Magic Spoon & Exo: Gabi Lewis and Greg Sewitz

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SPEAKER_03: All these numbers seemed crazy and huge, right? The amount of money we're raising from investors, that was more money than we'd ever really thought about in our lives. In terms of revenue, the first million dollars or so was faster and easier than anybody would have predicted for a company selling cricket bars. But getting bigger than that, that was really hard to convince mainstream America to eat bugs was much harder than we thought. SPEAKER_04: Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how two college friends set out to sell snack bars made of bugs and then pivoted to something that was easier and harder at the same time. A sugary breakfast cereal without the sugar. Over the past 30 years or so, the story of natural and organic foods went something like this. There was a product that everyone ate, and smart entrepreneurs simply made an exact copy of it, but just made it organic. This happened to mac and cheese, to Oreo-style cookies, to potato chips, to lunch meats, cake mixes, canned soup, salad dressings, you name it. Once you slap that organic label on, lots of people buy it because they think it's healthier. And in many ways, this is a relatively easy thing to do. You just replace regular sugar with organic sugar, or regular unbleached white flour with organic flour, or regular cheese with organic cheese. And today, there are very few foods left that don't have a corresponding organic version on the shelves. And so now, in 2024, we've arrived to a new era in natural and organic foods. An era where organic isn't enough. At least, not enough to break through. In this era of natural foods, a new cohort of entrepreneurs are trying to create versions of foods you love, except with no sugar, no grains, and almost no carbs. And if you ask any food scientist, they will tell you that this is really hard to do, because sugar and grains and things that have carbs are, well, delicious. And it's pretty challenging to make an exact copy of an Oreo cookie or a Cheeto without that stuff. But some are trying, including today's guests, Gabby Lewis and Greg Sevets. These guys are the co-founders of Magic Spoon. It's basically a high protein, grain-free, sugar-free, low carb breakfast cereal. And one more challenge? These guys are trying to replicate the flavors of nostalgic breakfast cereals like Cocoa Puffs and Froot Loops. And they're doing it at a time when the overall breakfast cereal market is in decline. But Magic Spoon has raised tens of millions of dollars from investors who also believe the future of natural foods is going to be low sugar, low carb, and high protein. Now, if this sounds like a risky proposition, just consider what Gabby and Greg did before they launched Magic Spoon. For nearly five years, they ran a startup called Exo that sold a protein bar made of cricket flour, as in those chirping insect's crickets. And as you'll hear, the cricket bars essentially failed. But Gabby and Greg drew on the lessons from that failure to build Magic Spoon into a brand that's in thousands of retailers nationwide. And just to be clear, Magic Spoon has no crickets in it. Greg Sevitz grew up in Los Angeles, and Gabby Lewis grew up in Scotland. They met in 2009 when they were both students at Brown University in Rhode Island. SPEAKER_03: Greg, when I first met him and saw him, I remember he seemed very classically L.A. to me. He had the sort of L.A. surfer accent almost that I'd seen in films. And then being in similar dorms, similar friends, just quickly became friends. I think we had a couple of classes together. Remember we were in a math class together, and we were very good friends from then until now. SPEAKER_02: Nothing bonds you together like multivariable calculus. In college, I don't know, I found math was... It's hard to teach because it's sort of these large lectures. It's probably a grad student just basically teaching from a textbook. So we kind of bonded over how challenging that course was. Yeah. SPEAKER_04: And Gabby, I guess that you were also separately taking some classes in entrepreneurship, which Brown is kind of known for. And I read that actually the first business that the two of you guys started together came out of one of those classes where you had to come up with a product and a business plan. And I guess that the idea you had was to make a protein bar, like a paleo protein bar, is that right? SPEAKER_03: Yeah. The main idea was that let's just create a protein bar that is legitimately good for you. Unlike at the time what was mostly a sea of candy bars masquerading as health bars. And so we wanted to use dates, cacao, nut butter, some kind of very basic natural protein. This is pre-Rx bar. Correct. Did you start to make them in your kitchen or wherever you were living? I did. The amazing thing about developing a protein bar business is you can make a basic version in your kitchen. You're just mushing ingredients together, forming it, and you can make lots of different iterations of it. SPEAKER_04: There's a story of Lara bars and Cliff bars. It's the same story. All those companies, they started that way. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, 100%. I think lots of bar companies, some beverage companies, it's just mixing ingredients. You can do it yourself at home. I started writing this plan and then a couple of months in, a company launched called Amrap Nutrition, basically doing the exact same thing that I had put pen to paper on. SPEAKER_03: At the time, it wasn't really the biggest deal that somebody else was doing it because it was really just an academic exercise of a business plan. I had no idea at that point that I was actually going to launch this thing. So I was really just maybe wallowing around at our house on campus thinking about how do I pivot this academic exercise? And that was when Greg introduced the idea of what if you add crickets into your protein bar? SPEAKER_04: Okay, Greg. Record scratch. How did that idea? Were you sort of interested in being involved in his protein business at that point? SPEAKER_04: I wasn't at that point because where I got hooked was really the marketing challenge SPEAKER_02: of how do you make this product that people care about? At the time, I had just gone to a conference where somebody was presenting on the idea of edible insects. The United Nations had just put out a big report about edible insects all around the world and we realized that actually the protein bars were a perfect Trojan horse, if you will, to potentially normalize this idea of crickets because really what it was is a vehicle for protein powder encased in nut butters and cacao powder and chocolate chips and things like that. And where I got really interested was that theoretical idea of could you essentially normalize this practice that we all have an innate disgust response to, i.e. eating bugs in the US through a well-branded delicious food product basically. And so that's what started piquing my interest. SPEAKER_04: All right, let's kind of just digress for a moment and talk about crickets because I remember going to farmers markets like already 10 years ago and seeing people selling like cricket flour. All of a sudden, you start to hear people talk about crickets as a potentially great source and still do sometimes as a great source of protein and a sustainable one because livestock production accounts for like 10 or 12% of global carbon emissions. Was that what you were hearing at that conference? SPEAKER_02: Correct. And we were sort of struck by some of the facts in that report where crickets consume far less feed, far less water, and produce equal amounts of protein. But the hiccup obviously is that they're crickets and we have no history or tradition of eating insects in America for a variety of reasons. I think through our efforts at Exo and some of these other brands over those next few years, you really did start to hear about cricket protein and cricket flour as an alternative protein source much more. And cricket flour, I should mention, it's got, I mean, it's like by volume, it's more SPEAKER_04: than half of it is protein. So it's got, it's very protein dense. So when you, Gabby, when Greg went to you and said, hey, why don't we try and figure out how to use crickets? You were instantly intrigued? SPEAKER_03: No, I would say I was instantly confused or maybe even slightly disgusted. I think my reaction the very first time I heard it was similar to some potential customers the first time they hear it. But then the more I learned about it, the more I went from being unsure or maybe even disgusted by the idea to being really intrigued and then eventually really passionate about it because it makes so much logical sense. And then it seems like an incredible marketing challenge to figure out how do you actually get people over that psychological hurdle? SPEAKER_04: So you