 Then I wanted to raise capital. So my first raise, we raised $396,000. And again, it was just me, employee of one, but employee wasn't being paid. So I was living off my savings and being very, very careful. I had my 12-year-old car and the AC had been busted for my little Honda Fit. So I had to buy a little cooler from Home Depot to keep the bars cold because it was super warm in the summers. I'm driving around, going literally store to store. This is Started to Store From. Today's guest is Susie York, founder of the snack brand Love Good Fats. As the name implies, the brand is centered around bucking the notion that all fats are bad. This notion began back in the 1960s when the sugar industry paid scientists to fudge their studies on the correlation between sugar and heart disease. Those scientists took their money and instead pointed the finger at fat. Susie admits falling for this charade, and she developed lots of health issues as a result. It was her own research that eventually set her down the right path, allowing for a more nutritious diet with more healthy fats and less sugar. Some might have stopped there, but Susie, a single mom and at this point in her late 40s, was driven to shift gears and leave behind a 10-year career as a marketing executive to start her own company. It is through her hard work and perseverance that Love Good Fats can be found in over 14,000 stores today. So listen in as we cover everything from how she managed her family, her startup, and her training for an Ironman triathlon all at the same time, why she thinks there are more hurdles to starting a company in Canada as opposed to the US, and why it is never too late in life to switch gears and become your own boss. Now, back to the episode. All right, everyone, welcome to the podcast. On today's show, we have Susie York, the founder of Love Good Fats. Susie, thanks so much for joining. Tell everyone a little bit about your company. Well, hi, Diego, and thanks for having me on. Hello, everybody. Pleased to be here. Our company is a fairly new emerging brand, Food Startup. We started just three years ago. The mission is to change how people eat, and really to kind of encourage a nutrition diet, high in good fats, very low in sugar, and overall feel really good about kind of making that shift. So that's why I called the brand Love Good Fats, and I started with bars, and now we have shakes, and we're in thousands of doors across North America already. I love it. I know I certainly love fats. If they're all good, like avocado, that makes it even more amazing. What was the point of which you wanted to start the company? Was it just a personal issue you were having in terms of finding things that just didn't fit your lifestyle? What was the impetus for starting? Yeah, for sure. I had been following for 20 years a low-fat diet, and I had been running, and then doing marathons, and even doing Ironman triathlons as I juggled single mom, busy life. I had an executive, marketing executive job, and doing lots of traveling and trying to kind of balance everything. And by my mid-40s, you know, that type of diet and the lifestyle really kind of led to some health issues. I had cardiovascular, I had IBS. My tummy was upset all the time. And then I read a book, and the book was written by Nina Tichols, and it basically said that, you know, we got it all wrong in the last 40 years that we should be embracing fats and cutting out sugar and carbohydrates instead. So I was on a plane on my way to Natural Product Expo West, and I was doing consulting, and I kind of had in the back of my mind, I wanted to start my own brand one day, but that book was really the lightning rod for myself to change my diet pretty much instantly. I after 20 years of not eating fats, I'm like, okay, I need to do exact opposite of what I've been doing. And then I walked the show and I realized that, you know, there's undercurrent of fats here, but there's no beacon brand that says, you know, eat and enjoy good fats. And so that's kind of where it started. I said, you know, if I want to drive change, I could write a book or I could, you know, help promote, there's all these different books now on low carb diets and higher fat diets and low sugar diets, but a better way to kind of get the message out is do what I've spent my career doing, which is build a brand and have the brand carry the message. So I kind of gave it a shot. And this sounds a lot like the keto diet. Is that right? You're just making it, I would say probably more approachable. Yeah, I mean, when I launched the, you know, I came up with the idea in March 16 and then I did that summer, I did all the consumer research and I started having prototypes in 16 and then early 17 and then turned the production machines on in early 17 and then out of co-packer and then that failed because co-packers didn't know how to make high fat, low sugar bars. So it was kind of a trial and error. And back then ketogenic wasn't at the forefront yet. It was really just about high fat, very low carbohydrates and low sugar, like really, really kind of aim for, you know, aim for zero sugar and keep below 25 grams a day if you can. And that was kind of the premise. Then, so I launched in September 17 and then ketogenic just kind of came with a full force wave in May, 2018. And my, you know, the brand happened to be keto friendly by being, you know, very high fats and moderate protein and very, very, very low sugar, one to two grams of sugar only, all clean ingredients. So I just kind of have the keto wave happened to kind of help me along. I've had a bit of bad luck in some things, but I've had a lot of good luck on a lot of other things. And