Kevin McCray: Co-Founder & COO of Kevin’s Natural Foods

Episode 302

Kevin McCray, CO-Founder and COO of Kevin’s Natural Foods launched his company in 2019 to give home chefs the chance to make healthy Michelin-style meals in just five minutes. The company has seen amazing growth and by the end of 2022, they estimate reaching $150M in sales. His entrepreneurial journey in creating Kevin’s Natural Foods has encountered all kinds of interesting hurdles to overcome with stories and lessons to boot. But this determined, mission-driven, entrepreneur has remained undaunted and pushed forward. Hear all about his inspiring journey and thoughts on this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow.

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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 down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control 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. It’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show. And I’m so so excited to have my next guest. Here we have Kevin McCray, who is the co founder and chief operating officer of Kevin’s natural foods. And Kevin, as I mentioned, is the co founder, he launched Kevin’s natural foods in 2019, to give home chefs the chance to make healthy Michelin style meals in just five minutes. And the food is absolutely delicious. If you have not tried it yet, you need to absolutely do that. And the company’s first quarter business, they recorded an amazing 4.5 million in sales in the first quarter. I mean, that is I think unprecedented, especially for first quarter business. They are growing ever since estimated to reach over 150 million in sales by the end of 2022. It’s sold online. Now we’ll get into that he started out really growing and Whole Foods and Costco but we’re going to hear a lot more about that. I can’t wait to hear more about his journey overall. Because as they said, really, really fascinating. And the product is really yummy. So welcome, Kevin.

Unknown Speaker 1:57
Thanks. Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here. Absolutely. So

Kara Goldin 2:01
for those people who are not familiar with Kevin’s natural foods, what is the backstory? Like why did you decide that there was a hole in the market and you needed to do this?

Unknown Speaker 2:12
It’s one of those 15 year overnight success stories where I started, the insight came really early, actually, when I was in my 20s, I got hit with an autoimmune disorder out of nowhere. And that kind of that kind of threw my life off kilter, I probably spent north of 4050 days in the hospital in my 20s. I was dealing with that the doctors, they found ways to knock my immune system down when I get these flare ups. But ultimately, they kind of apologized and said, Hey, we dove into this, we don’t know what’s causing these flare ups, we don’t really know what to do here, you’re just going to kind of have to deal with the symptoms as life goes on. So I was pretty bummed out about that it was very disruptive, and went on with my life and had stumbled on a paper about the Paleo diet. Hmm. And at this time back in 2007 2008, that was a it was a new thing. It was very niche at that time, not a lot of folks knew about it. And it was supposed to be good for autoimmune disorders because it was anti inflammatory. And so I gave the diet a shot. And it really worked for me, I didn’t have these massive flare ups, I didn’t have to go to the hospital, I didn’t have to take medication. So it kind of set me off on a good track. But then there’s a break. So I just went on with my life. I had graduated college study marketing and got into advertising. I became a zealot for the diet, of course, with my friends and family and I became a little bit of a pain to go to restaurants with but besides that I didn’t think about, you know, bringing this new passion into into business until much later. So life goes on. And I get recruited into food manufacturing. And I’m helping the co founder of Kevin’s who became my mentor in the manufacturing space with a meal kit concept he had. And we’re working on this in like 2013 through 2018 together on these on these meal kits. And we’re refining the concept of gaining traction, gaining some success, but it’s never like a breakout success homerun. And over that timeframe, I had started to learn some things one was the it’s hard to eat healthy even if you’re extraordinarily motivated like I was your I Am I have this this big reason to eat healthy just in the back of my mind every day. The second thing I saw was the consumer started to their desire and motivation to eat healthy was growing during that timeframe. There was like this, this tipping point where you saw natural products and these lifestyle diets and this whole idea of managing carbohydrates and refined sugar really take hold in the general market not just in the in the natural food space. So at that point We were at this kind of precipice where the meal kits were doing okay, I had this like kind of dormant passion for this way of eating and empowering other people to eat this way. And we were co packing everything. So we had like this big choice, like, do we stay on this path? Or is there a way to do something different in in kind of pivot and take advantage of everything we learned in the meal kit space. So at that point, in August 2018, we decided to build a factory designed Kevin’s and we shipped our first case in August of 2019.