guys start to talk about this idea, but what's the next step? How do you, how do you actually test it out? You'd already been making protein bars with, you know, egg white powder and dates. So, I mean, could you just at that point, this 2013, could you just order cricket flour? SPEAKER_02: Well, that's definitely where it gets a little bit weirder because we tried to find a source of crickets that we felt we could serve to people, but there really weren't any at the whole cricket farming industry existed to service Petco, PetSmarts and the reptile feeds of the world, basically. So we ordered some to try our very from, from like the internet or from Petco or what? I'll never forget, we basically found a cricket farm in Louisiana that would ship us crickets in the mail. And by the way, are there different, were there different like grades, like food grade, SPEAKER_04: like animal grade, human grade or no, it's just crickets? SPEAKER_02: There wasn't at the time because there really weren't any companies on a large scale trying to serve crickets to humans. So the whole, the whole, no, no, no cricket farmer would have ever in their wildest dreams thought that people would come knocking and ask to serve their crickets to people. So it was a really smallish industry. It was, you know, there were a lot of family operated farms. And when I say farms, really, it's sort of their rooms full of bins of crickets. And you could just buy them and this is to feed your, your pet snake or whatever. Exactly. Your lizard, your snake. And so we ordered a box and we walk back to our house on campus, we got the notification, it arrived and sitting on our doorstep was a shoe box with some holes poked in it. And we were like, oh, that, that must be the crickets that we ordered. So we take them inside and you can just hear instantly hundreds of crickets in this little box. Sure. We chirping and sort of jumping around. We had other roommates at the time and we hadn't told them what we were doing. We really hadn't thought it all the way through. And so we started unpacking this box full of crickets and it was, we could see it was going to just be chaos to try and somehow get these crickets into the oven. Cause you were, the idea was let's take them and just put them in the oven and cook SPEAKER_04: them. SPEAKER_02: Right. So cause cricket flour is, is just whole roasted crickets that are ground into the outer. Yeah. Right. SPEAKER_02: So we put the box in the freezer because we Googled online. How do we, you know, what happens trying to feed crickets to your lizards? And I guess it is common to put them in the freezer because they're cold blooded. They essentially go to sleep and then you can take the box out and do what, do what you will at them. So we set rows and rows of baking sheets full of crickets, put that in the oven, roasted them. And then all of our roommates came home and we're like, what is going on here? You just had roasted crickets on cooking sheets. SPEAKER_02: Exactly. And I'm sure we seem totally crazy. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: There was a tradition in many countries for basically drying out insects in the sun and then grinding them into a high protein flour or powder that's then used for baking or breads. And so that's essentially what this notion of cricket flour was. We dried them out in the oven and then yeah, we, we threw them into the Vitamix, SPEAKER_03: blended it into a coarse cricket protein powder, essentially. SPEAKER_04: And so with that powder, and by the way, you guys had no idea how this would affect the taste. Like if it would be like rancid or funky, like you didn't know, right? Because I don't know, is cricket powder neutral flavored? SPEAKER_04: It's quite neutral, slightly nutty, slightly toasted in taste. SPEAKER_03: So as it happens, it didn't have a negative effect on the taste or texture in any way really. But we didn't know that at the time. We were just purely blindly experimenting at this point. SPEAKER_04: And you just like put it on a sheet of like parchment paper and then press it down and then cook it? Yeah, basically. SPEAKER_03: And then we started giving some samples out to some friends. SPEAKER_04: And you would say to them, this has cricket powder and what, and probably some of your friends are like, I don't know, but probably some of them were like, all right, let me try it. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think, I think some of them we told, some of them, honestly, we probably didn't even tell until after they tried it. And people were some combination of curious, confused, grossed out when they first hear of it. And then we'd explain to them why it actually makes sense. And they'd realize, huh, this actually tastes quite good and it's good for the world and it's good for me. And then they'd get it. SPEAKER_03: And this was, I mean, you guys started this your senior year of college, right? SPEAKER_04: Correct. And so by the time you, I mean, I guess by the time you graduate, which is in May, had you decided that you were going to pursue this after college, that the two of you were going to see if you could create a product? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we decided quite close to graduation. So I was actually planning to join what at the time was the largest hedge fund in the world. Bridgewater? Yeah. SPEAKER_04: Okay. I just, I just read that book about Ray Dalio. Very interesting book, by the way. Fascinating. The fun, fascinating book. Are you happy you didn't go to Bridgewater after reading that book? SPEAKER_03: I think regardless of the book, launching XO and Magic Spoon is been amazing. SPEAKER_04: Well, you're keeping the door open in case you still have an offer. SPEAKER_03: Anyway, so you don't go to Bridgewater. So we decided to give it a shot. We had been giving out samples to our friends. We had been talking to professors. We had even spoken to a couple of angel investors in town. We had taken some samples to the local farmers market, the downtown CrossFit gym in Providence, and everyone we spoke to was just getting so excited about this idea once they understood it. SPEAKER_04: I mean, the facts are fascinating, right? It's high, high protein content, really protein dense, good for the environment. It's a neutral flavor, but of course it's still crickets. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And honestly, that was what made it interesting enough, I think, for us to do that instead of our other possible choices. It was the fact that this seemed like such a worthy challenge and such an interesting marketing problem to solve that really played a part in us saying, hey, let's see if we can make this happen. And I also think the more we looked into the history of other foods that have made this transition from being weird to being mainstream, the more we felt compelled by the idea of a cricket protein bar. So there's a long history of foods that at one point were viewed as bizarre in the US. You could look at sushi, for example, which 50 years ago eating raw fish was a little bit strange to most Americans. And the way it became popularized was that a chef in LA created the California Roll and sort of hid that raw fish inside the rice and seaweed, reimagined it for a more western palate and then served it to celebrities in Hollywood. And so we saw parallels with using our protein bar as the sort of California roll to introduce Americans this idea of eating bugs. Yeah. And so we graduated, we decided to move to New York. We decided that doing a Kickstarter campaign would be an interesting way to prove demand, get some preorders. And so we launched a Kickstarter that summer when we graduated. SPEAKER_04: And you guys came up with the name Exo as an exoskeleton, presumably? SPEAKER_02: Exactly, exoskeleton. We wanted something that sounded sort of sporty like Nike or something, but alluded to the crickets without making it super obvious. So we landed on Exo. Good name. SPEAKER_04: And also probably you guys were excited at the prospect that because this was such an outlier, because it was so different, you could get attention for it. People would want to know more. You could not pass by somebody handing out cricket protein bars and not at least stop and look at it. SPEAKER_02: Exactly. And it was also the era when all of the plant-based meat companies were first being founded and launched. And so there was a larger cultural conversation going on around alternative protein sources and the need for sustainable meat alternatives and things like that. And so crickets fit very nicely into that as well. So you're in New York and you decide to raise money on Kickstarter, which is smart SPEAKER_04: because you can get attention, right? And it's a way to maybe even get some media coverage. