Danielle DuBoise: Co-Founder of Sakara

Episode 899

When did taking care of ourselves become another job?
On today’s episode, we welcome Danielle DuBoise, Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Sakara — one of the pioneering companies behind the modern food-as-medicine movement. Danielle and her childhood friend and Co-Founder Whitney Tingle launched Sakara in 2012, building it from a small meal-delivery startup into one of the most recognizable names in wellness, with plant-based meals, functional foods, supplements, and wellness programs.
In this episode, Danielle shares how her own health journey led to Sakara, what she understood about food and wellness before much of the industry caught up, and how her thinking has evolved along the way. We also get into protein obsession, diet culture disguised as “wellness,” supplement overload, gut health, and whether all of our tracking, optimizing, and biohacking is actually making us healthier. Danielle also shares what it takes to build and protect a mission-driven brand in an increasingly crowded category.
If you’re interested in nutrition, wellness, entrepreneurship, brand building, or simply finding a healthier and less complicated relationship with food — this one’s 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. We 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. 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! Welcome back to the Kara Goldin Show. Here’s a question: When did wellness become so complicated? And does being healthier really require optimizing every single thing we eat, drink, and do? Today, I’m joined by Danielle Dubois, co-founder and executive chair of Sakara, one of the pioneering companies behind the modern food as medicine movement, Danielle and her childhood friend and co-founder Whitney Tingle started Sakara in 2012 after their own health struggles led them to rethink the relationship between food and how we actually feel, and what began as a small meal delivery business grew into one of the most recognizable names in wellness. And as I mentioned to Danielle today, I’m having the metabolism bites here-the gummy bites that are so fun and so good-and just love them. So, what I find so interesting about Danielle’s story and her journey is that she was talking about food as medicine, the microbiome and nourishment long before much of this became mainstream. And now, in an industry obsessed with protein and supplements and tracking and optimization, she’s making the case for something that sounds almost radical, food should also bring us joy. So, without further ado, I’m very very excited to have Danielle here with us today to talk all things Sakara and her journey. And she’s actually tuning in from Costa Rica, which I’m very jealous. It sounds really, really awesome that you’re able to build a company as a co-founder from outside of of the U.S. while having your co-founder inside the U.S. So, anyway, really, really great. So, welcome.

Danielle DuBoise 2:34
Thank you so much for having me, and so happy to be here with

Kara Goldin 2:37
you. Absolutely. So, for someone who thinks maybe Sakara is simply a meal delivery company. What are they missing, and what is the brand to you today?

Danielle DuBoise 2:50
Well, we always thought of Sakara not as a meal delivery, but more as a toolkit. So, what I personally experience, and I’ve seen so many of our clients’ experience is this desire to feel better, but not really knowing how to get there. And so we talk a lot about what is your toolkit to getting back to feeling good because we’re not gonna we’re not static. We’re gonna move in between feeling great and sometimes not feeling our best. And for so many of us, the scariest place to be is in a place where we don’t feel like ourselves, and we don’t know how to get back to feeling really good. So you can think of Sakara as your toolkit. We offer everything from ready to eat meals to detox protocols that are also ready to eat delivered to your door. We offer supplements and powders and probiotics, etc.

Kara Goldin 3:45
So take me back to 2012. What was life like? You’re talking to your friend Whitney, your co-founder, about life, about your relationship with food and health, and when? At what point did that actually become okay. We’ve got to go start Sakara.

