Sarah Kennedy: Founder & CEO of Calocurb

Episode 661

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Sarah Kennedy, Founder and CEO of Calocurb, a pioneering brand in natural weight management. With a background leading major health and nutrition brands, Sarah shares how 14 years of research led to the development of Amarasate®, a natural GLP-1 activator that helps curb cravings and support metabolic health.
We dive into the science behind Calocurb, how it fits into the GLP-1 movement, and the challenges of building a trusted health brand. Sarah also shares key lessons from her entrepreneurial journey and what’s next for the future of weight management.
If you’re curious about health innovations, entrepreneurship, or metabolic wellness, this episode is for you. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Super, super excited to have our next guest here with us today. Sarah Kennedy is the founder and CEO of Calocurb, which is a company at the forefront of natural weight management and GLP, or GLP, one, however you would like to hear it activation. And Sarah has spent decades leading in health, nutrition and consumer products with executive roles at many, many companies. We’ll have her get into this, but as a trained get ready for this veterinarian turned entrepreneur, she brings a science backed approach to solving one of the biggest challenges in health, and certainly health for humans. So Calocurb isn’t just another supplement, it’s a natural GLP, one activator derived from New Zealand bitter hops, where she’s joining us here today. It’s actually her birthday today. So happy birthday to Sarah. Very excited to that you chose to come on the podcast today on your birthday. So very, very excited. So really happy to have you here and to finally meet you too, Sarah. So welcome. Thanks,

Sarah Kennedy 1:58
Kara, it’s great too. It’s great to be on your show, and it’s great to talk to you. And because anyone that gives me an opportunity to talk about Calocurb, I don’t care if it’s my birthday, Christmas, day, any day, I’m going to talk about it. I’m very boring. I’m very singular about it. I

Kara Goldin 2:14
love it. So let’s, let’s talk about Calocurb. What is it and what makes it different from other weight management solutions. So