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, in hindsight, Kickstarter probably wasn't the easiest way to raise money, but it was an amazing way to get attention and get press and prove the concept. And so that month during our Kickstarter, we were in the New York Times, we were in Forbes, Fast Company, tons of press just because the idea was so buzzworthy. And based off of the success that Kickstarter, which did close to $60,000 in pre-orders. $60,000? SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, you wanted to raise $20,000. You raised almost $60,000. And just tell me what you did. Did you make a video? And I don't know, how did you put it together? Was it like a really slick video? Or was it kind of just an iPhone video? SPEAKER_03: It wasn't especially slick. I would say it was the classic founder staring into the camera. Hey, I'm Gabi. Hey, I'm Greg. And here's our idea and why it makes sense. SPEAKER_02: But we spent a lot of time thinking about how to position the messaging and really can, you know, get our point across about all the reasons to eat bugs, but also acknowledge that people aren't going to purely do this based on an intellectual exercise. You also had to really convince them that it was going to taste good and also meet the nutritional needs they were looking for from a protein bar, because ultimately, the product was going to live or die on whether people kept buying it for the use case that we were selling it for. And so you raise $60,000. SPEAKER_04: And with that money, what were you able to do? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I would say we were able to do less than we thought with that amount of money. So we had done this Kickstarter campaign to really prove demand, improve the concept. I think like many first time entrepreneurs launching a Kickstarter, we hadn't even shifted SPEAKER_03: gears yet to think about if we sell tens of thousands of these bars and preorders, where and how and when are we going to make them? And so very quickly, we had to shift into gears to figure out how do we make tens of thousands of bars versus the dozens we'd been making previously in our home kitchen? And so what did you do? SPEAKER_04: I mean, you had to locate a co-packer, a manufacturer. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so from googling, you know, energy bar, nutrition bar, protein bar manufacturers, we ended up finding a place actually in in New York State that was willing to take us on. And we did have a challenge in that crickets have an allergen overlap with shellfish. So any bar manufacturer that was going to run us would have to disclose to their other customers that they were bringing in a shellfish allergen. And as you can imagine, that's not a very normal allergen for protein bars. And so we got a lot of no's. I mean, there was basically one place that was willing to do the full allergen clean after we were to run to to let us produce there. That probably was going to cost you a lot more money. SPEAKER_02: It was going to cost us a lot of money. And at that point, we had we had enough money to make the bars because of the pre orders basically from the Kickstarter. We didn't have enough money to make anything else besides the right amount of bars. But I would say before that the the first challenge was that there was no source of crickets to make the cricket flower to put in the bars. And so I flew down to Louisiana actually to one of the cricket farms we'd ordered from in the mail, had dinner with this, you know, old school cricket farmer, who was I'm sure very taken aback by our request and probably didn't quite believe we had enough demand. How much how many crickets were you looking to order her like how many pounds? I don't remember but definitely 10s of 1000s SPEAKER_04: of pounds or of crickets of pounds. Wow. And and and they're used to sending like a shoe because a shoebox of crickets probably doesn't weigh that much. No, exactly. SPEAKER_02: And so we actually had to work with them to set up a separate room where they raise crickets specifically for us. We we wanted to make sure they were fed organic feed and that the cleaning products were organic and, you know, raise the bar, so to speak on just a lot of the products used in the in the farming of the crickets. And so it was a lot of work. Right. OK, so they agreed. SPEAKER_04: They're like, fine, you send us a check. We'll give you as many crickets as you want. Did they did they think you guys are a little baddie? SPEAKER_02: I think it was, you know, this guy coming down. First of all, this 22 year old coming down from New York City saying we just raised sixty thousand dollars to make these bars full of crickets and we need your help in going organic and supplying what we were pitching as, you know, a massive long term industry and business. So I'm sure he half believed us and half thought he would never hear from us again. SPEAKER_04: But he does. He will hear from them again. When we come back in just a moment, Gabby and Greg put their cricket bars out into the world until they realize the world is not ready for cricket bars. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. Finding new clothing is really hard. Scrolling through countless websites and spending hours wandering through crowded stores. No, thank you. Instead, I'm transforming my shopping experience with the stylists at Stitch Fix. Stitch Fix is an easy way to get clothes that fit you without having to endlessly browse through options or break the bank. 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My favorite is the Tim Leatherman one where he took his Leatherman tool and sent it to every pocket knife manufacturer in the country and they sent it back to him and said, well, it's a tool. And so he sent it to every tool maker in the country and they sent it back to him and said, yeah, this looks like a pocket knife. And so he went off and just created an entirely new marketplace all on his own. Sometimes you got to do that in life. SPEAKER_04: If you want to share your favorite episode of how I built this, record a short voice memo on your phone telling us your name, where you're from, what your favorite episode is and why. A lot like the voice memo you just heard. And email it to us at hibt at id.wunderi.com. And we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks and future episodes. And thanks so much. We love you guys. You're the best. And now back to the show. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2014 and Gabby and Greg have raised almost $60,000 for their cricket protein bar on Kickstarter. And as they begin working on updating the formula, they decide to reach out for some help. In the fine dining world, there was also a bit of a bubbling movement around edible insects. SPEAKER_02: And so we wanted to kind of bridge that divide as well. And so we got in touch with a chef who was a very creative person. We got in touch with a chef named Kyle Connaughton, who used to work at the Fat Duck. And we met him for coffee as well in New York, told him what we were up to. And he also came on board to help us scale up the recipes and make new flavors. And you just cold emailed him? Yeah. Shot in the dark, sent him a long email about what we were working on. I mean, he's a super nice guy. And I think he was intrigued by the fact that these two 22 year olds were trying to take SPEAKER_02: this big swing. I think we got a lot of mileage out of being so fresh faced at a college trying to do this big thing that just it seemed really interesting and cool and like a big challenge that a lot of people were intrigued by. SPEAKER_04: I should mention Kyle is a very close friend of mine. So I know him very well. He had run the R&D kitchen at the Fat Duck famous restaurant in the UK. This is before he would go on to open up his restaurant Single Thread in Sonoma County, which is now Michelin three star restaurant. But at the time, he was intrigued. And so he agreed to help you kind of formulate the recipes that to make them into something that people would really want to eat. SPEAKER_02: Yes. And we had Gabby's original recipe, which was a cocoa flavor, basically. And we knew we wanted to launch with a couple more. And so Kyle really helped us figure out what is a sort of gourmet twist we could bring to some of the classic protein bar flavors because we didn't want to do the same thing that everybody else is doing. So we came out with a peanut butter and jelly flavor, for example, and things slightly different that Kyle really helped us develop. So the idea was, of course, to get this these orders out on Kickstarter, but but eventually SPEAKER_04: to to get investors on board. