 This is, Start a Store Front. Parents will always want what's best for their children. Many go to great lengths to give their child just the tiniest leg up if that will mean success down the line. Whether that be after school tutoring, private music lessons, or waking up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning to drive your kids to practice, it's not difficult to find examples of parents making their child's development a priority. But what about that child's nutrition? Our guest today is Mark Brooks, co-founder of Brainiac Foods. Mark, together with his co-founder Jonathan Wolfson, found that certain nutrients were essential to early brain development. Notably, choline and omega-3. The problem is, it's not always easy to get your child to ingest foods that contain these nutrients. So the two founders decided to put a twist on a product that was already a hit in school lunchboxes. Yogurt. By adding choline and omega-3 to yogurt, they were able to support early childhood brain development without asking parents, or kids, to sacrifice taste for growth. So listen in as we cover everything from why they're not trying to be the number one applesauce company, why food is the first line of defense when it comes to health care, and why it's not nutritious if it's not eaten. Now, on to the episode. All right, welcome to the podcast. On today's show, we're talking to Mark from Brainiac Foods. Thanks for joining. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here during Expo West Week, which is insanity. It's a good way to start. It's a good way to start. What was the first start, your first position? So you meet Jonathan, you have this crazy idea, you both have three kids, the most unreasonable consumer of all time, children, and you say, here's what's missing. What did you see in the market that you wanted to bring? You know, Jonathan had the original vision, born out of circumstance. I will say he had an advantage, his dad's a neurologist. So whereas, you know, so his third, when his little boy was born, was diagnosed with failure to thrive, wasn't able to breastfeed. So then the question came, how do we get the nutrition in? And having a background in food and nutrition sent him, speaking to the experts, speaking to, you know, his dad, his brother-in-law's a neurologist as well. So realized that there's this part of what you're trying to get is not only, you know, calcium or protein, but it's also things like omega-3s, right, for the brain. And he was told to relax about a little book and, you know, go find good infant formula. Those guys have been doing a great job. But then the legacy question that kicked this off was, what are you doing for, like, yourself and your older kids? They're eating lots of salmon and trout, right? And he's like, no, they're eating pizza and chicken and fries. Chicken and fries? Yeah. And so as a while, then it sent him asking the questions and as a serial entrepreneur came up with this idea, we did the research and found that on average we get about 20% of what we need for the primary constituent of our brain, omega-3 DHA. And when you see that and you've been in this industry, the light bulb goes off and you're like, well, hold on. Maybe, maybe that's a gap that we could fill. Maybe we could put those things, put those nutrients into foods that my kids would eat. So I have three kids, about five, eight and 10. They are very real consumers, right? They won't eat what they want to eat and they will eat. And even if they will eat it today, they probably won't eat it tomorrow. I love strawberries. I hate strawberries. And so how do you deal with that? And so we decided that was a pretty good challenge. And Jonathan roped me in and we took off. And was the solution always omega-3? We first go to science. There's an awful lot in this space. And since we started back, I mean, the company started at the end of 2017, first product launched middle of 2019. Back then the idea of what you eat can affect your brain was very foreign, just the sort of space we love. Especially for kids, I feel like. Yeah, so there we are. We're like, definitely got to eat your protein, got to get your calcium for the bone, eat your carrots, you're going to get good eyesight, not really knowing that that's lutein. But the idea, even for me when Jonathan brought this to me, was what I eat can impact my brain. Well, yeah, I've got a coffee here, right? It's the morning. It's not my first. Because it's an instant brain performance. So we know that. And so then when you realize that brain's made of and connected by nutrition that you have to eat, your body doesn't produce it. Omega-3 DHA, there's another one called choline. Those are in everything we do. And then there's some others. But we start and finish with the science. There's a bunch of stuff that we'll find that there's emerging perspectives, which will turn into science, hopefully good clinicals. And then you'll see us put those in. Aside from fish, where else does Omega-3 naturally occur? Like what food groups are we looking at here? Yeah, it really, you can get it from two places and back prior to this venture, where Jonathan and I worked previously, we were actually taking algae. He was a pioneer in the field of taking algae and producing oils. Algae actually makes Omega-3 DHA and other