How a Diabetic Built One of the Fastest-Growing Cereal Brands in America with Krishna Kaliannan

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Title: How a Diabetic Built One of the Fastest-Growing Cereal Brands in America with Krishna Kaliannan
Podcast: Consumer VC
Host: Mike Gelb
Guest: Krishna Kaliannan, Founder & CEO, Catalina Crunch
Date: April 15, 2026

In this episode, host Mike Gelb speaks with Krishna Kaliannan about his journey from being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes to founding Catalina Crunch, a health-focused cereal and snack brand now found nationwide. The discussion delves into consumer trends in functional foods, startup growth strategies, the challenges of D2C in food, retail scaling, fundraising insights, and learning how to balance taste and health benefits. Krishna shares honest, tactical advice and personal anecdotes that illuminate what it takes to build a breakout brand in the competitive CPG space.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes – The Catalyst (04:13)

• Krishna was diagnosed during freshman orientation in college, which was a profound personal turning point.
• Early struggles with compliance: “Your body quickly pulls you back into compliance because you can't go too high or too low... you need to change.” (04:13, Krishna)
• Shifted to a high-protein, low-sugar, low-carb diet for health reasons, leading to a repetitive breakfast routine: “I would eat eggs every day for breakfast, snack on nothing but nuts, and I did that for about 10 years straight.” (05:36, Krishna)

2. Rediscovering Cereal & Early Product Development (07:19)

• Krishna began baking his own cereal using different protein and flour alternatives, tired of eggs and uninspired by available breakfast options.
• Experimented with a variety of protein powders and flours, finding pea protein optimal for taste, texture, and cost (09:39).
• Quote on R&D challenges:
  “When you bake with protein powders, they... create weird textures... foods that are like crispy on the first bite, but rubbery after... All the failed recipes.” (09:39, Krishna)

3. First Signs of a Business Opportunity (12:18)

• Krishna's friend Venmoed him after enjoying his homemade cereal—a "lightbulb moment" for commercialization.
• Product-market fit confirmed by other diabetics’ excitement: “I got like 100 orders in one day... these people really want this.” (17:19, Krishna)

4. Production Scaling and Going Beyond the Kitchen (19:22)

• Realization of kitchen limitations led Krishna to rent commercial kitchen space and pursue contract manufacturing.
• Attended a Texas A&M cereal extrusion course to learn industry-scale cereal production.

5. Fundraising Strategy: Angels over VC (24:01)

• Raised ~$800,000, mostly from college friends and angels, which offered flexibility and minimized outside pressure.
• Krishna: “No one investor necessarily cared so much about how I did or didn't... That freed me up to run the business the way I felt was best.” (24:01, Krishna)

6. Direct-to-Consumer (D2C): Dreams vs. Reality (27:02)

• Initially inspired by D2C brands (e.g., Dollar Shave Club), Krishna planned to scale this way but soon learned the economics for food were poor.
• Shipping costs ate margins or created a high minimum order quantity (MOQ) burden on consumers.
• “It's going to be hard to make a profitable business selling food through the mail, right?” (37:00, Krishna)
• Realized D2C made less sense for low-cost foods:
  “I just reinvented the concept of a grocery store... It should just go through grocery stores.” (28:22, Krishna)

7. Retail as the Core Channel (32:01)

• Whole Foods became the breakthrough retail partner thanks to a visionary buyer who saw the potential.
• Once sales data was available from Whole Foods, large retailers became more receptive; market validation became the key growth lever.

8. The Role of Word-of-Mouth and Marketing Fundamentals (35:07)

• Early growth depended more on word-of-mouth than paid advertising. Tactics like packaging, shelf placement, and price point are crucial.
• “If you have a great product, consumers recommend it to one another... that is the number one force for driving sales.” (35:07, Krishna)

9. Expanding Product Lines – Snacks and Beyond (38:41)

• Consumer feedback showed people snacked on cereal dry; quinoa snack mixes became a natural extension.
• New categories = increased complexity; success depends on consumer demand and manufacturing feasibility:
  “New categories are more tricky just because of the executional effort involved...” (41:40, Krishna)

10. R&D Setbacks and Personal Grit (46:18)

• Faced near-failure when a key co-manufacturer dropped Catalina Crunch due to scale mismatch.
• Krishna resorted to leasing warehousing and packaging cereals himself, demonstrating resilience and hands-on leadership:
  “Bought a cot off Amazon, I slept in the office and started coating and packaging the cereal in the back... That was the time when I almost threw in the towel.” (46:45, Krishna)

11. Balancing Functionality & Taste (49:46)

• Taste vs. function is a constant tension in healthy CPG:
  “You have to make it taste at least good enough... If you can't make it taste good enough, maybe it's just not the right time for that product.” (49:46, Krishna)
• Function only works when truly meaningful and appropriate for the category.

12. Trends, Fads, and Brand Positioning (59:27)

• Krishna shares his thinking on evolving the Catalina Crunch brand from keto-centric (“plastered on packaging”) to a more universally understood “high protein, high fiber, low sugar.”
• On riding trends: “When you're small, it's likely better to go deep and narrow... Afterwards, you can start to broaden your messaging.” (63:39, Krishna)
• Clear differentiation between fads (ephemeral, hype-driven) and trends (durable, cause-effect) is crucial when positioning a brand.

13. Book Recommendation and Final Message (69:46)

• Krishna cites Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl as a key influence—both for personal perspective and business purpose:

  “If you're operating a business to make money, it's really hard to succeed. You have to have... an underlying purpose, a way you're making the world better...” (69:46, Krishna)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On DIY nutrition before Catalina Crunch:
  “I would eat eggs every day for breakfast, snack on nothing but nuts, and I did that for about 10 years straight.” (05:36, Krishna)

• On scaling production pain:
  “I thought it would be easy to make a lot of cereal in my apartment... as soon as the orders start coming in, you’re like, holy crap, this is a lot versus what I can make.” (17:19, Krishna)

• On D2C pitfalls:
  “When we’re selling cereal... the cost of shipping can exceed the cost of the product.” (27:02, Krishna)

• On switching to retail:
  “Once you have sales data... you have market validation. You can take it elsewhere and it’s quasi incontrovertible evidence.” (33:38, Krishna)

• On R&D and resilience during near-failure:
  “Bought a cot off Amazon, I slept in the office and started... packaging the cereal... That was the time when I almost threw in the towel.” (46:45, Krishna)

• On function vs. taste:
  “If you can’t make it taste good enough, maybe it’s just not the right time for that product.” (49:46, Krishna)

• On trends vs. fads:
  “A fad is... being driven by its own growth... A trend is something that has a durable cause and effect based reason for being in existence.” (66:28, Krishna)

• On purpose and entrepreneurship:
  “If you’re operating a business to make money, it’s really hard to succeed. You have to have, in my opinion, an underlying purpose...” (69:46, Krishna)

