RESOURCES
- Visit “Snack Jackson’s” website snackjacksons.com
- Buy the book “Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Falon on Amazon
- Watch this episode on YouTube
- Watch the Home Visit portion of the Shark Tank episode on YouTube
- Watch some of the studio portion of the Shark Tank episode on YouTube
- Listen to this episode on iTunes
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro Snip
00:47 Introduction Jackson’s Meagan and Scott Reamer who got a deal on Shark Tank
03:30 What is your son Jackson’s story that brought you to study healthy foods?
04:35 When you can’t figure out the diagnosis, or there are no treatment options, what can you do?
07:40 How starting a snack company focused on low inflammatory foods has ministered to others.
08:51 Jackson’s legacy
09:35 How inflammation is a part of so much disease
11:48 For an anti-inflammatory diet, what would you consume more of and what would you avoid?
14:11 How to make healthy potato chips
17:42 What are the healthy fat options for potato chips?
20:35 Why are saturated fats better?
24:30 Are any of your ingredients potentially on the MAHA chopping block?
27:55 How different parts of the country are looking for healthier options
29:55 Tell us about your shark Rohan Oza that invested in your company and how much he participates in decisions
32:45 What are some of hard decisions you have had to make?
34:34 When did you realize you needed to ditch co-packers and bring manufacturing in-house and what were the advantages?
40:26 Who did the researching to decide what foods were healthier and who observed the results?
41:14 Who were your influencers and what books did you read?
41:29 All about Nourishing Traditions, Weston A. Price recipe’s and more
44:14 What is a “Nutrient Dense Food”?
46:59 What was one of the nutritional “AHA!” moments?
47:55 What are the underlying cynicisms about the food chain?
TRANSCRIPT
This was started by parents. It is still the same, parents who are involved making sure that the recipes and the production manufacturing process are the same as when we did it on our stovetop.
You are listening to the Dr. Haley Show, the podcast dedicated to helping you optimize your health. Each episode there will be an interview or a message to help you discover better health. We will be featuring health radicals on the show to bring new ideas to the table, as well as doubling down on key fundamentals to support you living your best life.
Your host is no other than the founder of Haley Nutrition Dr. Michael Haley.
This is the Dr. Haley Show podcast, and I’m Dr. Michael Haley, your show host. Today we have some special guests off of the show Shark Tank with their brand. Jackson’s potato chips. You guys, thank you for joining me on the show. Megan and Scott Reamer, founders of Jackson’s. I understand that you guys were on Shark Tank, and you’ll be my first guests.
That actually got a deal. Is that correct? Is. Yes, we did. In fact, I was, I was just texting our shark yesterday, so
it’s good timing here, but, yes, we did get a deal. It was successful. I actually tried to do a little research, and I saw a snip on your website. Is it snackjacksons.com if I recall.
Correct. And in the about us or who we are, there was like, a minute and a half is the whole episode online somewhere where our audience could tune into it. Yes, I mean, I all I ever do is Google it, so. Oh, yes. Which is never I don’t watch myself on it often, but,
when I know, like we people they do reruns for sure.
We had a lot of,
replays of,
the episode, which unfortunately, we never really know when it’s going to re air We see that outcome in our sales. Like, we always have this boost online, for sure,
of sales, but the, longer link,
is, I think, just like you Google it. Right Scott? Yeah. We can make the link available and show notes, etc. with a password.
It’s a full 12 minutes. Yeah. So
we’ll try to make 12 minutes. Okay. We’ll try to make that available. Yeah. It’s funny because I saw I found another one that was like 4 or 5 minutes long and I thought, no, there’s got to be more to it than this. And I’m guessing that you were probably in the Shark Tank studio for a lot longer now, an hour and they trimmed it down to.
Yeah. Just a handful of minutes. Yeah. And we were lucky because they came and did a home segment. And so we had more time on the beginning of our episode as well that shared some of our story, our son story, for sure. And, you know, this beautiful place where we live in Colorado, in the mountains of Colorado.
so it is quite this extended,
video for us and exposure for Jackson’s.
Okay. And I did not get your son’s story, and I definitely want it.
what happened? And what brought you to start this particular brand? Yeah, I guess I’ll.
give you some of that back story. So, Jackson,
was our oldest child. We have four kids, and, he, you know, the long and the short of it is he had this rare autoimmune disease.
And,
that was
the, final diagnosis. But it took 12 years to get to that diagnosis. And so he started sort of displaying symptoms when he was about two. He was just this healthy, you know, typical toddler walking, talking. We already had another child at that point or 18 months apart. And so,
he started to display some just muscle weakness.
