Meet Danielle Hobbs

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Danielle Hobbs a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Danielle , thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Man, what a question. When you realized you’ve survived hurricanes, a flooded car, surgeries, frightening medical diagnoses, failure and fears, my answer to the source of my resilience is simple as it is complex: my maker, Jesus Christ. It seems I’ve been fire tested my whole life. For a long time I thought God only protected us from danger, but my life is a testament to the opposite. Sometimes He leads me into storms. Over the years, I’ve learned to run towards them. The obstacles He caused me to charge through have been mind blowing. In 2012, during my first week of orientation at a hospital in New Jersey, Hurricane Sandy was predicted. We were told to pack a bag for a night in case roads were hard to travel. One night turned into a 5 day live-in trial by fire where part of my job was to deliver the deceased from the Oncology unit to the morgue. After that epic orientation, only a couple of us remained employees. I was one of the crazy ones who stayed. In 2020, God routed me back to the hospital during the 1st wave of the pandemic. I slept in my car some nights to avoid exposing my family. I lost co-workers within 72-hours of us working together. A World War I Marine veteran & POW I cared for held my hands and said “Darlin, I’m praying for you gals. You are tougher than I will ever be. As a solider I knew my objective. I was taught to study my enemy. But you girls are fighting an enemy you don’t know and can’t see.” Truly, that fight is one I won’t forget. In 2022, on the first night of my biochemistry class at Rutgers, Hurricane Ida hit NJ. My car stalled out on an overflowing bridge and I was nearly trapped in my car. After being coached by a 911 operator through the flooded bridge, I made my way to knock on the door of complete stranger’s house – a family that is now my family – took me in for the night. The next morning when I went to retrieve my car, I found mud on the roof from it being completely immersed in water. The reality that I was seconds from being completely sealed into my car set in. I used to think I was cursed, marked, doing something wrong for all of these things to occur. I now understand that some of us are tested by life to build things that will hold other people up during crisis because crisis has been our training ground. On days when being an entrepreneur becomes too heavy I lean on the faith that God designed this journey to serve and prepare other people for whatever may come and that strengthens my will to straighten my back and start again.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