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And thankfully, we're able to use the Kickstarter as well as having this amazing chef on board as proof of concept to then raise a seed round of I think $300,000 at the time as well. SPEAKER_04: It seems like everybody you talk to was excited about this. I mean, when you started to raise money, because I know you raised about a million dollars a little over a million dollars from investors at the end of 2014. Did you run into people who were like, I'm not interested in this? Or did it feel like everybody that you talked to was just really interested and intrigued? SPEAKER_03: We definitely got a lot of no's. I mean, every business gets a lot of no's from investors. This was no different. I would say maybe the difference was the yeses were really passionate. And that inspired us to move past and ignore the endless no's. SPEAKER_04: So when when it was time to actually launch the product, I think you actually launched them formally in 2015. Is that right? Yeah, around 2015. And where were they sold? Did you did you sell them in stores? Or was it still direct to consumer online? SPEAKER_03: At first, it was just direct to consumer online. And so we were able to leverage what at the time was almost all of the names in the paleo world, whether it's John Duran, Mark Sisson, Rob Wolf, Tim Ferriss, all of those people came on board as advisors or investors in the business. And so they were able to help us launch the business in a much larger way and much faster than if we were relying on the standard tactics of a direct to consumer company. SPEAKER_04: And you've got a lot, probably a lot of free coverage, right? Just because there was a lot a lot of these influencers were writing about you. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, 100%. There was lots of traditional media coverage, whether it was Forbes or Fast Company or New York Times, but far more impactful than that was having Mark Sisson paleo primal blogger write a blog post to his startup Primal Kitchen 100% writing to his hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of the time readers or email subscribers to check out this amazing new cricket protein bar. SPEAKER_04: So when you launched in 2015, I mean, how were sales? How were you guys? What do you remember? Like, in terms of revenue, were you doing like $30,000 a month $50,000 a month more? SPEAKER_03: I think we didn't have any real benchmarks. So in terms of whether it met or exceeded expectations, we didn't really know what to compare it to. And to us as 22 year olds at the time, all these numbers seemed crazy and huge, right? The amount of money we're raising from investors, even the Kickstarter and the seed round, that was more money than we never really thought about in our lives. In terms of revenue, when we look back on it, I think the first million dollars or so, which was roughly what we did in the first year after launch, was faster and easier than anybody would have predicted for a company selling cricket bars. These early adopter communities of paleo, of primal, of CrossFit, they were really into the idea. But getting bigger than that and growing beyond that early circle of early adopters, that was really hard to convince mainstream America to eat bugs was much harder than we thought. But getting those early adopters on board was easier. SPEAKER_03: So just reading about this story is so fascinating to me because it's, you know, as I say, you've SPEAKER_04: got a lot of attention, there's a lot of goodwill. You know, you had at a certain point made the Forbes 30 under 30 list, which, you know, I won't say what you will about it, but it is, you know, it is certainly something that people point to and you're getting attention and you're getting people wanting to invest in the brand. I think to a certain point, you guys raised what, I mean, how much did you eventually SPEAKER_04: raise for XO total? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we raised another four million on top of that first million. So we raised a total of about five million dollars for that business. SPEAKER_04: So consumer, I mean, still only direct to consumer. This was not sold in stores at this point? SPEAKER_03: We started to get it into some select stores. So we slowly went from being purely on our own website. And then we also sold in some CrossFit gyms, some Equinox gyms, and actually a few Whole Foods stores in New York as well. So there was a limited retail presence, but majority was still online. SPEAKER_04: When did you start to, between the two of you, when did you start to kind of feel like you weren't breaking through, that it was, maybe it might just be a niche product for a certain set of people, CrossFitters? SPEAKER_02: Before we got to the point where on the marketing and demand side, we felt like it wasn't breaking through or that there was a lower ceiling than we might have hoped, we actually encountered a lot of supply chain challenges because we were sort of developing this whole industry in real time where we were trying to essentially create the demand and the supply together. And it just got really hard to ensure that there was enough reliable and consistent cricket flour at a price that we felt would make us competitive. So we eventually wanted to make cricket flour the star of the show. I mean, our goal was to develop the use of insect and cricket protein, not to sell protein bars really in terms of the mission statement of the company. And so we actually ended up going to Thailand where there's over 20,000 cricket farms. There's a long tradition of raising crickets in backyards. And we spent a lot of time there. We lived there on and off for six to 12 months, I would say, trying to see if we could build up a supply chain there that could lower the costs enough that it could really become competitive to even hopefully sell in tubs, for example, as a protein powder. Because how much were the bars? SPEAKER_02: I think they retailed for $2.99. All right. So they weren't prohibitively expensive at all. The bars weren't, but there was- You weren't making a profit off that. The company was not profitable, no. Our margins were totally industry standard, but there was only, if I remember correctly, maybe 10, 11 grams of cricket flour in those bars. And so if we were talking about using the amount of cricket flour you'd need to get 20, 30, 40 grams of protein per serving for some of these other use cases we were exploring, the costs were way too high. But the reality of the supply chain was that it was nowhere near what the theory said. SPEAKER_03: And so it was almost as if we were launching a beef jerky company when there's three cattle ranches in the country. You're just not going to be competitive. And so all of these theoretical promises of insect protein as a new food source and being so much more sustainable, and eventually it's going to be cheaper as well, right? We just realized the supply chain was so far from where it needed to be to make good on those promises. And we didn't see a path to getting there in even the medium term. SPEAKER_03: And so it was a combination of not really being able to figure out how to create a more SPEAKER_04: concentrated protein, like powder from the crickets. And at the same time, I have to imagine there was still that just that leap to make psychological leap. I mean, human psychology, this is a problem, right? If you can't get people past that thing, this is not the sushi problem. SPEAKER_02: Totally. And it really started to feel like we were pushing a boulder up a hill by a certain point. And I do still believe that on the timeframe of 10, 20, 30 years, it was totally something that could be viable as an entire industry. But on the timeframe that we were working on and that we were interested in, we just we realized there wasn't really a path forward necessarily by ourselves. And Gabby and I took a long, hard look in the mirror and realized we didn't want to be cricket farmers for the next 10 or 20 years of our lives. So what was the thing that sort of prompted you to sell this business? SPEAKER_04: Because you sold it to another company that was also in this space. And then I think they went on and sold it again. And you can still get these bars, they're still available online. And so the brand is still out there. But basically, there are some people, I should say more than some people, a lot of people are reluctant to become entrepreneurs, because I think it's a natural human instinct to fear the possibility of failure. And any entrepreneur knows you've got to fail, right, in order to eventually succeed. And this show is often about failure, because that is part of the journey, a massive part of the journey. But it's still painful. SPEAKER_03: It definitely felt like a failure for a while. And I think not only in the sense that we hadn't achieved the mission we set out to achieve, but we also self-identified as the cricket guys. We'd go to Expo West and trade shows, and we'd have our t-shirts that said, crickets SPEAKER_03: are the new kale, or crickets are just tiny lobsters. And everyone would come over and say, oh, I love your product, love your brand. And we were pioneering that. And so a lot of our identity was wrapped up in it. So it definitely felt like we hadn't done what we thought we were going to do. And that didn't feel great. But