Sarah Kennedy 2:22
in New Zealand, in 2009 2010 a group of very talented scientists. Now I just got to step back a bit, just about all what all primary research in New Zealand is done by the government. So the government will sponsor primary so all of our large research institutes are owned by the government, separate but owned by the government. So in the largest institution called plant and food research, a group of very talented scientists in 2010 had a hypothesis that they would find a natural plant based extract that suppressed appetite. Now, why did you say? Why did this group of crazy scientists have this hypothesis? It actually came from history, so in times of famine in the Scottish Highlands, Scottish people chewed very, very bitter berries to some rest appetite in the Kalahari desert before going out on a long hunt, they would chew very, very bitter cactus to suppress their appetite. That was the original of hudia. And I don’t know if people remember houd, but the original, it was an ingredient from quite a way back, and then it sort of got mass produced, and so on. And then they did that, and then there’d been some recent work in rats on bitter substances and suppressing appetite. So they put in for a grant, and the grant was called foods for appetite control. They got back a $20 million grant to explore this. So this was then, this is a hypothesis. Remember, long before we go V zip around, all of these ones came up. They did some amazing work, and I’ll go through it very quickly. But what in fact, they did was they took 300 biopsies from the human intestinal tract because they wanted to map the bitter taste receptors right down through our track. Very funny story, one of the chief scientists had to go and hang around in hospital waiting rooms looking for people having colonoscopies and enteroscopies, and say, Hey, would you mind giving us a couple of your samples? Of course, you know, they had to go to a lot of people, and they couldn’t be diseased or anything like that. They had to have normal human cells anyway. They finally got the 300 biopsies, and they mapped the whole of the bitter taste receptors right down through the intestinal tract. So why is that important? Because bitterness is a mark. Bucha for potential toxicity. So if you eat something bitter on your taste on your tongue, you’ll spit it out, right? You’ll go because it potentially could be toxic. If it goes down into your stomach, you will It will stimulate something called ghrelin, which is a hunger hormone which is trying to make you eat more, so you will dissipate, or you will in anything. But if it goes into your upper intestine, because you can’t do anything, so it stimulates these bitter taste receptors to release. And here’s a drum roll. GLP, one, right? Your natural GLP. One also it releases CCK, which is a potent, which is a very potent appetite suppressing hormone, and p, y, y. So they mapped these all out. They proved that in the upper intestine, these released these appetite suppressing hormones. So there they had it. This was great. They then built a high throughput, a high throughput robotic model with using these human cells, and they tested over 1000 extracts on it to see what would release GLP one and the appetite suppressing hormones. Well, not surprisingly, only two did, because if everything released it, we’d never eat. You know, we’d have coffee and we’d never eat. So only two did. One was a potato oxaloid, which was great, but it’s poisonous, so we’d be thin, but dead. And then the other one was a hops extract. So that hop extract was a Eureka. They then, because they planted Food Research and do a lot of work in plants, tested 50 more hop varieties till they came to the one that was the absolute gave fire the largest signals in that upper intestine, and that’s what they named a marisate. I always giggle at it, because this would have been in 2014 15, and only scientists can name an extract with a word like a Marissa, Amara, meaning Latin meaning bitter, and Saint meaning satiation. But no one can pronounce it, so I’m kind of stuck with this word that I’m forever pronouncing for people. They did a lot more work on dosage and encapsulation and so on like that. They then took it into their first human clinical trial, so they knew it worked in the laboratory. But would it work in humans? Would it have significant enough to make a behavioral change. So they did a very large, or large human clinical where all the subjects were cannulated so they could take bloods continuously, and they gave Calocurb an hour before it eat to your full lunch and snack. Then they measured all the Bloods, we got a 600% increase above baseline in GLP one and CCK, so two of the potent appetite suppressing hormones, 600% I want to go back to that. Because anything that says it activates GLP one, it probably does, because, you know, food activates it. It’s a natural feedback loop for us. However, unless it’s above 400% you’re not going to get any behavioral change. So we had this spiking of GLP, one, CCK and P, yy, at 400% we then, we then had that was an hour before an ad libitum lunch or an ETF full and snack, we got an average of an 18% reduction in calorie intake. Now that is massive. It’s statistically significant. If you compare that to a GLP, one injectable, a semi glutide or something that, on average, semi glutide will reduce your hunger over, sorry, reduce your calorie intake over a day by 25% we, on average, do 18% so that’s just a comparison there. So yeah, so that was it. They approached me in 2017 and said, Hey, we’ve got this extract name Amara say, and what do you think we should do with it? And I, I loved it. I absolutely, I had never seen something like that in this category, which is troubled by dodgy, you know, things that don’t work or they’re uncomfortable. I’d never seen something like that with that amount, where we actually had the extractor, we owned the science, and it actually, you know, it was statistic. We actually behaviourally made a difference. So, you know, a bit like. Man that bought the razor company, I said, Oh my god, I love it. I want it. So herein lies the journey. So, you know, I raised money, I formed a team, and we launched in 2018

Kara Goldin 10:15
that’s incredible. So, and just to back up a little bit more, so, Calocurb was developed from 14 years of research I read, and that’s that’s incredible. How does it compare for those who are listening, who maybe have heard of maybe they’ve heard of GLP ones, they’ve heard of ozempic, and maybe we go V and some of the others, you talked about the percentages. But what else is, kind of the main difference between what you’re doing at Calocurb and these other prescriptions.

