Ali Wing : CEO of Oobli

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. And we are here on the Kara Goldin show, I’m so excited to have my next guest here, Ally wing, who was the CEO of Oobli. And I have to say that I, I knew of ally for many, many years, because she had started a great brand that I’m gonna, I’m gonna keep secret for now. But I’ll force her to share a little bit more about that. But it was, it was a terrific brand in a totally different space that I definitely want her to talk a little bit about as well. But But now she is the CEO of Oobli and Oobli is commercializing the world’s first suite proteins. And they recently got the FDA approval on it, which is very, very exciting. And you read that right? Sweet proteins, no one is talking about this, what she’s doing is incredibly hard. Starting a new category, as I know a little bit about but today with chocolate bars and tomorrow with much, much more. So I’m excited to hear all about this unique new ingredient and category and how she is tackling growing this and joining a founder to do so. So welcome, Ali.

Ali Wing 2:03
Thank you, Kara. It’s so nice to be here.

Kara Goldin 2:04
Yeah, really nice to have you. So you’ve created this new ingredient. Or I should say you have an Oobli has created this new ingredient the founders created the the ingredient and you were brought in to run the company, you are a founder as well of a company in the past, which is not always the case, when CEOs come into companies. Can you share now a little bit more about your history and sort of how before you got here, what were you doing?

Ali Wing 2:36
You’re right, this is the first time I’ve been brought in to a founders environment as the CEO. But I think having been a founder makes me a very different kind of partner and I that’s quite a what I’m so excited about about this marriage at at Dubli that I have going on with my partner Jason writer. But I really started my career I played in a lot of different roles, I kind of grew up at Nike as a brand lover. Then I went into the Silicon Valley, and I worked for a lot of founders helping them unlock growth around the consumer. Then, like anybody who’s been building a lot, I founded a company and that’s what you’re referring to Kara thank you for the nice compliment. It was a great brand name giggle. And we were really focused on healthy living, better living for parenting, right all how to do it less toxic, less use and dispose, better products for the parent, super fun. After that I went on and I actually worked in health care and actually worked for another founder and helped unlock growth around improving the healthcare system. I loved elements of it because I liked getting closer to the big health problem. But I really miss being early enough in the problem to be more preventative around consumers. And that’s what led me to believe, which is this perfect marriage of science and technology unlocking access to solve a big consumer problem around sugar today. And that’s what I’m so excited about.

Kara Goldin 3:53
Super, super cool. So you are also an attorney prior to becoming an entrepreneur. That was before you worked at Nike right?

Ali Wing 4:02
Now I’m a little odd that way I actually worked for seven, eight years at Nike after undergraduate I was really young kid when I graduated college, I was just barely 20. And I worked and I went back to graduate school and I did my MBA on my law degree at the same time that I went to the Silicon Valley first as an attorney practicing as a venture capitalist attorney. And then by about the third year I didn’t last that long. I had changed sides of the table and started working as really a consumer lead for one of my venture capitalists investors.

Kara Goldin 4:33
Oh, that’s wild. So how did you connect then with the founder of voobly.

Ali Wing 4:39
It was actually through our investors. Our largest investor is close to ventures I had had the benefit of working with them in the past and they were really looking for somebody with a unique experience, right? I’m in food tech, if we call the category, the category today, it’s sort of the intersection of biotech or sin bio meets CPG and there’s great companies and that you They’ll great brands like Impossible Foods and beyond brands. But if you really look at the industry, it’s still very early. It’s, it’s, it’s not just we’re creating a new category, this is a new category. And so they were looking for somebody who had worked in technology had worked very was willing to go early stage right pre revenue and actually build a tech company from that stage. But that had enough experience to sort of think through how those larger industries are being formed and think about how to actually build this model. And we got introduced again, my partner’s name is Jason rider, he’s a really awesome guy. We like to think of ourselves as photo negatives, he is to technology that I am to the consumer.

Kara Goldin 5:35
Oh, I love that. That’s so great. So sweet proteins, or, I mean, we can start either with what is OOB li or what is sweet protein?