that's one of them. I know your brand is basically a household name in Canada. Here in the United States, the biggest problem we have is sugar is subsidized. And so because it subsidized heavily, you know, all these companies have no incentive to move to something that isn't as bad for your body. And so what ends up happening is, you know, and it makes sense. That's how we get fast food and we get, you know, hamburger buns with all these preservatives and that you could literally leave it on a shelf and it would be fine for a year because there's no actual bacteria anymore. It's just heavily processed. That's amazing. I know that's something that's new to me. I recently spoke to HVMN co-founder who's, he's also big on keto and he actually sells ketones oddly enough. You can actually buy them for like 30 bucks. And so he, you know, he does well in the startup community for me. And this is really like, I consider myself a student of people like yourself in your company because for me, almost kind of like your journey, when I was a tech executive, I was working, you know, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. And at some point I realized everything I put into my body is essential because I need to be on essentially the whole day. And then I have to be home and be a husband and that if, you know, if we're eating big meatball subs, we're going to pass out and unfortunately the company's going to fail. And that's the first time that the light bulb went off for me, but it's hard because then you have to, it's almost like you have to go above all the noise, everything that's so accessible and things become a little harder per se. When you decided to launch, what were like the two or three things that you said, okay, we're going to, we're going to do bars, we're going to do, what was the product that you really wanted to enter the market with? Yeah. Well, once I decided to launch, at first I said, oh, maybe not bars because bars are so crowded. It's a difficult, expensive, high risk, high fail category to launch in. And I purposely kind of spent, you know, three months looking at every other category possible. But then with my business and marketing hat, it became really obvious that the reason bars is such a great entry category is that you get rapid trial. And with new products, it's all about trial. So if you have a $10 pouch of something or a $30 pouch of something or $40 bottle of something, you're automatically not going to get as much trial. And in package goods, the game is about awareness to drive first trial. We happen to have a bar that is incredibly delicious and it melts in your mouth and it doesn't taste like any other protein bar out there. And it's really just one to two grams of sugar. So you kind of get this like, wow, really, like how can this be a healthy, you know, natural product with super clean ingredients? Like how does this happen? And to be able to kind of really leverage that discovery, bars is perfect. You know, you can get three for $5 and you can try three different flavors. So it became pretty obvious. And I had worked in bars before my prior career. I was at Weight Watchers and I did consulting for a couple of bar companies. And so I was very familiar with the portfolio of bars and supplements and foods in my whole background. So it kind of all quickly made sense that if, if I kind of have this grandiose dream changing how North Americans eat in a big way, quick rapid penetration of bars, especially when you have a product that tastes so unique like nothing out there is really, really smart. And we saw that in Canada. You know, I launched in 10 stores in September, 2017 and then wind up in 50 stores and about 170 stores by Christmas. But six weeks in, we were at Whole Foods in Toronto and we were already having all the store managers tell us that OrgTel was kind of me and a few investors and board of directors walking into stores and saying, hey, how are our bars doing? And we were number one in two best selling within weeks, like within six weeks. So we knew, you know, in a world where there's 500 bars on the shelves, particularly, you know, and that the largest kind of Whole Foods store in the East here is in downtown Toronto. And, you know, within weeks, we're number one in two best selling. We knew like, whoa, like something's going on here. Cause as a marketer, I knew it takes a long time to build a brand and get, particularly, you know, we just had goals of like this being sustainable. Or if we sell a couple million dollars a year and, you know, slowly build the brand, I would have been really happy instead. We're like, what, you know, we're out of stock already. We gotta make some more, gotta make some more, launch innovation more, more, more, more. So it just went really fast. Every time I like go to any, so there's an air wand here, which is kind of like this natural, almost like a Whole Foods, but some people consider it a level up. Obviously we have Whole Foods here in Bristol Farms, a lot of great grocers. And my thing is always like, I just want a bar that's low carb. And it's so difficult to find. And last time I was in Bristol Farms, I actually saw your bar and I grabbed the peanut butter and chocolate one and sure enough, delicious. But more than that, it just makes sense, right? It's like, obviously, this is what we should be ingesting in our body. When you decided to launch, did you immediately raise capital? Did you bootstrap? Because given your experience, you probably knew exactly what was required to penetrate in a big way. Well, I pretty much knew, because I had, you know, I was a single mom. I managed to keep, you know, my home despite kind of the