Sarah Kennedy 10:48
Okay, so prescription drug, let’s, let’s call it, you know, a Zen. We go, V, these are synthetic. GLP, one, right? So they’re synthetic. They they have mimicked. So what you do is when you eat, and if you think about it, you go down you eat, and when your food digests and it goes into your upper intestinal tract, it stimulates the release of natural GLP one. Now it’s a feedback loop. Otherwise we would just carry on eating. We’d pop. So you’ve got to have this feedback leaving, but it happens 45 minutes to 50 minutes out of a meal. So have you ever had a meal and a big meal, and then about 45 minutes later, you go, Oh, I’ve eaten too much, because that’s when it signaled your brain to tell you you’re full. But what we do is we super stimulate those before you eat. So you just won’t eat as much. You’ll still want to eat, but you’ll just eat less. So we’re super stimulating that GLP one, so you’re going to eat less. So when you normally eat, your GLP one would be stimulated at 300% we stimulated at 600% and we do it before a meal versus after a meal. The synthetic or the injectables, they have mimicked the natural GLP one. They’ve changed one molecule so it is not degraded, so it is at a high concentration for seven days. Your natural GLP, one will be broken down in two minutes. But because we move through the intestinal tract, firing these little receptors all the way we last for four to six hours, are synthetic because they’ve changed a molecule lasts for seven days. Oh, it’s not broken down. Okay? So that’s why you have one injection per week. So you have high GLP, one, what we would call it a Supra physiological level, which actually is a word, that’s what the scientists used. I had to look it up, but apparently it is a word, Supra physiological at this very high level. So you’ve got high GLP one when you’re asleep. You’ve got high GLP one all the time. You don’t need high GLP one when you’re asleep. And that’s slowly broken down over seven days, we stimulate your natural release, and we last for four to six hours. When is when you actually want it so interesting,

Kara Goldin 13:21
can you combine the two of them as well? Yeah,

Sarah Kennedy 13:25
it’s a really good point. Kara, and it’s been interesting for us in the fact working with practitioners in the US, they’re doing what we’re calling some of them. It’s used in three ways, but let’s talk about that. Some of them are using a micro dosing because what they’re doing is they are giving the smallest amount of the injectable they can. So I don’t know people that know about it, or have been on it, they’ll know they ramp up their dosages over a month. And the reason is that because you get quite bad side effects, so you need to let your body get used to this synthetic hormone. So what they do is doctors or practitioners are doing starting at the lowest level. Let’s say it’s a tricep petite or something like that. They start at 2.5 mils, which is the lowest. So they give that and then they give Calocurb at the same time. And what you’re doing is you’re getting that exogenous, or you’re getting that external synthetic hormone, but you keep on stimulating your natural GLP one. So you want, you want to keep that gut brain access going, and I’ll tell you why, for a couple of reasons. But yes, they are. And what it, of course, does, is it reduces side effects. And I think everyone would have read about some of the pretty ghastly side effects. It also reduces cost for people. So they’re using it. So they’re using it in three ways. They’re using it as an alternative. You know, it’s a natural, affordable and effective alternative. And you want, some people don’t want to enjoy. Infection, they can’t afford it, or they can’t take the side effects, right? So you got an alternative. The second usage, as you said, is they’re using it on the way through, so to lower the dosage and keep this natural hormone going. And the third, third one, which is actually becoming one of the most interesting for us, is, as they take people off, or titrate people off the injectable. Whenever you’ve been on a hormonal injection or a synthetic right, you reduce your you, you, you bring your natural hormones down to zero, right? Because if you’re injecting in a synthetic hormone, your body doesn’t need to make that hormone. So it kind of goes, Yeah, I don’t need to make that hormone. I’ve got it already. So your natural hormone, your endogenous levels, have gone down to zero. So when you come off the injection, of course, your natural gut, brain access, you know, the one we talked about, is not working. So your hunger is going to go through the roof, and that’s part of the reason for the some of this weight Rebug. So if you come off onto Kelly coup, we kick start that kick start that gut brain exit. We get those little receptors going, and we start that. So you can almost have this fabulous safety net where you can come on to so you haven’t gone from 100% to zero. You’ve gone to this great safety net where you, yeah, you can, you know, you can keep doing and make and you know that is, I’ve given you a physiological reason I should do it. But there’s also a psychological and a wonderful paper came out the other day about they actually measured the psychological about coming off and out of these people, that they measured these qualitative measures, it was just it stood out for me. It was this fear and hopelessness coming off these injections, and the fear was about the weight rebound. And the feeling was hopelessness, was about, I will not be able to change it, because I’ve always had this struggle with food and weight, and that is really, that’s huge for me, you know, which is why I founded this company about, you know, this struggle with food so

Kara Goldin 17:20
interesting. So what was the biggest challenge, looking back, and you know, probably still is a challenge on educating consumers about your product. I mean, you’ve gotten a lot of help because GLP, one is, is definitely out there as a, you know, it wasn’t even known what? Five years ago, most people, unless you were in the space when you were starting, knew what GLP ones knew that knew the word, I guess, or the term. But today, I think most people do know. But what’s been the biggest challenge in educating consumers?