Danielle DuBoise 4:04
Yeah. Well, you know, it wasn’t a business to start. It was a solution to our own needs. So Whitney suffered from really bad cystic acne. We grew up together, so it started when we were about 11 or 12, I’d say, and it greatly affected her life. It was very painful. It was all over her face, and she tried everything, every antibiotic and Accutane and all these lasers. I had been yo-yo dieting since about the age of nine. Was my earliest memory, which is wild because I have an eight-year-old, and I just cannot imagine her coming to the idea that she had to change herself. So, you know, fast forward, we’re in New York City together. We hit a rock bottom. She had gone to see a dermatologist in New York, like the top, top, top one, and he spent 15 minutes with her and was like, “Here’s more Accutane, and she was like, “I’ve done that. It doesn’t work.” And you know, my rock bottom came from I had just done this crazy retreat, and it involved a water fast and eating raw food. And you know, I thought it was going to help me transform my relationship to food, but it really just exacerbated my relationship to food, which was food is the enemy, less is always better. That was my entire understanding of food. You have to count calories and carbs and points and pounds. I was also studying pre med at the time, so I was I was working in a hospital, and I was doing the free clinic, and we were seeing patients with late stage lifestyle diseases. And I had IBS. I had no idea how to take care of my body, and I just thought, you know, I’m going to be one of these people with this late stage chronic issue, and how do I transform my own life so I can really have that toolkit we were talking about earlier? And how do I help people have that toolkit before we get to these late stage lifestyle diseases, which are then really hard to navigate, or at least much harder? So I was really lucky that at the time I was studying nutrition, it was really the the blossoming of the microbiome and the science behind you know what you eat affects overall health and how and the mechanisms. And throughout my studies, I just kept coming to this conclusion: like it’s not that hard to eat well, like it’s not rocket science, right? But it is very hard in terms of actually doing it, in terms of actually adopting it. So yeah, you got to get your greens, you got to eat a lot of different colors, you have to get a balanced plate, you have to get high quality food, you have to eat a lot of fresh food, and none of that is rocket science. But when it goes to like, okay, how do I do this? That was where it got really hard for not just myself, but I know millions of other people. So Whitney and I decided, you know, we were going to switch off cooking days and weeks and try and help each other really eat this way. So I made a meal plan, and it was based off of all the things I was just talking about. Very simple, but very colorful, lots of healthy fats, lots of healthy proteins, lots of plants, and we ate that way for about three weeks, and it completely changed our lives. It was the first time Whitney noticed inflammation in her skin going down at all. It was the first time in over a decade, and for me, it was like something just switched in my head. Where food had been the enemy for so long, and it was the first time that I realized food is there to make me feel better. That it’s a tool to help me feel better. It’s not something that I need to constantly sort of navigate and take out of my life, and less is better, and count calories. That when you get the right foods, it actually helps you feel more like yourself. I didn’t know that until that moment, and so you know, friends around us notice, and they’re like, “What are you doing? What are you eating? Can you give me some? And so we did. It really just started with our friends.

Danielle DuBoise 7:56
We would cook for them, and it happened very quickly after that. That was around 2011, and within the next six months, we you know started our own website, which you know there was no Shopify or anything like that at the time. So we built our own website on like I think it was like iWeb. It doesn’t even exist anymore. You know our our website you couldn’t check out because we had no money to pay a developer. So it was just basically a brochure, and you had to email us, and then we sent you a PayPal invoice. It was very complicated, but it quickly grew because I think people really resonated with this idea of eating healthy should be a lot easier, and a lot of us know how important it is to eat healthy, but and a lot of us have trouble actually doing it,

Kara Goldin 8:41
and were you just doing meal delivery in New York

Danielle DuBoise 8:45
then? It started in New York, and we were cooking ourselves, delivering ourselves, everything ourselves.

Kara Goldin 8:53
Did you have any idea that you were creating a category? I’ve heard who, what, where talk about Sakara as the company that put healthy meal delivery on on the map. But did you did you know that you were doing this? I mean, it clearly sounds like you were trying to create a company or create products that helped others because you had been helped, right? And and yeah. But did you know that you were creating? I I often say with the company that I founded and and built hint that if I would have known like that’s so scary to think that you’re creating an entirely new category in our case unsweetened flavored water but you know I knew I was creating a company but I had no idea that I was like really creating an entirely new segment.