And over the next three years got muscle weakness that started in his feet, spread up his body, and he lost his ability to walk and eventually talk. And so, you know, we were watching this progression of symptoms and regression of skills,
that looks very much like M.S. or ALS and, you know, frantically taking him around the country, not being able to find this diagnosis that, again, started when he was two.
And he finally got a diagnosis when he was 14 years old, through this very, you know, sort of specific program at the National Institute of Health,
called it was an undiagnosed disease program. And it’s really this last resort and last stop for people who’ve gone through this journey like our son did, where we you just maxed out your local hospital, your local specialty children’s hospital for us,
and then multiple hospitals around the country in multiple tests.
And
so Jackson’s as a brand started as a byproduct of that because when we didn’t have any answers for what was happening with him, we just sort of started looking at his diet as a way to try to manage symptoms. And, you know, the symptoms that we saw were neurologic and they were GI and they were very closely tied together.
And then, you know, what our sort of overarching,
goal was in trying to manage symptoms
and do that through his diet was to control inflammation, really was like, you know, kind of, bucketing fats, carbs and proteins into, types of foods and quantities of foods that would increase or decrease inflammation in his body. That was like our baseline.
And that’s the only thing at that point that doctors could confidently say is that there’s some inflammatory process taking place. They didn’t know the genesis of it or the pathologies of it, but they knew there was one underway. And so we took that one data point and said, okay, how can we possibly intermediate in whatever this pro-inflammatory process is?
And that’s when we got to work on, as Megan just said, all his macros. You know, what drives inflammation in the body, what food sources are pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, etc., etc.. So we went down that rabbit hole pretty quickly because it was the only thing we could link to. Yeah. You know, it’s a heartbreaking story and I’m, well, you know, you’ll have me emotional on here because I have four kids, and, you know, we’ve seen some suffering, but nothing that compares at all, to what you’ve been through.
I appreciate you saying that. Yeah,
it was existentially challenging. Yeah. There was there was an 18 month period there where he didn’t sleep for more than two hours and know he would wake up crying every, every two hours. I mean, he was losing his nerve function, like actively losing. And so he’s in a lot of pain and, so thank you for, just your condolences around, his story and certainly, you know, for us, we started this.
So, you know, once Jackson got a diagnosis, he very quickly, like, within a year, became part of this, experimental drug trial. And it’s actually what he ended up passing away from. He’d been on it for about 15 months, and then we increased the dose, and he died within just a few weeks of increasing the dose.
And so he was 16 years old when that happened.
And, and so we started this company when he was about 13, when he was maybe a little younger. 12 around 12. 12. That’s right.
just because we knew that that this would work for him, we had information to share. We weren’t trying to be sort of, you know, preachers about this. We were just trying to share what had worked for our family.
And we knew, you know, he was one extreme of this medical challenge and medical journey.
but what we ended up finding when we opened this up and, you know, started Jackson’s and certainly talking about his story was that there were a lot of people, for various reasons along that path, where he was sort of at one end, you know, there were a lot of places that it intersected with people’s stories
and whether they were, you know, medically trying to,
contain
or understand something in their home or behaviorally or, you know, even just maybe something more,
I don’t want to call it superficial because it feels like a big
deal, but something that maybe a skin issue, right? Eczema, something that they were looking at diet to try to manage.
And so for us, that was really rewarding to interact with people who responded and resonated with this story in whatever way, in some capacity. That made starting Jackson’s feel very purposeful and impactful. And then that certainly helped a lot.
You know, a much stronger meaning for us.
and the rest of our family, with our children, once he passed away that we were creating this legacy, really, for him and that he still lived in our daily lives
and in people’s interaction with him through this product, I don’t think I’ll be able to eat another Jackson’s potato chip without thinking of him.
Well, thank you. That’s important for us. You know, that’s all the meaning for us. Appreciate you saying that. I mean, as you well know, Dr. Haley, the inflammation is
the mediator for so many diseases of modern man. We didn’t appreciate that because we were just looking at an end of one experiment with Jackson and saw profound changes, particularly his quality of life and sleeping happiness.
Through this low inflammation diet. And, you know, to Meghan’s credit, she said, we cannot hold or husband this information
if this is valuable, that we could reverse engineer over, you know, 24 months a diet that was in fact more information, which the National Institutes of Health , PHD, MD’S confirmed on his diagnosis, they said, hey, congratulations. It was a profoundly important moment as parents for us.
Congratulations. You know, you found the lowest inflammation diet you can give a person, and still got to be healthy. And up until then, it was mostly just us, you know, following contrarian logic. And just it worked for Jackson. That’s all we cared about. But as Meghan had mentioned, that when we opened the story, started the brand open, the story of many more people.