Ali Wing 5:45
Well, I’ll give you the education on sweet proteins. And it’s sort of the heart of Uli. And that is that we didn’t really create sweet proteins nature. So these actually are nature identical. They come from places like West Africa and Southeast Asia, we believe scientists believe we’ve known about them academically for about 20 years, that they evolved with human nature. But what we didn’t have is the technology to make them accessible, because to grow them would be an ecological disaster. And what I mean by that is, they the these, they grew out of fruits and berries that were in really precious ecosystems, and they needed to come up with a way to attract primates to eat them to spread their seeds, they only work on primates, and carrying sort of the carbohydrate of green leafs was too expensive calorically for them. And so they evolved to make this one tiny, little protein. And this one protein in these plants or berries, only works on large primates, T one and r1 taste receptors, the way we experience sugar on our mouth, but it’s a protein. So as you swallow it, it unfolds administer your body as a protein. And back then that was a dirty trick to apes and gorillas, right, they worked extra hard to get up for this sweet thing, and they ate it and there wasn’t all this energy. And then today, it’s kind of the perfect solution to our problem, which is sugars recklessly abundant. We love it. There’s nothing bad about loving it. We’re biologically designed to love it. But we weren’t designed to have it this recklessly abundant in our diet. And that’s exactly what sweet proteins are, as they give us that craving satisfaction, but they move through your body in a much healthier way as a protein. So that’s that’s sort of how they came about what hadn’t been possible before really crisper and what we now know as sin bio, and biotech is a way to actually produce these that would be not just healthy, but planet friendly. And that’s where precision fermentation comes in. So that’s googly. Googly is really a sweet protein platform, using precision fermentation to unlock the power of sweet proteins with the idea of bending the Global Health curve, hopefully giving people something that is as good for their body and good for their planet as it is delicious to taste.

Kara Goldin 7:53
It’s so interesting. So So COSLA reached out and thought you guys would be a good team working together. But you really hadn’t worked in science kind of biotech product, right? Like it this is this was a whole new learning for you. And you explain it very, very well. So. So you know what I mean, you obviously can do a lot of things, you’ve had a lot of great experiences, what really kind of made you maybe kept you up at night about this idea to the point where you wanted to join. And

Ali Wing 8:29
well, you need some you and I share this experience, right? The one thing that you have to be willing to be as an entrepreneur is willing to take bets and willing to take risks and willing to be told you’re crazy, right? And I am all of those things, probably multiplication. But I also think if you peel it back a little bit more, it’s also a really commitment to certain things that you want to see in the world, and a willingness to always be a learner. So this was my fifth industry. I’m not new to science, I mean, new to biotech. But I’ve pretty much spent my career from consumer products to software as a service to different types of software technology platforms to healthcare technology, to retail to now food tech. So what I think is the sort of unlock or common skill is pattern recognition against a principle around the consumer. And my, my sort of secret sauce, if you will, is I live and die by consumer consumer data, consumer feedback, how to actually unlock solutions to problems that have a clear sort of unmet need. And my personal preference on that. And really, as you look at the arc of my career, I could have never said this to 25 years ago, because I don’t think it was an active conscious decision. But I’ve always really chosen roles that helped me leverage technology or data to unlock healthier living solutions. And now I recognize across all those industries, that was the arc of what I was doing, I was always attracted to the next healthy living soul addition, and how to get at it with leverage and technology has usually been the common denominator. Lots keep me up at night, I think the word biotech sounds big and weighty. At the end of the day, the how we make it, it’s sort of like how we make a car is complicated. But at the end of the day, we all buy cars. Well, how we make a sweet protein had a lot of incredible PhD minds around the table in order to unlock that. But for it to work and have a chance at making a healthier world, people have to like consumer products and eat it. So it operates like a food product. And it’s pretty familiar in what you have to do to solve to figure out if you can get mass adoption, because at the end of the day, the only way we’re going to bend the global health care is to have enough people want to eat it.

Kara Goldin 10:47
Yeah, definitely. What types of plants are they, by the way,

Ali Wing 10:51
mostly fruits and berries. They’re more fruits than berries. But you’ve heard of them. miracle berry fruit, khatam Fay fruit, the googly fruit, which is oh up li e which is the inspiration of our name. And that’s got a very fun, colloquial, second meaning in the places in West Africa, where it’s from UI and French means forgetfulness, and the local village understanding of that fruit is is it’s you eat it, and it’s so sweet. You forget your mother’s milk. And that’s where we got inspired by me.