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Important Timestamps

• Diagnosed with Diabetes & Nutrition Shift: 04:13 – 05:58
• R&D of Cereal; Landing on Pea Protein: 09:39 – 11:44
• Idea to Business – The Venmo Moment: 12:18 – 14:20
• Scaling Kitchen to Commercial and Manufacturing: 19:22 – 20:34
• Fundraising Strategy & Angel Investors: 24:01 – 25:15
• Harsh Realities of D2C: 27:02 – 29:45
• Pivot to Retail with Whole Foods: 32:01 – 34:56
• Word-of-Mouth, Packaging, Shelf Placement: 35:07 – 37:30
• Expanding Categories/SKUs: 38:41 – 41:40
• Facing Near-Failure & DIY Warehousing: 46:18 – 49:04
• Taste vs. Function in R&D: 49:46 – 52:33
• Brand Messaging Evolution & Trends/Fads: 59:27 – 68:36
• Book Recommendation & Importance of Purpose: 69:46 – 71:16

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Bottom Line

This episode is a masterclass in health-focused CPG entrepreneurship, touching on everything from deeply personal motivations to market-driven decisions. Krishna’s journey reveals:

• Relentless consumer focus
• The importance of iterating based on real feedback
• The pitfalls of D2C in food
• Why resilience is non-negotiable in scaling
• The necessity of purpose-driven leadership

Memorable Quote:
“If you personally are not going to eat it, then you can’t be selling it... and ultimately if you can’t make it taste good enough, maybe it’s just not the right time for that product.” (49:46, Krishna)

For founders considering a “better-for-you” product, this episode lays bare the operational, philosophical, and personal realities of building a shelf-stable brand with staying power.

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Transcript

[Krishna Kalianan]

It's going to be hard to make a profitable business selling food through the mail, right? Either you're losing money on the sale because you're paying for the shipping, or they're paying for the shipping and then they're paying like two or three times what it would cost in a grocery store because they have this big shipping bill.

[Mike]

Krishna Kalianan was sick of eating eggs for breakfast. As a diabetic, he could no longer

[Narrator/Host]

have cereal, so he created his own.

[Mike]

He launched Catalina Crunch after identifying a massive gap in low sugar, high protein

[Narrator/Host]

breakfast food foods and scaled it into a multimillion dollar business sold across major national retailers.

[Mike]

Today, Catalina Crunch is redefining what everyday pantry stables look like for a new generation of consumers.

[Krishna Kalianan]

If you can't make it taste good enough, maybe it's just not the right time for that product. If you personally are not going to eat it, then you can't be selling it, right? Even if you are personally going to eat it, that doesn't mean that it's good enough. I would not just try to spend a lot of money on D2C and grow that way simply because other brands were successful doing it or because some person told me to do it. I really have to see the logic behind it.

[Narrator/Host]

A drone is about to deliver your lunch and you won't pay a penny extra for it. In commerce news, Mana Air Delivery just

[Mike]

raised 50 million bucks. And they're not testing anymore. They've already completed 250,000 real drone deliveries. They're backed by the same investors behind Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI. And they're building up to 40 drone bases across America. And they're already inside the apps you use every day.

[Narrator/Host]

Doordash, Uber, Just eat. And the part that nobody's talking about.

[Mike]

Mana once delivered a defibrillator to a cardiac arrest victim in under four minutes. It's not just convenience. That's a life saved by a drone. And GrubHub just made history. New Jersey got its first ever commercial drone food delivery. No extra fees, no driver, just your meal dropped at your door from the sky. This is no longer science fiction.

[Narrator/Host]

The infrastructure is being built right now, maybe in your neighborhood, whether you've noticed or not. So maybe in the near future, next time you open a delivery app, look

[Mike]

up, your order might already be on its way. Krishna, thank you so much for coming on the show. How are you?

[Krishna Kalianan]

I'm great. Thanks for having me, Mike. I really appreciate it.

[Mike]

Oh, thanks so much for coming. This is such a treat. Big, big fan of Catalina. So from the very beginning. When did you first learn about pea protein?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Oh, I think I first learned about pea protein years before starting Catalina Crunch. I probably first had it in like the mid. Maybe like 2007, 2008, something like that. I was in high school and starting to go to the gym, start to take protein powders. And I remember at first, I think, just buying like whey or milk or something like that, and then realizing, oh, there are all these other plant based protein powders. And my. My dad was a vegan, and so he encouraged me to get into that. And so I think I tried pea and I tried hemp, and I tried soy and pumpkin. I tried. I tried a whole bunch of them.

[Mike]

So what. I guess, when did you start experimenting with pe and how did you land on pea as a primary ingredient?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, when you go back to Catalina Crunch. Right. So I launched Catalina Crunch in 2018, and prior to launching the business, I had been baking my own cereal and eating it for breakfast with almond milk. I'd been doing that for several months and not really actually thinking of turning it into a business. And I started when I first started down this journey of basically meal prepping and baking for my own type 1 diabetes. That's when I started going to GNC and I got interested in basically baking with protein powders and other alternative ingredients. And so I tried all sorts of protein powders as well as almond flour, coconut flour, you know, all that sort of stuff. And so that was probably like early 2018.

[Mike]

Got it, got it. That's. That's really helpful. And I mean, talk to me about also just getting diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and. And the change that you had to do for that.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. So I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes about 10 years before I started Catalina Crunch. I was a senior in high school, going into my freshman year of college. And I basically was actually at college going through a new student orientation day, kind of thing, collapsed, went to the er. That's when I found out I had diabetes. When you have type 1 diabetes, you get a dietitian that's kind of specialized in type 1 diabetes, and they teach you how to count carbs and then how to take insulin based on how many carbs you had eaten. And then you have a blood glucometer that tracks your glucose, and you have these pens where you inject yourself with insulin and you're kind of constantly balancing that. Right. And so that was like 2008, 2009, something around there. And when I was diagnosed I first realized. Well, first I rebelled a little bit, and I didn't want to believe that I had it. And kind of. I didn't throw the insulin away, but I didn't want to do anything with it. I didn't want to inject myself, et cetera. Your body quickly pulls you back into compliance because you can't go too high or too low too quickly without realizing that you need to change. And then I started to realize, you know, if I eat things that are high in protein, high in fiber, low in sugar, it's a lot easier to keep my blood sugar in check. Also stay in good shape. You know, it keeps strong mental clarity throughout the day, a whole bunch of good benefits. And so I'd say, like, early 2009 was really when I started on that journey. I would eat eggs every day for breakfast, snack on nothing but nuts, and I did that for about 10 years straight.

[Mike]

Wow. Wow. And so. And it was quite. I'd imagine it was quite the lifestyle. I mean, the lifestyle changed in terms of what you were eating before that prior.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up eating the classic American staples and loving. You know, I love going to the supermarket with my mom to shop. And especially in, I think, like, the 90s and 2000s, there was a ton of exciting innovation in foods, as there always is. Right. So I think growing up ate a lot of bagel bites and pizza rolls, also just the normal stuff, the cinnamon toast crunches of the world and Cocoa Puffs and Chex Mix and Coke, all the stuff that a kid growing up in America would eat.

[Mike]

What compelled you to start cooking?