We realized there are many, many people. As Meghan just mentioned, who are experiencing some level of inflammation along some very wide spectrum, from relatively trivial to catastrophic. In Jackson’s case, where diet and intermediated on that basis is a possibly profound benefit to them. And so
that’s what became the fuel for the many, many restless nights of actually starting a business in a hyper competitive category.
it was what kept us going, in those darker, more challenging moments of entrepreneurship. That’s amazing. And for everyone listening, I’m going to reiterate right now, kind of the take home message, inflammation really is the start of all illness and disease. And even without a diagnosis, you can do something about it. And there’s no better time to start than right now.
If you’re not living that lifestyle. We have so many choices we can make with our food. Consuming anti-inflammatory foods. If you were to kind of sum up what you’ve learned about food and inflammation, a general guideline, what would you avoid and what would you consume more of? That’s a good question. Is a good while you think of specifics, I’ll say just very generally, the more ingredients and the more processed it is, generally speaking, the more pro-inflammatory it’s going to be.
The fewer ingredients, the less processed or the more gently processed, up to including raw, the less inflammatory it will be, the less inflammatory load it will put on your body. So without Meghan, you maybe want to talk about specifics, but for sure, that is very became our overarching theme. And then we dug much more deeply into that, into, as Meghan mentioned, specific macros and within macros like within carbohydrates.
Well, you know our sweet potatoes better than white potatoes. But yes, you know, at least for, for our experiment for Jackson’s health. And so we got more and more granular. And that’s what Megan, really wanted to share with the world and really had to drag me into it because the snacking business is unbelievably competitive and extraordinarily difficult to succeed in.
And I was reticent to do that. I said, let’s find other ways to share this story. And she said, nothing is going to be more powerful than this. You know, 85% of all human beings, you know, eat snack foods once a month. You know,
let’s use snack foods as a manner in which to speak about this story and the lessons we learned and that Jackson suffered through in that reverse engineering project.
you know, kudos to her for recognizing that. But maybe you want to speak about some of the specific foods. No, I don’t
I think one of the easiest take home messages is you know, there are swaps.
you can do that, make a difference.
And,
I use tips as an example. If you enjoy eating chips, like look at the type
of input it is, look at the type of carb and look at the type of oil. And you know, you can swap that out for a healthier sort of lower inflammatory version option. And it tastes just as great.
And so I think what we struggled with in the beginning was that,
there weren’t a lot of those swaps available, not nearly as many as there are now. But,
you can continue to eat the foods you like and elevate the ingredient, deck, you know, for Jackson. Yeah. Get to go ahead. Well, I was going to say when it came to potatoes, my initial swap was, you know, getting the, the toaster type oven.
what’s it called? Air fry things. Air fryer. Yeah. And. Yeah. And we shop at Costco. So I picked one up from there and we sliced up some potatoes. And you know, the problem is when you do that on thin, like potato chips, you can only put so many on a shelf.
You can’t, you know, mass produce them in your little toaster oven at home.
Yes. But that’s what
we started doing. And then we thought, you know, these would be better if they were a little crunchy. So let’s start putting a little healthy oil on them. But again, we’re making it’s like, you know, we’ll fight over the two trays. And
it’s not working.
Well, you know, it’s funny when bring that up because when we started this, Scott, I laughed when Scott was saying that, you know, I said something about how often people eat snack food. I was not nearly that clinical or scientific or data driven about it. I was just like, you know, I like snack food lots of people like snacks.
So let’s just start this company. And he was way more, you know, sort of business focused and logical about it.
But, I think, you know,
that’s really the beginning of where we thought we had, a version of a potato chip,
that tasted good. And we knew,
it this great oil in it,
and some great ingredients because we would make them and they would be consumed so quickly.
Right. We we’d have people over for dinner, our kids and their friends, like, they would just like, we need more chips. Like, let’s have more chips. You need to make some more chips. And we were, you know, even in the beginning of Jackson’s, we were making them by hand for almost a year
and bagging them and sealing them and shipping them.
And we could not keep up with the demand.
so there you go, Dr. Haley, maybe you need to start some, like, a chip business with air frying them
and see go. No, why would I do that? Why would I do if I can just pick up a bag of them at Costco? Well, I kind of were like, why isn’t someone making these in this?
You know what we’re doing at a mass scale and why? Like, we can’t keep up with this and we can keep working for somebody else, another brand to do it, but I didn’t. That was my excuse to Megan. I’m like, oh, somebody else is going to do this. We don’t have to figure solve this. Like the market is efficient.
Someone is going to see this opportunity and solve it for us. And it just didn’t happen. And I was like, eventually, gosh, maybe you’re right. We have to do this.
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looking at your ingredients, it’s like, wait a second, those are my ingredients. And we actually used an avocado oil. And we tried other oils, but avocado was the one that seemed to work the best.