Kara Goldin 5:37
So were you ever an entrepreneur? I mean, did you? Were you setting up your lemonade stand or delivering newspapers? I mean, were you did you feel like you had this itch to be an entrepreneur that you had to sort of scratch? You know,

Unknown Speaker 5:53
I, I always it’s like the opposite of what everybody says, I had some entrepreneurial experience, but I had actually pictured myself as like a corporate guy, you know, when I was like, in college, I was like, Oh, I’m gonna want to go like run an ad agency or something that was always like my 10 year plan in the early days. Throughout college, I was a personal trainer, and I set up my own little personal training studio, and, you know, kind of kind of had my first like, not quite lemonade stand. But I wouldn’t say very, very, hyper legitimate, professional, long term business. But it was, it was good experience that I draw on all the time.

Kara Goldin 6:31
You didn’t see the pandemic coming. I’m sure that was kind of a crazy time, I’m sure for you as a brand new startup, looking back. What did you think at that moment? I mean, what did you fear about your business? And stores are shutting down? Have you thought back on that time?

Unknown Speaker 6:50
Oh, yeah. So there was there was kind of two things going on. First was the the kind of core insight that Kevin’s was built on was this whole idea that people wanted to eat healthy. And they were showing, you know, if you do surveys, folks will tell you, they want to cut the sugar and in change their change their habits, but all of the core health markers related to heart disease, and diabetes and obesity are pointing in the wrong direction. So what we’re seeing is there’s this motivation that exists to eat healthy, but there’s a problem with execution, people are having a hard time pulling it off. When the pandemic hit, we saw the motivation and desire to improve your life in in pay attention to what you’re putting in your body, like go through the roof. So this awareness that was already taken hold that we were designing all these culinary shortcuts to help satisfy had like grown exponentially overnight, because everybody was starting to think a lot more about their health, longevity. So we knew that this was going to have some type of long, long term impact with that mindset. So there was something there that was that we knew that would be a positive long term effect and how people viewed healthy eating. But then when it came to just managing the pandemic, you know, our company was young, we were new to manufacturing. But we had two things on our side. One is we had just launched that factory. So we had a bunch of capacity, which is great when everybody’s shorting orders. And we were in the business and ready to work. So every buddy in the company, I don’t care if you were in accounting, or you were, you know, meant to be in the factory, or you were in it, you were on the fact on the factory line, packing orders getting product out, we had reserved warehouse space to get heavy on everything that wasn’t going to be perishable. And just make sure we didn’t Short any orders. And we did not short a single order the entire pandemic. So while it was absolute, organized chaos, like it was just it was such a stretch for us. I think it helped us earn credibility as a manufacturer, because a lot of our customers had seen good ideas for brands come come across their desk, but to see a brand that was on the younger side, but really committing committed to being an effective manufacturing partner, I think kind of helped us with our street cred with retailers.

Kara Goldin 9:03
Yeah, for sure. Well, I think more than anything, nobody knew how to sort of manage in a pandemic in the US. And I think it’s, you know, the people who have lived through that there’s many, many things along the way. I mean, you’re managing your manufacturing, dealing with workers who are hopefully not getting sick, but it was definitely during a time that that was happening. And I’m sure there’s lots of lessons that you’ll look back on.

Unknown Speaker 9:33
So many just Well first off, being productively paranoid around planning stuck up and just we knew at the front end, whoever is going to plan is going to win coming out of this thing. But just working with our people to have two way communication and just understanding getting them talking all the way through the organization and speaking up when they’re when they’re not feeling good and just being open and honest with us. That was a that was a big deal for us.

