If you have lunch at Follow Your Heart vegan cafe on Sherman Way in Canoga Park, you may see a friendly-looking guy hovering around. He’s there for a few hours every day, doing a little bit of everything.
“It’s kind of my job to eat different things on the menu to ensure consistency. One cook teaches another cook and recipes totally change.”
Take note — that man is not just the food taster. He’s Bob Goldberg, now a wise elder to the vegan food scene in Los Angeles. He began Follow Your Heart with friends in 1970, as a vegetarian hippie hangout in the valley.
Today, more than 50 years later, it’s a vegan grocery store and diner, with a college town food co-op vibe, selling plant-based diner food: sandwiches, pot pies, chili cheese fries. And even more importantly, Goldberg has had a massive impact on plant-based eating, creating Vegenaise and starting the Follow Your Heart and Earth Island brands.
The Follow Your Heart cafe first started as a juice bar in the back of Johnny Weissmuller’s American Natural Foods on Owensmouth. Weissmuller was an Olympic gold medalist and star of the Tarzan movies.
In 1973, Goldberg, along with partners Paul Lewin, Spencer Windbiel and Michael Besançon, bought out the market, and got rid of all the meat and dairy products.
“When we first started, this strip was still Antique Row — we’d get thrifted plates from the Salvation Army,” he remembers.
The place soon attracted a loyal following, with people traveling long distances to the West Valley, because back then, as Goldberg says, "vegetarian places were few and far between."
By 1976, they outgrew the store and moved into a former butcher shop, which is the current Sherman Way location.
"I grew up in a family of grocers,” says Goldberg. His grandfather Sam Kapitanoff opened Crystal Foods shortly after the turn of the century when he arrived in Beloit, Wisconsin from Eastern Europe — “very New Agey name,” he laughs. He’d visit the store as a kid with his parents from Chicago, an hour-and-a-half away.
The other side of Goldberg’s family was in the model airplane kits industry. In those days, Carl Goldberg Products was a hugely inspiring company for would-be aeronautical engineers. However, model planes later fell out of popularity in the 70's with the emergence of the space program. “I was a national champion as a child,” he says with a smile.
In 1967, Goldberg got drafted into the army. Initially, he thought he’d have to travel overseas, but he received a last minute change of orders to join the Army Band. (Goldberg had played trumpet since he was 10 and studied music at Indiana University).
Goldberg says he wasn’t yet critical of the war in Vietnam. “It was a bad time — a turbulent time. But I was on board for everything. I didn't question authority ... that came later.”
In the barracks he was assigned to a room with one other guy who had the "opposite of my background.” He’d been in trouble with the law and a judge had given him the choice to go to jail or enlist. His barrack-mate showed him something rolled up in aluminum foil — he didn't know what it was. "I'd never seen marijuana,” he says. They went into a closet and got high.
A moment later Bob remembers sitting down on his bed and thinking “‘Everything I know was wrong’ — it just hit me. I remember an overwhelming feeling that I'd been lied to.”
In the Army Band he’d travel to midwestern states playing “a lot of parades,” Bob pauses, “but also Taps at a lot of funerals.” This experience made him see the impact of what war can do, which led to his embrace of meat-less eating.
“I became vegetarian for moral reasons. I was against unnecessary killing. And sometimes the practice of killing animals can lead to the killing of people.”
Out of the Army, in 1969, Goldberg drove across the country to Los Angeles. He spent the first few weeks on a buddy’s couch in Woodland Hills before finding a place up the street from Johnny Weissmuller’s.
Goldberg was glad to find somewhere he could get camaraderie and vegetarian food. “I was meeting my people and getting an education in living in a more peaceful way.”
Their customers included many seeking a more spiritual parth, and would suggest books, which they’d sell in the corner of the shop. The Whole Earth Catalog, books on environmentalism or eastern philosophy, Hindu- buddhism, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Michael Besançon was a follower of a guru whose followers’ culinary practice excluded meat, fowl, and eggs (though dairy was okay). So the menu at Follow Your Heart applied that approach to their familiar diner fare.
But they wanted to serve that part of the community that didn’t eat eggs. And without mayonnaise, the cafe’s sandwiches were less than appealing. “They still needed a lube," laughs Goldberg.
So they set about finding a mayo alternative. They went through lots of options before stumbling upon a guy who’d created a product called “Lecinaise” which was supposedly an egg-free substance made from lecithin, which helped emulsify lipids.