And we would use either a sea salt or a pink salt. And then eventually that evolved into there’s this spice that we found at, Costco called butt rub. And now it’s like barbecue potato chips. Oh, that’s yummy. That’s. But then aptly named. Yeah. You know, we used to make mostly organic ingredients. Nice It makes me laugh a little.
Not laugh. I don’t think that’s the right word, but I see, you know, tallow is really popular right now in tallow products. And certainly in face products. And, we used to make them in lard and tallow. Initially we tried all the, you know, ancestral oils and, you know, thank goodness we tried them all we do. Then I would figure out the supply chain for tallow in 2012 was like, impossible.
Like literally, we could not scale this beyond like ten bags a day. There was no way we could sell this many because the supply chain just simply didn’t exist. And so,
thank goodness. It’s one of the things I think is wonderful that in the last,
decade we’ve seen the supply chain for avocado oil go from,
really quite a niche market with not very many providers to a significant market with worldwide options.
And that’s good for everybody. Right. You know that one of our sub goals, other than sharing Jackson’s story in this profound insight about how food can support an anti-inflammatory,
ethos or lifestyle is that, we wanted to help bring back a marketplace for these sort of lost oils. Right? These ancestral fats that had largely for economic reasons, been driven out of the food chain.
And, you know, we’re it was a long project, of course, you know, a decade plus in the making. But we can’t be more excited that there are now major suppliers of avocado oil around the world. And we played one small part in helping consumers demand that in the marketplace. And in fact, it was some of our first pitches to the buyers, that’s a Whole Foods or Natural Grocers.
Some of our original first distributors, and
retail partners was, you know, please give your consumers a choice, because right now when they go down that aisle, all choices are canola, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed oil, soybean oil,
etc.. And, we were I remember, you know, many of those buyers, like, wait a minute. You’re right.
There are no choices other than those polyunsaturated seed oils down that aisle. I said just just, you know, give us four feet
just for that one extra choice that is fundamentally different than these other polyunsaturated fats. And it was part of our original pitch. But we’re super proud that we’ve attempted and succeeded at some level in changing the food supply chain.
I’ve never heard the term ancestral oils, but I know that you’re referring to things like, you know, not only the avocado, the coconut, possibly. Tallow
and ghee and things like that that are more saturated. And why are you deciding on saturated fats? You know, so I was a chemical engineer undergrad. And so part of our research for Jackson’s particular disease, again, an experiment and of one was what?
And we just reverse engineered this, you know, when we gave him these polyunsaturated fats, he just wouldn’t respond well, as Meghan said, there was a huge nexus between his GI and his neurological symptoms. So,
if we gave him a piece of candy, he’d have neurological symptoms within two hours. Easily.
because that stuff is metabolized and you have an insulin response, you know, pretty quickly your 15 minutes basically in your blood.
And we saw some similar reaction to polyunsaturated seed oils, for Jackson. And we thought, okay, well, I don’t necessarily know why. Let’s just take those out of his diet. Eventually answered. What would that be? And so you did a bunch of research on why that might be and realized that monounsaturated fats, olive oil, avocado oil and saturated fats, you know, coconut oil, for instance, butters also sort of mono unsaturated, that these things generally do not promote an inflammatory response.
And Jackson’s physiology was so sensitive to any changes in his inflammatory response, any insults to it, that we would see that immediately. Many other folks, you know, could suffer fat days, weeks, months, maybe years and never see any symptoms. But his symptoms came on immediately. And so we simply said, we can’t give him those because it affects quite negatively his quality of life.
And so it was only afterwards that we realized the science behind
monosaturated and saturated fats when heated, are much, much more stable. They don’t break down into, aldehydes and other sort of, insults to your body. They literally molecularly change, and polyunsaturated fats, you know, do. So, and those breakdown products are what you’re sort of responding to when they enter your bloodstream.
And so
that was what we learned only afterwards. But all we really cared about is,
that he was happy and thriving and on saturated, and mono unsaturated fats, he was. Yeah. I’m smiling because you’re speaking my language, and you and I could probably completely geek out and talk about, you know, the cis fats and how they become trans fats
and
how this breaks and other things join onto them.
And that’s it. This is exactly what I would say to the buyer at Whole Foods when, you know, he or she would say, well, why the like? Why? Okay, I understand the choice element, but what is going on chemically here from a lipid chemistry standpoint? I literally go to the white board. We draw in stuff, I draw the bonds, and they’d be like, oh, incredible.
Like we won the So Cal region a Whole Foods on the basis of what you just said. And describing those bonds on a whiteboard. And so Cal California that’s great, I love it. Yeah. People there are a difference. And the saturated fats are more stable. They don’t have those bonds that can be broken and twisted and changed into something other than what they are.