I think that that feeling didn't linger for too long. And then we were able to dust ourselves off and quickly pivot to, all right, what's next? So did you have a plan in place for the next thing? SPEAKER_03: No, we then spent some time thinking and reflecting. SPEAKER_04: But the two of you knew that you still wanted to work together. You didn't hate each other at this point. You didn't say, all right, this was a disaster. Goodbye. We're going our separate ways. SPEAKER_03: No, no. I mean, I think the opposite. We felt, on reflection, once we got past the feelings around not quite doing what we thought we were going to do, we felt really grateful for the experience. And we felt like it was an education in building a food business. And so then the next question was, what's the next food or beverage business to build together? And what kind of ideas did you start to batter out? So we basically wanted to have the opposite experience from what we had at Exo. So whereas with that business, we were taking this really niche idea and trying to push it towards the mainstream, this time around, we wanted to try and find a large category begging for innovation. And so at one point, we were really just thinking through, what are the largest categories in SPEAKER_03: the grocery store? And has there been anything interesting there for a while? You start off with milk and soda. And obviously, in milk, you've got endless innovation, whether it's oat milk, almond milk, pea milk, lab-grown milk. So it didn't seem to us that there's very anything interesting to do there. Then you look at soda. And similarly, there's just endless innovation, whether it's at the time, it was perhaps peak kombucha. There's all the seltzers. There's probiotic sodas. And so it didn't seem like there was anything interesting there. And then you get to cereal. The cereal aisle five years ago looked pretty similar to the cereal aisle 25 years ago. And so we started asking people, why is nobody truly innovative in the cereal aisle? And why has nobody created, at the time, the references we used were the Halo Top of cereal, the smart sweets of cereal. So we'd seen all these categories where somebody had come into a huge category. They'd either taken out the sugar or added in more protein or both. SPEAKER_03: And in some cases, they'd captured maybe 5-10% of some of these categories are several billion dollars. And so we said to people in the industry, why has nobody done that for cereal? SPEAKER_04: But why cereal? Just for a moment. Why the cereal category? Why not, I don't know, dog food or condiments? SPEAKER_03: So we were looking for a large category and we were looking for a category that was beloved by people. And cereal is beloved by people. SPEAKER_04: I think it is, but I'm just kind of surprised because I would think cereal is like kind of a declining category. SPEAKER_03: It is technically declining and that's actually what was kind of interesting about it as well. So the cereal category is enormous, about $11 billion. And it's been declining slightly. And people would actually say that to us as a reason for why we shouldn't go into that category. We said to them, hey, why has nobody created a cereal 2.0 with more protein with less sugar? One of the answers we got was, oh, it's a declining category. We never want to go into declining categories. But what we saw was that it's an enormous category only declining because none of the products speak to today's consumer. SPEAKER_04: But it clearly is speaking to some consumers of its $11 billion. I mean, I'm not eating Lucky Charms in the morning, but I did when I was a kid. I loved them. But clearly there are still people who do it. When I was a kid growing up, we had Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios and Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs. Now I just want to eat that stuff. But I would never buy that for my kids. SPEAKER_02: And I think you hit on something really important, which is that these brands are so iconic. I mean, there's no other category where there's probably 40 brands that your average person on the street could name. Crunchberries? Yeah, exactly. Not only name, but light up when they talk about it. And, you know, it's these memories of Saturday morning cartoons and growing up with your grandma. And there's there's so much emotional chocolat material. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly. These iconic, iconic names. And so there was this pent up demand we felt for something that could replicate that feeling that you're having, even thinking about these memories. But a product that could speak to essentially Gabby and myself. And you asked about something like dog food. The last criteria we had was we wanted it to be something that we could be users of. And I think I see you would eat dog food. We wouldn't eat dog food and we don't have dogs and we don't have babies. And so there's a lot of categories that just didn't feel as relevant and that we were the right people to really take on and build in an authentic way. SPEAKER_04: I wonder how, but you said there was pent up, you felt like there was pent up demand. Did you feel it or were you able to actually, you know, do some research and confirm that to be a fact? SPEAKER_03: It was somewhere in between. I think every time we'd speak to someone and we tell them this idea of, hey, what if we could recreate that delicious taste and texture of your favorite childhood cereal, but with more protein, less carbs, zero sugar, people would say, I can't even imagine that that could exist. That sounds amazing. And so we wanted to put in basically protein to replace the carbs and then use natural sweeteners to replace the sugar. And the idea was to create a healthy cereal really for anyone, regardless of whether they are a workout fanatic trying to get protein after they're at the gym or a parent wanting to give their kids a cereal that looks like it's sugary and tastes like it's sugary, but it's actually not, or somebody who's gluten free or grain free. And so we had these broad guardrails that we went into development with. We wanted to ideally be more than 10 grams of protein. We ideally wanted to be five grams or less of net carbs. And part of that was because when we were developing it, the keto diet was really at its peak. Keto, right. Correct. SPEAKER_04: And to make it without any grains. SPEAKER_03: Correct. And also have the net carbs, ideally below five grams per serving. SPEAKER_04: And net carbs for people who don't, this is a little bit of a, it's, you subtract the fiber from the amount of carbohydrates and that's, and then you get the net carbs. So it might have 15 carbs, but if it's got 10 grams of fiber, then it's only five net carbs. SPEAKER_03: Correct. And keep sugar either one gram, zero grams, really as low as possible. SPEAKER_04: All right. You land on this idea of creating a cereal that was, had no sugar, lots of protein, and low in carbohydrates. Easy, right? No corn, no wheat, no rice. So how did you find, who did you find to help you kind of come up with what this could be? Because you're not using grains, you're not using nuts. SPEAKER_02: We did all the actual original formulations ourselves. So we were using basically plain regular cereal. And it was me and Gabby just ordering a bunch of ingredients that we thought could potentially work. Looking at a bunch of products across different categories, seeing what was common amongst them, and then reaching out to flavor suppliers and you saying, hey, you know, we, can you send us something along these lines? And we tasted, we'd say, can you make it slightly stronger, et cetera, et cetera. And we made it all ourselves. SPEAKER_04: But just to be clear, you couldn't literally make the cereal yourselves because it's complicated or you couldn't make it at scale. So you had to find somebody to make it for you. And I guess you guys went to this big trade show in Las Vegas to find somebody who could sort of make this like loop-shaped cereal for you. Is that what you were looking for? SPEAKER_02: Yeah. We kind of had, we had a prototype that was unbeknownst to anybody, just regular cereal. You know, I won't name names, but it's sort of a loop, a plain loop. And we went up to a bunch of different manufacturers and said, hey, we're, you know, we're, we haven't launched anything. We're looking for something that looks like this, but is very high in protein and very low in carbohydrates. We're open to dairy proteins, vegetable proteins, you know, we don't have anything yet basically. And they said, well, who made that for you? And we'd say, well, you know, we can't really say we're still looking for our preferred partner. Are you interested? And we didn't have any good leads at the time, but one of the suppliers actually said, you know, we can't make that because of allergen concerns, but we think we know who made that sample for you. And we said, well, you know, we