challenges and the costs in Toronto of doing that. And I had managed to put together some savings and my kids kind of school savings and stuff. So I kind of had like the three reasons for 35 years as to why I hadn't started my company, they all kind of were being checked off the list one by one. Like I had an idea. I had enough savings to start, but not enough to kind of keep going, but enough to kind of seed, seed, seed and bootstrap off my credit card. I kind of had, you know, I had time. So my kids were a little bit older, still not old enough, but certainly older that I kind of literally went from 5 a.m. to pretty much 9 p.m., seven days a week for two years. And I kind of had like the three circumstances came together. The idea was really, really good. So I shopped the idea to probably 200 people and it went kind of from, hey, I'm doing consulting, can we chat? Oh, by the way, I have this little idea tucked under my arm. Everyone wants to hear about the idea. And then the meeting wind up being, you know, 55 minutes on my new brand idea and five minutes on this kind of consulting stuff I was doing to pay bills. And so very quickly it became like, well, like not only is this a good idea, but when you're looking to raise money, you know, just call me back. So at first it was all scrappy. It was all my, you know, all my money to pay every single bill, all the samples, all the packaging, everything. And then once I kind of had samples, prototypes, I think we had over a hundred different prototypes initially when it kind of became time to like, okay, whole foods wants to list me and UNFI and Purity Life, the big distributors in Canada. And then, you know, kind of you'll go into 50 stores and then a hundred stores and then eventually 600 and 1600. Then I wanted to raise capital. So my first raise, we raised 396,000. And again, it was just me, you know, employee of one, but employee wasn't being paid. So I was living off my savings and, you know, being very, very careful, you know, the sale sheet was, you know, not spending more than $400 on a little kind of sale sheet and it was me going everywhere. And I had my 12 year old car and the AC had been busted for my little Honda Fit. So I had to buy a little, you know, cooler from Home Depot to keep the bars cold because it was super warm in the summer. So I'm driving around, going literally store to store kind of saying, hey, you know, we're listed at UNFI and you can kind of place an order and raising some funds. And it pretty much stayed, you know, we were, even though we grew really fast, the first four months we had a couple hundred thousand in sales, but then we had 5,000 percent, 5,500 growth the first year, another 500% growth the second year. Very kind of stayed close to bootstrapping. The one exception is I was always very generous with sampling because we just had a product that tastes so, so different. So at first I went to every single store manager that the head office of the natural health food store listed us and then I would go into the store when they had the product or I'd bring samples and then I had my iPhone and, you know, my Facebook is, if you look at the first videos, it's every single kind of store staff would try the bar and I'd be like, I'm gonna turn the phone on, is that okay? And then they would taste the bar and they're like, what if I don't like it? I'm like, you'll like it. And they were all blown away. So it was kind of fun. You know, it was all very scrappy, just authentic kind of first trial and kind of go from there. I wanna ask you this question. So we have a lot of people who wanna jump into entrepreneurship in terms of our listener base. We had one founder on who was having a baby and so she was raising capital while pregnant and I got to ask her, what is this like? You know, we see a lot in the news, females, it's a little bit tougher to raise money. And so I was like, how do you, how are you, what's your mindset going into this? And she said, I have the right team. And so she's like, not even concerned. I just love that answer. And it's an answer that a lot of people don't hear enough. Right? It's like, there's so much fear. There's so much of your own thought process that holds people back male or female. But I think there's always the question for female of what happens when I have kids. And I loved her answer, it was so direct. In your position, here you are, you're a single parent with two kids. And so I really wanna hear your answer as to, you know, obviously we as entrepreneurs do a really good job of burying all the difficulties. And it sounds like in your answer, you just put it aside. No, no, no, no, it's brutal. Like it's brutal, fundraising is really, really tough. And, you know, I was a team of one, I had a board and some advisors that were helping. But at the end of the day, I had to hit the pavement and I had to kinda pretty much every single $10,000 was, you know, me reaching out and what about this? What about that? Another person and another person. And I'm also in Canada, you know, and everyone tells you initially, you know, there's only one route which is angel funding, right? You can't just kinda snap your fingers and get $2 million from institutional. It's really friends and family. I'm like, well, I have no friends or family that have, you know, even $5,000, right? So, but it is the angel funding and I tapped into all of kind of my prior relationships that, you know, I've been kinda this busy single mom going to work, turning around this brand, traveling. And I hadn't felt that I had prioritized networking that much over the last 20 years. But I kinda still, you know, went in the Rolodex and it's 10,000 at