Kara Goldin 11:27
So interesting. So how does sweet proteins work? I mean, what is probably the most unknown thing about the suite proteins,

Ali Wing 11:35
probably the most unknown thing about sweet proteins that is that a protein can be sweet, right? Like one thing we know in this world. And this is what I get most excited about. This is a solution in the world of a lot of different sugar alternatives that have attempted to be a change to sugar is we’ve never had a protein tackle this problem, right? For at least for humans. And what’s so different about that is we already know and trust proteins, our bodies are 50% made up of proteins. Proteins are good. They’re proteins give energy proteins are power inducing. The reality is, as we now know, we haven’t been asking enough of our Proteins Proteins can also be a solution for for sweetness. I think how that works is they’re structured, it’s still kind of a, you know, the greatest gifts in science still have a lot of lessons from nature, right? How these proteins actually trick our T one and r1 taste receptors, which are the way we in our mouth, tell our brain we’ve just had sugar is sort of the mystery of nature, right? They figured out how to trick they actually, when we actually eat most sugar, or sugar alternatives, all of those are really getting absorbed immediately. And these are Proteins Proteins go and absorb. They actually bind with your taste your with your taste receptors, and they say, Hey, you just got sugar. But the moment you swallow different than every SUGAR SUGAR alternative on the market, which then moves through your glycemic system at some level, interacting with your blood sugar levels and hits your gut microbiome, the protein the moment you swallow it unfolds. So it’s zero glycemic index and zero, that microbiome effect. So pristine, pretty powerful, right? And that’s really the science of the how the binding mechanism, I will tell you, it would take one of the you just hit my limits on my honorary PhD in in sin bio, you’d have to have one of the biologists explain how the binding works. But it’s a really unique part of nature and how it evolved.

Kara Goldin 13:25
And there’s actually seven proteins correct. We have,

Ali Wing 13:29
we have seven right now on our platform in the world, we believe there’s a dozen, maybe two dozen, and scientists are pretty sure we’re going to uncover more of them. Now that we have a lot of the tools that have come out of this era of, of synthetic biology, because we’re now understanding a lot more about the components of most plants. But today, we have the broadest biggest suite protein platform in development that’s working on development or scaling up options from all of them. And that raises a really good point that I will bring up, which I think is kind of cool, which is why seven if you have one lead anymore, right? And that’s because we have this hypothesis when I got here, we’ve since proven it out. One of the big things we started to do is really test at very early skills of development, all the different proteins. Because if you think about you and I you’re a consumer person, how would we define success? Like I think of it as say, What’s your favorite? Sweet? You know, what, what Sweet Tooth item makes you happiest? Right? Let’s want to know, let’s pick an orange soda. We’ll just say typical, but I mean, I know probably not ours, but yeah, whatever. Yeah, right. And we say all right, a typical one will have anywhere from a chocolate bar does say dark chocolate we’ll have anywhere from nine to 15 grams of sugar in it just on average, right? Right. How much could any one protein reduce the sugar without changing the taste because the bowl really right isn’t to tell you how to like chocolate but to give you that out with a much better health equation. So what we figured out quickly as any one protein can reduce the sugar required by about 60 to 70%, before it starts to change the taste, but what’s really special is when you start looking at proteins combined, they can drop it to closer to 89%, without changing the tastes you’re already used to, and the why we think that is, because all these plants and berries have been out trying to solve the same thing. Right. So they’re each trying to mimic what we call our sort of curve of sugar are, you might have heard us talk about the Gaussian curve for sugar. And it’s sort of mimicking that. And actually, together, they seem to be more of a one plus one is bigger than two than any one of them alone. So that’s what we’re really excited about. So the products we have on the market today are just our first protein, the only fruit protein that has the first FDA because every one of these protein, which is a novel ingredient has to go through its own FDA process. So more to come.

Kara Goldin 15:57
And what is that, like? Going through that process? So because you’re you are educating them, right? I mean, a whole, I mean, it’s not like you’re on right, waiting for a patent right on something. I mean, it’s a very unique, so I’d love for you to share kind of what that process is like

Ali Wing 16:17
it is. And we take that really seriously right? Especially with a platform commitment. So I will tell you that, listen, it will be hard for us, Jason and I to wake up each day saying the thing that turns us on is this idea of bending the Global Health curve, if we didn’t think ultimately what we were putting into the food system was going to not just be safe, which is the FDA is primary concern, but also healthier. So we take kind of an above and beyond approach to all those early standards of tests to really have testing. And the reason we do is we know if we can prove it in general, for sweet proteins, each new one we bring in will be easier for everybody to understand. So we’re in that process right now doing very long toxicology and health and safety studies. We’ve done enough of them with the first one in the US to have our first product out with self grasp. But we’re now in the middle of taking that protein into other countries who equally have this issue and are trying to solve better ways to give sweetness to consumers. But then working on our additional proteins, and it’s long, it’s time consuming. And it takes a lot of attention and detail. As much as I it’s easy to complain sometimes as a founder, entrepreneur, partner within a growth business that FDA is hard and long and expensive. I’m also sort of grateful, right, because it’s food, it’s how it’s about our food supply. It’s about safety. And so I really do view it mostly as a partnership, and one that’s only going to help us make a better platform. And this is where I would say being brand new to biotech, it’s been helpful that I’m also an attorney. Having worked in regulatory environments before, it’s fairly familiar to me just a new dataset that I’m working