Omega-3s. It's kind of a single cell plant, if you like. And it produces an oil in the same way that like sunflower or olive oil does. And it's fish that go eat algae or plankton or other things that accumulate Omega-3s and then we eat the fish, right? So fish don't make the Omega-3s. They eat them in these in the sort of single cell plankton and then pass it up the food chain. So we can get it from two places. We can get it fish oil or we can get it straight from algae which is just made in these big vats. Is that kind of in a ha moment? Because I would imagine that maybe tastes better than the fish oil because that's the next problem. The next problem is we used to take multivitamins and he quit on me because he didn't like the fish oil. It tastes terribly good. Alone, stand alone maybe. Or maybe, you know, if there was a food brand that put it inside for you. But look, it's down to the quality of the fish oil. It's down to if that fish oil has gone bad, you know, the smell of fish is exactly the smell of oxidized Omega-3 oil. So which one is it? So it's oxidized oils, right? That taste awful, you know, fish burps, which makes launching a mainstream food product that you don't get the things you associate with bad supplements. So that means it's bad if you get like a fish burp? No, it's natural. I mean, look, that's fine. If you, as you taste it, you're tasting something that really fills off. There are ways in fish oil where, you know, they can extract from certain types of fish and it's better quality. So in the supplement space, there are those that you would recommend and those, you know, which don't have such, you know, good manufacturing standards. And then from an algae source, if it's been exposed to oxygen, it's going to be the same. What was your first product? So now that you have the concept of science is there, everything seems directionally correct. What's the first thing that you guys decided to launch into? The first thesis, which started with kids, looking at, you know, Jonathan's three and my three, was what do they eat every day? How can we make this a staple? So our first thesis and also because of what we just said about these things like oxidize and they can go off and you have to put them in an environment that can work because there's a reason it hasn't been done before. It's like really hard. It's really hard to put it into a food product. It tastes good. So we chose yogurt because if you think about yogurt, it's already a sort of thick fat source. So putting in another fat source, there are folks like Horizon that had already done a nice job of putting DHA into milk. So they sort of pioneered in that space. They put a little bit in and we wanted to put a lot in. So we started with yogurt, worked extensively to do yogurt drinks and yogurt tubes. We chose straight down the fairway flavors. So we weren't going to be, you know, thinking about to American, you know, strawberry, mixed berry. And we, yeah, we put it in the tube format that we thought new kids would gravitate to and therefore we set ourselves up to sell alongside a go-get alongside a Stonyfield. And the thesis was great launching back into 2019. We got ourselves really nice distribution in January of 2020. So super quick into Whole Foods nationally with our strawberry banana tube. We had a big old target distribution as well in January and then March happened. And I suppose we could have had that foresight, but cold chain, really hard, really expensive. We knew that part. But cold chain pandemic where people were, you know, buying all the milk and eggs off the shelf, stores had to necessarily turn themselves into like online performance centers. So, you know, you would, you didn't want to go in the store. I mean, all of us back then that were like wearing these weird masks. That's where COVID is. Yeah, COVID's in the store. So I want to drive by and pick up. Obviously, at that period of time, we just been, we just put on Amazon a shelf-stable product, Apple Source pouches. And this absolute reversal happened. You know, we kind of hit the ground in January to kind of like, you know, doing a dance feel and like, okay, we're off. And then that one really hit, as many of us did, right? We just hit the pandemic and the reality. And then this thing just rocket ship took off on Amazon, which was shelf-stable Apple Source as people were just buying. So then we went into the problem reversed into a supply issue here and a demand issue on the other side. When you first launched though, to kind of go back to what you were talking about before, you have to like pick a consumer, right? And so is it a mom? Is it a dad? Is it the kid? Does the kid have to like it? Does that even matter? Because when I watch my nephews, they really just, if something has dinosaurs on it, they'll put it in their mouth, whatever it is, including the dinosaur. And so when it comes to your perspective, like, what was that like? All right, you have kids, you have a small test group. I imagine you guys did some research. But who did you think would purchase the product? Yeah, we obsessed about this. Because you have the luxury and the privilege of designing a brand name, a logo, packaging. And then you look at taste and you've got to pick who you benchmarking against. And that was one of the biggest hurdles, which is