Kara Goldin 9:58
You have a co founder And can you share more about why you decided to have a co founder? And how did you two get together on deciding to do this company together?

Unknown Speaker 10:09
So I started in advertising, ended up in marketing for a supermarket chain out in our neck of the woods, Save Mart and lucky supermarkets. And Dan, who is the co founder of Kevin’s came to Save Mart to present an idea he had for that meal kit company. And him and I became fast friends and stayed in touch as I as I after I left Save Mart. He called me and said, You gotta come help me on this meal kit company. And I said, Dan, I don’t have any experience with new food manufacturing. I’m, you know, how, what do you want me to do? What are you looking for? He had a lot of background, growing startup companies. And he started as a chef. So he had the culinary side and had ran plants. So he had operations down and he’s like, Don’t worry, I’ll I’ll teach you that side. Just come come, let’s, let’s work there. So I was going to help him on on his meal kit, concept. And we did and we learned and we got closer. And at a certain point, it came to that this kind of juncture where it was, it wasn’t going great. And here I was, like obsessed with with clean eating. And we Dan and I both had earned our stripes in this in this industry, just learning along the way for five years on what was working, what wasn’t working, what worked about the meal KidSpace, what didn’t where meals were going. And, and that’s when the idea hit about Kevin’s. And we started going well, you know, what’s interesting is we started the meal kit idea with wanting to marry gourmet food with convenience. But finally, the general market population is almost like ready to add the third leg to the stool. And that is health. And we did a lip analysis of the brands out in the food business. And we’re like, it’s so difficult to find a brand that hits on all three of those healthy, convenient and flavorful. There was a lot of healthy brands that were convenient, that didn’t taste good. And a lot of brands that tasted really good and were convenient, but weren’t healthy. So to marry all those became our objective. And we were hearing from people that were interested in changing the way they ate and struggling to pull it off. People didn’t know how to cook like they did back in the day. There’s no homework in the schools, you got dual income households. So this whole life skill of cooking had kind of gone by the wayside. But the motivation was high. So at that point, the idea hid, and we decided to go all in. And there was a series of aha moments along the way that ultimately helped out it, it became, let’s identify all of the things that kind of tripped up meal kits. shelf life, we got to have something that makes it through the supply chain. You don’t want it to be polarizing. You don’t want too many ingredients in there. Every meal kit had a bunch of ingredients that you get somebody in the family that didn’t like broccoli, they can’t have that kid somebody else doesn’t like cilantro, they can’t have that kid so we want it to be simple mix and match. Price point don’t go a complete meal for two so your trial prices aren’t going to be right. What case back does the store want? Obviously everything on the on the consumer side, how are we going to make this perform. And we stumbled on Suvi cooking which ended up being kind of a big breakthrough for us. So we started with Alright, empower people to eat clean without sacrificing flavor. Let’s double down go all in on this. And then how are we gonna pull this off? And the first big breakthrough we had was Suvi cooking. That was big for us. Have you ever heard of sushi?

Kara Goldin 13:42
No, I haven’t. I was gonna say what is that? Exactly.

Unknown Speaker 13:46
So we wanted center the plate and we wanted to tackle the meat part first because we saw a lot of startups in snacking and desserts and it was just it was very rare to have a company focusing on health in the center of the plate very substantial food. So we decided to start with a chicken entrees. And we were looking at how we could take the prep out of this process and do the basically do the meal prep without the prep work for the consumer. So we were going to have to pre cook the chicken and every way we were finding to pre cook the chicken and the factory would either dry it out or hurt the buyer or make it taste artificial and or we’d have to use some ingredients we didn’t want to use because we were dead set on having everything be paleo keto certified certified gluten free just held to the highest standard. And so we stumbled on suevey which is I was invented by the French it was brilliant. The the core Insight was we wanted to you wanted to cook the meat evenly all the way through from end to end. So if you could picture a steak, do you want your steak like a perfect 130 degrees medium rare. You are typically cooking it on a grill or in an oven or in a pan in the heating sources very hot, you know 300 degrees no worth 300 degrees. So naturally, if the meats touching a heating source, the ends are going to be more overcooked than the middle, to get to that 130 In the middle is not the same all the way through. So the French came up with this process where you take the raw meat, you vacuum, pack it in a plastic pouch, and you put it in a hot water bath, set to 130 degrees for a long time. And then that heat penetrates the meat all the way through, and then end to end, you have this very consistent, precise finish temperature for

