 Whoever can make really good healthy ice cream, that's like the holy grail. And boost the protein, which is the most expensive macronutrient on a meal built. Then you get to possibly save a couple of cents on a meal. And across an industry that serves billions of meals per year, this can make a financial impact. You make them healthier. They can think better. They can be more competitive. I'm just saying in a way, young, you're an amazing patriot. Public school food in America is due for a change. There have been multiple separate studies done over decades to prove that a poor diet at school does negatively affect a kid's cognitive ability to learn. Although in recent years, some have pushed initiatives, none have really changed the system until now. So for this episode of Upside Mindset, we sit down with Yong, who is a major disruptor in an industry that doesn't change much, the public food services system. He's recreated a classic snack that is so delicious and so healthy. It's served in almost a thousand schools and to D1 athletes nationwide. And it could be the spark needed to save the kids. Let's hear them out. Welcome everybody to a brand new episode of Upside Mindset, our success focus series where we're talking to smart, interesting people who are changing their industry, making money, adding value to the world and making their parents proud. Shout out, we got Yong Bai in the building, founder and CEO of Xfrost Ice Cream. What's up everyone? I'm Yong, I am the CEO of Xfrost. Thanks so much for having me here. It's amazing, it's very exciting. And I'm really looking forward to sharing our story with everyone. While we go into describing what Xfrost is actually doing right now because I think there's a lot of questions, it's changing the public school food system. That's right. Or it's a step in the right direction and which is a big deal as a lot of people know. I'm trying the strawberry flavor right now. This has 10 grams of protein and only 100 calories and it's delicious. Literally, I can barely tell it tastes any different than other ice cream, you know? That's the whole point. Ice cream? What do you got? I have mint chip. So actually, I designed the recipes and it took me like four years to do it because I don't have a food background. I was a pianist, engineering, finance, investment banking sort of stuff. So literally you were an Asian kid before. So now this is why you know the ice cream is good. So real quick to explain what Xfrost is doing and this is a company that I'm now a part of, me and David are part of it and I believe in it so much because what you guys are doing, it's not a product that you can actually find in stores. It's not being sold on shelves, not at the Walgreens, not anywhere that a customer can actually buy. Not even online, correct? Correct. So the way it is, it's healthy ice cream, it's low fat, high protein and it's being sold to schools to fit the nutritional needs of those schools, right? Schools, nursing homes, hospitals, just this massive market called Food Service that you and I don't see day to day. Right, and then now that this deliciously nutrition packed ice cream is being served to a lot of college athletes, right? You said what, Ohio State, probably hundreds of public schools across the nation now and expanding. 13 states worth of public schools. Dude, that's crazy. It's, congrats. People want healthier foods for schools but as we all know, a lot of the public school food, especially after COVID when they stopped making it in the house, a lot of the food got really bad. There was a whole bunch of TikToks that went viral of kids complaining about this horrific looking food but this is part of like the change of like good delicious food that's going to meet all the health needs. So let's talk about it, man. I guess we mentioned your Asian background of you being a good student. I guess how does a person who's majoring in economics who's studying piano and playing piano, how do they end up doing ice cream? Cause this is not the path that you chose. Like you weren't always passionate about ice cream since the age of 10, right? Like how did you get into this? So there's two parts of this. When I was a kid in Chinese culture, when you're a baby, they put a bunch of stuff in front of you and whatever you pick up is you're going to be your future profession, right? You've heard about this. So hilariously, I picked up a spatula when I was a kid and I didn't know about this. They had that as an option? Yeah, they had that as an option. Some parents wouldn't put that as an option. I know one. Maybe they thought we're going to move to the States and I'll run the Chinese restaurant, Golden Walk, right? Shout out to all the Golden Walks out there. Yeah, the Great Wall, yeah. So I was an athlete all throughout my life. I was a sprinter, played a little bit of football. I lost a couple of pounds since then but healthy ice cream is one of those things that's just impossible to make, right? We have healthy cookies, healthy brownies, healthy muffins, healthy all this but there's like five ingredients in really good ice cream. There's cream, sugar, milk, some flavoring and maybe eggs if it's like a French vanilla or a custard based ice cream. So if you take out the fat and the sugar and ice cream, that's like 40% of the ingredients that are gone, right? That's really hard to recreate but whoever can make really good, healthy ice cream, that's like the holy grail if