Danielle DuBoise 9:43
Yeah, I mean, I think we knew a lot of people wouldn’t get it at first. So you know, like when we started to tell people around us what we were doing that didn’t get it, it’s like, oh, people don’t want salads delivered. People want pizza delivered, or. You know, you shouldn’t call yourselves Sa Kara. You should call yourselves Healthy Meal Delivery NYC, and and so you know, I don’t think in the moment we’re like, no, we’re re we’re reinventing or redefining a category. It was more just like we knew that in order to help people eat this way, we had to inspire them to do so, and that inspiration came from, of course, providing a really superior product that was delicious and beautiful and organic, but it also came from the brand. And so, this brand being the permission to feel sexy, the permission to become something you feel so good about, the permission to, you know, we have this notion of like eat clean, play dirty. So, for me, so much of my life was spent dieting and restricting in the the cycle of guilt and shame about what I had eaten and therefore what I should eat later. And so at Sakara, this idea of eat clean, play dirty is like I eat clean a lot because I feel really good when I do. But I’m also the first to grab a glass of wine and a bowl of French fries with girlfriends when I’m out, and so this idea of what balance actually looks like it means like, you know, eat clean, play dirty, like have fun. A healthy life is not without joy. It’s the exact opposite. How did you come up with the name Sakara? You know, it really found us. It was a word that we had read about. We were very much into yoga at the time, and we’d read about, and it really resonated with us because it was Sakara is the manifestation of Brahman, so bringing sort of what is in our minds into something physical. So our hopes and dreams. Like for me, I would hope and dream about what it would feel like one day to feel really good in my body, to feel really proud of my body, to feel very sexy in my body. That was a dream that I just thought would never happen. And so, for me, Sakara and eating this way was really what brought that dream into life. And now, 15 years later, I mean, I know 1000s of people would say the same.

Kara Goldin 11:59
What were you doing before launching Sakara, and what was Whitney doing as well? Did you have experience in this CPG and foods? What were you doing before?

Danielle DuBoise 12:10
No, no, not at all. I mean, we started it when we were we were 24 when we started the business, so I was fresh out of school because I studied pre med and then nutrition. Whitney worked on Wall Street for you know a couple years, and you know yeah we were very young. We had absolutely no experience. We had no idea what we were doing. We just knew that we we felt really strongly that we wanted to help people have a similar experience that we had to to have this toolkit that felt so sort of ominous and like maybe you could never really have or understand how to transform your health, but we had figured it out for ourselves and we wanted to offer that to people. So we just, you know, it’s an awful saying, but the saying is like, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? And so we didn’t go, which is what I see so many entrepreneurs do now. Which is, they spend a year thinking of the idea, and then they spend a year building the brand and the deck, and then then and then they go out to raise money. It’s like we just started with one client, and then that one client turned into five. And as we went from one to five, we were still building our website and still building our brand, and still, and it was like it all kind of happened together. And if we had waited for perfection, I don’t think we would have made it. As you were growing, Sakara, I always share with people. I mean, it’s this incredible brand that you built with so many incredible products. What was the maximum number of SKUs that you had at one time, probably like 40, maybe 50. Yeah, it’s a lot of SKUs. It’s a lot of management, and you learn along the way. You know, you learn why maybe it’s too hard to have 45 SKUs and what that means for the business, and and how do you dedicate fair time to each of those SKUs so that people, because we also aren’t making products that are very easily understood. So, like to understand what our probiotic does for you, you actually have to like read it and and have to you know, or there’s just this trust, which also happens a lot at Sakara. There’s just this trust. Okay, it’s the Sakara probiotic. I trust it. Let’s go. There are clients like that, but for the most part, most people want to have some understanding, and so we’re not just making like a scarf or a cashmere sweater that you put in the box and you send, and you have an understanding of what it is without really many questions. This is like metabolism gummies. African contain African spice fruit. What does African spice fruit do for your metabolisms? It takes a lot of education, and so we learned quickly that like focusing was actually better, so that we can really give due airtime to each product because each one is innovated on so with such specificity that it deserves you know that moment to really help clients understand what each product actually. Is doing for you.

Kara Goldin 15:01
How do you think the consumer has changed since 2012? As you’ve grown your company and you’ve seen competition and lots of different things being discussed in health and wellness overall, but how do you think this consumer has really changed since you started Sakara in 2012,