a time. And then some, you know, some investments took 10 meetings to kinda get. And it's really, really hard. A year or nearly two years into it, I had kind of, we were a team of five, but even then, you know, you're kind of five people and the fundraising was just me. I had board members that were helping, but you kinda really have to, you know, you're pitching your brand and you know your brand day in, day out, you know your results. Canada is really tough. So, I don't know if I had known how tough it is. I don't know if I would have stepped into it. It's just, you know, I think the US market is a little bit different. And I think the statistics of funding that goes to women founders and CEOs versus men speaks for itself. The numbers are very dire in terms of the funding that women founders are getting versus men. And it's tough out there. So, in Canada, there's not as many VCs, there's not as many options for founders. So, I have, you know, hundreds of acquaintances that I've met through the last three years. I was in a little incubator program and we were 16 of us, but I think there's been a hundred brands in that incubator and thousands of thousands of applicants. And you're kinda, you're just hustling to try to get 300,000, 400,000. We wind up being very fortunate because I raised 400,000 in the first round and then I raised, you know, I raised kind of five rounds, 10 million, another 10 million, another 12 million in debt. So, I think we're smashing records for Canada, but in food we're the exception. Like there's not a lot of money. And my advice to Canadian founders is to not underestimate how hard it is. So, you have to bootstrap and count every penny and try to get the velocities because as soon as your brand is on the shelf and is selling, then doors open. But if prior to that, it's really, really tough because most of the startups don't kind of make the returns and many don't make it. So, it's not an easy world. That's good advice. That's something I tell a lot of founders when they're first starting to raise and they have a product with some initial traction. Usually it's at this point a little bit bigger than their friends and family. And I always say, look, if you can even take on your own debt to just get to the point where you have a distribution deal, like even a whole foods accepting it and then raising off of that, you're gonna save yourself a tremendous amount of your own company. And it's gonna save you so much time to your point. It's that velocity that a lot of founders are looking for. And I found, one of the things I found initially when I was kind of networking, everyone was saying, once you have like a deal, like a buyer, the larger chains, natural chains here, the law of laws or whole foods, once you kind of have a listing, oh, the money will just like pour in, right? Nope, because then I was like, hey, I'm listed at all these accounts, not good enough. How are you doing at these accounts? What are your logistics? Yeah, like so it really is, it's been quite a journey over the last three years. I've learned a lot. I hope to be able to give back, and right now it's still pretty busy, but I certainly have a lot of kind of insight for Canadian startups for sure, where we live in a little bit of a, I think a tougher world with less money, more conservative approach, it's harder to get some good numbers too. The country is 10% of the US. So I'm hoping that once I have a little bit more time opening up, I'll be able to share some of the trip ups to help other brands avoid the same pitfalls. I really love it, I appreciate that. And then in terms of, it sounds like you kind of hit it right, or maybe got lucky with keto that taking off, but in terms of the amount of education, so if you're in 2016, even 2018, I guess in 2016, it's basically just Facebook where people are a lot of social media and then it's transitioning during that time to Instagram. How much education or time do you spend on the marketing side of it with just educating the consumer on, hey, less sugar is good for you? Or do you, or not, or just say like, this is so delicious, you're not even gonna realize there's no sugar. The no sugar has from day one has been a key driver off the sales because there's a lot of sugar bars on the shelf and we just came a new brand on the shelf next to hundreds and hundreds of SKUs offering like 16 feet times four shelves of bars and our two little bars with kind of weaker branding because our logo is tiny, boom, we started selling. It's the low sugar that really made a difference but the analogy I use is the first kind of year my pitch deck had 10 pages on why fats are good and sugars is bad, fat is back and sugar is out. And then, if you look at my pitch decks now and my sales decks, there's not even one page, there's just, here's our positioning, here's our product, but I literally had, like I had clippings of all the articles, Time Magazine article, Fortune, all the scientific articles, all the quotes from Big Fat Surprise from Gary Tobes on sugar. I had kind of the kitchen sink on believe me, fats are good and sugar is the culprit and now I don't even, I say the brand name, I say one and two grams of sugar and they're like, can I taste it and then off you go. So it's a very different world. That's so great. And then obviously this world has evolved quickly also and so it's not just in terms of your marketing and then your pitch deck is obviously evolving but are there certain formulations to your product that you've had to change simply because the market has moved so aggressively in such a short time? Yeah, so the classic story of, again, my career started with Procter & Gamble, Frito Le