You know, I think of, people read the scriptures and they talk about, you know, olive oil being. Well, it’s a it’s a biblical, food, but probably in its purest, unprocessed, not heated, you know, fresh form. The more we use it and cook and change things, it changes. So let’s talk about potato chips, because there’s probably a lot of brands out there.
There’s probably some sweet potato chips. And then there’s sweet potato chips. What’s in the ingredients. How are you going to have to worry if RFK makes changes? And will some of your competitors have to worry about possibly what’s in their bags of chips? I, I can’t speak for the competitors, but, you know,
I think one of the most important decisions we made about getting into this business is that we did so as parents, not business people.
Right? So we produced products that we would want to feed our kids full stop. And then we figured out the economics afterwards and the efficiency of the supply chain. They manufacture them. It was and remains an unbelievably difficult undertaking to start on the basis of nutrition and what you feed your kids and then figure out all of the economic supply chain, manufacturing, all that sort of stuff.
Most folks get into this, you know, on the manufacturing side. And then
they cut the corners on the nutrition. We did the exact opposite. And,
there were times where we thought that was going to put us out of business. I assure you that there were times like, we can’t keep doing this like it’s, you know, just the costs and yeah, you know,
the economics of it were challenging for quite a long time.
And so I think,
to Scott’s message
and point is that we’ve always remained true to,
the values and the mission around why we started and
the sort of narrative around that.
and I don’t want that to sound fabricated at all, but,
that is like we’ve always led with Jackson, his story,
his disease,
who we are as his parents
and those other pieces have kind of fallen into place behind that.
And so that feels more true than ever, particularly politically, which is what some of the conversation is around,
analyzing seed oils or conversations around seed oils or at least a recognition around, you know, a certain type of ingredient in products. Right? And so for sure, you know, for us, I think it’s a great position to be in and, and a great conversation to be generating for consumers.
Yeah. I think you’re in a good position to I’ve looked at the ingredients
and other people using the other kind of oils. I think that could be a problem for them. Who knows? Yeah. Consumers are definitely asking and talking about it. And,
I think for us when we first started,
we had these small pockets of consumers that like, for instance, kind of paleo and CrossFit were big when we started.
Right? I mean, certain brands, like RX bar, built their whole brand on the CrossFit community
and engaging with them. And so for us,
they were very early adopters of our product because they got it.
they were already reading labels for ingredients, particularly oils. And so,
I think for us in the past even 24 months, we have seen these smaller pockets of consumers who are asking certain questions, looking at ingredients for, you know, certain types of oils or not having certain types of oils.
in, you know, that has continued to increase that conversation. Those pockets of consumers are becoming larger. And so,
it’s almost sort of round two of what we saw when we first launched in where consumers attentions are. That’s a great point. Yeah. There was you know, there were probably a dozen different zip codes around the nation before we had any retail distribution.
We would make these trips for weeks and sell out in ten minutes, but they would generally go to certain zip codes. Right? You know, like Austin, Texas. Yeah. You know,
Seattle, Oregon. Seattle. Yeah. That, you know, California, San Francisco, Bay area, Massachusetts, you know, in Boston and,
areas like that. So it was really these super niche progressive communities.
and now, you know, by virtue of the fact that we’re in Costco, it tells you that it’s a far more national understanding
and awareness, as Megan said, about the importance of ingredients and
that’s nothing but good. I mean, know, we could not be more proud to have played a small role in that process of,
educating the consumer based on the choices
as you are through your podcast, Dr. Haley, the choices they can make to positively influence all manner
of their lives.
Yeah, I’m actually in the nutrition business too, and I’m in Florida. Where are you guys shipping from? Oh, we ship from our plant. We have a plant in Milwaukee like 20 miles west of Milwaukee. Okay. Being here in Florida and catering to people in the gut health market, I ship more to California than I do to my own state here in Florida, I will.
So there are definitely, you know, pockets of people that are, changing faster ahead of the rest of the population when it comes to their food decisions. Yes. We very much saw that in what Scott was talking about in Florida was our with our last state that we went in to truly what was the last state we won in Whole Foods in all 13 regions.
of Whole Foods, Florida was the hardest and last get yeah. I’m not I’m not going to speak for all of Florida. But there’s a lot of people that are more interested in looking healthy than actually being healthy. It just is what it is. Now, your shark is still with you. Yes. Rohan is, is is our shark?
Yes. Rohan, just had a a pretty big deal happened last week. I don’t know if you heard about this poppy Pepsi, purchase, but Pepsi acquired Poppy, which is a functional beverage brand with prebiotics. And so a prebiotic soda. I think it’s fair. As far as what they told themselves, they were another couple that he found on Shark Tank, and, they exited last week and maybe like a, what, 1.2 one plus billion dollar deal.