adults would taste the product. And to their palette, they're like, oh, it's just two. Whereas kids would taste it because we were matching against, you know, you pick a strawberry. Do you pick an organic strawberry that's just beautifully. Right. Or do you pick Skittles? Yeah. But you've got to manage sugar. So we looked at it and said, right, we've got to make sure the product is absolutely kid guaranteed. So they will love this product. They'll ask for this product. But how do we get them to actually taste it? And so then the packaging had to do a couple of things. First of all, I had to say this is for your kids, particularly when we were doing yoga. So it had to be fun. It had to have a clear point of difference because, you know, I've never heard of this. So how do you get that across? And so you end up with too much on the packaging and then how do you distill that down over time? But yeah, we were selling to, essentially selling to mom, often dad, but the kid is the repeat consumer. If you're paying four or five bucks for something, you're not going to do it twice if you've still got, you know, six out of eight yoga tubes or three out of four drinks. It's a tight rope to walk. It's so funny, isn't it? To think about like kids being the ultimate decision maker in the household, but it does make sense. They have no purchasing power themselves. And so let me ask you a weird question. Like, what do kids care about the most in your research? Is it the look? Is it the taste? Oh, taste. Taste. Taste wins. Taste, taste, taste. I mean, they certainly don't care about the price. But they do care. So we spent a long time, we put characters on at the beginning because characters were in a category and then we're like, right, so who... Did you have to make your own character? Yeah, we had to make it. So we sat there with all sorts of great creations. And then of course you get into a lot when it comes into, okay, so gender. I've got two daughters and a son. So we had... And I'm a big believer in there being many primary display panels on a package because who knows how they get stacked and that's borne out. I haven't yet done the bottom, but I should. We put a strong female character and we figured, let's do a six... an eight to 10-year-old because if I'm six, I'll aspire to that. And if I'm 12, you know, I want... So we tried to find that line of... And then we thought, how do we make sure in the playground, you know, on the black top, I'm not gonna get bullied. When I pull this thing... You want to be cool. You want to be cool. So you sort of have to gravitate towards it's okay for boys. And it was crazy. And even designers, you end up sort of leaning into these sort of... So we had this sort of Superman, Fist Forward, Flying Space thing going on. And they put the guy in it, the boy. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. The boy, because we had a floating one in space, the boy should be floating, you know, somewhat lost like me. And the girl should be really purposeful and like going for it because if you've met my daughters, you know. And that really sort of, I don't know, we put a lot into it. And over time, we put much more in them was really probably necessary because we've moved away from characters. We've, you know, we've stressing other things now, but certainly as you're sort of thinking about dual marketing to the parent and the kid. Is there some science in the relationship since you're mixing it with food? Like for example, when I take multivitamins, I have to eat something first to trigger the digestion. And then boom, I guess my body absorbs it better. From your perspective, you're kind of doing the two in one. But do people know that? Or do they care? Or is it something you guys just know when you guys have beers together and no one else really cares about? Well, I think in general, and of course, we're in a field where we, we're educating on almost everything. And you can sometimes, if I think about the bell curve of the population, there are those people who will be highly interested, highly knowledgeable and highly critical. Those people that are absolutely not interested would never touch, and then there's like, what is it, 80% but it's everybody else that kind of needs, they need it easy. They want just, you know, make it good, make it affordable, make it clear to me because I really don't have the time to engage with you and I'm not going to follow you too much and read everything you publish. So yeah, the science would say, and there's been some things written around taking supplements, that taking a supplement by itself is less efficacious than taking it in native food. And so you sort of have this, not taking anything at all, worse, taking it as a supplement isn't quite as efficacious as taking it with food or in functional food, and then isn't perhaps, and this study I don't think has really been done, you know, in a native food. As I said earlier, omega-3s aren't really native to salmon anyway, so functional integration into food so that you are digesting so that you can actually radio trace nutrients passing up through the blood-brain barrier to make sure and to see that the nutrients are getting to where they need to get to. And that's why we start and finish with science, right? You really want to make sure that, if I'm going