Kara Goldin 15:31
your meat. Oh, that’s interesting. And then you put it on your grill or whatever. Yeah, after that. Oh, so interesting. So I had I had never heard about that. That’s so so interesting. So how did you decide how many SKUs you needed? Or you talked about chicken? And you know, how did you know what to start with?

Unknown Speaker 15:52
We will come in from the meal kit side, we knew that the country for whatever reason, it seems like we eat chicken six days a week. So we knew chicken, when you rank the sales at the supermarket folks are eating chicken. So that was a good place for us to start. And we said we’re gonna start with chicken, it Sufis really well. And we, we wanted to have enough assortment to where our heavy users could eat the product multiple times a week and not get burnout, because what we found was the folks that had success, improving their diet and eating better tended to meal prep. And so our thought was, well, what if our brand could be the meal prep without them having to do all that work? Well, it’s not going to help if you only have two flavors, and someone’s trying to meal prep for the week, and they’re gonna get burned out on your products really fast. So we wanted to start with a line of eight flavors and go go big. So there was a lot of assortment. It you know, it was it’s a tall order to get eight items approved in a retail on the retailer on the first go around. Yeah, so we would typically be able to get four in, which really helped with our brand block and our presence and gave gave our customer a lot of variety at the same time.

Kara Goldin 17:03
Well, you’re talking about things that I know very well, like I always share with entrepreneurs, that really understanding how the consumer is going to see your brand show up, oftentimes, you know, retailers will say oh, we’ll take one or two. And you know, more than likely you’re going to fail. And I think that this does not primarily because the consumer can’t see it, right. And they think that it’s kind of an afterthought. So I think that’s a really, really big lesson there that you have to have enough presence for is not perfect, but at least it’s like giving you credibility and allowing people to really see what you’re doing.

Unknown Speaker 17:43
Yeah. And that was big for us on the on the packaging side of things. I mean, that was another kind of big, big box to check for us was when we knew we were going to have two to four items on the shelf. And the product had to sell without any marketing had to sell better than the conventional offering without any marketing for it to be a runaway success. We knew that from the get go. So it had to jump off the shelves. So when we were designing the products, we our initial prototypes had all this loud packaging, like oranges, and yellows, and greens. And every time we would go face a shelf to test the packaging, we’d noticed that it just kind of blended in no matter how loud we made it. And it was because the supermarket is loud, everybody’s screaming for your attention. So it when we decided to go with more, more negative space, a stark white background and really make the food the hero. And then we went and tested it, it jumped out at you because everything else was screaming at you. And this was like this kind of beautiful white canvas almost like a resting place for your eye. So you could have two or four items and still stick out in this really busy set.

Kara Goldin 18:46
Yeah, now that’s so interesting. Our packaging story in the very early days of hand was we had clear labels, we really wanted to emphasize, you know, the fact that there was nothing in it and there’s it’s clear, and it had fruit. And what we did not take into account was the lighting in stores and who and who we’d be next to in stores on the shelf because often they would put us in the enhanced water sat next to vitamin water and it would be colored pink and yeah, you know some of those loud colors. But the consumer just lost our product. And especially when we had less skews on the shelf. It just was. It was terrible. So we ended up ultimately changing to our white labels, which I am here still to this day. And we did it because of some Bottle Deposit laws that were changing, but we couldn’t believe it. I mean, we like 10x Star packaging because of just that one tiny little change and yet nobody told us that and it was really kind of an accidental mistake

Unknown Speaker 19:55
and it looks great. We look like we could be like cousin brands with our white background.