Hines, Kamagra and then Weight Watchers. So I was in four or five large multinationals. It takes you a year and a half to bring the product to market, you do all this research and when you bring to market, you don't touch it after that. Emerging brands is like adapt, adapt, adapt, adapt, adapt. So you cannot be scared to tweak what you need to tweak and to move crazy fast. The speed I was moving was driving everyone crazy. I probably had the word can't said to me thousands of times and I was like, well, okay, well, let's work this through, right? I'm an engineer as a background. Let's unpack it. No, never done this this fast, not possible, can't, can't, can't. It's like, well, okay, well, let's kind of figure it out. And I think when a combination of factors, but I think if you go back and kind of talk to all the kind of the folks that did things that they never thought possible, they'll kind of looking back and saying, yeah, wow, like we'd never moved that fast. We'd never make those changes. It took kind of the right risk, but we certainly, you know, adapted the packaging four or five times with new packaging rolling out, adapted. Like again, at one point, I had over 250 recipes. Now we probably like were more than that now in terms of iterations and actual samples. And then I've done everything from, you know, all the heat testing in the oven and my kitchen, outside, inside, iterated, iterate, iterate. And the formulas did change, you know, the very first formula I had ingredients that the keto community was like, no, you know, you can't have this. So my, the coating had a little bit of sugar alcohols and there was a little bit of IMO in it. And no, no, you know, that, you know, we kind of remove all of that stuff pretty quickly and moved to cleaner. We added some fiber, even more. And we had the right fiber and the right fat, which kind of gives this magic formulation of feeling full or longer. And now we kind of realize we kind of stumble into the right combination of the right fibers and fat. So you eat the bar and you feel really full for a long time. And it's a really clean bar, you know, you feel like we have hundreds and hundreds of people writing in and saying, I can't eat anything, like tell me he's always upset except for your bars. So, you know, we iterated, iterated, boom, boom. Like we literally had production every two months. And I was like, okay, now I want to change this, just this. And the R and D and the plant were like, what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we need to. Duh, duh, duh. Why don't we dial this up, dial that up, dial that up. And they're like, you're crazy. And then in the end they tried it and they're like, ooh, wow, this is really good. I love that. We just made, you know, we improved our peanut butter chocolate flavors. I don't know if that one's on the shelf yet. Yeah, like it has like a bit of new packaging and it says new and improved and it's even sweeter. So you might not have tasted that, but it's noticeably, the taste is noticeably better. Like a more kind of intense peanut butter taste and even a little bit sweeter, still with one gram of sugar. So it's kind of nonstop, you know, we're never kind of got to kind of stop pursuing a high ground of taste and texture. And of course, I mean, one thing, at least I've noticed it here in the States is during COVID, this has become, you know, the consciousness around food has just taken a complete exponential hockey stick type where everyone's questioning everything around what they put in their body. And a lot of my friends are just losing weight because they're not going out as much. Obviously people are drinking, well, some people are drinking more, but I think just going out less is helping and contributing to weight loss. Do you guys do a lot of D to C? Have you seen during COVID, the grocery store section, you know, has obviously, at least in America is the only thing open for a long time. And so a lot of the grocery stores are just running out of things. How have you guys coped? Well, COVID has been really, really tough for the bar, the bar category. So on the go just kind of has been decimated. So at first, you know, March, April, we started kind of looking at the numbers and then we get, you know, weekly, in some cases daily, but we look at weekly sales and we're like, whoa, you know, like it kind of, like the category is just down and massive numbers. And essentially it's kind of like it tumbled. And then we're like, okay, you know, come back for back to school and nope, you know, with kind of whatever the second wave and whatnot, like on the go really took a nose dive. So we, you know, we're kind of fortunate that the had the brand been a year younger than where we were, I think we would have been caught in this vortex where you're trying to launch a brand and you're just cut off at the knees, right? Like you need awareness and trial and you need to be on the shelf. You need the discovery of your bars and consumers are literally going in the stores with their mask, with their mission, with their listens. Like I don't want to just, I don't want to stand at the bar shelf and see what's new and pick bars. So we're fortunate enough that we were already in 14,000 doors and we had some discovery. The brand had enough momentum where the strongest keto bar on the shelf were in most of the accounts that we got listed were the fastest new bar on the shelf. So we're very fortunate that, you know, we're kind of breaking through the clutter because a lot of new brands are gonna have a really hard time launching and kind of surviving through COVID. So we're doing okay considering the bar category has really kind of