to say food for hungry minds or eat this and we're helping to bridge the gap for the World Health Organization and it's for kids, I've got to make sure that I'm doing it right. Yeah, price point. How did you guys decide on price point? Is it like super expensive because you're buying all this oil? What's the difficulty there? No, we've priced forward. We started our company, I think relatively uniquely as we started as a certified benefit corp. I'm very, very passionate about accessibility. Accessibility for various income levels. It shouldn't be that if kids should be getting a minimum amount of the nutrients they need for learning, for attention, for just their development, it shouldn't be a treat. And there's a lot of models where we would launch a product or someone would launch a product west coast and then over northeast and then start in the natural channel. And there's a reason that we're in thousands of Walmart's today at a price point that is, yes, it has to be a small premium to the mainstream, but we've gone mainstream first. We've partnered with Partnership for Health in America because they're all about health equity. We're all about food equity. I'm inspired by my wife where she grew up in a food insecure household where choosing between medicine and food was a real thing. And so I want to make sure that if it's possible, we can make this a staple and make it from non-gmo ingredients, organic if and where possible, but not at the expense of affordability and accessibility. Is getting into schools on your list, when I do research on this topic around foods, everything that's in schools just seems to be awful for you and then obviously you have these behemoths that have secured those contracts with Coca-Cola. And I'm not trying to cast any sort of doubt that they're not well-intentioned, but for the most part we know those foods really don't do much. And so is that something on your agenda? Is it easy, any insight into like, is it even profitable, is it worth it? I spent a lot of time during the pandemic looking at that as a space in particular because during the pandemic people switched from the big bucket to scoop and eat foods, a lot of which for kids whose primary source of nutrition is actually at school so that link between sending your kid to school because they actually get food and the link between a full tummy and learning is huge. So as part of a passion project we looked into it a lot. It's really hard. What are the obstacles there? So at the time we were, if I was looking at yoga there were a bunch of outdated USDA rules about things needed to be low fat and so good industry. So you're from the future on this category? Yeah, now on snacks I think so be it applesauce, etc. then it's going to be an affordability play. We have managed to work with there's a group called EveryMill and what they do with schools in Minnesota I used to be there and some of the guys I used to work with have joined EveryMill. They will go into schools and they'll put food bags curated for whatever sort of ethnic diets that there are of which they've got many more than I could mention and they put these food bags into kids' backpacks while they're in the class so they can have a food source during the weekend. It's really inspiring but the way they do it is they take in obviously donations and then they come and buy products like ours. So we work really hard with our value chain to make sure that we could figure out a way affordable and as close to parity with what they were putting in at the time so instead of it being a fruit cup or you're getting into I'm going to replace one serving of fruit with a brain yak applesauce. It's really energizing for us and it is possible. What I've got to get is my foundation set with the core business and then there's a whole lot of space there to do. Is it profitable? I mean to start as a benefit corp it's necessary and it's part of that. It's necessary to help attract the right talent. Food service in general it's not about profit it is about revenue. Then you get into schools and you get into not-for-profits. When I watch my nephews I'll just go back to this a lot because I just watch the behavior and I'm like so fascinated by them as a consumer and I just see like they watch a lot of TV or like educational stuff but then there's obviously commercials to some of it less and less on like the Amazon tablets if they're on Netflix there's less and less commercials but if there are commercials I always think about it like if I'm in your space how on earth do I get market share because to me there's a feeding frenzy people will pay whatever because you have their attention you have them in front of you it's not like an adult watching TV that's just going to look away the kid is mesmerized by this thing and so when it comes to your thinking about marketing is TV something that you think about a lot do you have any commercials now how do you view that I used to run a brand where we did a bunch of TV but we had massive ACV so I meant that if I captured the eyeballs then you could do the math to say well after 12 opportunities to see I'm going to get a certain conversion rate now we look at that mathematics a little bit more in performance marketing for online where my targeting isn't quite so spray and pray there the targeting was