Sarah Kennedy 17:58
Well, it’s, you know, it’s interesting. You say that because when we launched in 2018 you know, I was just in love with and, of course, I was in love with a science and, you know, I built the best mouse trap, and I take it to the world. But, you know, like trying to explain to consumers then that I was super activating their natural hormones, that we’re going to tell them the you know, you’re full, they’re like what you’re making with my hormones. You’re telling my brain all of this. So, you know that we were growing, but not growing, you know, exponentially. And you know, it was just as constant education in 2021, we go. V was approved by the FDA. So ago would go for be nozepix sister was approved by the FDA for obesity. Novo Nordisk spent a billion dollars on marketing. They took out to lunch and dinner, 2030 9000 doctors. So I get down on my knees and I thank them every day. Less than 3% of practitioners in the US prior to that, truly understood the etiology of weight. Now it really so they educated them. And I just want to go a little bit back on that, and then I’ll say why it’s important. Is our hunger is controlled by our hindbrain, or in the hypothalamus, which is our hindbrain, right, and in evolution, right? I’ll go back, if you decrease your calories by 25% Your hunger will grow, will double over four months, right? Because what your hind brain is saying is you’re going into a famine. Go out and eat something. So this is measured your grill and your desire for food doubles so and what that was, it was an. Set an evolution because it was telling us to get out and hunt. It was driving us forward. Of course, in modern day and developed countries, we are surrounded by food all the time, and our body does not like to lose weight. It wants to hang on to it. And so that we’ve had this dogma for forever about it’s about diet and willpower, right? So what happens? And people have had this stigma about it, you know, I don’t have the willpower. I’ve failed, I’ve gone off my Dad, I’ve fallen off the tracks, all of these things. But what actually happens is, you reduce your calories that sort of fine. You got your great willpower on that. You put hormones, you put stress, you put alcohol, you put anything over that. And your forebrain, which is your willpower, your cognitive thought, falls off, and your little hind brain goes, woo hoo, I’m off. And how many times have you had hot chips late at night after alcohol? You know how many times under stress you’ve stress eaten, and that is your hind brain overtaking and saying, Hey, go out and eat something. So this whole stigma about weight, about about willpower, is wrong. It is your physiology. It is your body. And it was a, absolutely an asset to us. It’s now a liability. So literally, they educated the market on it wasn’t about willpower, yeast, diet and exercise do play an important part. But it’s not just it’s not the only thing in there. There are physiology, and they educated the market on that. So it became, you know, a lot easier to talk about natural GLP one instead of synthetic GLP one. After that, really natural. Next thing came, which is Kara. The interesting one is, well, why should I believe you? You know, you’re a natural supplement. You know, there’s so many dodgy things out there, and so we had to then go through the whole, you know, 14 years of science, because I’ve only told you about one clinical trial. We’ve done two more human clinical trials, which are amazing, and we’re just on to our fourth now. So I have to talk, you know, talk about we are science LED. You know, we’ve spent 30 million to date on our human clinical trials. So we only test one thing, and that is our active ingredient, and our product, we are owned by the New Zealand government. Everything or the technology is owned by the New Zealand government. So everything we do must be correct and represented. So love. Love the billion dollars. Thank you. But you know, my next challenge is always and then people go, you know, you’re too good to be true. Well, in fact, you know what? We are true and, yeah, it’s amazing. I’ve been taking it for six years, and it it has absolutely every founder as you know, has a story, and it’s why it drives you to do this, because I think you have to be clinically insane to do it. You just have to have this singular you, having grown a company, would know you just have to have this singular focus. I always had a love hate relationship with food, right from a very young age, probably 10 years old. I was on my first diet. So it was a love hate. And, you know, I love food, but I hated it, that binging, that yo yo dieting, that whole time, that guilt about food. And I can honestly say to you, this has made me at peace. This has changed my life, and the fact that I’m at peace with food I can eat, but I just don’t eat as much. Yeah, look, I get tired, I get stressed, but this helps me enormously. So, yeah, it’s been life changing for me. And I know there’s a lot of people out there that struggle, really struggle, and I want to tell them, don’t feel the guilt. It is your body doing its natural thing, definitely.