can't say, and they said, was it so and so? They actually have a booth. Did you get it from their booth? And we'd never heard of them before. But after that, we ran right over to their booth and actually that supplier ended up being our launch partner. And they helped us develop back into basically a cereal piece that ended up being primarily dairy proteins and a little bit of chicory root fiber and some tapioca starch essentially. SPEAKER_04: So basically you take whey protein and you mix it with tapioca starch, which is from a, is it from the cassava plant? I think I can't. Yeah, exactly. And then which is paleo, right? And keto and gluten free and all that. And then you add some chicory root, which has a lot of fiber. And those basic building blocks can create like a crispy loop. SPEAKER_02: And it was a lot of trial and error. I mean, it took us a year, I would say, to develop the right ratio of those ingredients. And did you raise money to do this or were you bootstrapping at this point? SPEAKER_03: As soon as we became clear with ourselves that this was the bet we were going to place and we're going to get into the cereal game, we actually called up many of the old investors from Exo and Collaborative Fund, which was the first VC in our last business, actually wrote the first check into this business as well. SPEAKER_04: So you raised money from the beginning. SPEAKER_04: This was going to be a different approach. SPEAKER_03: It wasn't going to be like Kickstarter. Correct. And part of it was we knew this was not taking a small niche idea and taking our time to grow it. This was going up against some very large companies in an enormous category. SPEAKER_03: And we wanted to do it right. And we wanted to build this business faster. So we raised a million dollars pre-launch, half of it from this VC fund, Collaborative Fund, and half of it was actually from Health and Wellness influencers, who wrote small checks into the business and could then help us eventually launch it. SPEAKER_04: And so with that money, you were able to really do the R&D to develop the recipe to make this. SPEAKER_02: Correct. It was mostly R&D and a little bit of branding because we felt like the marketing opportunity was so massive given the emotional resonance of these brands that we were sort of inspired by because a key part of our positioning was that we were updating cereal for grownups basically and really going after Gabby and myself, 20, 30, 40-somethings. That was the age group. You weren't going for children. No. We very explicitly were not going for children. SPEAKER_03: And so the main insight was that every other category in the grocery store has evolved for the modern consumer, but cereal was just stuck in the past in this old paradigm of carbs and sugar and junk ingredients, and we were coming to upgrade this category. Yeah. In fact, one of our taglines early on was, why did you grow up but your cereal didn't? SPEAKER_04: Why don't we come back in just a moment, how Gabby and Greg come up with the exact ingredients to make good on that tagline. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. I've talked to hundreds of founders on how I built this, and I've heard time and time again how important it is to have a strong web presence in order to really grow a business. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building a brand and engaging customers online. Squarespace lets you easily create a dynamic website and sell anything, your products and services and even content you create. 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So, it's 2019 and Gabby and Greg have raised $1 million for their new high-protein, no-sugar cereal. And most of that million goes toward developing just the right flavors. SPEAKER_02: Our first four flavors that we launched with were fruity, cinnamon, cocoa and frosted. So we wanted to basically have a version for any cereal flavor profile that you might enjoy and remember from your childhood. And no sugar because you use something called Allulose which is a, you can buy it in bags. SPEAKER_04: It looks like granulated sugar but it doesn't actually convert into energy in your body. So it doesn't spike your blood sugar. Your body doesn't consider it to be sugar. SPEAKER_02: Exactly. So it's a natural sugar that, it's a relatively new ingredient but it really allows us to get pretty close to the taste of those classic cereals while having a very different nutritional profile. SPEAKER_03: It's really a pretty magical ingredient and we use that along with monk fruit. SPEAKER_04: Monk fruit, right. And these are two sweeteners that have started to appear in recent years that were not really widely available even five, 10 years ago. And unlike those other sugars, Allulose doesn't have a bitter, monk fruit has a little bit of a bitter taste, stevia has a little bit of a strange aftertaste but Allulose just doesn't seem to. SPEAKER_02: Correct. And we got very lucky with the timing because to your point, 10 years ago we really couldn't SPEAKER_02: have launched this business with a formulation that we felt was close enough to really make that trade off worth it of nutrition for flavor. And Allulose importantly also functions like sugar when you're using it in the recipes and so we were able... It melts or it dissolves. SPEAKER_02: Exactly and it can coat the cereal in a similar way and so we were able to use a lot of the same equipment that regular cereal manufacturers use for our cereal. SPEAKER_04: Some people might be weirded out by Allulose, right? Because they might think of it as like a Frankenstein ingredient. What is it? Is it derived from corn? How do they make it? SPEAKER_02: It can be derived from lots of different things and it's basically... You can make it from sugar cane, you can make it from corn, it's found in raisins and figs so it's a naturally occurring sugar that I think different companies probably are commercializing it from different places. SPEAKER_04: And how did you come up with the name Magic... It's a great name, Magic Spoon. SPEAKER_03: It's funny, we actually initially the business was called Discos and we thought... Disco or disco. SPEAKER_02: Disco is like O is like the shape of the cereal. SPEAKER_03: Okay. SPEAKER_02: And we were calling it that for a little while and people generally liked it and then I think SPEAKER_03: we just had an aha moment one day that the name felt a little bit small and so we were thinking through other names eventually Magic Spoon popped up as an idea and the kind of reasoning behind it was that whenever we give people a sample what we want to observe, what we typically do is that they're just amazed, they think it must be magic. They cannot believe how this cereal tastes so sweet, so colorful, yet there's no sugar in it. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Somebody did point out to us that disco, you know, I love disco music but as an era it's not so closely associated with health and wellness and so for a brand that was trying to lead with its nutritional benefits it felt maybe a bit like a bit of a misfit. SPEAKER_03: Yeah and we also learned that being discoed is code for being discontinued off a retail shelf. There were a couple of connotations that we realized didn't quite make sense and that was another reason why we changed the name. SPEAKER_04: So all right, if your target audience was at least initially sort of people who are into, you know, high protein diets, low carb, high fiber, they're the kinds of people generally I think who wouldn't go towards sugar and sweet but who would eat like some coconut yogurt or maybe Greek yogurt and they're not gonna pour anything into a bowl with milk and eat it in the morning and certainly not something sweet but I don't know, did anybody give you pushback on that and say, I don't know, the CrossFit crowd is not gonna, they're just not gonna go for that. SPEAKER_03: Well we definitely got pushback on the idea in general, you know, some investors we spoke to were so anti the idea they actually said to us, okay you can do this but don't use the word cereal. You can use a dirty word, you've got to call it clusters or rebrand cereal somehow. So there was definitely pushback on the idea but in terms of what we saw was when we were speaking to people, the kind of people you're describing who are very health assessed, they perhaps were having eggs and avocado for breakfast, some of them were very happy with that and maybe didn't want something sweet and maybe they'd lost their fondness for sweet foods over the course of the past several years but many of them were pretty unhappy having a breakfast of eggs and avocado or green juice. SPEAKER_00: SPEAKER_04: Unhappy? It's a delicious breakfast. Clearly not you. You're unhappy? That's not gonna make you unhappy? That's gonna reduce inflammation, that's gonna make you very happy. SPEAKER_03: But for many of them being able to reduce inflammation and get that protein and get those healthy fats but do it while eating a bowl of delicious colorful cereal, to some of them, many of them that we spoke to, that was really compelling and we saw a lot of excitement in people's eyes when we said that to them. SPEAKER_02: And we're not out here trying to say never eat regular cereal or eat this every morning instead of your egg whites and avocado but it was more just it felt like a way to really create a brand that was just sort of positive and optimistic while also really making a product that was vastly healthier than what existed before. SPEAKER_04: All right, you had a playbook from XO which was you really leaned into developing relationships with and raised money from influencers, from paleo influencers, some celebrities and they were able to get the word out. What was the playbook here? You raised, you were gonna approach us somewhat differently, right? Because unlike XO, from what I gather, you decided that you wanted to raise a lot of money as quickly as possible. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think part of it goes back to wanting to have a very different experience in company building to XO. We knew that this time around we were entering a huge category dominated by really three very large incumbents. Talking about Kellogg's, General Mills Post. Correct. And we knew if we were going to go up against them, we were going to need to be very well capitalized, we're going to need to nail the product, nail the branding, right? No time to kind of do a sort of cheaper version of the branding that didn't quite nail it SPEAKER_03: and then pivot from there over the course of a couple of years. We knew we wanted to get it right on day one and we wanted to build this business as quickly as we could to scale. And we also knew that if we had some success, those larger companies would likely create their own versions of what we were trying to do. We wanted to make sure that we could do every step of this right from the formulations to the branding and be well capitalized to really step on the gas and scale it as soon as we had any early signs of success. SPEAKER_02: And we also at that time, we'd spent five years really getting a crash course in launching and running a food business. So we felt like we had all the tools to really be operating a company at scale already. And we were sort of willing that company into existence and we wanted in a way to leapfrog all the years of time we'd put in at Exo of kind of the little bit of fumbling around in the dark, figuring out who the customer was, like maybe redoing the brand a few times. And we wanted to really hit the ground running as soon as we launched with Magic Spoon. So from the get go, you had this box and the box kind of has like a little bit of a psychedelic SPEAKER_04: look. I mean, it's called Magic Spoon, right? It's got it almost looks like a magic school bus kind of look. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we wanted to nod to the incredible job that cereal companies have done historically in building brands and creating characters. And the goal is to evoke nostalgia, evoke that morning cartoon feeling. And that was the goal even down to the choice to use a cardboard cereal box, right? When you think about it, a cardboard cereal box that doesn't reseal at the top is actually not the most practical packaging to use. A stand up pouch that you can reseal from a purely practical perspective, perhaps makes more sense, but that doesn't create the same feeling of joy and nostalgia. So even the packaging we chose was done from a sort of branding perspective. SPEAKER_04: And tell me about how you guys divide what you do. I mean, Gabby, do you mainly focus on operations and Greg, do you mainly focus on branding and product or is it just you'll both do everything? SPEAKER_03: We're co-CEOs and I focus more on sales, marketing, fundraising. And Greg focuses more on operations, product, manufacturing, finance. SPEAKER_02: We actually are very similar personality types. And in fact, at the very beginning, investors told us that they thought we were probably too similar to really make it as a founder pair. Because I think people have in their mind, you know, some usually someone is like the, you know, designer, creative genius and the other person's like the finance guy or something. But there actually hasn't ever been a major decision that we've really ultimately disagreed on, I think because we sort of approached things in a very similar way. SPEAKER_04: So this was going to be a different approach. And by the end of September, by the end of 2019, you raised another five and a half million dollars from some venture partners and some people, some individuals, investors who've been on the show, started brands like Warby Parker and Harry's and others. And the idea was, again, direct to consumer that you would sell through the website, through a website. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that was the playbook that we developed at Exo. And we ended up running this business purely direct to consumer for almost three years. When we launched, we thought that was only going to be a few months. But our first month back in the middle of 2019 shattered all our expectations in terms of revenue. And so three months after launching, we then raised about five million dollars. And that was some funds, but also, like you said, some individuals who could really help us level up the business. The founders of lots of DTC companies, also several celebrities, lots of influencers, people who could- SPEAKER_04: English humor and Nas and some of these- Correct. SPEAKER_03: Halsey, Nick Jonas, Questlove. My God. What do those guys know about cereal? SPEAKER_02: Well, Nick Jonas, interestingly, is diabetic. And so he actually found the product from that point of view, organically. SPEAKER_04: So I wonder how did you get the attention from customers? Did you hire a PR firm? Did you get press early on? SPEAKER_04: Actually, what we did when we founded Magic Spoon is we created an equity pool for these SPEAKER_03: influencers who were investors in the business. And based on the revenue they drove through their sites or email lists, we divided up this bonus equity pool amongst them after the first year. So we were able to really incentivize these influencer investors to promote us frequently to their audiences. And alongside that, we ran paid social ads. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, because customer acquisition is just much more expensive now than it was when you started EXO, for example. And so this is now a new strategy and I think an interesting one. A lot of times you see a celebrity talking about a product. What most people don't realize is they are investors in that product. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, very often. As it happens, some of the ways we found our celebrity investors were actually them organically posting. So Questlove, a few months into our launch, posted organically on Instagram. SPEAKER_04: He knows a lot about food, actually. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he does. And he loves cereal. Like cereal is like he throws cereal eating parties and things like that. Right, right. So we saw that organic post and we just DM'd him. SPEAKER_04: So when you first kind of, so it was direct to consumer, right? Just like EXO. And when you first kind of, I don't know, launched this product, did you go to Expo West with this product? SPEAKER_03: We went to Expo West, but not with the goal of attracting retailers. We knew really one month into Magic Spoon that we weren't going to have to go to retail as fast as we thought we were going to have to before we launched. So our first month, I think we were hoping to maybe do a hundred grand a month in sales towards the end of our first year. We blew past that after a few days. And so we instantly realized there is such pool for this product from online customers, we can build this thing for a while before we need to go to retailers. And over the course of those first few years, we had retailers coming to us constantly saying, can we bring you on? And we just kept on saying, we're not ready yet. We'd love to partner with you at some point, but we're not quite ready. And then that changed about three years in when we launched in retail. SPEAKER_04: All right. So you launched it in 2019 and you're getting some good feedback. And was it a challenge to find a manufacturer? Because you're extruding a, it's not a grain-based product, so you can't, I'm assuming it has to be made in a grain-free production facility or they have to scrub it down. Was it hard to find a manufacturing facility willing to make these? SPEAKER_02: Yes. It's a very hard product to make because it's so high in protein and we use dairy protein, which is milk and milk burns at a pretty low temperature. So when it's going, you know, when you're extruding it out, it's a very high