I'll put it on to home and garden TV and a certain type of person so we can be a little bit more micro even when it comes to social advertising we do that but it's far more productive for us to put our investment in advertising awareness driving as close to the point of purchase as possible so if that's Walmart.com if it's Amazon.com or if it's in the last few feet of the path to purchase physically that's you know actually investment in good packaging is probably number one thing I can do is bring my Apple source brain squeezes and making sure that that's really prominent on the shelf as something that like it or hate it it arrests your attention so that you then get to the primary this has these nutrients I imagine this year so come middle of the year we're going to probably tripling our points of distribution and going getting a lot more ACV in more than one category we're going to have to start investing in the top of funnel we've got media partners out there that I would love and aspire to work with even though it's probably more in that space of you know we like people like Scary Mummy who just go out there they've built a good audience who trust them because they swear a lot and they just tell it how it is because you know what this is really fucking hard and it is and so if you can be real with the audience I think that you'll see us doing some of that and you'll see us developing this out there a little bit stronger than we have that's fun do you ever feel like you have to temper yourself like you're always like don't you get it everyone no because look if you've got three kids and you're in the grocery store if you've made the mistake of getting one of those little shopping carts and they're windmilling around taking out people's ankles and then you want me to stop and consider your brand it was like launching in a pandemic where we're all freaked out by masks and you're the new brand I'm sprinting, grabbing whatever color packages that I think I normally buy so we are screaming the benefit more than we were our packaging is far less if you forgive it cerebral you know all of us sit in front of our nice computer screens and we look at it and we're like yeah that's it let's make the font just a little and that is it that Pantone and at the end of it no you've really got to just be on point and really obvious and so we're challenging ourselves more and more to say less but say it louder and so how many products do you have today you have the yogurt what else do you have yeah so actually yogurt we moved out so we came out of that where there's plain economics on some things right so cost to serve and what it takes to win it was deeply unprofitable and so there's a certain point where you've got to whilst I think for me love the product fantastic but in terms of winning in a space that you know some of the big guys there's only really four big yogurt companies sure was that an easy decision to make or did you guys keep trying to help them out look it's your baby right so it's really hard to you kept being creative and entrepreneurial you know we'll figure this out and then eventually you can't ignore the fact that the other one there is line of sight to this weird gross margin thing which means you can then invest in you know at the top line that is so the fact that you can actually build a business I mean look people have joined you they've made career choices you have an obligation to not only investors but the team you know and so yeah we launched Apple source and that's our main product today we're launching bars we'll get national distribution with those come June we've launched almond butter that gets national distribution in May and we've got peanut butter that's going into regional how does it come the peanut butter and the almond butter is it kid friendly or is it for like in session so most of our stuff we're starting off with single serve single serve because that way I can make a promise to you that there's this amount of the nutrients in it so it helps me feel good about calling it something like brain fuel right it's also from a product perspective I know it's going to taste good each time because I know that it's not being open and closed and exposed to oxygen and those things we talked about before do you worry about any competition like or do you have you seen anybody try to copy you yeah you see in the yogurt space we flattered when you know one of the big guys came in and launched a product who are the big guys in yogurt so think Chibani thank Chibani, Donyfield, Stonyfield who are now owned so you got Danon, like Talis is a big company that owns a bunch of the brands and Danon owns horizon and horizon launched something called growing years with the two nutrients we had has anyone tried to do that for applesauce as well not not yet and I will say it's really hard like really hard and we've got some nice patent so trying to think about the IP as well because once you actually figure out it takes a whole bunch of different ways to do it and so they're applied for so we'll see also look I'm not trying to go and be the number one applesauce company right we're literally here to give brain nutrition for the whole family you know it's as important for my mom you know in her elderly years as it is for me to try and perform today and my kids so I