Kara Goldin 19:59
Yeah I love it. No, that’s so great. So one of the things that I thought was so interesting as I was doing research on your on your company is that you did not start in direct to consumer. Today, it seems to be a huge trend to start in direct to consumer and then go into kind of the reverse of what many people have done in the past. We certainly we started in retail first and then went into direct to consumer. But we talked to a lot of people were trying direct to consumer first, and then they’re going into stores. So how did you decide to not start in direct to consumer and instead, I mean, you had worked, I guess, in retail, but yeah, tell me a little bit about why the decision to go to D to C now.

Unknown Speaker 20:43
So it’s a start, I came into this with a little bit of a bias towards retail, because I feel like we started with the problem. This whole idea of empowering people to eat clean, and we quit. We were kind of channel agnostic at the very beginning. And we just said, what are the right products? And how do we do this. And as the right product came to fruition, and we started developing the entrees, and then the sides. Shortly after that, and looking at how we can expand this menu, retail became the obvious choice for us just for efficiency sake, we looked at that and said, How do we really help as many people as possible? Well, today, the majority of folks are still buying their groceries online retailers. Despite how challenging of a business model it is, they’re still really efficient, you could ship truckloads and pallets into the retailer and get it on the shelf it at the best price point where when you’re comparing that to shipping a parcel, it’s still especially with perishable food, it’s the economics still tended to work at retail. So in the retailers were all in a mindset of helping their community. So when we were getting ready to launch this, we were reaching out to different retailers talking with them, and getting their feedback. And if you read their, you know, their board minutes, or what they were saying that their quarterly meetings, meetings, they were all looking for healthy and convenient. So they ended up looking like really good partners in this endeavor. So that’s so that’s how it became obvious on the retail side for us. And then over time, we’ve really expanded our distributions. Today, we’re in, you know, over 17,000 doors across the country. So it’s not, it’s not very difficult to find us. However, we’ve developed quite a following of folks that eat the products regularly. And even if a retailer has six 810 items, it’s not it’s not the full full assortment. And it’s not all the time it they’re swapping flavors and rotating things out. And they’re seasonal offerings. So the idea behind the ECAM now is if you want a full assortment you want this regularly, here it is every all of our entree flavors, you could buy it online, but the majority of our effort advertising dollars investment still goes into that, that retail space. The the DTC side is for our heavy users who want access to the wide variety of meals we have on that in the line.

Kara Goldin 23:02
Very cool. So how’s the DTC going now,

Unknown Speaker 23:05
it’s good, the parcel companies exit all bounced back from the pandemic and they’re, they’re delivering boxes like, like they used to, which is create that was a tricky time during the pandemic when everybody was struggling with labor. So that is going really good. We’ve actually we customize the packaging for D to C, which I feel really good about. It’s it’s in a as opposed to a tray with a sleeve which is kind of necessary for merchandising in the store, it’s in a pouch. So you have the pouch of cvwd me in the pouch sauce in a in a pouch. So you’re not shipping air in it, it works to keep the product cold better. So we really thought it through. It’s going well, the responses have been great. The thing I do love about DTC that you don’t get asked easily in the retail space is you hear from customers, for some reason, when folks tend to buy something online, they’re more likely to review your product and tell folks what you think. So we love the review aspect of the DTC side of things.