you can make really good, healthy ice cream. And there are some healthy ice creams on the market right now that pitch themselves as healthy, right? I mean, we can give a shout out to them or, you know. But I do think a lot of the flavor, even like halo top, which I've eaten quite a lot of, it's like still kind of icy, it doesn't have that milky flavor, right? That's kind of missing. I think that there's a, if you look on the packaging, you only get to call yourself ice cream if you fit a certain chemical profile of like fat solids and milk solids and that sort of stuff. It has to have cream in it. It has to, yeah, it has to have a certain composition. Otherwise you have to call it a frozen dessert, which is what you see on those packaging frozen dessert. If it's a water based, right? And they've done a lot, like all these brands, they've done a lot to convince, you know, consumers like me and you that that is something that's possible but the next step would be for the product itself to really start to improve, right? There was a time when we didn't think that personal computers should be in every home. So someone had to convince them of that concept first, right? But then after that, you have companies, you know, that started to make better products and that's where we are now. Okay. So, you know, we pay tribute to those companies that have done that. Right, so you're just like, you're a later version of the earlier versions of healthy ice cream. Correct. And now you're just a later iteration. Usually later iterations they are, they've worked out a lot of the kinks. They usually get better and better, just like the later iPhones are more advanced, right? This all makes sense. Real quick, Yon, can you explain the difference about your product and how you're not going to the retail sector right now? You're not trying to be on the shelves selling to people like me, even like, I can't even buy it off your website right now but you're going to schools. Right, I wouldn't have- And most products are not like this. Most products are not like this. Most products are, you know, make 10 jars of jam and sell them for $20 each and then scale to be bigger and bigger but start at a very, very high margin and sell fewer quantities of it. This product, I designed it to scale from the beginning so that at a certain point, past the tipping point, it becomes a snowball effect that you cannot stop once it starts rolling down the hill to become bigger and bigger, once it reaches critical mass. That's food service for us. So that's a new business model for I think a lot of people watching is like, you don't have to sell something on the shelves to even make a lot of money or to make a big impact. You can actually- It's by no means easy because- And this is less common of course. It's probably, there's more stores than there are schools. There are not more schools than stores necessarily but it is a very consistent market. You show up to school eight months out of the year and you eat every day. You live in a nursing home for the year and you eat every single day, three meals a day, right? So food service doesn't go away. It doesn't necessarily depend on what the financial markets are doing. It doesn't depend on if people think it's a cool product or it's out of trend, in trend. Correct, people need to eat. And if it just happens to be a little cooler than the rest that happens to taste a little bit better then you kind of get all the attention. We are the star at every food show that we go to for schools. So, Yung, can you tell me real quick about what food a student eats affects their ability to study because there is an obesity problem in America. People have talked about this is not like new. I'm not breaking news here. That's right. But the obesity has to come from oftentimes activity and the food that they're eating. So how does the food that they eat affect how they can study and how they can focus even? So early childhood and not just food, right? Just all areas of life, whatever you do as a kid has a huge impact on later on in your life, right? Relationships, food, physical development, musical ability, right? Languages, it's very easy to learn as a kid but it's harder, it's not very easy but it's way harder as an adult, right? You don't just pick up a new thing. That's the exact same thing with health. You don't get to come back when you're 25 and say I'm gonna undo whatever choices that I made when I was 10. Yeah, you don't get to undo the first 20 years of your life. Yeah, those are choices that you made that are now seen as either consequences or benefits. Choices you made individually or your parents or your environment, whatever was available, right? Right, so eating right, there are lots of studies. There's a pretty good famous one from Berkeley where there's three areas in academics where it affects you. So one is cognition. So actual kind of understanding of things but the second one is physical development. So like seeing, hearing. Right, you need to eat good food. Well, that's why the age-old adage of like, oh you eat carrots, apples, eggs, which is brain food, right? I mean these are all kind of healthy foods so obviously this is why, but I don't know if they have actually that thing to do with carrots and seeing, like I heard that thing is like not really food. You're growing, right? You need the right ingredients to grow and you don't just stop growing in sixth grade. And the other one is memory. So