[Krishna Kalianan]

I mean, it was mostly diabetes. As a type 1 diabetic, if you eat something different every day, and you. Especially if you eat things that are higher in carbs or if you go out and then you're eating it like a. You know, you're eating at a restaurant or even like a fast casual restaurant. You don't know what's necessarily in the sauce, et cetera. It's hard to know how much insulin to take, and you frequently have to take more. Um, so if you. So I started basically meal prepping. Right. And if you keep eating it, if you prepare the food yourself, you know exactly what's in it. You don't have to guess as to what someone else put in it, and it makes it a lot easier to be consistent with your dosing.

[Mike]

And what. What was interesting to you about cereal? Or how did you get to start baking your own and making your own cereal?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. It was mainly you Know, I was trying to. I'd been eating eggs for about 10 years now.

[Mike]

Was that not cutting anymore? Were you a bit, were you a bit sick of eggs?

[Krishna Kalianan]

I was a bit sick of eggs. I didn't love the texture. I didn't love the. You know, eggs are great, right? I mean, they're, they're freaking amazing. But when you eat them every day, it gets a little boring. And so, yeah, I mean, I tried 100 different hot sauces and other sorts of sauces and eventually just kind of decided, you know what, I got to do something different. And I loved cereal growing up, right? You have chocolatey cinnamon, like great flavors. You have the crispy crunchiness of it. It goes great in a bowl of milk. It's very convenient, right? Like in the morning. And obviously it's not super expensive either. So, you know, I just really loved it and that's what got me interested in making it again.

[Mike]

And talk a little bit about that journey and what part of the experiment. High protein and of course, low sugar cereal. What were different kind of greedies you experimented with.

[Narrator/Host]

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[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, I experimented with all sorts of stuff. Pretty much every protein powder that you can buy, whether it's whey or milk or pea or soy hemp, pumpkin rice, you know, the list goes on. I got some stuff off Amazon like almond flour and coconut flour. I think there were a handful of other things like that that I, that I don't remember at this, right this moment. And you know, I kind of just went to work trying to make something that tasted like what I grew up eating. The hardest thing I found right off the bat was the. When you bake with protein powders, they typically tend to make your food really dense or like, they create weird textures that you wouldn't even know were, were possible if you didn't cook. Right. Like dense foods, rubbery foods. Rubbery, dense foods. Foods that are like crispy on the first bite, but then they're like rubbery afterwards. Like all this stuff that I think the chefs and other people that make food, like, kind of like, you know, they hide that stuff from you. All the failed recipes, Right. So I tried a lot of different stuff. And, you know, a lot of these, these protein powders taste different as well. So, you know, if you're trying to make a cinnamon flavored cereal and you're using, you know, some hemp protein, you start to get these kind of like hempy notes in there with it, and it's like it doesn't taste exactly what you're looking for. Right. And so I spent a lot of time. I eventually landed on pea protein for a few reasons. I mean, one, I think it was, it was helping me when I was baking to create like a relatively crispy, crunchy profile for the texture. It didn't taste crazy. Some of the, like, milks and wheys could taste pretty bitter, whereas some of the other ones, like hemp, could taste pretty like grassy beanie, you know, kind of weird, right? And it wasn't like crazy expensive either. So that we could make a cereal at a, at a reasonable price point.

[Mike]

Got it. That's helpful. But even, even before the price point, even before the price point, I guess talk. Or, or even turning this into a business. I know you're, you were doing this for yourself and creating maybe a Betty, a cereal that you can actually have for yourself since you couldn't have cereal anymore. What was that moment that you thought, hey, maybe this could be a business and maybe this could be, could be a product that's not just for me, but other people might also like it.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so I was actually at the park and in New York. I was living in Manhattan as I was meeting a friend in Central park. And he was, he was funny enough also looking to eat more protein for breakfast. I was kind of on his own health journey. He was not diabetic, but nevertheless was trying to eat more protein and really get healthier. And so he told me he was sick of eating eggs every day because he'd been eating eggs for a long time. And I was like, oh, that sounds familiar. That's like the same thing that I've been dealing with. And so I. I made him some cereal, gave it to him in a baggie. He really enjoyed it, and he actually Venmoed me for it. And I hadn't asked him to pay me for it. I hadn't really thought about that. But when he did, and it was a great gesture, obviously, it kind of. It kind of a light bulb went off in my head, which is like, oh, you could actually make and sell food products. Right. I hadn't really thought about that before. And that's when I kind of started to think about, oh, does this make sense as a business? As opposed to just me baking, you know, like on the weekends, as a meal prepping sort of thing. Right. And there were a lot of things that. That became exciting about it. You know, one was I, you know, I'm a type 1 diabetic. So I was very highly motivated and felt really strongly that this should exist. Right. And the reason why I had started baking in the first place was because I'd gone to the grocery store and I couldn't find something like this in the store. Right. There were a ton of cereals on shelf, but most of them were. Nearly all of them were based in either like, you know, 100% starch, really? Sugar and starch. Right. So like corn, rice, wheat coated in sugar if they tasted good, or things that were like, you know, like 100% wheat, stuff that tasted very bad. And so there wasn't really an option like this. I had known and been seeing that the obesity rate in the country.

[Mike]

Right.

[Krishna Kalianan]

In America had been climbing for decades. And, you know, I felt there was a big opportunity to help people and help them eat healthier, help them take care of themselves, help them stay in shape. And so that was all very exciting to me. Yeah.

[Mike]

I thought. I thought what was really. That's really interesting because I was gonna. I was gonna ask, how did you know, or think about markets in that? Do you think there was a bigger market than just. Than only people who happen to be diabetics? Right. In terms of the cereal. But it seems like from your friend who was, you know, not a diabetic, but is beyond that scope, and then as well as this thought that, okay, maybe in general, people actually want to eat, you know, more quote, unquote healthy or, you know, higher protein and. And fiber into their lives, and not have these kind of sugary cereals, which are kind of like candy for breakfast, if that's fair to say so. That is. That is really interesting how it seems like that conversation also saw that kind of made you realize that maybe, hey, there's a bigger opportunity here beyond if. If I were to start a business. There's actually quite a big opportunity here.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, when I grew up, my dad was a, you know, he was a health. He was your classic health nut. You know, kind of shopping at Mother's Market, buying all this stuff that was made with black beans and, you know, didn't taste good and came in a brown paper bag. Right. And so I was not, you know, I tried to stay 10ft away from that and his stuff whenever I could. So I didn't necessarily think of this as a big market per se, but when I realized how quickly the rates of not just, you know, not type 1 diabetes, which is genetic, right, but type 2 diabetes, gestational diabetes, LADA, and pre diabetes were growing, that actually now is over half of the American population. And so it's huge. Right? And then you look at adjacencies like added sugars and how that can contribute to symptoms around ibs, IBD, or, you know, kids that have adhd, et cetera, in addition to, as you said, people that are just, like, kind of philosophically trying to eat healthier but don't have any specific health condition. I was like, yeah, this is actually a majority of the population that either should be eating this or would have an interest in eating it. Right. So I felt good about the size.