gone down and we're a new brand but the discovery is not there. You know, you literally had thousands of consumers just go in stores and then say, okay, like let me try all these things and that allows the bar category to do so well. And that's not happening. Initially, it's now different, but the first six months, people just ate bread, you know, drank wine and ate bread. So, you know, ice cream, wine and bread makers, you know, we track on Google trends, you know, bread and keto, right? And it just did, like it went like this. Now it's kind of coming back. So if you just put the two words in Google trend, everyone just kind of said, oh, you know, I'm gonna eat and drink. But now like the reality is, you know, if you have a preexisting health condition and you crash COVID, you know, so that kind of like go crazy, I'm gonna eat everything. And maybe not your generation, but certainly a little bit of the older generation is just like, okay, I'm eating carbs and bread. So now I think a lot of people have been touched by someone getting sick and realizing that, you know, if you just kind of inhale like carbs and don't take care of what you're eating and you're putting on, you know, five, 10, 15, 25 pounds is what we're hearing. And then, you know, there's still COVID around. Like first, you feel miserable and second, you know, the preexisting conditions are really, really damaging. So now there's a pretty big return to, okay, I'm not home, but I still have to, you know, work extra hard to eat clean. That's a great point. Yeah, they still have to take care of themselves and be very disciplined about that more so than before because now they can't escape, you know, you're literally just, and you have dogs, kids, all sorts of, that's a good insight. I remember I talked to Christie who introduced us from Mother Raw and, you know, one of the things we talked about was my generation in particular, we would never go into the freezer section. And I gave her the analogy or the story of like, my brother-in-law, if I go to his house, you know, him and his girlfriend, they just bought a new home. They're early 20s and you go in their fridge and it's everything you'd expect, you go in their freezer and it's just ice, right? And so what I was telling Christie is what's been interesting and Google trends alerted me of this is people have been Googling like frozen milk, frozen goods, a lot more frozen bread. And so what ends up happening is it's almost like this, this market, this 21 year old, 22 year old who never used the freezer. Is all of a sudden now, you know, looking at the freezer section way more and it creates an opportunity. And these are just fascinating things to learn, you know, for my person, I'm not in it. And so for me, I'm like, you know, what is the world in the future look like? Really interesting stuff. Well, the behavior shift is massive in so many instances. We bought a freezer, right, in our home. It's just like, okay, we need a small, like not a full size, not the full size coffin freezer, but the half freezer because we're like, who knows what's gonna happen with our food supply? And then we're thrilled, right? Because the shopping trips are no longer pleasant. I love shopping and it's no longer a pleasant kind of experience to go in these gorgeous stores and to try stuff, all of the, you know, a lot of my meals were like, I lived, I think I visited over 90 Whole Foods in the US in the first year because we launched and we had national distribution at Whole Foods last February across the country. So I literally went to visit as many as I could. So I kind of planned some road trips and I literally would go in my rental car and go up to the service and say, hi, I'm Suzy and I had my t-shirt and the founder, you know, our products are on your shelf. Thank you, thank you. Take pictures, give out a free box to the staff. So I went and I kind of hit the pavement on as many stores as I could and I would eat out of the, you know, the meal, the warm food bars. We're not eating out of the food bars anymore. Like they're all shut down and I don't know when that's gonna reopen up. So the behaviors have really, really changed. So it's important to adapt and to kind of make sure that we kind of keep on pace with the changing behaviors. It's so true. For me, there's a company where an investor in, it's called Good Milk and they basically make a four ingredient almond milk. So it's just almonds, water, sea salt and dates, all natural, super clean. And because there's nothing in it, there's no shelf life. It only lasts about seven days and it always came in these freezer packets and then you just add water and that was it. And so we have like a tremendous amount of these. And so I was talking to Brooke, the founder and she was the one that said, you know, we've never been, we've never done better because now everyone kind of to your point around the buying freezers and you have the option to store and it's mega healthy, which is great. I mean, I just love that the world is moving in that direction or at least is aware of that. As you guys come out of COVID, are you working on a need or just in general, maybe the timing of it was just there. Are you guys working on any different products besides bars that you can share with us? Yeah, for sure. Well, I launched with two bars in the fall of 2017 and because we shot up to best selling in pretty much all the stores, I launched two more mint and rich chocolate almonds. So we had four bars going into 2018 and then we got listed at Walmart, Canada and all the big banners here, La Blanche Canada and all the food grocery banners very, very quickly through 18 and then 19 we went to