Kara Goldin 24:23
So this started in New Zealand and and obviously you’ve been expanding. Can you talk a little bit about plans for not only more expansion, but also new products, potentially? Yeah,

Sarah Kennedy 24:38
sure. We, we really relaunch back in the new the in the US after COVID. I don’t know if people realize, but in New Zealand, we probably had the strict it is in the world. We were locked down for two years. You could leave New Zealand but never come back. You had to go into a lottery system to come back. Into your own country. So we would have 2023 the start of 2023 we went back into America, and I remember the first conference we went to because I was going to test whether our science was strong enough for the practitioners in America, because we’d been both going to consumers, but we wanted to go through the practitioner channel as well. And we got to a conference called obesity medicine in New York City. I’ll never forget it. So we happily set up our stand and our booth and everything like that, and we were there, and we were just overwhelmed by practitioners. I could have sat on the floor and cried, and since then, we’ve just grown and grown in the US. I was 85% of our sales are in the US. I had 12 trips to the US last year, so literally, don’t tell immigration, but I was there probably 50, 60% of my time talking to practitioners, talking to consumers, and doing that so massive, very successful in the US, and we, we love the US, and it’s great, and it’s a big place. I think I’ve been in just about most of your states, but there’s still more to go. So us, big focus for us. We’re just registering in Canada, and that should come through in the next month or so. We are we are approved in Australia. We just have to launch in Australia, and we’ve just sent our first shipment to the UK. So pretty fast, pretty big, but absolutely singular on this message, you know, we’re based on science, and you know, we can be used in conjunction or as an alternative.

Kara Goldin 26:55
I love it. So if you could go back to day one or the early days of launching, would you do anything differently? You’re, you’re a founder and a CEO of a company in a space that is super hot and growing, but, you know, as we’ve discussed, a lot of education around it, and, you know, it’s always fun to have the crystal ball in front of you, but also the ability to sort of look back and say, you know, I should have seen something coming. I should have done this faster. I should have never done this. Is there anything that you do differently?

Sarah Kennedy 27:30
I think everyone looks back, don’t they? Everyone looks back. You know, right from the very start, I think my I was reading an early application for something that would have been 2018 and I love my child like optimism, you know, I had the best mouse trap, and I would take it to the world, and then the world would come to me. So I love that childlike optimism, you know, I look at things, and maybe it was a time 2017 18, and we forget that that was seven years ago, you know, I paid too much for the first website. You know, I don’t know if you’re nodding your head, it’s such so much cash, you know, just there’s so many things like that in a couple of years later, some amazing not AI, but augmented reality people came out of New Zealand. I spent too much time on building what was my artificial Jenny, who would talk to consumers on that? You know, it just never resonated. There’s so many things. However, I look back, and each of them were building blocks. So, yes, you would do a lot of things differently, but each were building blocks for now. And you know, we still learn absolutely learn every day. And I think, you know, that’s the process, isn’t it, of growing a company is learning and saying what you’d do differently. As I said, educating the market, though, was a huge part to us or educating what is? GLP, one

Kara Goldin 29:04
love it. So Sarah, this has been such an incredible educational conversation. For sure, you’re building something truly game changing, involved in an industry that is incredibly hot, bringing science, nature, real health solutions together in a way that’s shaping the future of weight management. So thank you for coming on and sharing a lot more about what you’re doing with Calocurb. If you it, will have all the info in the show notes for Calocurb. It’s at Calocurb.com and if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others, subscribe and thank you again, Sarah and happy birthday again.

Sarah Kennedy 29:46
Oh, thank you so much. Thanks, Kara. It’s been wonderful talking to you Thanks

Kara Goldin 29:50
again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and a. Course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now. You.

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