[Mike]

So once you walk me to that moment, too, about when you actually realized that this was. Hey, I'd imagine it was talking to your friend. And once that. Once your friend Venmo you for that first transaction. But once you decided, hey, this is actually there's a business opportunity here, and at least my buddy liked my product. I like my product more people maybe like my product. Talk to them about the next steps for you in terms of turning that into reality.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I first had launched a website and put it online. I thought that, you know, I was baking it in my. In my kitchen. I had five racks in the oven. I ever only used one rack. And so I thought it'd be easy to make a lot of cereal in my apartment. It turns out that you go, you know, you can't make zero that quickly. And as soon as the orders start coming in, you're like, you know, holy crap, this is a lot versus what I can make. So I hadn't necessarily thought that through too well, but it really proved out the demand for it. Right. I think when I first put the website online, there were, there was someone who is like, shared it in some sort of like type 1 diabetic support group or something like that on Facebook. And I got like 100 orders in one day. And then I had a bunch of emails to respond to and stuff like that. So that was how I first launched it. And I felt really good about it based on that kind of like early consumer feedback. And it wasn't just the number of orders, but it was also the depth of interest as well. As I started talking to some of the folks that were buying it, I was like, oh man, these people really want this. They don't just like kind of want this. They've been, you know, one person was planning a trip to Singapore and they had never even had the cereal yet because they just placed an order and the guy was asking if he could buy like two suitcases worth so that he could take it with him for his whole trip. There are other people that talked about how they had wanted a cereal like this for years, but it had never existed. And so they just been missing it for a long time. Like people wrote, you know, wrote in with very long emails. Um, and so that's when I really kind of felt the, the pull, so to speak. Um, and I really felt that it was, it was something that a lot of people, it was exciting a lot of people. Um, and that's what kind of got me to, to dive in further.

[Mike]

Amazing. So at what point did you decide, all right, we need to actually go and find a coman and have to expand outside of your kitchen?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, well, I went to a commercial kitchen. I, I, yeah, I had no background in CPG prior to this, so I had no, I guess, idea that comans existed or there, there was such a concept as a coman and, you know, so it might sound strange to people who have, who have experience in the industry, but that idea hadn't crossed my mind. So anyway, so I went to a commercial kitchen. There I got this like late night kind of graveyard shift. I think it was like 10pm to 5am or something like that. Was able to make more cereal out of the kitchen, but it really wasn't enough. And so that's when I kind of started to put some math to the amount of cereal I was making and actually look at like how much I could make over time and how long it would last, etc. And I realized, oh, okay, now I'm going to have to go make this at a larger scale. Right. And so I went to.

[Mike]

What do you find that there was like a certain revenue threshold or, or, or just, you know, number of messages inbound, they were receiving, receiving, or just sales volume that you felt, okay, now I need to, this is too much to actually stay and actually do it myself. And actually I need to actually shift towards a coman.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was hard making the cereal in a commercial kitchen. I think when I was doing something like 50 orders a day or something like that, it was already way too much to, to do in the commercial kitchen. And I just keep going in stock, out of stock, that sort of thing. And so that's when I went and I actually, actually got lucky. There was an upcoming course at Texas A and M on cereal extrusion and other methods of making cereal. It kind of walked through how General Mills Post and Kellogg's made cereal. And so I went to attend that course as a way of learning more about, about how to make cereal. Got it, Got it.

[Mike]

That's, that's, that's helpful. And what were your. So walk me through as well, you know, what was the first impressions? Because it was the first time doing a consumer brand, I believe. What was your first impressions of a. Of, you know, D2C as a sales channel and thinking about growing on via online?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, I was very excited about it. You know, I was broadly aware. I was more aware of D2C than I was of CPG. And so I was aware of some of the benefits of B2C as talked about by folks like the founder of Barkbox or the founder of Dollar Shave Club or, you know, other sorts of businesses that had been in this space, if not in food. Right. And so I was excited about it from the perspective of being able to sell directly to consumers rather than through retailers. The ability to talk then directly to those consumers, to learn directly from those consumers, those sorts of things and just to really accelerate the process. Right. You know, because, you know, it can take a year to get your product into a retailer and it can take longer if you're a new brand and you don't have any distribution and so you don't have distributors set up and yada, yada, yada. And so that was, that was really exciting for me. I think at the time social media was growing, you know, was obviously very big, but I don't think that necessarily all the brands had conceived of or realized that. And so there was an opportunity to acquire customers from social media, you know, at a relatively low cost, which made it, you know, all the, all the more exciting.

[Mike]

Yeah, no, for sure. That's, that's incredible. And yes, obviously, and we'll, we'll get to it that the landscape for E. Commerce has certainly changed. Regarding social media, where 2017, 2018, how, at what point did you, did you think about raising capital for Catalina?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, it was during that switch from doing it in the commercial kitchen to doing it at scale. Right. That's when I realized, oh, it's going to cost, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a day because this equipment is so big just to get the ingredients to try making the cereal. And so we're going to need money for that. And then I had wanted, you know, I had, I had wanted to hire a small team as well. Right. At least one person that could help out with marketing, one person that could help out with operations and finance, one person that could help out with sales. And so that's when I felt it made sense to raise some money to make that happen.

[Mike]

And what was the approach when it came to raising capital from, from your side?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. So I ended up raising from a friend of mine from college who then introduced me to other kind of angel investors and mainly angel investors, high net worth individuals, those types and raising money. We raised about $800,000 in total or something like that. I'm really grateful for those individuals. I think it was great to have raised from angel investors and high net worth individuals for a couple of reasons. One, they were my friends, they were people that I knew. And so, you know, there was a strong, there would have been anyways, but there was, there was just added to my already overwhelming motivation to make sure that, that this was successful. So I think that was great. Two, you know, I actually had a large number of smaller checks and so no one, for better and for worse, no one investor I think necessarily cared so much about how I did or didn't. And so I didn't have any over overwhelmingly strong personalities trying to push me in any one direction as to how I ran the business, which kind of freed me up to run the business in the way that I felt was best.

[Mike]

It's amazing. That's amazing. And, and I imagine too since you raised from, from angels, they were maybe a lot more flexible when it came to their timelines versus raising from an institutional fund.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. I mean I do think early stage VCs can move pretty quickly in general depending on where, where you are. But yeah, angels certainly, it's like they know someone else is investing in your business. The business makes sense to them. They'd like to see it succeed. Like you know, they like you. They can be in in 48 hours, right?