don't know that anyone's going to necessarily see us as like we just took over the category and rendered something people will probably try and describe us as niche even though I think with some of the distribution and some of the growth we're seeing we play a role in helping to provide some category growth Is that what drove the rebrand then from braniac kids to braniac foods is that the desire to show that you can be good just beyond this one category that your mom and your kids can both benefit the same way I mean what was that decision like and how long did it take you to switch it was always part of the plan from day one we just decided to launch in kids partly because of that that sort of genesis story of where we started and partly the focus of Jonathan and I as two dads with three kids but we always envisioned that product range would be something consumed by the broader family there's always a question mark if you go older should it be a different brand is it the same brand and we see the braniac family we get notes from 7-year-old consumers of our applesauce saying they love it because it's the ensure of applesauce it's got all of the which is fantastic right and grandmas watch their kids grandparents watch their kids an incredible amount again on social we get a lot of grandparents buying this for the first time when they're looking after the kids because they they've got to go and they're going to make a choice because they're actually kind of some of our biggest advocates have you found anything in terms of like your customer data where you're like wow that's really surprising like I always try to think about it like here you are you have kind of this more thoughtful consumer or at least like biohacker I hate to use that but basically like kind of a biohacker type of type of profile is there's something that you're like okay this person this this city that you found to be oh that's we wouldn't have expected that yeah it's somewhat the opposite right so part of the benefit of deciding to be mainstream in America even though we're based on the west coast but there's a lot of transparency which is awesome unless you have a problem and then it's really but at least it helps you deal with things really quickly but when you do get good reviews and obviously there are two types of review there's the review that you let's say stimulate through marketing and part of the gig is that people provide reviews and then there's just the reviews that come on the platforms that you're being sold so we we've been doing very well on Thrive Market there's some great reviews coming from there they're coming from Florida and Kentucky coming from all around the country and when people play back the I just love that it has omega-3s and choline and it's from a state that you know the Trump supporter state is what you're saying because look our kids and our we're all fully into this right into our families and that's part of the emotional connection of sitting thinking about my parents aging me aging and my kids being like if I'm going to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in whatever it is music lessons extra curriculum math but I'm not feeding their brain and the same thinking forward about the do-co memory games etc but if we're not taking care of that engine and that's something that's resonated throughout even though people any strategist will tell you to go to the coast first and that actually hasn't necessarily been for us we found Texas is a huge state for us in terms of demand and it's so far we're pretty spread where the population is I wonder if that's because of Joe Rogan Joe Rogan talks about all this stuff all the time he's got his own company Alpha Brain yeah so so that was purchased by Unilever now that's one of the things that as you look into this space of what we eat what we consume and how it impacts our brain that's why we're starting with kind of nutrients in food based on clear science and there's a space this in utropic space which is really interesting right this sort of different shots and different and people talk about the nutrients associated with brain and so we look at that we watch it but we stay away from this idea of hacking or in utropic stack until frankly our own scientific nutrition advisory board says you need this you need this much and here's the clinical proof so we want to link to the clinical studies on everything we do that's smart and it's not that we love the innovation right and as something comes up that we think has some degree of efficacy will either add into our scientific nutrition advisory board we just did for some people that really look at curcumin have done the science have done the research to make sure we're current but mostly so that no one should listen to me saying you need this much for your brain no you need we need the guys that are in academics and practice a neurologist yeah when you signed up to this company you're a little early right you're in a market where you're still educating the consumer which is always difficult and so in your head is this like a 10 year thing for you personally where are you guys in the raising right now like what what your seed right no we've done a you've done an a yeah okay yeah so you've done an a so you're approaching I guess the moment in CPG of like this is