all of these obviously affect your ability to learn something very well, right? You have to be able to recognize the thing that you're practicing, whether it's a sport or a subject that you're studying. So basically if these kids are not getting nutrients, vitamins, healthy food early on, it is affecting everything from remembering things to growing their bodies, learning obviously physically, learning motor skills, yeah. Yes, it's not just us, right? As a food company, I mean even in behavioral economics you will find tons of studies that say early health choices overall will affect economic outcomes or later in your life how your health develops, but what's at the very base of a lot of health choices is we eat, right? And if you spend a third of your life or of your day in a school as a kid, that's a huge impact on your early development and subsequently later on in life. So is X-Frost kind of like diet ice cream? Is it like what Diet Coke did for Coca-Cola where it basically gave people some of the same vibe, it gave you the same bubbles, the malt flavor, but kind of less of the guilt? No. No, it's not. No. Okay, so how would you put it? Healthier alternatives like what you see in supermarkets for healthy ice creams or diet versions of foods are things that you can eat. This ice cream gives a protein boost that's menued and boosts the nutritional profile of a meal that now you should eat. So it's different because one time on one thing, I'm just trying to drink Diet Coke because I just don't want the calories. Correct. But as a little trick to myself, but now you're saying the ice cream actually has so much protein in it that you should be eating this ice cream that it's worth the calories that you get from it. That's what. Which is not that many calories, it's 100 calories for a little. Right, so that's what. But you should get it, it's worth the calories. That's what dietitians and a lot of institutions basically say. So you can make the argument that X-Frost is actually part of a balanced meal. Correct. Not while Diet Coke is actually just a complete extra. Correct. A balanced meal and it might actually save on the cost of meal, which is very important in say like a nursing home, right? Because if you can replace both the dessert and boost the protein, which is the most expensive macro nutrient on a meal built, then you get to possibly save a couple of cents on a meal. And across an industry that serves billions of meals per year, this can make a financial impact. Crazy. So we explained how important it is obviously for kids to eat healthier food early on, right? Cause it helps almost every aspect of their life. But what is the situation in a lot of public schools right now in America? Because there's obviously a lot of complaints. I've seen videos about kids talking about this horrible lunch that they had or like Michelle Obama years ago was trying to revamp the whole school system, Jamie Oliver, everything. So I guess what is the situation now as it stands? The situation now, obviously COVID has played a huge, you know, had a huge impact. Negative impact. Negative impact on a lot of industry schools included. But there was always this overarching problem in schools even before COVID, which is, it's so big. There's over a hundred thousand schools in the U.S., right? So in order for someone to supply all of that, you have to be massive, which means the companies that get to supply the foods to schools and nursing homes and hospitals, there are huge chains of buildings. They also have to be massive. So these are companies that have been around for decades, sometimes a century. And if they have been around for that long and they have such a huge monopoly or whatever you want to call it, market share on this sector, it means that not a lot of new players get to come and play game. Right. It's hard to update. It's hard to improve. It's hard to add new items, right? Change the food up. It's hard to update an entire railway that's already been built, right? So you don't have startups that come in here. You don't have venture capital. All these innovative companies, it's hard for them to even get a chance, right? To introduce a new product. We have not met anyone else in this sector that's even remotely close to us. We are the only ones with a seat at the table right now. How did Xfrost get to this level where you are making ice cream in your kitchen, you're making protein-filled ice cream, you realize that the schools is a great market, you can help a lot of kids, you can help change the food system, but how does Xfrost now get into this old institutional system? So Xfrost, which was originally called Flexfrost because we were in athletics, but it's Xfrost now, we moved to Columbus, Ohio and I partnered with a guy named Craig, who is an early partner founder of the company, with another guy named Album, who is also Chinese American, and we three worked out of a commercial kitchen and basically made all the product by hand and delivered it locally to Columbus schools and they bought it directly from us and they were able to move it and the kids liked it so much that they connected us to the wider food distributor network and said you need to be in the large distributors so that they can deliver on the weekly food trucks to us because there's a limit to how much you can actually sell to a school directly as a manufacturer, right? So you have to figure all that out and get into distribution and food