So,
Rohan. Yeah, he’s great. He was, we were his first deal on his first episode. Like first time. What year was. I think he was a guest shark. When were you? 2017, October of 2017. Okay. Wow. That was a while ago. So you’ve had plenty of time to make some tough business decisions? Yes, we.
And does he influence you? I mean, he’s been essential at all of the critical points in our life cycle, our evolution. He’s been there to help,
we the company would not be in position today without Rohan on us. Full stop. Yeah. He is. I would say he doesn’t. Maybe interact in the daily, sort of, you know, defining,
what’s our plan at Costco?
What are we going to do? What’s the packaging look like? Right. Like, certainly provide some, opinion and value and, perspective on that. But I think in, in sort of the big scheme of some of the things that we’ve done since he’s been a shark. Yes, for sure. And,
you know, I think he’s been just,
a great sort of,
opinion, narrative perspective.
You know, I’m not sure what the right word is a counselor, adviser, around CPGs specifically and consumer packaged goods, which is a really hard business Remember, we’re parents, with a side hustle as entrepreneurs and business people. And so he’s forgotten more about consumer packaged goods than we’ll ever have learned. And so it’s and that’s one of the reasons why we felt it was so necessary to say yes to his offer.
Right. In the show, we sort of go back and forth about what percentage and how much money. And at the end of the day, though, you know, Megan and I were very clear
and in alignment that the company would be better off with his involvement. And that has turned out to be 100% true. That assumption. Yeah, there’s wisdom in the counsel of many, but some people have more wisdom than others.
And someone like him who’s done it and has been successful. Absolutely. What are some of the hard decisions that, you’ve had to make? Oh, I can tell you. I can tell you one right off the top of my head. You know, we had a lot of products, actually. We had potato chips, and we expanded into tortilla chips.
We were starting to introduce sort of a grain free Puff. We probably had 26. Yeah. 26. Right. 26 SKUs, flavors, type, bag sizes.
and it kind of expanded a little bit more from that when you factor in snack size and all these things we were trying to do, it was too much like it was just, you know, we from the beginning, our best selling product were sweet potato chips.
And, you know, one of the things I think we all came to this realization and looked at a lot of data and analysis is like the proper analysis is that we were a sweet potato chip company first and foremost like
that was our product that we were selling. Well that we needed to try to innovate around with different bag sizes, different seasonings, different flavors.
No one had really been, no other brands had been pairing,
flavors with sweet potato. And, you know, that was something that we felt we could do really well. And the team we have in place in,
Milwaukee, in Wisconsin are just sort of this amazing version of that. And so,
we pulled back all those other products.
We took them off the shelf, which was a really hard like we basically contracted the business and it was a really hard thing to do at that point in time, revenue wise. Distribution. You know, the traction
we got in the after Shark Tank and visibility to, to not be continuing to expand, but to pull back
and
that was one of the hardest decisions we made right at
to innovate and refine this process to, you know, have our own manufacturing operation and build that up and stand that up and then go sort of pull our distribution where you really weren’t able to find this anywhere.
Take the time to almost like relaunch and rebrand the business and then go back to market and fingers crossed, you know, I have this, experience that we’re having now, which is consumers finding us, consumers recognizing us, old consumers standing by us and old retailers standing by us through that process. And then, you know, sort of having this new awareness and bringing these new consumers and retailers
into our business.
And so, you know, it was really this relaunch and rebrand of the product. And during that, during that time we found, you know, just the perfect capital partners who understood that vision and brought an institutional discipline to the business, and supported very much supported what Megan just said. And,
outside of Rohan, they have been the other, folks that have been essential to our success.
You know, up until that point, we were using, co-packer around the nation that we developed relationships and had great relationships with. But, you know, that’s a very different and much more difficult model financially.
and these folks said, you know what? We should
have our own facility where we control the quality assurance.
we can ship where we want, when we want.
We control the entire process.
that was an absolute game changer. And we could not have done that without
these capital. Yeah. It’s really true partnership. I’d say great people.
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as you’re talking about that, it’s like, wow, that’s where my business needs to go. I don’t have a
necessarily a co-packer, for our product, but it’s essentially a farmer that, produces for a lot of different brands, and you kind of go in there with your own specifications.
We want you to produce our product kind of like this. Ours is really simple. So it’s not really like a, you know, it’s not quite comparable, but I don’t have my own processing facility in-house where I have complete quality control. Yeah, I have my equipment installed in someone else’s farm, and they follow my process.
But, it’s neat that you got to that point where you could bring it in-house and have total quality control. I’m a little jealous. Yeah, it’s made a big difference for us. You know, we like Scott said. We had some really great manufacturing partners. We had some great farmer partners. We still do, you know, but, and there’s no real but about that.