gonna go or not yeah right yeah and so maybe maybe with the pandemic we're in a second moment of that okay right as things changed and we've lived for two years where we spent the time innovating more than expanding and now this year it's it's trying to keep hold of the demand as everyone's kind of coming back and in some ways for us all of us thinking a bit more about our own sort of mental wellness and that of our kids and that conversation being a little bit more open has been to the benefit if you look at just media mentions and searches for things like brain fog they're up 400 percent and you know so that the environment now is is better and this idea of cognitive functional foods and obviously we've been out there you know but it's when people like you know Harvard and that geo are coming out writing about it that you can feel that little bit of it's nice to actually feel a little bit of wind on the back not in your face totally do you think this is a seven-year thing ten-year thing for you like what is your grand vision for the exit is it is it proving proving the category you have three four five maybe six products out you know everything there is to know about getting this into a consumer and then one of the big four purchase you guys and you're on your way or is it do you guys want to run this company we want to look worrying too much about the end when the beginning is so hard like really hard how hard is it fucking hard and it is and it's all I mean anyone that's in this small company and we're 12 people right running what's becoming you know national distribution with many different product lines and you're tripling our points of distribution and the buyers during the supply chain crisis still it's on time in fall is the first thing you've got to worry about so we have to wake up and just get on with it and I've always actually trusted that if I sprint at something and I do a good job and of course correct along the way good things will happen now I have a very non-linear path to here with all sorts of bumps and bruises but I think if we sat here worrying about either building a company to look and feel a certain way you know I don't have a HR IT department that's me all of that we get the essential people that are passionate about what we're doing and we have a set of core investors that came in at seed that have stuck with us throughout and we really try and keep things lean so where it goes I think my job is to get it sure it stood on its feet it's healthy we address not only growth but profitability something I think people don't think about isn't enough because if we can if we can address that then and I think maybe some of that comes from that sort of being a certified benefit corp we can't really make a positive impact and address things like schools or stakeholders community employees if we don't have a healthy company I think once we're there and there's a personal point of pride as well the people that trust me with their careers to join our company they take a risk and I would be damned if they end up making a bad choice what's the next big venture coming down the path for Brainiac you got the bars coming I got the bars coming not the alcoholic bars very delicious, nutritious, great great sweet bars we've got some big launches coming up, there's one that's indicative coming as well that I can't talk about yet but there's three different product lines confirmed going into national distribution with some of the big guys we're just head down we're going back to Expo West what is it like do you make a lot of relationships that are worth it in terms of business what do you get out of it is it sales or is it mind share tips and tricks what's the thing that you walk away from being like for this reason you get a bit of a sense of what's out there, what are people focused on it's shocking how many to this day you're going to see how many new coconut waters are out there it wasn't that, didn't we do that so there's a little bit of that and then there would be those new things that really catch on some of the brands that you're just like yes that's going to work you've had some of the folks on here so what we've got out of it is distribution from Whole Foods first so you meet the buyers for sure you have to work it like you're standing outside your restaurant on the beach saying come on in so we had back in 2019 we had a photo of who are the five people if we could see the yogurt buyer from Whole Foods that would be amazing and we had the photo actually we were like there she is and then held her until and then she's like look I've got one spot and then our Walmart relationship was built off of Expo as well where one of the guys in charge of innovation and these sort of incubators because they're astonishingly committed to helping young brands in a way that I don't think they get any credit for they've been the number one quarter of hours through hard times and performance do they get it? your angle yeah you're totally right about that when you think Walmart you think kind of old not so fun probably not innovative no science you just think cool stuff let's hit the mega market and then what we all should do is then go into the store and really look I mean sure it's overwhelming but if you take any of the aisle some of the stuff that they're doing in other