Danielle DuBoise 15:23
I’m not sure the core behavior of consumers has changed as much as the trends that inspire action of those consumers. So, you know this, I’m sure very well. Like when you’re in it long enough, you see the trends just cycle through, and you see, oh, okay, now we’re coming to the end of this protein trend that was the exact same as the Atkin South Beach trend. Like it’s all same, same, different title, and you know now we’re moving into this fiber trend, and so we’ve made really sort of specific choices about not changing anything about our offerings based on trends. We’re based on nutrition science. We’re based on 1000s of years of how people have eaten, from you know Taoists all the way through Ayurvedic traditions, etc. And we’re not going to change it just because there’s a new trendy way to eat, and I think that sometimes that can be hard, and you really have to like be strong about your choice, and then just trust that the cycle always comes back. That you know when you know it’s a cycle that’s maybe not in your favor, you have to really understand how to educate, and when it’s a cycle that is in your favor, then you have to really understand how to innovate. So, I think that at this point, 15 years in, I’m really grateful for the wisdom that is. You know, consumers still want the same thing; they want to look good and they want to feel really good, and they, you know, there’s some new key terms like longevity, etc. But it’s all the same. People want to look good and feel good, and they want to know how, and that’s still what we do, and it’s and it’s what we’ve always done, and we’ll continue to do.

Kara Goldin 17:14
So, how has? I mean, you mentioned that you’re still Sakara, you’re still the same, but you’ve you’ve launched different products along the way, including the metabolism bite is a little bit different than when you first started in 2012. Can you talk a little bit about like the selections and sort of what you’ve decided to to do different?

Danielle DuBoise 17:37
Well, so there’s a few things. So our core is our fresh food delivered, but what we’ve learned is that not everybody wants to be on fresh meals delivered every day. Not everybody can be, but that we have an expertise in nutrition science, in sourcing, in microbiome science, and getting really high quality raw goods, and so we innovated in a few categories that we knew people were already looking for from us. One is boosted metabolism is probably one of the top two reasons people come to us. They want to feel like their engines are revving, and so metabolism powder was actually one of our very early launches and became a cult favorite. It’s a chocolaty powder that helps your body burn through calories more quickly, and the metabolism gummy is similar, but kind of comes at it from a different direction, and that it it changes your your cravings, so you you you recycle through dopamine and serotonin differently. So you’re not like look like if you’re somebody that has like a a very intense sugar craving or cravings in general, the metabolism gummy can be really helpful. So it’s the same category that people always wanted from us. It’s just a new way for us to participate in it with the consumer.

Kara Goldin 19:05
So, for any founder who’s listening about you know building a brand, like how do you get it out there? I I always say to founders who ask me, I mean, if you’re if you’re still standing longer than the others. I mean, you’re doing something right, right? And so it’s. I think that it doesn’t necessarily take you know buying your way into whether it’s through influencers or you know you have to be able to have a product that people want to buy again and again and get that velocity going. So, what would you say to anybody asking you about this? Like, how how are you guys still able to keep going and and build this company the way that you have?

Danielle DuBoise 19:56
Yeah, Whitney actually always says that like stamina is 90. Percent of it that you just keep showing up and you keep figuring out a way, and that life will throw wild things your way. I mean, all of us had to deal with COVID, but as you know, we’re vertically integrated, so we own all of our own manufacturing, and we have over 100,000 square feet of manufacturing facility, and so during COVID, that was very wild to navigate. And you figure it out, and you keep going, and you just like there’s just something in Whitney and I where we don’t give up, and I think that’s extremely important. And I think you know, for entrepreneurs, it’s like I think there’s this idea these days, or like you can kind of do a few things and make it. And I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions: is that entrepreneurship can be easy these days. I think it’s actually harder than it was when Whitney and I started Sakara. The you know anyone can decide to open a business, and so how much time, effort, love, attention, focus you’re going to give it over a long period of time? I think is probably the biggest indicator of success.

Kara Goldin 21:10
So, what do you think has been one of the hardest moments in Sakara in your journey with Sakara that you’ve had to face? You mentioned COVID. I think yeah, COVID was so hard for everyone. But you’ve, I’m, I’m curious if there’s something that you really had to face and have the stamina to be able to get through it. But you, but you obviously have lived to tell. So I’m just curious what was what was that hard point?