Kara Goldin 24:00
Yeah, you know, what we found, too, is when we launched our direct to consumer in 2012, we started doing something called Smash ups, where we would, you know, take two flavors, it was funny, sometimes we would bring those to retail, and we’d say, Oh, these two flavors together are really great. And they’re like, yeah, no, no, no one’s doing that. So well. Yeah. Oh, wait, you know, and so essentially, they would say no, and then that flavor would never come to be and when we had our own site, we would launch it, you know, which is essentially limited edition. Yeah. And so it would drive people to actually come to the site and check out did you have anything new? The irony of the whole thing is then we started having retailers reaching out to us and saying, hey, you know, why didn’t you come to us with this flavor? And a few times we said we actually we did and you said no. And they were like Well, that was really stupid. Can we have it and And so we said, of course. So it was almost like a way for us to test. And I think today, the consumer more and more, if they feel like it’s a limited edition, you know that you only have a few that you’re doing, you’re doing something that is really special because you ran into, you know, a great supply of it, but you didn’t have enough to go and launch it. And some big way with a retailer, I feel like it’s, it’s really interesting how you drive engagement with the consumer. And I think the other thing that we learned about direct to consumer is that our consumer that was buying on an NA is buying on direct to consumer still goes to Costco, yeah, you just have to have sort of a different pack different, you know, something unique about it, where maybe you’re mixing up flavors that they wouldn’t normally have online. So it definitely encourages people to still buy it. It’s not an either or situation. So I think a lot of times retailers, you know, still to this day, get nervous about seeing a company do direct to consumer, but there’s so many pieces of evidence from so many people that actually do have a successful direct to consumer that it just encourages people when they go and do their shopping and places where you are that they’ll buy it there as well.

Unknown Speaker 26:24
Yeah, I think both of both of the points you made are so right on the money in how you’ve managed etc. In today’s environment. Think about what goes into testing something at retail, I mean, you have hundreds of people stocking shelves and receiving stuff in the distribution center, you got to do these large shipments to do that same thing online, you have your designer swapping out the picture on the site, and you could do a small run and run it then in the fulfillment centers just easier to test. It’s a perfect incubator for testing. Before you go burn a bunch of years and the retailer’s resources, putting something on the shelf and 1000 stores I love that whole thought of of testing in in the DTC space. So we definitely have some plans to do more of that.

Kara Goldin 27:09
It’s true. And I think people start to, you know, really look for it, as well as like a reason to go and visit you there and give you feedback and all of that. So super, super cool. So one of the things that I always ask people is about the time when things were not great, right, that you started to feel like, oh, shoot, you mentioned the packaging, you know, sort of accidental mistakes along the way. But is there any other story that really sticks out where it was a tough time, a low point, and you didn’t know how you’re gonna get through it, but you did and what lessons you learned.

Unknown Speaker 27:48
The number one for us, by far was right, before we had launched, Kevin’s deciding, okay, where do we go with the meal kits, because those, you know, I had blind spots in and that’s what I learned after the fact you get kind of married to these ideas. So with the meal kit company I had, I thought that it was a perfect product in the in the world should conform to my product and deal with the short shelf life and deal with the fact that there was a lot of ingredients in it. And in that that hurt the ability for that product to take off once once I kind of accepted Hey, these are these are barriers that are that are hurting the brand name and kind of put a cap on this brand. And we’re in was able to translate that and look at Kevin’s with a fresh lens. First off, don’t I wasn’t it changed my mind like don’t be afraid to scratch your own itch. I was like really into healthy eating. And for the longest time I was like that’s my hobby. That’s not a business, the no one else, you know, I’m still the weird guy, the restaurant, no one’s going to want anything like this. Once I kind of got out of my own way and started being more open to that. And then was open to this idea of trying to understand the blind spots. That was really like a monumental learnings before we ever launched Kevin’s. Because you hear a lot of entrepreneurs, it’s it’s fail fast and try quick and make sure it’s not perfect. There’s a lot of that. And we do that all the time, especially with flavors and things of that nature. But my stance on it in this kind of big breakthrough was be methodical before you launch the product. So we actually would put the product up and think about everything that could go wrong. And it came down to we want it we used to call it the minefield before we would take it to market we’d have to make it through the minefield distribution cost ingredients. What’s the right what’s the right shelf life? What’s the right flavor mix is this going to work in that geography versus this geography so we came became a kind of obsessive to check all the boxes in that learning came from All the experience with kind of this imperfect product that still had a lot of promise in the mill KidSpace that we were able to translate into making Kevin’s kind of armored value proposition stronger and it’s not not vulnerable.