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Host]

And this episode is brought to you by the Hidden Gems. Let's be honest, there's a lot of bullshit in the marketing agency world. So much under delivering, overcharging and incompetence. You truly don't know who's good until you engage. And by then it's too, too late. That's what the Hidden Gem solves for. Powered by deep agency insider knowledge, they provide founders and brand operators with only brand beloved, highly vetted boutique agencies at preferred rates, agencies across media, creative, dev, design, events, social and beyond. All well covered. The Hidden Gems serves brands like Dr. Squash Monster Energy, Gorilla Mind, Figs and Sadva to achieve some of their biggest growth. And here's the best part. David Drexler, the founder, is offering his service free forever to anyone in the consumer VC community who mentions the show. So if you're thinking about hiring an agency, talk to the Hidden Gems first. It's free service, biggest bang for your buck. You simply can't lose. Link in the show notes and was

[Mike]

the plan initially to grow and scale on, on dtc? I mean I know that obviously you're, you're in so many retail stores and a lot of, and have such a massive retail footprint, but at what point, at what point did you feel like at, at some point that you kind of tapped out when it came to dc?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, there were a couple of things. Yeah. So originally my pie in the sky view in my head was just to sell D2C and similar to like a Dollar Shave Club, get into the nine figures just selling D2C and I quickly realized there was, I realized that wasn't going to happen. There were a couple of things that happened. One, I had this great advisor early on. I was entering a totally new industry and was very lucky to have found this individual. But he was pushing me to go into retail and to consider retail. And two, I realized D2C I think works well when your shipping costs are a low percentage of your total order value. Right. And so you know, it has that impact where like when we're selling cereal, right. Or like a snack, these are things that are not super expensive where the cost of shipping can exceed the cost of the product. Right. And so you want someone to buy your snack from your website. Either you're losing money on the sale because you're paying for the shipping, which is something you might decide to do because everything's, you know, there's no shipping costs on Amazon. And if you want to compete with Amazon, you're going to have to realize that, right? Or they're paying for the shipping and then they're paying like two or three times what it would cost in a grocery store because they have this big shipping bill, right? Or you have them buy six units at a time or four at a time or whatever. And then the shipping cost can be taken out of the margin. But in that case, it's still like now they have a high moq effectively, right? And it's not like, oh, you can try this new cereal brand. It's like, you got to try this new cereal brand and buy four of these things at the same time, which adds risk if you don't like it, right? So doing that math, I quickly saw, hey, it's going to be hard to make a profitable business selling food through the mail, right? And then I started to think about, well, how can we make it more cost effective? And I started to invent in my head this idea of basically neighbors coming together, creating their own sort of buying groups. And I would ship them like a pallet of it, and then they would all go get some. And I was like, huh, that would actually work really well. And also, huh, that sounds like a grocery store, right? And so I was like, all right, I just reinvented the concept of a grocery store. It should just go through grocery stores. And so that's how I really focus, you know, came to realize, okay, retail is going to be a big part of this. And obviously, obviously, you know, retail has been a big part of our journey from there.

[Mike]

But at this point, Blitzscaling online, that was, that was, that was huge. That was maybe what, you know, a lot of brands were doing at the time. Because ads back then were. Your CAC back then was so cheap. And I'd imagine that your investors were probably pushing for you to go and scale dtc. Why didn't you. And were you actually ever tempted and what was it like? Kind of pushing back?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so it goes back to, I think, the composition of our cap table, right? We had many small checks. And so no one investor, I think, really cared all that much. I had one main investor, my friend, who cared, but I don't think that, like, he had many investments, etc, right? And even for him, it wasn't a big investment. So no one was going to argue with me or add infamin item about. About what the right way to do it was. So that was part one, part two. I'm Naturally the type of person where if I don't understand why, you know, the reasoning behind doing something, I'm. I'm very unlikely to. I. I would say just blindly follow the advice of someone else or do something because they're saying to do it. Um, and I think that's just a part of my personality. I think there are pros and cons to that aspect of my personality. But regardless, I would not just, you know, try to spend a lot of money on D2C and grow that way simply because other brands were successful doing it or because some person told me to do it. I really have to see the logic behind it. Right. And as I, as I kind of analyze the logic behind it, I felt unless we were going to get to a Amazon like scale, right? Which we were not that it was. It was really highly infeasible for that to make sense.

[Mike]

So once you realized, okay, Grocery, that is our. That's now and now not our new path, but an additional sales channel that we want to explore and really kind of kind of go hard on, what was, what was the first step with Grocery? Was it going through the natural channel or what was kind of that, that route to market?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. So I had first actually tried to. Well, so Whole Foods, right, was probably the grocery store that I went to shop at the most that I liked. And so I had reached out to the buyer at Whole Foods. This woman was fantastic. I think that the Whole Foods buyers in general, they're looking for new up and coming stuff, right? I mean, they're not just trying to buy more of stuff from the big CPG companies. She realized the potential in the product, I would say, and really championed it in bringing it into Whole Foods. So that's how I got started in retail. It was a, you know, it was definitely. I was very fortunate for. For that reason, because it was an uphill battle otherwise, to say the least. We were, you know, we. A lot of the industry, you know, coming out of, say, Boulder, Colorado, et cetera, was very focused on natural and organic and, you know, things like that. And so not necessarily looking at what I was doing as in line with that movement, so to speak, but we weren't a mainstream food company either, right? And we also, we also weren't like a gourmet artisanal food company either. Right. So we kind of sat in this, this bucket that I don't know that many people knew how to put us into or what to put us into. Furthermore, because I was a diabetic, I think a lot of people immediately associated the cereal with things like insure shakes or other sorts of things which they perceived as not selling well or not going to sell well or, you know, whatever the case may be. I still don't know what the sales of insure shakes are. They could be doing fantastic for all I know. But I kept hearing, you know, I kept getting looped into this, oh, you're like an insure shakes guy. And you know, no one wants that kind of stuff. So I was really lucky that this buyer, you know, I think she saw the, the, the opportunity and she, she jumped on it. And then from there it was a bit easier, right, because once we got into Whole Foods Market in the, in the cereal sold well there, I think we, we quickly became one of the fastest selling brands in Whole Foods Market. Then it was, then it was, you know, before you have sales data, you're really trying to sell people on an idea, on a dream and on yourself, right? Once you have sales data, you kind of have market validation. You can take it elsewhere and it's kind of, it's quasi incontrovertible evidence. So the data then started to speak from, for itself. Amazing.

[Mike]

What do you think most people misunderstand about how a product actually moves off the shelf in a grocery store? In a grocery store.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Many ways that I could go with that question, Mike. I think maybe a couple big, you know, a couple things that I would state, I think, and I have no way to prove this, but especially in the early stage, that word of mouth moves more units than anything else does. And so you can spend all day long working on your own advertising and etc. Etc. But I think ultimately, if you have a great product, consumers recommend it to one another. Some people love recommending things to other people and will tell, you know, 20 different people about your thing and then, and then those people will go buy it, etc. I think that is the number one kind of force for driving, driving sales, driving growth, basically getting off the shelf, right? Once you're on the shelf outside of that, I think that the basic building blocks of, of marketing are super important, right? Basically the four P's, right? And in particular, obviously you have to be at a price that makes sense both for you and your business, but also for the consumer that you're going after. I think that you have to be in the right place in the first place, right? If you have a really, as we did, kind of premium priced.