Danielle DuBoise 21:44
There’s been so many, and they come with different sort of water levels. I mean, some of the earlier times where you’re like, “What am I doing? Is this ever going to be a business? Does this count? If I only have 40 clients, is that a business? Like you’re just constantly questioning yourself, and then you get to this level where it’s sort of I don’t know what the level was for us, but it was like oh this is working, so we stopped asking if we have a business and then kind of moved into other things we had to navigate. But I’d say overall COVID was probably one of the bigger things. I mean when you have a very complex supply chain like we do, we got deemed a necessary business because we were delivering ready-to-eat food, you know nobody was going to the grocery store or out to dinner, and so having fresh meals delivered to your door was really important. But that also meant that you know we had to deliver many, many more meals than we had pre-COVID, and so adjusting appropriately while also keeping our team safe and six foot distancing and all of that-it was just a what? There was an endless list of things, new things to navigate on top of also doing what we had always done for the business. That was just incredibly complex. But I will say that team that we had, kind of in that earlier COVID days, especially on the production side, is still together. It’s

Kara Goldin 23:07
awesome.

Danielle DuBoise 23:08
There’s something about being in the trenches together and really having to face what you just can’t even fathom. It really bonds people and it really bonds a team. So though it was really really hard, it also offered a lot of trust. That team has a lot of trust in one another now. That’s awesome. You’ve moved from operating the company day to day as the CEO to executive chair. What did you have to learn about that transition that maybe surprised you a bit? Our board. I remember when when Whitney and I came to the board and said like I think it’s time like this business is gargantuan and you know we don’t get to even do what we’re really good at anymore because we’re so busy managing day to day. Their biggest piece of advice was like you have to let the CEO make decisions. It can’t be like let’s hire a CEO to like deal with the day to day stuff, but then we’re going to kind of be micromanaging them. And they were like because if there are failures, it has to be single point accountability. It can’t be like well, it wasn’t clear when Danielle kind of had it and I kind of had it, and so I was really grateful for that advice to like hire someone that you can truly just hand over the wheel to, and obviously being a founder, you know we still had weekly calls. It wasn’t like we were just acting like a board member. We still had weekly calls. We were still involved, and we still are today across innovation. You know what products we’re going to make, so we’re still highly involved. So we were talking about this early earlier, but I do think founder in and of itself is a role, and it might change depending on you know what you like to do for the business. But just making sure that the business stays true to its values that you created in the first place. I think is something and I still take very seriously. So I think you have to hire somebody that can really you can hand over the wheel to, and that you have a very good relationship with, so that they want your constant feedback and thoughts, and look that you can work with each other in a way that is synergistic and cohesive, while also letting the CEO run the company and really be the person that everyone looks to for answers. When you’re used to being that person, it’s hard to do that.

Kara Goldin 25:31
Yeah, definitely. And and is Whitney? She moved into that role as well, so she’s not operating either.

Danielle DuBoise 25:39
That’s right. We’re both we’re co-chairs.

Kara Goldin 25:41
That’s awesome. And if you are sitting here 10 years from now, what’s the one thing that I guess you’re very proud of in in the journey of building Sakara? I mean, you should be very very proud of everything that you’ve built to date. But when you look back and say, “I can’t believe we’ve done this, is there is there something that you’re so often consumers don’t see the what’s going on in the background that you’ve been able to kind of get through so many hurdles, and I get it, and it is like what is something that you just really believe? Danielle was like, “Wow, I’m really, really like can’t believe that we’ve been able to do this.

Danielle DuBoise 26:35
I mean, I think wellness has become something that people think is reserved for people that can afford it or a certain set, and that really breaks my heart because that’s not how it should be. It’s not what it was meant to be, and so one of our core pillars is like helping people just get really fresh plants on their plate every single day, and I am really proud that we’ve been able to do that for millions. And as I think about the next 10 years, I think about new ways to do that at new price points. And I’d be really proud if we feel like we can make some products that make it both very accessible and very convenient to help families provide greens, to help mothers, parents provide greens for their families.

Kara Goldin 27:30
I love it. Well, Danielle, thank you so much for joining today. It was so thank you so nice to meet you finally. I’ve heard so many great things about you, and and obviously have watched your journey, you and Whitney, and it’s really awesome. And for everyone listening, check out Sakara and follow along on Danielle on on social as well as Sakara, and see what the team is is building next. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you so much for coming on. I really, really appreciate

Danielle DuBoise 28:03
it. Thank you so much for having us and for being such a an example and a champion of female entrepreneurs.

Kara Goldin 28:09
Thank you so much, and thanks again, everyone, for listening. Goodbye for now. 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. 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.

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