service. So are you guys like one of the first companies that you know of that kind of did it this way? That is making this much headway right now, being this successful, being in this many schools but started off like that in that process? We are so far the only ones that we know of and we are so far the only ones that our distributors can confirm that have done it this way where we basically faked a meeting with one of the largest food distributors in order to just get a sampling and sneak in and then once they convinced themselves that they were too busy and we weren't actually on that calendar, oh, we got the meeting. Wow, so you snuck in the little healthy ice cream and you guys like, hey, we got a meeting here. Yeah, and they said, wait a second. Try the ice cream. So we said, look, we have a meeting here for a sampling and they go, you're not on the calendar. And we're like, well, we're, I mean, we're here for that, you know, sampling. And then after like 10 seconds, she's like, okay, we're so busy these days, you know, we must just forgot, you know, come on up and we'll do the sampling. Shout out to that assistant who got tricked by you guys. So it was Craig. Craig are one of the early founders and partners. He was the one who got that meeting. Craig must be quite charming. Yeah, shout out to him. If you don't see a lot of product that has this type of premium design and packaging in schools, but we're there, it's proof that it can be done on a costing basis that can be affordable to these institutions that have the lowest budget with their users that have the lowest budget, right? So if we can do it, that means that it can be done on a larger scale across several food categories, at least I think so. And across many different, you know, people, corporations or entities working together, you can transform and improve food overall. But we're just that stepping stone. We're just here to say, look, we think we can do it with something very simple. You understand if you like ice cream in like three seconds or less, right? It can't be complicated. Because you're not gonna remember anything that's over a couple of seconds in sixth grade. So I wanna ask you, where is Xfrost in the country? Is it at every school? Are schools in California, do they see it? If schools, my school district in Seattle, can we get it? Or is it more like, what's the market right now? Did you start in the Midwest? You started in Ohio, so Ohio is probably your first market, where is it at? Like where, what schools? So this year, fall of 2020 is the biggest ramp that we've ever gone through. So we started in schools in 2017, but this is by hand manually. 2019 at the tail end of 2019 for the last couple of months of the year was when we first started working with the distributors just in Ohio. Kind of like a food services of America. I remember this big truck that had like a star with a smiley face. Like the Cisco's and Gordon Foods. This type thing, yeah. The trucks that you see everywhere, but you don't really know where they're going. You don't know what they're carrying. You know they're carrying like unbranded food. Yeah, I mean they're branded, but we don't see those brands oftentimes in retail, right? They're going to institutions. But a couple of months in to that, COVID shuts down schools for basically up until now on the food service side. This fall is the first fall since 2020 shutdown of K-12 where food service is trying to resume back to normal. So we went from basically Columbus schools, about 16 schools in Columbus to 13 states worth of a footprint. Stretching from Wisconsin through the Midwest, Carolina's, Tennessee, Georgia, all the way into the Southeast, Florida. And we experience something like a 5X growth every semester which is every four to five months or so because there is just no other thing in institutions like ours. And we are a menued ice cream, right? So I said earlier, the USDA considers ice cream an extra, but at nursing homes and sometimes schools, they'll just decide that on this day of the month or the week, it's on the menu now. So it's included in the meal. This is the first ice cream that's done that. Oh, okay. Because of the nutritional profile. And people don't want to eat the other thing that dietitian in a nursing home goes, okay, look, this will get you whatever protein boost you need. Calories a little bit, but it's not gonna overdo anything. You now eat this four times a week. And I'm sure at the nursing home, I don't think they're mad about it because the old people like ice cream. That's actually a problem that they'll eat buckets of regular ice cream because they don't want to chew the regular meal. So X-frost is right now heavy in the Midwest, like the heart of America. I mean, they consider Ohio the heartland of America, or part of the heartland of America. It kind of is due to logistics for sure. So X-frost is ice cream, but it's almost functioning as like a protein nutrition filled like smoothie would be. It's more like in that lane. Yeah, they'll make- It's like a health smoothie. It's definitely what you can find at like a fuel station at a D1 school. So they'll make smoothies out of that. Pureed diets in healthcare, they'll do that. And I think that even in after-school programs like athletic school programs in high schools, they'll make shakes with it. That's what they did at Equinox, by the way. They used the vanilla and the chocolate to make all kinds of smoothies. I