Kara Goldin 30:13
You sort of toyed with entrepreneurship you talked about in college, you were doing some stuff there. But you also worked for large companies. Clearly, you know that being an entrepreneur is tough. I always share with wannabe entrepreneurs, there’s way easier ways to make money than actually becoming an entrepreneur. And way easier ways to where you know, the the challenges and the ups and downs, the spikes are our highs and lows, it definitely gets your adrenaline rushing, I think along the way, but what have you enjoyed most about being an entrepreneur that you want to share with people that, you know, kind of keeps you doing what you do?

Unknown Speaker 30:58
For me from the get go, I was really interested in consequential work in the hardest to give you some examples behind that hardest thing. Being in advertising, when I first got into it, I just loved it so much. I’d been in advertising forever, I wanted to be Don Draper who’s gonna be perfect. The problem was, for me, you only had so much influence over the companies that I worked with. So with this, if once you have that bug where you really want to have control things, not saying there’s not a lot of consequential things you could do in the advertising space. But for for me, I wanted the work I did that day to be reflected in the product or service that was there was going to market. And I thought, hey, if I just get high enough in a company, then it doesn’t matter. I’ll be I’ll be calling shots. And I’ll see, I’ll see this work out there in the world, you know, and it’ll be making a difference. It wasn’t till Kevin’s that I really felt like, okay, when I go to work, what I’m doing, I could see the direct response of that. And it goes both ways. That mistake I made, yeah, it’s out there. I mean, it is out there, it’s on the p&l, it’s out in the market, whatever it is. And if I if I rolled out a product that doesn’t hit or overbuy on packaging, whatever mistake is you’re gonna make 1000 of them. But the gratifying part is that you know, that when you go to work, you’re going to, you’re going to see the fruits of your labor in a very obvious way out in the world. And that’s been the most exciting thing. On the entrepreneur on the on the business side, being in the health food space. And I’m sure you’ve you’ve seen this, it’s just hearing from people that are enjoying the products and talking to you about how the products are improving their lives that bar none is the most exciting part of running, Kevin’s is hearing from the customers that it’s helping for sure.

Kara Goldin 32:46
What’s really fun, which I don’t know if you’ve run into this, but when they don’t know who you are, and they’re talking to you about your product, I was actually on a ferry in Martha’s Vineyard. And there were a couple of people drink in hand on the ferry a few weeks ago. One of them said, Oh, I’ve never seen that product before. And, you know, she’s describing it, she said, I love it because I get great taste, but it doesn’t have the sweetness in it. And so it was great, because I you know, was watching exactly the fruits of my labor play out right in front of me. And you know, she was a huge fan. I didn’t actually say anything to her if she happens to be listening. I just I just really sort of was in the moment of enjoying listening. And when that opportunity happens, you know, you really, I think it really just hits you because somebody’s talking to you also not just about loving something that you created, that you you know, have worked really hard to create, but also actually they got what you wanted to do, which obviously, from a health perspective, you are, you know, speaking my language for sure. So, well, this is been so great, everybody, definitely go and look for Kevin’s natural foods, we’ll have all of the information in the show notes as well. And we really appreciate you coming on Kevin and sharing many of your lessons and good luck with everything and super super excited to see the growth happen and and continue to happen. So thank you again. And thanks, everybody for listening. Goodbye for now.

Unknown Speaker 34:27
Bye. Thanks again.

Kara Goldin 34:29
Thanks all for listening to this episode. We hope you enjoyed it. And I want to thank all of our guests and our sponsors and finally our listeners keep the great comments coming in. And one final plug if you have not read or listened to my book undaunted, please do so you will hear all about my journey and including founding, scaling and building the company that I founded hint we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks everyone for listening and goodbye for now. Before we sign off I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts, and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of Pentwater Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening

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