[Narrator/Host]

This episode is brought to you by the hidden gems. Let's be honest, there's a Lot of bullshit in the marketing agency world. So much under delivering overcharging and incompetence, you truly don't know who's good until you engage. And by then it's too late. That's what the Hidden Gem solves for. Powered by deep agency insider knowledge, they provide founders and brand operators with only brand beloved, highly vetted boutique agencies at preferred rates, agencies across media, creative, dev, design, events, social and beyond. All well covered. The Hidden Gems serves brands like Dr. Squash Monster Energy, Gorilla Mind, Figs and Sadva to achieve some of their biggest growth. And here's the best part. David Drexler, the founder, is offering his service free forever to anyone in the consumer VC community who mentions the show. So if you're thinking about hiring an agency, talk to the Hidden Gems first. It's free service, biggest bang for your buck. You simply can't lose link in the show notes.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Cereal Better for you cereal. Catalina Crunch cereal. You know, you're probably like Whole Foods is a great place to be selling it. You know there, there are other stores like a corner liquor store that you know in theory you could convince to put the cereal in there. Right. Or like a convenience store that may not be the right place for your, your product to be. Right. So I think getting that right is important. I mean I think getting the packaging right is obviously very important as well. So you're communicating to your target consumer what it is that, that, that they should, why they should be buying the product, what's in it for them, what the product is, et cetera. And so I think those, you know, those things as well as the product itself are, are key. And then there's just the selling environment. I, I definitely am guilty of underestimating how much where you are on the shelf and what part of the shelf you're on at, what in what set you're in, what you stand next to on the shelf. All those things also have a big impact on, on how fast you sell.

[Mike]

No, that's really helpful, thank you. And when, I mean when did it make sense for you to expand categories beyond cereal?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. So first went into our, we have a line of protein snack mixes and basically it's like Chex Mix made high protein. We take our cereal, mix it with cashews, almonds, pecans, etc. Some cheese crisps, some chickpea flour based pretzels. We make toss it in seasonings like honey mustard, parmesan, garlic, cheddar, etc. And sell that as a savory snack. Right. So that was the first extension we went into, it was simple. We had found that a lot of people were telling us that they loved our cereal but they were actually snacking on it. And that's a theme to this day, is that more people actually snack on our cereal than eat it out of a bowl with milk. And I had not expected that at first because I had mostly started the company to eat it for breakfast, but. Yes, yes, yeah, exactly. Yep. But you know, we sell our cereal in a stand up pouch so it's easy to open, it's easy to close, it's easy to get. You know, it's not like a bag in box which is harder to access and. But then there were a lot of people that were like, hey, I'd love to snack on this. I snack on it sometimes, but I prefer salty snacks. You know, would you consider making like a salty snack version? And people were bringing up other things they were snacking on and so it made a lot of sense to get into snack mix. The other thing about that kind of extension or new category, however you want to put it, was it was, you know, it was. The consumer was asking for it. But it also runs on the same lines that our existing products run on. So it's not like inventing a whole new production process. It didn't require getting too deep into any sort of new manufacturing technology, etc. So I think it was, it was like relatively close in from a hardness to do perspective.

[Mike]

Got it. No, that's. That makes a lot of sense. And that also that just hearing that people were actually snacking on the cereal instead of consuming it traditionally with milk and everything makes sense in terms of being easily able to, or seems like easily able to expand to other categories within the snacking. Within snacking. Also introducing salty snacks and everything, which. Yeah, that's. That's amazing. Personally, I mean I, for me the salty snacks are just unbelievable. That's for me. I understand once, once you kind of had gotten a Whole Foods and that was performing really well, it was easier getting to. Into other retailers. What was kind of the next steps there? And at what point did you actually introduce like the next SKUs? What did it make sense? Because still, you know, tying up capital, producing new SKUs and also the R D process. How do you think about sequencing and timing?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, I think so. You know, it depends on what you're launching. Right. I mean you can divide things into new flavors which are very close in and can be more simple to execute. Right. Versus entirely new categories which can be very complicated. Right. And things in the middle like new pack sizes and new formats, et cetera. And so I think that you, you know, a couple of things. We started out with flavor expansion on serial. That was easy and simple from a, from an execution standpoint, but it also made a lot of sense because that's what people, our consumers were asking us for. Right. I mean, the number one request we would always get is, and we still get is like, hey, can you make a XYZ flavor of the cereal that we don't have? Right. I had in my head when I started the company really, Cocoa Puffs. And I thought we would just ever make like chocolate cereal. We have a dark chocolate cereal. It's our second most popular. Right. And so I didn't necessarily think about, I didn't actually realize, oh, people are going to want all these flavors. But then I said, you know, people wanted some cinnamon and then they wanted, you know, we have blueberry muffin, which sells really well. We have Honey Graham. Right. We have, we have fruity, etc. And so we, we started down the road of, of making more flavors because that's what consumers were telling us they wanted. Then we got into snack mix because it was like a salty adjacent to cereal. And then from there, I think when you go into new categories. Oh, and we'd also gotten into different pack sizes. Right. So we started selling into the club channel. And the club channel requires or typically is optimized for larger pack sizes. Right. So we got into new pack sizes, we made some single serve pack sizes, et cetera. And then as we started to grow, we started to look at new categories as well. I think new categories are more tricky just because of the executional effort involved, which I think can be more than you first think. Right. What I mean by that is like you can have a new category which dictates the use of a large number of different ingredients, because the ingredients that work well to make cereal may not work well to bake dough or something like that. Right. And so you're then looking at, well, so what are the ingredients I need for this specific application that then leads you down the rabbit hole of sourcing all sorts of new ingredients as well as the technical aspect of learning how those ingredients work. You then, on the, on the sales side, you have now maybe a new category, so a new set of buyers that you're going after as well.

[Mike]

Right.

[Krishna Kalianan]

And, and you know, if it's, if this product is the right fit in a different channel, instead of your current channels, you have new channels that you're Going after and so on and so forth. So yeah, I think that getting into new categories, it definitely ups the business complexity a lot and I think is a high, a high intensity endeavor. It can obviously de risk your business and obviously it can help. I mean it can reward you if you do a great job. You're helping consumers out in some way. Right. And ideally you have some strategy behind it. Right. Where you have your existing consumers and you're trying to get into a new day part in their life. Right. Or you're trying to bring in new consumers that your current product doesn't appeal to. Whatever the strategy is around it, if you execute it well, that obviously can do wonders for you too. But it's not an easy endeavor.

[Mike]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, when I talk to some investors and obviously everyone's different, but the idea of building a platform, sometimes it can scare them because it's like, hey, you have like, I really want just like single category products and then exit to, you know, strategic because you have your kind of single category instead of building like a platform form, for example, and being in different categories. But I also, like, I understand that it also is de risking and I mean I just love your products as well. And so I just think that it's, it's very, makes a lot of sense as well in terms of the, in terms of capturing the consumer at a different time of day where cereal tends to be morning, although they're snacking, but. Yeah, but, but, but then you have salty Sax, which might be something for more so the afternoon, for example. So that's, that's really cool. Really cool how. Talk to me a little bit about the time that you almost quit Catalina Crunch. There's a couple of times you almost quit, but. Yeah, yeah, one time due to, due to manufacturing issues.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. We had, you know, so when I started the company, I was insistent on putting the product, the cereal into a stand up pouch. You know, I'd grown up eating cereals and all the cereals were in a bag in a box. I hated how when I took the bag out of the box and then opened the bag, it could be hard to put the bag back into the box. And then that was annoying and frustrating and the cereal could go stale, etc.

[Mike]

Etc.