By practice and vocation, I am a Biomedical Scientist, Health Crisis Educator, future physician, speaker, writer and one of the very few Black woman anatomists in the country. I have a strong passion for home health crisis education. After the onslaught of the pandemic, working the front lines in healthcare during its first wave, being a healthcare administrator and then having a traumatic experience during Hurricane IDA, I understood my assignment is to both teach and create systems that allow us to prepare proactively ahead of the next crisis.
Salt & Savor Apothecary is what we call the House of Homemade Medicine. It is a herbal pain relief product business that uses science-backed herbal medicine to alleviate symptoms to minor household injuries. Salt & Savor was born out of a desire alleviate pain and equip people everywhere we go and to build a community that is both prescriptive and protective against whatever life decides to throw at us next. We are the first line defense of our homes, families and bodies. Salt & Savor is one arm of a larger company: Village Medicine LLC that will take an intergenerational group of people to learn home medic emergency skills in pop-up clinics around the globe. Our first trip is January 2025 in the Dominican Republic and more information can be found on our website www.villagemedic.org.
What makes Salt & Savor different from other herbal brands is 3-fold. Our company is a Christian faith-based company that believes in Rev 2:22 which says the leaves on the tree will heal nations. So, our focus is entirely on pain and symptom relief using herbal means. We provide home crafted organic formulations that hold verifiable weight in both faith and science. Our distinction is we are not cosmetically driven . While wrinkle creams and moisturizing products are incredibly lucrative and less likely to raise eyebrows, our North Star is in remaining attached to our mission of pain/symptom relief and first aid. A steeper mission to tackle but one I am invested in 2. While being a product producing company is great, the real heart and spirit of Salt & Savor is promoting the gift of community and sharing recipes, resources and life hacks that we can add to our arsenals for tough times. 3. Salt & Savor endeavors to be the company of choice for household medicine in teaching people to personalize their care, partner with their providers and gain home emergency skills that yield proactive plans for home health.
Our top selling products are ancient family recipes with modern science backed medicinal benefits as its twist. Our Fire & Ice liniment is reconstructed recipe once used on race horses to alleviate muscle strain but the addition of cooling menthol and ancient herbs like comfrey and arnica makes this liquid all natural ‘icy hot’ a fan favorite. The second top seller is a recipe near and dear to my heart because the woman who I called Grandma Margaret was a midwife in the south during the 1940s and she had a cabinet full of wonders. The Margaret’s Burn, Bite & Eczema Balm is a luxurious remodel of my grandmother’s recipe which she unraveled from tin foil and slathered me with when I was bit in the summer heat. Lastly, the beauty of ancient knowledge is not only did it work but it was pressed and made by the hands of those we love and hold dear. Home medicine’s power is communal and deeply personal. It’s through that lens every jar is crafted with care, every community event is tailored to the people in it, and our commitment to educating the public will leave them with a skill set that armors them against passivity in taking our lives back.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Wait for the “Noah’s ark’ vision. I grew up in a very orthodox religious household. Despite my reasons for finding some of my upbringing problematic, I also see how it made going against the crowd easy as an adult. I am not saying finding commonality is evil or something to shun. I am saying that as an entrepreneur, breaking the mold becomes easier when we do not depend solely on group validation and following the chartered path. There is a saying I absolutely struggle to agree with, “you can’t be what you can’t see”. I think it’s fundamentally flawed because it’s based on an absolute. I believe I can absolutely be, create, live something the world has never seen. The greatest inventions did not have a blueprint and I didn’t come with a manual either. I have a practice of going by water and getting still without distraction but with a notebook at least twice per year. I pray and then I wait. It’s never failed that at least one of the two times I go I am struck with an idea. The idea isn’t calibrated to what is popular on social media, the news or even the opinions of those around me. In fact, the big mission for my company is multi-faceted and something I’ve never seen. This is what I call “the Noah’s ark vision”. Noah prepared for something no one had ever seen. You will know you’ve uncovered a “Noah’s ark vision” because it’s a solution to a unsolved problem, it’s something you’ve never seen, it usually comes to you when you are in a state of rest and it something that will make everyone around you say ‘you’re crazy’. When my Noah moment came, it was then that I knew I found what I was born to do and everything I survived to that point all began to make sense.
2. Work Diligently, Don’t Hustle. It’s easy to get burned out with so many marketing platforms to juggle in addition to making and selling your products. Proverbs 10:4 says “He becomes poor that works carelessly and sloppily but the hand of the diligent makes them rich.” I wake up reminding myself not to work out of reactivity to a laundry list of tasks on my to-do list but to use each day as a setup for the next day, week, or month. My task list is no longer me playing catch up to my mind saying what I should have done by now but rather it’s a plan that sets me up better for each day ahead of me. What does that mean practically? If I have a vendor event on Saturday, I prep brochures, labeling and check inventory on Monday. On Tuesday, I advertise the event. On Wednesday, I decide if I should prep samples of a new product for market testing, Thursday, I pack my inventory and decide on decor changes. Friday, I repost the graphics for the event and send out a post related to a product that I’ve curated for that event, charge electronics, and pack the car. Each area of my life is assigned a specific task to set up a future event.
3. Wake with the Birds- Sleep with the Birds routine. It’s weird but it also works for me. I am naturally an early riser. I read some birds wake at twilight and sleep at sun-down. While, I cannot commit to this faithfully every day, I do my best to adhere to it if only on the weekends and it has changed everything energy wise for me! I take time in the morning for myself for an entire 30 minutes before the sun rises and then I am able to get coffee and two hours of work done before 9 am. Usually by noon I’ve cleared out the things I dreaded doing and have the rest of the day to focus on easier tasks. It’s been the most productive method to getting things done I’ve tried yet.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

1. What happens if help doesn’t come? We saw it in COVID. I personally survived it in the throes of Hurricane Ida when responders could not reach me. So, I am an incredibly passionate speaker on the topics of crisis preparedness, community resource sharing, home health planning and herbal first aid. I want to continue to partner with churches, conferences, colleges and companies across the country to serve them as a speaker and strategist in finding new ways to break down siloes between them and their health care providers, demystify medical lingo and create networks of communal medicine that will thrive in calamity. Please check out my personal site (www.daniellehobbs.com) and fill out this form if you are interested in working with me: https://forms.gle/ZtJcdUU6qzEgRn3TA

2. Next, if you are health practitioner or provider who is interested in marketing our products to your clients or in collaborating to conduct workshops/events with our company, please do not hesitate to contact us via [email protected] or a DM on our instagram at www.instagram.com/thesaltandsavor

3. Do you have an emergency survival story you’d like to share? If you are interesting being interviewed on our soon to launch podcast please send your pitch to [email protected]

4. Lastly, I want to partner with the communities all over the world to teach cross-cultural emergency medical crisis interventions. There are many things that are confusing in life, our health shouldn’t be one of them. In that light, Village Medicine, LLC (the parent company to Salt & Savor) is going to the Dominican Republic to teach Emergency Preparedness Skills in pop-up clinics within this beautiful island in January 2025! If you would be interested in being part of our inaugural class please visit www.villagemedic.org to read more information!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thesaltandsavor.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesaltandsavor/
• Other: https://linktr.ee/thesaltandsavorcompany