Whole Foods, so the US. So by the time we were launching in the US, we had six of our truffle flavors. So that's kind of our, you know, our kind of core initial launches. So they're our original and they're the soft kind of melt-in-your-mouth truffle type of experience. Once the fat kind of hits and melts and you're like, whoa, what's going on with this? It's light and airy and like no other no other bar I've had before. So we launched with those six and then as COVID was hitting, we are launching three new chewy nutty. So a new high ground of taste with our three new chewy nutty and shakes. So we have innovation in the second quarter and quarter two that was rolling out as COVID was hitting. So we kind of fortunate that our innovation was ready to go, was presented, was pretty much listed everywhere. We're very fortunate that the retailers, most of them didn't delay the planograms and then kind of say no after they said yes. They all kept kind of with the plan like so they had accepted our new items on the shelf and they rolled onto the shelf. So we're really fortunate that now we have, you know, our kind of six truffle flavors, our three new chewy nutty rolling in thousands of stores, a lot of the big banners, the Walmart and Whole Foods and Sprouts, HEB, Kroger, Keri, our bars, we have regular displays with them and they're bringing in the chewy nutty and our shakes are also available nationwide at Kroger. And that's more of a, you know, at home type of opportunity. Also just kind of make a fat shake if you do it without almond milk or cream, it's just like it's another world. So we're very lucky that that's our innovation now like our eight or nine bars and our shakes and rolling that out in the US. We are working on, you know, 2021 innovation, but we just like the focus right now is making sure we get enough awareness and trial on what we're rolling out. So the timing worked out really well. I think you said this before, but I just want to give everyone a price point. Is it two for $5? Is that the price you said before? Yeah, like our bars are pretty much 229 and three for five is often like, you know, two for four, three for five is the price that you'll find them on deal. In Canada, we love to, you know, they just go by the box. So the box is 10% off pretty much everywhere and Canadians just buy a box. So in the US, it's still a world of two for four, three for five and mix and match is great. But again, the world of discovery is less than it was. So the promotional mix is really down in bars, but it's a pretty attractive price point. And you can, you know, you can pick six of them and give them a shot. Are there any other nuances you can share around being in Canada, but also in the United States? Or is there something you've picked up on where these countries do things? Some nuances just completely different or that just seems so foreign to you? No, well, I've been a marketer for 20 years in multi-nationals. So I had, you know, most of the experience was in Canadian head office with a lot of interaction on, you know, mother US head office. So I was kind of familiar with, you're always comparing, you know, per capita and your results and, you know, is Canada or the US stronger? On average, it's quite similar. And then I've worked on the last five years, 10 years on a lot of US brands, also from Canada where it was Canadian company marketing mostly to the US. The biggest difference is really around sweetness. That's kind of the one big thing that most marketers who work on both countries will know. Americans like sweet or stuff. Yes, they do. And yeah, like it's just so, whether it's, you know, it's chocolate or our bars are not very sweet. We've not put sugar alcohols in them. As keto kind of rolled in and across the country, a lot of the competitive bars and products are full of sugar alcohols and they're very sweet. You also have that cold kind of taste with sugar alcohol. So we've, our bars are not over the top sweet. They're filling and they have that, you know, sweetness that comes with the right blends. But it's not, you know, you're, you're not kind of getting a big influx. So they're great for, you know, for mornings. You know, the last thing you want to do is eat something that tells your brain you're eating sugar first thing. So that's the big difference. I think is the, the sweetness profile, flavor profiles, you know, mint has always been stronger in the US. We've got a girl guide cookies, but you know, our mint in Canada just kind of went to number one selling. So mint, you know, happens to be very strong for both countries, but there's a lot of similarities. We have a more consolidated trade. So, you know, we have one big banner that's 30, 35% of the volume food and grocery. And then we have Walmart and we have convenience stores and drug stores. So, you know, we have a bit more and club. So we have a bit more consolidation. So it's easier to get to 80% of the market than the US. The US is much more work. There's much more regional and local banners. So that's a big, a big difference. But from a consumer behavior perspective, it's pretty similar. I always like to ask entrepreneurs this. I mean, you're clearly very passionate about what you're doing. Do you foresee yourself doing this again? Do you see yourself exiting soon? Or is this something that you want to run for the rest of your life? And maybe a legacy play here. How do you, you know, how do you view your future with the business? Well, Diego, I'm 53 and the last three years have aged me about 20. Like it's been nuts. You know, I kind of thought I was superwoman, kind of coming into this and I would, you know, whip off the hour commute