have a question. So how is it that you, how do you make X-frost taste good and not just like ice cream with a whole bunch of protein powder put into it? Like, what's the technology behind that? Is there something that I'm missing that it doesn't taste like protein powder or like you're able to mask it or I don't know what it is? Ice cream as simple as it is, is one of those foods that's chemically one of the most complicated because you'll be able to tell if it's done incorrectly. Little ice crystals that form from one free stall cycle, you can tell. It's not exactly a solution because over time it'll separate. The particles will separate. So it's a suspension. It's a dispersion. There's this thing that I use called trial and error through thousands of iterations, just making, you know, I basically learned how to make regular ice cream and I reverse engineered it gram by gram and started to replace every little bit with alternatives. And I probably made about 300 or 400,000 of these by hand from scratch over the first couple of years. Okay, so but I guess what is the protein? The protein is a combination of milk protein isolate and whey isolate, very clean, very high concentration, no sweeteners and no flavoring at it. So it's as pure as it gets and it's a balance of slow metabolizing and fast metabolizing protein. So we want that. It's not just 30% milk concentrates or something like that. Man, so I, Yung, I actually learned a lot from this. And I already knew about the company, obviously, I'm part of the company, but even talking at lengths about it, I learned a lot and there's new things to me that open my eyes to it. All right, everybody, that wraps it up for this episode of Upside Mindset where we talk to smart, interesting, successful individuals that are disrupting their industry, making their parents proud, making some money. Yung, it was so cool to talk to you about this in depth, because even though I knew about the company, I'm still learning even new things from this whole conversation and hopefully everybody out there learned a lot. You talked about a different business model, selling to institutions instead of retail, of how this ice cream is so healthy, it's almost becoming an actual health food that you should eat because it's worth the calories now. And so it's not like other ice creams out there, it's more like Greek yogurt. And those things kind of just really stuck with me. So I guess any last things you want to say to people out there that are watching, maybe they're like, man, I wanna, like, I can imagine that there are a lot of people who might identify with lots of different things that we may have said here, right? Because we all militate on behalf of K-12. We all, no one wants schools to be worse if you think about it, right? But I'm basically breaking this problem down into very simple terms and saying we want to close the achievement gap. I think we start to look at something much more basic, which is closing the nutrition gap. In school cafeterias, 50% of the cost of a meal goes to just labor to make that meal in the school cafeteria, right? Which means that there's only 50% left to the quality of the actual ingredients. So when people go, well, how come we threw money at K-12 and it didn't improve schools? You didn't throw it at the right thing. You have to put money towards food service and cafeterias in schools to then offset some of the wage costs to build a meal, to improve the food, which improves cognition, retention, memory, all this for student health, and then maybe you can start to improve education. Man, that's so cool. I think it's like what you're doing for kids in the school system and the fact that you're born in China, you came here and a lot of people wouldn't expect a person like you to be such a disruptor in the public school food services industry where you are like actually, actually in a long term sense, making American school kids more competitive because you're making them healthier. You make them healthier, they can think better, they can be more competitive. I'm just saying in a way, Yung, you're an amazing patriot. I don't know if you think about it that way. I do. I mean, yeah, I do. No, you're doing something good for America. I'm an American citizen, right? You're doing something really good for the American school system. You can tell that a lot in the world is changing now. We've experienced that over the last two or three years. The current generation in K-12 will be handed a very different world than what you and I grew up with during the 90s and the early 2000s. They should have as much resources and preparation and all the help that they can get if they're gonna be the ones that decide which direction we're going. It's a good point, man. Schools is making the future more healthy. That's you. That's what you're doing. I'm trying. We try to do the same thing as far as YouTube videos. Anyways, all right, everybody. Thank you so much. We're gonna wrap it up here. Thank you so much for watching that episode of Upside Mindset. Again, please hit that like button. Click subscribe. Check out other episodes. We'll have it all in a playlist. Yung by the great ice cream man of America right now. Making ice cream healthy and delicious for all the schools out there. So it's great to sit down and talk with you. Again, I'll leave all the links down to Xfrost, Flexfrost down below. Thank you so much for watching and until next time, we out. Peace.