It just for our model and what we were trying to do. And, and the process was really different than what they were used to. And so, you know, the initial partner, we found, co manufacturer, we found it was in Denver,
we live in Colorado. And this, co-man was in Denver, which is about 200 miles from us.
And, you know, when they first started working with us, like literally the first time we’d been making these by hand,
we knew it sort of very clearly
and intimately like what temperature we needed to cook these up, how long we needed, what the process was on a small scale, sort of like how to back into this larger scale production process.
And it was much different than what they were used to. The frying time,
the process by which the temperature was right. And so when they first made them, they did it how they normally do, like very quick fry, very high temperature and send us a picture and said, you know, they were burned to a crisp, they were black.
And they said, is this. I mean, they looked like sort of this, this mouse
and, you know, they said, is this what the quality like? Is this what your chips look like? And we’re like, oh my gosh, the burn like, no, you know, what are you talking about? And that’s the point at which I realized, oh man, I am going to have to sleep at this place for the next 6 to 8 weeks to figure out this process.
That’s absolutely what happened. I had to go there and basically stay there for days on end. And, you know, just like Laverne and Shirley on that manufacturing line, I was in there picking stuff out, talking to the plant manager like, oh, we have to adjust it. So which is a Wisconsin, based show, if you ever remember it.
But yeah, I guess, but I, you know, but that co-manufacture was amazing for us. Like, they were a true partner.
they gave us a shot because we had been making these by hand in our kitchen, and we were parents, and
he just loved our story and was like. And he we had no business sort of being in that plant.
Right. They were making products for Kroger and Trader Joe’s and you know, Boulder County, big, big, big businesses. And so without these partners, particularly on the manufacturing side, we would never have understood what we were doing. They were these connectors to farmers, to
packaging suppliers, to, you know, other retailers. I mean, they were fantastic partners for us.
We just sort of outgrew isn’t the right word. We just needed different economics to make this a profitable, sustainable business. Yeah, yeah. Which one of you was the researcher that decided to, you know, get in deep and figure out what foods were healthy and which ones weren’t. We, while we both were. So I would say that was more Scott.
But I want to understand the science. But Megan, what her intuition about how Jackson would respond to them was, you know, second to none. So, you know, she would say, you know, this, whatever this thing is, I don’t he’s not responding well to that. And so I would take that observation and say, okay, well, what is it about this thing?
What’s in it? Read the labels, you know, all sorts of stuff, and then try to understand the physiology behind the, you know, the deposition of whatever that thing was. And so it was a great partnership in that way that she would be the conduit through which those critical observations, you know, would be made. And then I would try to understand what the underlying science was.
So what it couldn’t have done, I, I think that’s perfect. Who are some of your influences? I’m going to guess Weston A. Price. Yes. You’re you’re 100% correct. That’s just like a Bible. They are. Yeah, I will, that book
it was what really educated us around, the, you know, the certainly the fats, proteins and carbs
soaking,
grains,
fermenting foods.
Right. Like that was what we both needed. And more specifically, Jackson needed at that point in time for surviving. Like we were in survival crisis mode with him. No one could tell us what was wrong. He was actively getting worse. And he was he was tiny. He wasn’t gaining weight. And
so he was like three years old and probably 20 pounds, 21 pounds.
Right? Like he was under nourished eating a good diet of that was at least not processed. That was, you know, primarily gluten free, certainly nothing, you know, nothing added in there that we’re like dyes and preservatives or artificial coloring or anything, but still not gaining weight. And, and it was that sort of, nourishing traditions and Weston A. Price group that had the information and sort of educational process for us that talked about, the ratio of fats, proteins and carbs, the types of fats, proteins and carbs and more specifically, fats, because we knew that a diet heavier in fats for him, was a significant changing point, like for his sleep pattern for gaining weight, like
any amount of weight. That was what worked for him. And so, yes, that was a primary early influence there for us in in fact, our first kind of show
when we brought products to a market was at the Weston A. Price Show was our first trade show in like 2012. And my daughter, I may have been there.
Was that was that in Dallas? No, it was in like San Jose around San Jose, California. So it may have even been in 2011, no less than around 12. I’ll have to look. We were like in their Nourishing Traditions book, right. Of of sources for good products or acceptable. Yes. And, you know, Sally Fallon was there and I mean, I want to say that even, like, I want to say that the next one was where we met, kind of the jerky folks like epic, the people who started Epic Bar, Katie and Taylor, their names are, you know, they were launching in that same space.
because you’re preaching to the choir with that crowd around healthy fats. And, you know, you’re, you know, you’re just sort of showing up with the product and they are to get it. And but for Jackson, there was a before and an after and the after was when we saw the back of, Sally’s book, Nurturing traditions, the meat based formula.