and carpool and two kids's and lunches and breakfasts and this and that. And then, oh, by the way, I do an Ironman per summer. And I was just like, okay, you know, I got this. And then man, like it's been like, it's been crazy in the last three years. Like plus the travel, you know, I've been away from the house like half the time. So really it's been the best, best, best, best three, four years of my life. We have, you know, raised and very fortunate to have Angel shareholders and now we raise a series A. We eventually need an exit play. We, you know, we eventually need to kind of, to pay back all the people who kind of believed in me. So there will be some sort of opportunity for an exit at one point. I am, you know, the most kind of passionate voice for the brand and from now from, you know, doing podcasts for sure I wanna, you know, do my own podcast, write a book, continue to kind of carry the voice until my, you know, my very last days on good fats and low sugar. So I think I will always be very passionate about this message in one way or another, but certainly we'll kind of welcome at one point slowing down a little bit. Yeah. Well, look, I really appreciate your story. I mean, there's so many entrepreneurs in general who always think like, and at least, you know, I never got caught in this, but there's a lot of people that think once they have kids, their life is over. It's almost this weird mentality we had in Silicon Valley where we have to do it before we have kids and you have to make the million before you're 30 because at 32 you die or something. There's this weird thought process. And I know my wife who she owns her own construction company here in LA and, you know, it's top of mind for her all the time. She's always looking for to speak to people like you oddly enough about the realities and that you can do this at any age. And here you are, you know, raising kids, doing an Ironman and you're at the helm. And I think it's so important for you to share that message however you can. So thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing it here. But I think it's, I think more people need to hear this. You know, more people need to hear that you're just getting started and here you are. And you could do this easily again when you're 60. Who knows if you will, but you'll have the choice, right? The option is yours. For sure. It's been maybe 35 years to kind of have the courage to kind of start, but I also, you know, the 20 years of experience have allowed me to avoid a lot of the pitfalls. And the reality now, even if you're an emerging brand and you're just launching in natural, it's hard and it's expensive. So if you're kind of learning on the go, well, changing packaging is a big deal. Changing formulas is a big deal. If you can learn before you launch, which is what you learn in packaged goods, you know, where I kind of spent my career learning how to not make the mistakes like before you launch, when you're in the market, we can do the rapid evolutions that, you know, I talked about, but that's not like re-engineering the brand. And often in emerging brands, you kind of, you know, pivot in your positioning and pivoting your product. And when you're doing that in market, that's expensive and it's hard. So, you know, learn a kind of little bit on the basics of brand building and positioning product and price value and then how to grow a brand. And you can do that in a safer way where you're not risking your kid's university tuition, which is what I did, you know, kind of soak that up a little bit because it's high stakes when you kind of put your money on the table and kind of say, I'm gonna do this full-time. And you know, I don't have a safety net. You're reminding me. So I'm currently, I do real estate development and a number of these deals usually, you have to put, you have to put a lot of money up before you get to the point of actually deciding to go. And it's, and so you try really hard to, you know, make sure you know all the pieces, make sure you know all the moving parts where you get the pitfalls as you put it. And you do your best to basically de-risk, but we've been, you know, I say this, I've been fortunate in that we've been able to avoid losing money, but it's still one of these things where you just, you have to put it out there or else you'll never find out. And that's the tough part. It's tough. It's startups and, you know, more brands fail than succeed. So it's not, you know, for the faint of heart, but if you kind of balance doing the work prior and, you know, have a little bit of luck and kind of a lot of work and good smart work and, you know, very open to, you know, very open to feedback and input and move at a fast enough pace, then you'll be good. Oh, great. Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on. Tell everyone where they can find you, where they can purchase the product, all that good stuff. Good. Love Good Fats is available on our website. LoveGoodFats.com is available on Amazon.com at really easy to find. We're also in a lot of the major retailers. So Walmart, Kroger and all the Kroger banners, Sprouts, Whole Foods, we're in 14,000 stores. If you just go on our website and you go to store finder and you put your post, your address, you'll immediately get all the stores around that were available in it. So we're pretty easy to order with fast service. Try out the bars. We have a variety pack or just go to the store and pick the flavors that you like and thanks for your support. Yeah, they're great. The bars are great. So I can honestly say that and if it wasn't, I'd be saying it too. So thank you so much, Suzy. I appreciate it. Perfect. Thanks, Diego.