Kara Goldin 17:58
with. That’s awesome. So what was how long was the process to actually use said you got it this last December? How long front to back was the

Ali Wing 18:09
plan? I could answer that a couple of ways. Right? So that company started seven years ago, working on the research to get to this point, you have to ultimately unlock enough of it to produce enough to support all of the tux ecology studies which are rat studies, right? So you produce a lot. So technically, that’s been all the process to get to here, and then we got it at the end of their six and a half year. Technically, from the time you start filing with the FDA to get to that self gras. It’s about a year depending on how you do the markers, but it’s approximately a year. And it still takes us another about a year to get to what’s called a no questions letter, which is the FDA then goes through a process we’ve met every standard that they publish out there and we have the highest standard and we’ve already gone through the all the toxicology, then they get to take a year kind of reviewing kicking the tires before they issue an FTA confirmation letter. So it’s about two years when you kind of start and stop that clock overall,

Kara Goldin 19:09
and I protein. And as you go into, will it be as long do you think, to get the new approvals,

Ali Wing 19:17
there are some that will go faster, I expect this year will end with an additional two proteins. Through the preliminary phase, the self gras phase, one of them is going much faster because it actually comes from the EU Bluefruit. So this is a fruit that actually has two proteins. So we get some benefit of the research we’ve already done. To the extent it’s a new plant, they’ll always take about the same amount of time. The difference is now that I have a sweet protein platform and in producing a half a dozen proteins with manufacturing. I don’t have to wait for years to figure out how to produce enough to actually get them into the study. So I can start the clock a lot earlier and I can also be doing multiple proteins at once. I couldn’t do that before this year.

Kara Goldin 19:58
So you mentioned manufac texturing So has that been challenging to find somebody who would do something totally new? I mean, they hadn’t dealt with the protein, right? I mean, for the most part, I mean, that must have been, I remember when we were starting hands and, you know, getting people to produce a product without preservatives. And it was just a I mean, it was it was like, No, you know, they had they had more work that they could deal with, and why would they do something new? Now, today? There are many beverages that don’t have preservatives, and that are actually using the processes that we actually read trailblaze that we trailblaze. But it was, I remember, just, it was easier to say no to us, especially because we just didn’t have the industry experience. We were creating a new category, all these things that were really tough. But it was, I’m curious what your experience has been.

Ali Wing 21:02
And I think I think a few things are working in our favor. One of those is the growing Think of how many different types of sugar alternatives are out there today. So there’s 50 different types. Now, consumers don’t really get them, there’s a lot of confusion about them. But manufacturers are used to seeing a lot of people sweetened with different things at this point. So that’s opened the doors a little bit without understanding necessarily, what’s the big difference, you could put all of those in one category and be small molecules were proteins were a large molecule, they don’t probably care as much about that difference. So I think that in some ways helps us. I think, number two, there’s never been greater demand to really actually challenge what we’re doing as sugar and sugar alternatives. Look at all the headlines, right? There’s a lot of concern. Look, you look at the last 10 years, and you look at the general health of the country, you are very early in this as as, as I was thinking about it, giggle and you were building in it. Hence, we were both asking this question about what’s going to be good for our bodies. The reality is, as we look back and say we haven’t as a nation, or as a world gotten healthier with modern food diet. And there’s a lot of questions, not just sugar, but been asked about the different types of sugar and sugar alternatives, right, we’ve had a lot of those. So manufacturers are generally aware that people are all talking about this. And that helps us I would say the third thing that helps us is what we’re doing is precision fermentation. And there’s a lot of precision fermentation in manufacturing in meat and dairy today, that’s you hear a lot about that, as people are looking at plant based alternatives. They just haven’t heard it as much on the sugar side or on the sweet side. So it’s familiar in other areas. So by manufacturer, there’s different familiarity or closeness to it. So we generally it’s not the hardest part, here’s some of that’s the beauty of sweet proteins. They’re really, really, they work great and liquids, they work great in just about every type of foods. So they’re they’re an easy ingredients. So they’re not really adding a lot of complexity, the complexity happens for us to get to that that point, which is in the precision fermentation manufacturing, that’s actually our more complex manufacturing than our