[Krishna Kalianan]

I knew that we were going to have a premium cereal because we're using a lot of protein powder in our, in our cereal and that stuff is a lot more expensive than, you know, wheat flour, for example. Right. And so I was, I was, I was thinking all Right. We got to deliver the best experience. It's got to be in a stand up pouch. You know, all the companies that were making cereal at the time were putting it into a bag, in a box. And so we ended up having to split the manufacturing process into one partner putting it into, you know, making the cereal squares themselves and then the second partner that was packaging it and coding it. And what I found there was, is there weren't very many people that could do those last two steps. And so I ended up finding this co manufacturer. They were one of the largest in America. They do a lot of the airline snacks. I think the founder was a, or the owner was a type 1 diabetic and he was very, you know, he, he loved what I was doing, but it didn't make business sense for them. Right. They were packaging millions of stuff a day and here I was asking for 20,000 units a month or something like that right at the very early days. So they were having trouble with their machinery and getting it to work and so that eventually they said, you know what? We can't do this anymore for you. Sorry. And at that point I was like, shoot. I, they didn't want to do it anymore. I couldn't find anyone else that could do it. And I was like, man, I'm either going to have to go do this myself or stop doing it, right? I'm going to shut down the business. And so I started looking for space. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I'd never done it before, but rented 3,000 square feet in an office park with an office in the front and warehouse in the back. Started. I bought a cot off Amazon, I slept in the office and started, you know, coating and packaging the cereal in the back. And that was, I think, a blessing in disguise. It was, it was incredibly time consuming and challenging, but made us much more nimble, right, in terms of the flavors we could come out with, how quickly we could do it, etc. Um, but that was, that was the time when I, when I almost threw in the towel. Wow.

[Mike]

Yeah, that sounds, that sounds very frustrating. But also at the same time, as you say, like a great, you know, learning experience. I guess it's easy to say that once it all has happened, but, but how, how do you also think on the R and D side and launch new products even, even with your current, even with your current catalog of, of products, how do you balance taste versus function? Because I feel like you were one of, in this, you know, last few years, one of those Seems like functions everywhere in terms of what a brand needs to be, especially since coming back from Expo West. But it seems like you were, you know, quite early when it came to function. How do you think about function versus taste?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, we talk about a lot about this inside Catalina. It is hard. It is hard to know how to get it right. It's to hard, hard to get it right. Luckily, you know, I'm not the only one sitting in the kitchen trying to figure out how to make stuff taste good. We got a great team that can do a better job than I ever could with this kind of stuff. So that has, has really moved the ball forward for us. I think that, you know, to your point, if you start to add too, too much of certain functional ingredients, fibers, proteins, et cetera, it makes it hard to taste good. On the other hand, if you take something that exists on shelf and just add a gram or two of protein, you can make something that still tastes very good, but is not moving the needle on nutritional attributes really right? And then you're just asking yourself like, am I in business really to make people's lives better or am I really just in business to sell this thing? Right. And if so, how much of it am I really going to sell? And so you have to balance it. I mean, I think it depends on the category and the eating occasion. First of all, there are times when people are much more willing to compromise on taste for function than there are other times where they're much less willing to compromise on taste for function. So I think you need to identify where along that spectrum you sit inside the consumer's mind. And that depends on what consumer you're going after and when you intend on them eating it, what mindset they're in, etc. Two, I think is who you're going after. You know, if you're going after type one diabetics as an example, they're going to be much more willing to compromise on taste for function. Quote, unquote. If you're going after, you know, you know, quote unquote, the, the 50th percentile American on the question, they're going to be much less willing to compromise, right? So I think that's, that's a, that's a balancing act. Um, and, and I think there's no, again, there's no easy answer other than to say the, the thing your, your, your snack or your product has to be meaningfully better on function to stand out. Otherwise it's going to be hard to stand out. And if it's not meaningfully better. Are you really making people's lives better at the same time, then you have to make, make it taste at least good enough, right? And what good enough is depends on, I think, how many people you want to sell it to. And I think if you just can't, if you, if you personally are not going to eat it, then you can't be selling it, right? Even if you are personally going to eat it, that doesn't mean that it's good enough. And ultimately if you can't make it taste good enough, maybe it's just not the right time for that product. Right? And you just have to give up on what you're trying to make and do something different.

[Mike]

It seems like function today, which was probably very different when you first started, but it's kind of infiltrating almost every category in consumer goods. Do you think that there's a limit in terms of categories where the functional benefit it doesn't make sense to have, for example, a, a functional product in

[Narrator/Host]

this episode is brought to you by the Hidden Gems. Let's be honest, there's a lot of bullshit in the marketing agency world. So much under delivering, overcharging and incompetence, you truly don't know who's good until you engage. And by then it's too late. That's what the Hidden Gem solves for. Powered by deep agency insider knowledge, they provide founders and brand operators with only brand beloved, highly vetted boutique agencies at preferred rates, agencies across media, creative, dev, design, events, social and beyond. All well covered. The Hidden Gems serves brands like Dr. Squash, Monster Energy, Gorilla Mind, Figs and Sadva to achieve some of their biggest growth. And here's the best part. David Drexler, the founder, is offering his service free forever to anyone in the consumer VC community who mentions the show. So if you're thinking about hiring an agency, talk to the Hidden Gems first. It's free service, biggest bang for your buck. You simply can't lose. Link in the show notes I think

[Krishna Kalianan]

that, you know, I guess, you know, one thing I was, I was, I was thinking about is like, you know, people buy, they want to be getting the best stuff, right, whatever that category is that they're buying in, right? And so in certain categories, like in, like in automobiles, you know, if you have a used car and you go to the dealer wanting to buy a new car, like you're going to be looking for now, it's, it's 2026. You bought your car in 2020. What new technology is available in Your car, right? Like how can my car be more functional, for lack of a better word, Right? Like can it drive itself? Can it drive itself on the highways? How does it help me avoid getting into accidents? You know, like, can it do its own maintenance, yada yada, Right. I think in food there's kind of a similar aspect that's just less well recognized or well understood that's also changed, which is now with this interest in health and like people realizing that what they eat impacts more than just do I feel good or not, do I feel full or not in the moment? Right. But can have longer term impacts or shorter term impacts on how they feel the quote function. They're now looking for more. They're looking for more, better. I do think that there are situations in which the category might be optimized to deliver one type of functional benefit and you're trying to deliver a different one maybe in a way that contradicts a category norm and that might be challenging. Or you could be doing something where you're trying to deliver that functional benefit when it should be, it would be better designed to be delivered through a different category, so to speak.

[Mike]

Right.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Like a different mechanism. So it definitely function can definitely be taken too far. Function can definitely be put the wrong function, I think can be put into the wrong category. But I don't think there's per se, a limit on, you know, consumer outcomes, for example. Right. I mean they always want, they always want better. And I don't know, I don't know if we're ever going to be, you know, if we ever can say, okay, we have the best possible food and there's nothing to be done.

