also list her among their team leaders. The work crosses from presenting a business to understanding the conditions around it.

Food Frontier gives that broader interest an organizational form. Co-founded with chef Brad Cecchi and procurement specialist Kelsey Nederveld, it connects Sacramento’s food community through advisory work, relationships and storytelling. The combination of backgrounds is purposeful: a region’s food identity involves the kitchen, the supply chain and the way people encounter both.

In September 2026, Sacramento Republic FC and Wilton Rancheria selected Food Frontier to help shape Republic Stadium’s food program alongside hospitality partner Levy. The announced work includes regional sourcing, culinary partnerships and the food traditions of Wilton Rancheria. Food Frontier had previously collaborated with the tribe on programming for Terra Madre Americas in 2025.

The network extends abroad. Food Frontier’s published 2026 innovation-tour program put Phillips on the planning committee for a Northern Italy itinerary, with stops focused on food identity, production, workforce and regional development. The program follows the same curiosity that took her into coffee country: what can people learn by going to the place where the work happens?

The stadium is a concrete expression of Phillips’s interest in connecting a region’s food businesses. A menu has to turn that ambition into choices people can order and eat. There are growers to speak with, kitchens to understand and traditions to represent carefully. The storytelling will eventually have to survive a very practical test: lunch.

At home, Phillips enjoys traveling with her family and working on a 1952 adobe house. Her Honey biography offers a compact motto: “Optimism is a strategy.” Her career supplies the accompanying chores. Visit the grower. Learn the business. Call the person. Build something useful enough that other people want to take part.