They began using it in the restaurant. But a few months later they started hearing that there were actually eggs in this “Lecinaise.” Eventually, Goldberg says “the guy got busted by the California Department of Food and Agriculture — he was soaking jars of regular mayonnaise to get the labels off and then putting his own label on top!”
They immediately had to look for other options. But when they approached food manufacturers, they were told an egg-free mayo alternative wasn’t possible.
So Goldberg started experimenting. What could be a good plant-based solution? He tried mixing various oils and fats trying to find the best way to make them cohere. “It took a lot of trials, my whole fridge [was] full of various stages,” he says.
He finally came up with the answer in a dream. “I bolted up, and then sat in bed, waiting two hours for light — then mixed tofu scraps in a blender and combined them with oil,” he says, which gave the consistency he was looking for. Eventually they replaced the tofu with isolated soy proteins — and began making it themselves, as Vegenaise.
“We didn’t want to be a manufacturer, but that became the only option,” he says.
It was so popular that in 1988, Follow Your Heart started a manufacturing division, Earth Island, which expanded from Vegenaise into other plant- based products like salad dressings, dips, and cheeses.
It was highly successful — but around that time the original Follow Your Heart partnership started to dissolve. Goldberg says “we all wanted to do different things. Like many bands we broke up. We lasted about as long as The Beatles.”
Goldberg and Lewin bought out their other partners. Goldberg says “Spencer went into early retirement, and Michael went on to become an executive at Whole Foods.”
At that time Follow Your Heart and their Earth Island products were vegetarian, which meant they made some dairy products in their factories.
But when they started making white label products for Trader Joe’s, they were forced to wrestle with whether to go vegan. Trader Joe’s Caesar and Blue Cheese salad dressings had been made with a plant-based rennet. But when that became unavailable, they faced a choice.
"I wasn't comfortable with the company using a natural rennet — the enzyme used to coagulate cheese — from the intestine of a baby cow when the vegan one ran out,” he says.
They ultimately decided to give up that part of the business, and became completely plant-based. “I wasn't willing to be involved in the slaughter of animals.”
He says they walked away from millions. "We saw a short-term drop in sales, but eventually it paid off.”
Goldberg spent nearly 30 years building Earth Island. In that time, their products became available at grocery stores across the country and around the world. Their offerings helped spread the ubiquity of plant-based eating to a new generation that could now more easily access vegan food.
In 2020, Bob's long-time friend and business partner, Paul Lewin, unexpectedly passed away. "His passing was a big part of why I was ready to close that chapter of my life" says Goldberg "as it was something that we had done together for 50 years, and without him, it just wasn’t the same". So in 2021, he sold Earth Island for an undisclosed amount to French food-product corporation Danone, famous for their yogurt, who also had a dairy-free division, including the plant-based milk alternative, Silk.
At the time, Goldberg felt like he had spent enough time at the factory. “It was a good thing — but it was just so big,” he says. “I wasn’t having as much fun as the first ten years with the four partners behind the bar. I didn’t know everyone on the staff anymore. I didn’t know our customers, it was all big grocers. It wasn’t the same personal experience.”
Part of the sale required Bob to stay on at Earth Island/Danone for an extra year to help the transition, but now Bob is back where it all started at Follow Your Heart in Canoga Park.
He still has an eye to the future, seeing trends and wanting to be part of them.
"I have a sense, and a vision that Canoga Park is beginning a real renaissance of development, with the Rams building a training facility and Warner 2035. If you look around, this was an almost affordable area. Over the next twenty years it's gonna be very much in demand. We’re hanging in there — we want to be a part of the next phase.”
They own the building across the parking lot, which still says “Mr Jack’s Wig Shop” (which was never actually a business, just the set design from the movie Licorice Pizza).
In that space they are going to build out a bakery and a coffee roaster. “We still have our wholesale bakery — but we want to get into the retail side,” says Goldberg.
When I visited Follow Your Heart to interview Goldberg recently, we had a lunch of plant-based Reubens. Afterwards, he gave me a copy of his 2020 book “The Vegenaise Cookbook, Great Food That’s Vegan, Too” and signed it “To Josh my great new friend. Integrity is the answer.”
For Goldberg, integrity means “making sure that one’s actions are congruent with one’s beliefs. That you are living in your truth. And when you aren’t, those relationships get fractured. Integrity is what makes things cohere.”
Kinda like Vegenaise.