Kara Goldin 23:07
product. And you’re producing the this in California now. And is that in a dairy free nut free kosher facility? And what else IDs diabetic is safe? And it’s? I mean, it’s all How hard is it? To do that? I mean, you you touched on this slightly that it’s, it’s getting to the point where you could actually put it in to make a chocolate bar or put it in to make a beverage I would imagine, right? All of those, I mean, can you actually make enough of this tech to scale it?

Ali Wing 23:43
We can. And let me separate two things. We make our in product, the chocolate, as well as the sweet teas that we’re working on and about to announce all in California. And we of course have our primary labs in California for our proteins where we make our precision fermentation. But we actually scale those up in three countries today in the US, but out east, in Belgium and in Mexico. And so we have three facilities doing scale up on our proteins already. And yes, scale up is very feasible in what we’re doing with sweet proteins. Here’s why this is an important thing. And I should have brought this up earlier. So it’s a great question for you you to have asked. You know, if you think about it, can we build a solution that can bend the Global Health curve of obesity and diabetes? If it doesn’t taste good? The answer is no. We both know that. Right? Can you build it if it’s can’t be cost effective anymore? Likely? No. It’s really hard if you can ultimately get it could cost. Why am I so bullish precision fermentation for sweet proteins can be the right model for making a successful and therefore cost effective, because sweet proteins also give us this other gift. They’re 2000 to 5000 times sweeter on a waitwait basis and sugar. So a very little goes a long way. So I’ll give you an example. If we had a 16 ounce soda, we’ll just pick up a good example of too much sugar, right? And it has 64 grams on average of sugar in it. And that imagine that as a stack of about 17 cubes of sugar, we would replace that with about point oh, two, three milligrams of a sweet protein, and the rest is water. So part of why we can get to the health anything, is that in parallel, why we can get to the cost and accessibility is that a little goes a very long way for this sweet protein.

Kara Goldin 25:31
So interesting. Wow, that’s, that’s really, really interesting. So So you’re taking on big sugar? I mean, right? Like, I’ve been accused of that for years, but I think you guys really are taking I mean, your purpose and your mission is not too dissimilar to

Ali Wing 25:54
No, it’s very similar. We pay a ton of homage to hint and we respect you. We want to be right alongside you, and a lot of coolers someday, for sure. Because I think flavored water is awesome. And it’s the right place to be right. We also think we can probably make some of the choices that people want, whether it’s sodas to functional sodas to teas, and we can change the role of sugar in those for them. Yes, I think you’re right, we are taking on big sugar. That’s not really what I’m doing with consumers. I’m mostly with consumers, introducing a new pathway to get to satisfy their sweet tooth in a place I hope they’ve already decided to trust, which is what all the evidence tells me which has proteins and just let them know that they can actually get more from their protein than they realized. And that’s the introduction of sweet proteins. But there’s no way around it. If you look at our climate mission, we are a precision fermentation platform. Part of the reason to love precision fermentation in this era of sin bio, is really global food supply and ecological concerns around climate change. And whether I like what it’s doing in your body or not, sugar is a top 10 most harmful crop for a reason of how much we produce it in the world and how much we grow. And for every 1% that I can take out of the diet, I can put back 650,000 acres back into things like the rainforests, and that I’ll do all day long. That happens to be kind of the triple win that we see with Uli and with sweet proteins. They were evolved in nature to tastes like sugar. So they’re really good tricksters a lot better than a lot that have tried to replace sugar, right? So they’re very good at it. Number two, they’re a game changer for your body because they’re a protein, so they don’t interact with blood sugar levels and your gut microbiome. And number three, they are a sustainable, scalable, climate friendly production method that we can actually all get excited about.

Kara Goldin 27:44
Very cool. Do you consider yourself an ingredient company or a, or a product company?

Ali Wing 27:50
You know, first and foremost, we consider ourselves a product company. And the reason we do is because just like what you were doing creating a category, scientists have barely heard of sweet proteins. So it’s really important if you’re going to create a category to first create a pathway for consumer education, and give them a way to have Wayfinding. And I think, you know, this better than most people I talked to, consumers are pretty confused about what to trust on a label and what’s really in things are not in things. So creating a pathway to that, for me, all evidence suggests it’s better to give them something to actually see feel, touch and eat themselves. Over time, I would never want to limit our potential that way. Over time, we should also be able to be a rehabilitation tool across food supply in every pharma product, because we should be a top choice for rethinking recipes, and in that way, act as an ingredient. That’s not our interest in our first phase, mostly because we believe we have to really help build the consumer education around that category opportunity of sweet proteins.