places you know that I just saw their partnering with SpaceNK over in beauty you know a truly upscale English they were one of the big leaders and adopters in the organic space and then they learn and modify in functional foods they're doing the same thing if you look at their health and wellness pledge and their affordability pledge and then you marry that against what I said earlier about why we exist food equity and food being which just fundamentally what I get passionate about if we address our nutrition I mean if you look at that inequality of yes full bellies and satiety is important to learn but empty nutrition so they're committed to that it's not the only reason that I get in I've also got to make it tasty, price right, get the margins that they need, do all the base business but with that in mind they've been incredible so they were like look was March, could you be in 200 stores in July back in 2019 if I put you in an incubator of course you say yes 100% no problem, I'll be there tomorrow 200, 300 and then of course they leave so you got Whole Foods Walmart, who else did you meet at Expo West honestly those were the key those are huge, this is becoming an ad for Expo West which is great because I've always wondered because you know I've been to countless conferences and sometimes I'm like we're not going again I can tell you that there are many that I haven't been to some of the reason that you don't get the return is first of all if you don't work it like you're on fire and you're going bankrupt if you don't so if you're not in the aisle a lot of people will be trying to walk past you the people with their badges turn around the only reason that it works is because you've got to pull them in do you have a gimmick, do you have a hack do you give them something for free, do you have a cool thing that's not related to the product we have energy and we try and judge real quick about being how to be adequately persistent I'm going to give you one, you ready this is the thing I did, so my first company was a bowtie company as I told you every other company I was a part of or started we would make bowties with that logo on them and everyone would talk about it at every conference because we'd give them out for free and I just think about brainiac foods, kind of sciencey, kind of like a professor put your logo on there it's a cheap thrill you're talking about like $1.50 per bowtie and people never forget you're like you know the bowtie guy, you gave me a bowtie last time I just hired a guy you didn't like my idea? I loved your idea, I'm going to build on it Mark we had a good friend of ours he was the co-founder, co-CEO of Allbirds so we were like hey dude, this was back in 2019 and things were going really really well we're all going to have matching red Allbirds so at the first show we went to we were like you guys are the Allbirds guys so we kind of borrowed his brand equity a little bit and I just hired, I just got a new head of sale as a guy that I couldn't ever have attracted previously I saw you guys, you were the guys wearing the shoes so similar to the bowtie next to your bowtie no pressure, I just know it worked and it was really interesting it's a wacky stunt or a gimmick they call it well look man, anything else we should know anything else that you want to talk about? look, I think that hopefully I've conveyed that this is about just feeling our families the right way and whether it's brain yak or whether it's trying out cooking with some other brain foods like salmon or putting blueberries in a lunchbox it's all the little things when I was a kid my mom would put fish oil until I was like 16 and then she would make beet, I mean this is 20 years ago, 30 years ago she would make like beet smoothies and I had no idea they were beets I just thought they were delicious purple things, concoctions and she never told me did she use anything to sweeten it or anything like that? I mean natural stuff like mango my mom's from Peru and so it's like the fish capital you know it's on the coast and so fish becomes a huge part of the diet everything and people in terms of like omega-3s are very aware that this is the brain food and so you grow up like if I had an exam Wednesday I had Tuesday with fish that's just that was normal and I think what you're doing is a great mission to make that accessible to everyone no matter where they are on the planet or in America and I think that's really cool Thank you, one of the key points our pediatrician advisors say look it's not nutritious if they don't eat it and that's kind of a mantra if you develop a product it doesn't have to be wholeier than now let's sure no sugar added whatever let's get the fundamentals right but let's just make it fun Thank you Mark Appreciate you coming on the show That was our conversation with Mark from Brainiac Foods Since you've stuck around for the credits please consider subscribing if you're not already or even better leave us a review wherever you get your podcast We can be found at Startup Storefront or media platform with the exception of Twitter where we can be found at STS Podcast LA The team consists of Diego Torres Palma Natalia Capolini, Lexie Jamison Owen Capolini, and to me Nick Conrad Our music is by DoubleTouch Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next time