And we made that religious formula infinite Formula, meat based and some other stuff. It’s a remarkable formula.
it’s as simple and as nourishing a thing as you can get. And that’s what we realized Jackson needed. He, you know, he could not tolerate a very wide range of foods. And so what is a narrow, simple thing that you do that packs the most nutritional density into it?
and that’s what we ended up eating for 15 months nonstop. And it’s like a smoothie ish no, no, it’s not a smoothie. No, no, no, it’s actually sort of I was a little like the meat based formula based formulas. So it is
it was sort of this like the smell because it was a yeah, it’s liver and you’re grinding it up as stock beef stock, beef stock like we were ordering.
We were ordering marrow bones from like different farmers around the country because you couldn’t go into a store or it was not easy to find grass fed marrow. Right, bones. And so then we cooked those down and get the marrow out of them. And then we’d slow cooked liver, which we also had to order and find a grass fed beef liver supplier.
And we would,
slow cook that over many hours so that it was basically pre digested and then add all of the oils into it and it was a process, a daily production process that he loved it. He drank it up. That’s the part that was so amazing to me. Yeah. That you know he was in such an existential state from a nutritional standpoint, that taste and those things did not matter.
he wanted that stuff and he loved it because he knew, you know, something in his body knew, I need this thing. And, you know, he never once was. I don’t want that. He was nope, I want it. And that would give me that wanting it. He was healthier and we were like, okay, we can start adding other foods in here, right?
And it was this very visible process. So yes, the answer to your question is, Weston A. Price
and nourishing traditions were, just our unbelievable North Star? Yeah. Yep. Was Sally Fallon, the author of Nourishing Traditions. That’s what I thought I had forgotten. It’s been a long time since I have, well, not read but reference that book
and, you know, pick and choose things out of it.
Can’t read everything. I was, you know, one of my big influences was, Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride, who also attended many of those and the author of The Gaps diet, which, you know, very similar alignment when it comes to food. Well, I think and I think for us, one of the big moments was recognizing how closely related,
your GI health is and function and the neurotransmitters located in your GI system and the brain
and the central nervous system.
And, you know, we could see that very clearly with Jackson in these symptoms. But, you know, sort of educating ourselves around that was, was pretty influential as well for us. Wow. Well, this has been a super enjoyable, conversation. Is there anything that I didn’t ask that I left out? As we’re getting short on time, I’m thinking, boy, I, you know, we could go on for hours, especially now that we have the Weston A. Price discussion going.
what would you really want to share with the people that we haven’t discussed? Yeah, I think one of the things I want to impress upon folks is that, you know,
there is a sort of an underlying cynicism about the food chain and about brands and the consolidation that happens in those, transactions. And all of the products are going to be the same after the companies, you know, get larger or they start distributing to Costco, or they’re purchased by somebody else.
You know, the reality is that at least for us, for sure, you know, this is the central mission of the company, no matter who’s involved or capital partners, no matter, you know, if we sell internationally now or we sell through Costco and Walmart and Target, nothing is changed behind the scenes. you know, the our products are the same products that Megan and I made on our stovetop.
They are the same,
yes, it’s much more efficiency. We have a plant manager who has got a degree in chemical engineering. It is a genius. And, you know, increasing yields and keeping costs down. So yes, it’s become more sophisticated and complex. Business. But the products are the same. So, you know, no matter how small or large we get, the products, are always going to be the same.
And I understand that sort of cynicism because,
sometimes you just don’t know how the decisions are made and how the products are made.
but in this instance, the thing I think we want to leave with people is that this was started by parents. It is still the same, parents who are involved making sure that the recipes and the production manufacturing process are the same as when we did it on our stovetop.
We, our kids still eat with the same enthusiasm and frequency our products as when we made them at home. Yeah, I don’t think that’s great. Well, I want to encourage people to try your products. Go to snackjacksons.com And when you have your chips, think of Jackson and all the nutrition that is in in this food.
And, you know, what an influence he was in bringing products like this. Thank you. Thank you so much. I am going to definitely put a link to your website, to the book that you had mentioned by Sally Fallon. And, I think you guys have a YouTube channel and all kinds of, we’ve got it all out there, right?
Media. You can find this. You can find us through the website. And, yeah, we’ve got everything people will need as far as snackjacksons.com we’ll have everything they need as far as just information about us. All right. Yeah. And thank you. Get a bag of. Thank you, Dr. Haley for what you’re doing. Right. So, you know, we provide products that help people understand and, you know, this concept and scratch that itch.
But you know, these, you know, podcasts and information sharing that you’re doing. It’s just as essential a part of this evolution of the food chain and that people’s choices that they can make for themselves. So, you know, thank you for being an important part of this ecosystem. You guys are the best. Thank you. It’s been great talking with you.
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