Kara Goldin 28:56
Essentially, you’re building a brand and and you’re educating, like, how do you do that? Is that what your main focus is these days? Yeah,

Ali Wing 29:04
it is. It is. And you know, you know how hard that is? And it’s not a big bang theory. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a lot of different initiatives. We keep the consumer at the center of the wheel, and we’re thinking about how do you build authority and content and education. So when people start to ask the question about what is this what is this alternative, we become the place that they know, and the story that they trust, and there’s evidence to support that. So we spend a lot of time we’re just two and a half months, three months into this given that we couldn’t do this before we had self grafts with the FDA. So we’re babies babies, but you’ll see us with a ton of focus around content, strategic advisory boards around certain categories that are going to be really important to the credibility here like health care, right? As a really important part of the voice and then influencers and advocates that can speak on our behalf. You know, if you don’t trust me, then trust somebody that you already trust and let them tell As the product, you probably have even seen a lot of what we’ve done in the first phase has been a lot of sampling. So we go out of our way to sort of put our money where our mouth is and say, try it before you buy it. We’re happy to do that, because we want the more people to try sweet proteins, the better. Yeah.

Kara Goldin 30:16
And that’s what we found. I mean, the biggest challenge for us 17 years ago, when we started hint, was getting people to understand that a product without sweeteners in it was going to taste great. And so we said, Try it, you know, and it was, I mean, that was our marketing budgets were all we didn’t do any advertising. We didn’t do any advertising until last few years. I mean, it it was really all about sampling the product and getting people to experience it. And we also found, too, that it was that if we only gave them like a small cup, then it really depended on what they had had right before. Right? Yes, whether So if, for example, somebody tastes your product, and they’ve had a, you know, Hershey’s chocolate bar or, you know, whatever, right before that, it’s even more sugar, and then they taste your products, you can’t control that experience, right. And so you need to give them enough that they can actually, in our case, cleanse their palate a bit so that they can actually experience it. And so it’ll be very interesting. Because again, yours is a whole new experience.

Ali Wing 31:35
Yeah, and you’re, I mean, you, you’re spot on tape, we are sophisticated consumers with a lot of our mature tastes, preferences, right. And we like what we like we don’t like we like we’re pretty hard wired, even even why we’re so good at discerning what’s not, sugar is where, you know, our T one and r1 th receptors are pretty finely tuned instruments at this point, you know, right away if it’s not it, right. So all of that really makes you humble about really honing in and listen to the consumer and giving them exactly what they want. And that’s why I don’t believe there’s a big bang theory, you work really hard, you put you pick a segment that you’re going to make the product optimal for, it’ll never be optimal for everybody. And then you make additional ones for other segments, and you keep listening and you keep improving it. And that’s really what it’s all about and sampling. You were just a maverick, 17 years ago, you were very early and all that, it’s still the best thing and food, right to have taste. The big differences is we have a lot more social tools today to build the conversation and even put, you know, virtual conversations like on YouTube, about it, where people can actually see people eating it are making it and foods or things like that, so we can supplement it. But it still gets back to how do you get them to ultimately taste it. And so sampling isn’t any less important than I think it was 17 years ago,

Kara Goldin 32:50
definitely. And you’re mostly available online. Right now you and I were talking about that. And hopefully soon in stores. So people will be able to buy a beat and go, we’ll have all the information in the show notes about the company and in you as well. But thank you so much for coming on and sharing this and we will definitely be watching. It’s so interesting, it has me thinking about a lot of different things, but also just I admire you and the company for really tackling this because it’s very, very important, right? I mean health is, I always say health is doesn’t matter what your gender is your socio economic background, where you are in the world. I mean, if you don’t have your health, or if somebody you know, doesn’t have health, that it really makes a giant difference in your life. And so I think that with the mission that Ken has, and you guys have, I think it’s a very, very important piece that not everybody chooses to work on. So I really appreciate what you guys are doing so well. Thanks again. And thanks, everybody for listening. Have a great rest of the week. Thanks 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 of 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 and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my book on daunted which I share my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of the week. And 2023 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 hint water. 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