pressure, very high temperature process. And it's the line between perfect puffs and burned brown shriveled puffs is very, very, very small. It's really more of an art than a science. I would say it was very challenging to find people who could consistently make the product for us and scale it up. And I mean, we've seen extruders get lit on fire before. We've seen all sorts of manufacturing disasters because of how difficult it is to make. I think we learned a lot at Exo about making sure supply chains can handle the demand. And so one of the reasons why we delayed going to retail for so long is that we really wanted to be ready for that huge step up in scale. And so we spent a lot of time on the supply chain, making sure that we could supply the demand when it came. And we do we do a lot of limited edition flavors on our website. We sort of in the first couple of years followed almost like a supreme sneaker model where we would do kind of limited drops and seasonal things. And that was a big part of our brand and our and our sales model. And even on those like trying to come up with so many different flavors all the time. I remember there was we were doing a pumpkin chai flavor for the holidays and I was doing all the formulation still. And I'd ordered a chai powder that unbeknownst to me had whole rose petals in it. And you just you know, that's something that you just can't use when we're in our kind of slurry formulas. And so Gabby had to sit there overnight picking out handpicking all the individual rose petals out of the out of the chai powder. So there was a lot of manufacturing hiccups as we scaled and we were trying to iterate so rapidly. We still change our formula and try and make improvements based on consumer demand all the time. That's one of the big upsides of having such a large direct to consumer fan base is that we really can communicate directly with our customers in a way that the classic big serial companies cannot. SPEAKER_04: And let's talk about about funding because the the model is again it's a it's a new well I shouldn't say unusual but it is a you know it's a different type of model. You've raised I think now almost a hundred million dollars in funding. I think your last big fund raise was in June of 2022 is that right? Correct. We've raised a little over a hundred million over the course of four years. And I mean that's like tech company financing right? Like it's it's not common that a new food brand raises so much but but in your view you've got to have all of that capital in order to create a brand that can't be toppled. SPEAKER_03: You certainly don't have to. This was a path that we deliberately chose. It's also worth mentioning that we've raised a little over a hundred million but the most recent round which was about a year and a half ago about half of that round went to some early investors to give them liquidity. And so not all of that hundred million has gone into the business. SPEAKER_02: And some of that goes back to the supply chain too because the machinery required to make cereal is massive. It's these it's two stories and it requires like five operators at once and you need tons of power and water. And so you really have to start at scale. There's no way around the fact that you have to be running these machines for eight hour shifts you know pumping out tens of thousands of pounds of cereal to even make it worth anyone's while. And so it's just the whole the whole product category operates at a much larger scale that's quite capital intensive. And so obviously you're now I think you're sold at Target and you could buy it. SPEAKER_04: Where else where else is a cereal sold besides online? SPEAKER_03: We're in Target, Walmart, Safeway Albertsons, Kroger, Sprouts, some other smaller retailers as well. SPEAKER_04: And so eventually and actually before I ask that question you're not in Whole Foods which is interesting. SPEAKER_03: Actually currently Whole Foods doesn't have products with allulose in them. So that that's the reason we're not Whole Foods currently. I see. That's their position. SPEAKER_04: Correct. Hmm. Interesting. So in you know in terms of what still a very new product right. You know and it may be too early to answer this question but is this a 10 year timeline you know you raise money it's 2019 by 2029 you know we're talking now six seven years in the future. What does it look like? Do you sell it? Do you is it go public? What do you imagine? SPEAKER_04: I think it could be either of those and we're open minded right now. SPEAKER_03: Things are going really well. And from the early days it was obvious to us that this was going to be so much bigger so much faster than XO even down to the first month at Magic Spoon we did a post from one of the same influencers that used to promote XO. And whereas at XO if they did a post on Instagram about us maybe generated a few hundred dollars with Magic Spoon that same influencer was generating several thousand dollars. So right now we have so much more in front of us that we're itching to do. So we were entirely DTC for the first three years. We then launched on Amazon very quickly actually became the number one best selling serial on Amazon. And then we've only been in retail for about a year and a half and already every retailer we're entering in we're performing tremendously well. And so there's tens of thousands of more retailers for us to expand to. And there's also lots more product categories we think we're earning the right to expand to. And we actually launched our first product outside of boxed cereal a couple of months ago. We launched our version of a Rice Krispies Treat and that's also going well too. SPEAKER_04: So when you guys sort of reflect on the journey you took to get here now and obviously you're still growing and you could potentially make a lot of money off this business. You probably have already made a little bit. When you think about where you've come from and EXO and all that happened, how much of where you are now do you attribute to how hard you worked and how much do you think has to do with just getting lucky and timing and circumstances? SPEAKER_02: I think so much of it is timing. I think the same people doing the same idea five years later like one will work and one won't. But I think on the flip side, two different people doing the same idea at the same time also probably one would probably work and one wouldn't. So I think there is a lot of luck and there's a lot of things that have to go right and trying to claim too much credit for ourselves would be disingenuous. Yeah it's funny when people ask us what are we doing differently with Magic Spoon now? SPEAKER_03: Why is Magic Spoon so much more successful than EXO? The truth is we're doing some things differently but we're doing a lot of the same things and it's working so much infinitely better now partly because we've learned from some mistakes from EXO and we spent five years banging our heads against the wall but partly just because we have so much more product market fit. And it is a path that we chose because we thought that this was the way for us to create a mainstream best-selling cereal brand. It's by no means the only path but it's one we've chosen eyes open and we think it's right given the goals we have. SPEAKER_04: That's Gabby Lewis and Greg Sevitz, co-founders of Magic Spoon. As for the EXO protein bars, as we mentioned earlier they're still available on the company's website along with cricket, flour and recipes for how to use it. For example, you can make gingerbread cookies which are pictured both in the shape of a gingerbread man and a gingerbread cricket decorated with lacy white icing. This also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Chris Messini, John Isabella, Katherine Seifer, Kerry Thompson and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This. If you like How I Built This, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. Hey everyone, it's Guy Raz here and I have a new show that I think you're going to love. From Wondery and hosted by Laura Beall, the critically acclaimed podcast, Dr. Death, is back with a new season called Dr. Death, Bad Magic. It's a story of miraculous cures, magic and murder. When a charismatic doctor announces revolutionary treatments for cancer and HIV, it seems like the world has been given a miracle cure. Medical experts rush to praise Dr. Sirhat Gumruku as a genius. But when a team of private researchers looks into Sirhat's background, they begin to suspect the brilliant doctor is hiding a shocking secret. And when a man is found dead in the snow with his wrists shackled and bullet casings speckling the snowbank, Sirhat would no longer be known for world-changing treatments. He'd be known as a fraud and a key suspect in a grisly murder. Follow Dr. Death, Bad Magic on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Dr. Death, Bad Magic ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts.