 What individual thing has been the most impactful so far? Stephen Colbert. He made fun that our product was a pee milk, and he spent about a minute basically making fun of us. It was fantastic. Adam Lowry, co-founder of Method and Ripple Foods. You ready to answer some questions? Absolutely. Bring it on. What did you learn from Methods at helping you with Ripple? You know, I learned a lot about how customers work, like retailers and what their needs are. It's brutal in the grocery space, and these people have really hard jobs, and if you can create a brand that helps them get their job done, you can be a lot more successful. What made you come up with such an esoteric name? Yeah, forever this category's been about, like, what nut do we want to make milk from, and we've kind of run out of nuts to make milk from. And that's not a really interesting brand proposition anyway. Like, what do you do when almonds go out of fashion and your name is almond something, right? What we wanted to do is create a brand that was about the little things you do every day and how they make you healthier and make the world a little bit better. And so Ripple is really a play on that, on the Ripple effect, those little things we do every day and how they add up. Do you find that it might be a little too heady for people? I agree, you don't need to be called something nut, but Ripple and the Ripple effect and how it affects things, that feels like too much for me to absorb at shelf. Yeah, maybe at first, but people said the same thing about Method, and that turned out pretty well. So, you know, people thought, you know, that's not a clean product name, it needs to be WAMO or, you know, Windex or something like that. With Ripple, I think people eventually, they understand that it's about, we're trying to have a Ripple effect on people's lives and on the world at large, and once you start to be a consumer of the brand, you start to get it. Why is the font so hard to read? Yeah, so straight up, not that easy to read. A lot of people, the reason I ask that question, a lot of people think it looks like nipple. That is not intentional. I didn't see, you know, I didn't see nipple, just the drop shot. Yeah, I mean, there's two schools of thought of that, right? We first started with a font that was like lowercase and pretty easy to read, and it started to feel pretty kind of general internet era to us. It wasn't really distinctive, and we wanted to create some distinctiveness to it. I just kind of fell in love with this font that our creative agency came up with, and the fact that, you know, you take a little extra time to look at the font, it's maybe not such a bad thing. Who's the agency? VMG Creative. What percentage of consumers do you think really understand what you're trying to do with the ripple effect? Oh, a pretty small proportion of them at first, but I think when you're building a brand, it's important to build a brand that has layers and depth that you can go to as you become more engaged in the product line and in the brand. And so for us, it might not be the door you walk through, the carbon footprint, water savings and all of that, it might be, but for most people it's not, but it becomes something that unfolds as another reason why you should stay with the brand over time. I see you switched nutritious pea milk to nutritious plant-based milk. Have you seen an immediate lift from that? None that we can tell, but it's really about this shift in the category away from what's the ingredient to actually what do I want out of my milk. What individual PR marketing or media moment hit thing has been the most impactful so far? Being on Colbert on the late show with Stephen Colbert, he made fun of the fact that our product was a pea milk and we got him his face and the little screen and he spent about a minute basically making fun of us. It was fantastic. We saw like a 50% lift across the board in every retailer that day. If you could redo Ripple again, knowing what you know now, what would you have changed? Yeah, I think there was some stuff from a technology standpoint that I would have made sure it was a little bit more sealed and ready for primetime before scaling the business really quickly. So we raised quite a bit of money and we've used that money to do the technology that kind of underpins the brand, but we did get the growth of the business a little bit out ahead of the technology and I think that staging those things a little bit better would be probably what I would change. Do you think you approach this business with an unsafe amount of confidence given your last success? I'm really cognizant of that. It's been interesting that none of the problems are any less stressful, but the second time around you've seen them, so dealing with them is a little bit less personal. But I am conscious. Like I don't want to be too confident like, oh, I've seen this before. I know what to do here. You do have to take a little bit of time and just say, okay, you got to make sure you're not smoking your own stuff. Do you feel like you might have raised too much money? I don't know the answer to that question. I think only time will tell. I don't think so because we've had to do some really fundamental science work. How do you define your category? Right now we mostly define it as the broader plant-based milk category or what's often called plant-based beverages. But we also look at the dairy segment because the real big opportunity for ripple foods is really similar to what we did with Method, which is to mainstream a product that's plant-based. Method sort of mainstreamed a green cleaning product. And the way you do that is by making a product that can actually compete with the mainstream product, in this case on taste and nutrition. And we're the only brand that has the same protein content as milk and has a rich creamy texture of milk as well. So we do pay attention to the dairy category, but what we need to slug out every day for shelf spaces with the other non-dairy guys. What advice would you give someone who wants to start a beverage? Don't. When did the idea become a business? The idea really started with my co-founder who developed this way of getting pure protein out of plants. Proteins flavorless. So if it's pure, it doesn't have any flavor. He was kind of tooling around with that in the lab. And it was really when we kind of put two and two together that the non-dairy space is this large growing space that lacks the primary nutritional and taste benefits of what they replace. Essentially, non-dairy milks are terrible alternatives to dairy. Like, you know, they don't have protein, they don't taste very good. So when we sort of saw that we had this technology that could unlock a product experience that wasn't in the category yet, that's when it really became a business. Have you seen any copycat? Yeah, definitely. I mean, anytime you launch something into a consumer segment and it's successful, you'll see copycats. We've seen them. You mentioned Oatly. Within two months of Oatly coming into this market, there were five oat brands, right? Some of them from the big guys. So yeah, we've seen people silk launched a copycat pee-based product and then a couple of other brands, you know, did similar stuff. We've now seen two of those brands go by the wayside. So again, it's all about good food. If you create great taste and nutrition, that's how you create an enduring proposition. What are you going to do to make up for the fact that there's not a natural-born branding marketer here, which is a huge part of the entire promotion to the consumer? Higher one is the answer. So we're actually in the process of hiring a chief marketing officer now that will be the person responsible for doing the things that I just talked about and making that shift from sort of feature and benefit to really building a brand. Adam, thank you so much for coming on. I'm Ian Wishengrad and we'll see you next time on I'm With The Brand.