Samantha Citro Alexander and the usefulness of a wrong turn

The money arrived on a Monday. By Thursday, the bank holding it had become the problem. In March 2023, Samantha Citro Alexander and her bitewell co-founder, Chris Fanucchi, were traveling to meet the investor leading their seed round. They had a closing to celebrate. When their plane landed, their phones filled with messages about Silicon Valley Bank. The dinner suddenly belonged to a different sort of trip.

“We were flying high,” she recalled. The round had taken months to raise; its proceeds reached the account on March 6. Three days later came news of the bank run. That is a short interval between relief and a fresh operating problem. A founder can spend months persuading people to back the future, then discover that the immediate task is protecting the present.

Alexander’s path to that moment had already contained several changes of direction. She had studied drama, worked in skincare, taken a job at a hedge fund and helped established beauty brands tell their stories. Today she is the co-founder and CEO of FoodHealth Co, the business that began as bitewell in 2020. Her route raises an interesting question: how much of a career’s apparent wandering turns out to be preparation?

The interview she nearly missed

There is a temptation to arrange a founder’s past like clues in a detective story. Every early interest must foreshadow the company. Every job must point toward the eventual title. Alexander’s own account leaves room for a much less orderly process. She describes choosing experiences for the abilities they might add, rather than pursuing the next obvious rung.

She earned a BFA in Drama at New York University. Her first job after college was at JUARA Skincare, where she found an interest in marketing and storytelling. She considered business school as a way to move into marketing. Then a recruiter contacted her on LinkedIn about Bridgewater Associates. The firm was unfamiliar to her; her boyfriend, who worked in finance, encouraged her to take the interview.

She did, and subsequently worked there. An education in drama had led to beauty marketing, which had led to a conversation about a hedge fund. This is the sort of sequence that makes a conventional career ladder look like an unnecessarily restrictive piece of furniture. The opportunity became useful because she was willing to investigate it before deciding whether it fitted.

An audience is made of people

Her later responsibilities included global brand strategy and serving as chief of staff to Jane Lauder at Clinique, followed by North American marketing work at Smashbox. Those roles put creative work beside the machinery of an organization. A brand needs a voice; somebody must also turn decisions into a coordinated piece of work. Her résumé contains both sides of that assignment.

Alexander has linked her leadership style to two parts of this education: active empathy developed during acting studies, and radical transparency encountered at Bridgewater. It is an intriguing pairing. Acting asks a person to consider another point of view. Transparency asks colleagues to expose their reasoning to examination. Together, they suggest a leadership practice that requires listening carefully and speaking plainly.

The connection with performance is easy to misunderstand. The useful skill here is attention to other people: what they want, what they hear, what they believe a conversation is about. A founder has several audiences, often in the same afternoon. An employee, a prospective customer and an investor may all need an honest account of the same decision, expressed in terms each can use.

At Smashbox, that work also involved building a gathering. Alexander co-created Jefacon, a women’s empowerment and leadership summit. The event brought the brand together with Julissa Prado, founder of Rizos Curls, and Patty Delgado, founder of Hija de tu Madre. Its planned setting was Smashbox Studios in Los Angeles. The first edition took place online in December 2020.

The move changed the scale of the invitation. Alexander spoke of the opportunity to “turn inspiration into action,” and of reaching thousands through a virtual format. The important detail is the practical revision: an event designed around a physical place became a digital gathering. People could still meet around its purpose even after the original arrangement stopped making sense.

The calendar goes quiet

Founding bitewell required another change in the shape of work. Alexander had been accustomed to a tightly scheduled professional life. When she began building the company, some days arrived with little on the calendar. She initially treated that quiet as a sign that she ought to be doing more. Later, she recognized the thinking and creating taking place inside it.

“Enjoy the slow moments.”

Samantha Citro Alexander

That advice has a particular weight coming from someone whose experience includes both large organizations and startups. An established company supplies meetings, colleagues and a substantial inherited agenda. A new business asks its founders to decide which questions deserve an agenda at all. The absence of invitations can feel alarming precisely because it removes a familiar measure of usefulness.

Her advice on delegation is similarly interesting. She has urged founders to hand over work they are good at. Competence can make a task difficult to release: the founder knows how to do it, knows what a satisfactory result looks like and can probably finish it quickly. But a growing company also needs other people to acquire responsibility. Expertise can become a crowded doorway.

There is no universal timetable for that handover. Alexander’s observation concerns the habit behind it. If familiar tasks occupy every available hour, the founder has less space to examine the business itself. The quiet calendar and the difficult delegation belong to the same problem: learning to recognize valuable work when it no longer resembles the job one used to do.

Three days after the money arrived

The Silicon Valley Bank episode supplied a harsher version of that lesson. Financing was supposed to open room for the next phase. Instead, the founders were confronted with an urgent question about the money’s availability. Their investor visit had been planned around a completed raise; the notifications arriving after the flight brought a new set of priorities.

The distinction matters when reading a startup’s milestones. A funding announcement is a date and a number. Operating through it involves accounts, travel, employees, messages and decisions made while the situation is still developing. Alexander’s account of those days preserves that texture. The company had reached a goal, and the surrounding conditions changed almost immediately.

The episode does not require a heroic gloss. Its interest lies in how ordinary the original plan was: get on a plane, meet an investor, celebrate work completed. Uncertainty entered through a phone screen. For anyone who has mistaken a finished task for a settled future, the sequence is uncomfortably recognizable.

A smaller doorway into a bigger business

The business itself also changed. bitewell’s early approach included a direct consumer proposition and a marketplace. Alexander has discussed the need to revise that model. By 2025, the company was operating under the FoodHealth name and putting its scoring product into the systems of other businesses. The shift made partnerships and licensing central to the commercial story.

In May 2025, FoodHealth announced a $7.5 million Series A co-led by Reach Capital and Ulu Ventures, alongside a new headquarters in San Francisco. The announcement described a rebrand centered on its core product. Kroger’s retail banners were already part of its distribution. The company was moving toward supplying a capability inside places people already shopped.

NielsenIQ announced its collaboration with FoodHealth the following month. The arrangement placed FoodHealth’s data within a wider commercial data offering, giving retailers and manufacturers another route to the product. Hy-Vee announced its own collaboration in January 2026, with availability through its website and mobile app. Each relationship added an established channel rather than requiring shoppers to begin somewhere unfamiliar.

For Alexander, this is a different kind of storytelling assignment. In beauty, she worked on the relationship between a brand and its audience. At FoodHealth, she must also explain a business to partners who already have customers, software and operating routines. The product has to fit into those routines. A persuasive presentation gets the conversation started; a workable integration gives it somewhere to go.

A career with room to turn

Her public work extends beyond the company. She writes Sam Talks Food on Substack and appears in interviews about building the business. Her volunteer record includes advising scholarship recipients through America Needs You and serving on its California associate board. She is also listed among Journey To Lead’s fellows, alongside a biography that traces her upbringing in Manalapan, New Jersey.

These details put some human proportion around the CEO title. The person running the company is also the drama graduate who discovered marketing at a skincare startup, and the applicant who needed a nudge to investigate an unfamiliar firm. A career can accumulate value through encounters its owner did not know to schedule.

The ambition now is to build a substantial company with economic value and leave a useful mark on the food system. That ambition has already required changing the route. Alexander’s story is most revealing at those turns: the recruiter’s message, the empty calendar, the grounded celebration, the revised business model. She has kept finding work inside the interruption. The next plan will have to earn its place, too.