[Mike]

Yeah, no, that's, that's a great point. I mean, do you think also there are products where it seems like on paper and certainly in their marketing material materials that there is functional benefit. However, there actually really maybe isn't as much or it's actually a lot lighter than one would anticipate.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, definitely, definitely. I mean there are examples. Not to get into the negative, right. But there are examples of companies that say, hey, we make protein cereal. Then you look at the amount of protein in it and it's like, you know, again, it's like 4 grams of protein in a 60 gram serving size. Like it's not really meaningful. Right. There are other examples where like, you know, and again, I don't know much about this, right. But like fiber based sodas and how is your body benefiting from or processing or digesting the fiber when it comes in soda form Right. Versus when it comes in the form of food. And so are you getting the satiety benefit from fiber in soda that you would get from fiber in an apple as an example? Right. Like a food versus a beverage. Right. So are we actually delivering. And I think there's so much unknown about the gut microbiome and the different types of fiber. There's a lot of way to go there. But there could be examples where, yeah, it's like maybe the fiber soda is delivering you fiber, but it's digested in a different way, which really isn't that meaningful for you. And so we should rethink whether this is something to be drinking. Right?

[Mike]

Yeah. Something that I've been thinking about is on, like, on the nutritional fact section, are there. Like, it seems like there's a lot of call outs in the marketing when it comes to function, and sometimes I get confused and have a hard time understanding if there actually is a functional benefit or not.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Got it, got it, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think like, you know, an example maybe is like Celsius, for example, the energy drink and maybe energy drinks in general. But like, I think Celsius on the front bottom of the can has like three consumer benefits that it talks about. If I recall, one of them is like helps boosts. Helps burn fat or helps boost metabolism or something like that. Right. So in that sense, they're trying to take an ingredient. I don't know if they're laddering that up from caffeine or some other ingredient.

[Mike]

Right.

[Krishna Kalianan]

But they're taking some ingredient and then trying to translate it to, okay, how does that help Mike or help Krishna throughout their, their daily journey? Right. And I think that's a, That's a valuable thing to do.

[Mike]

Totally. On Catalina, you decided to do a rebrand, I believe, last year. Why. Why did you decide to do changing your packaging and change? I'd imagine that was a pretty, pretty long process.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah. So when I, you know, when I started the company a go, because we've done several. So when I started the company, low sugar and low carb were very important as a, you know, as a type 1 diabetic. And so I was very focused in, on that messaging. I started to sell the cereal though. Right. And I realized, oh, there's a lot of people that are eating our cereal because it's high in protein and because it's high in fiber. And then there were a lot of people that were getting on keto and they were eating our products because they were keto friendly. And actually the Buyer at Whole Foods is like, strongly encouraged me to add Keto Friendly to the packaging in big letters as a way of appealing to that kind of growing trend. Right. So the way I would look at it is consumers can change how they talk about something even though they're really talking about the same thing. And as a brand, you want to be evolving your messaging to keep up with how consumers are talking about it. So, so the most recent kind of rebrand we did, we went back to focusing on protein, fiber and low sugar is kind of like the three core, you know, kind of functional attributes of the product and putting those front and center across the middle of our packaging. And then people really, you know, the taste is really important. And so then we made a really big bowl of cereal, looks delicious with a splash of milk, but that sort of thing to illustrate the taste. Right. And that took us away from the previous packaging, which had Keto Friendly on the front, you know, as big. It was plastered on there. And the reason we did that was again, you know, it all goes back to consumers. It all goes back to talking to consumers, understanding how consumers are thinking, and then acting based on that. In this case, we had a number of consumers that were, that I was talking to that were saying, hey, I love your cereal. When I'm on keto, I eat it. And I'm like, well, why, you know, what do you mean when you're on keto, eat it. Like you don't eat it otherwise. And I started to realize that they were thinking of it as something that they would eat while on keto. And that was kind of boxing us out of just being something that was a good fit for them to eat as a snack or as a breakfast. Right? And we didn't want to be pigeonholed into that way of thinking. And so that's why we made the packaging change.

[Mike]

Do you, do you find that riding a trend, even balancing that when it comes to, you know, Keto Friendly, for example, and talking about a trend versus not, which is right now in the current packaging form, it's not talking about a trend, it's call outs in terms of just what you are. And. But do you find that early on when you're starting a business, it's actually really helpful to kind of capitalize on a trend that's happening and then later, later not kind of leave that out because. Because you kind of have reached scale or, or a broader audience.

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[Krishna Kalianan]

well, yeah, definitely, I definitely think that when you're small it's, it's likely better to go deep and narrow with who you're going after and make a great product for a specific group of people because you have very limited resources and you can, if you focus really tightly on who you're going after, you can make a dramatic improvement for that small group of people right afterwards. Then business gets bigger. You start to build out teams that are at least have people that do marketing and sales and operations and finance and supply chain, etc. Then you can start to broaden your, your messaging and you can go after additional groups of consumers. Right. Rather than just the one initial group. I think that you should always just talk in the terms that your target consumer is speaking in so because that's the most effective way of communicating towards them. And so to your point, there could be a trend like Keto Friendly that's going on that's a great fit or there could not be.

[Narrator/Host]

Right.

[Krishna Kalianan]

I mean like I don't, I don't know that there's, I think that these things like Keto Friendly can grow in popularity so quickly that they can be a great way for you to build the awareness of your brand. Right. And so I think it's good to recognize and kind of take advantage of that. But it has to be aligned with what you are at its core. Right. Like you can't in my opinion would not be, it would be ill advised. You know me as a type 1 diabetic, it makes sense to go from low sugar, low carb to Keto Friendly to now protein, fiber and low sugar. Like it's just, it's all the Same thing, right. It's just talked about differently. I don't think we'd be well advised to like now go next to gut health, if gut health became popular. Right. Or, you know, start talking about the, you know, something totally in a. Or, you know, or talk about how our cereal helps you sleep or something like that. Right? Like that's in a totally different direction.

[Mike]

Yeah, no, for sure. I'm always curious about how companies, when you do have a trend that actually is very much aligned in terms of your product, how to think about the relationship between that trend and the company in terms of how to think about, you know, your own positioning for it. Because of course, you know, trends come and go. Keto. Keto obviously was, you know, huge 10 years ago. Even though I feel like in, as we talk about protein, how about fiber? It's very keto centric, very much alignment there. But I just always kind of find it fascinating how to even think about a trend versus economy. Not getting too wrapped up in the trend or, or, or, or pulling back. So, so I, I appreciate that. Krishna, final question.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, I was gonna say, I was gonna say one thing there, actually, real quick, Mike. I think that for me it's about, you know, it's like, it's like trend versus fad, right? Is two sides of a coin there. And to me, a fad is something that's growing and its growth is being driven by its own growth. In other words, it's becoming popular. People are noticing it's popular, so they want to try it too, but there's no underlying bear there. There's no credible reason to be adopting it or doing it. It's just, it's popular and it's becoming more popular because it's popular. That goes up and then it comes back down when, when the popular people move on to something else and then you're no longer chasing that thing, but you're chasing something else. Right. A trend is something that has a durable cause and effect based reason for being in existence. Right. And so like, you know, I give a good example of my opinion, like gluten free to folks that have celiac's disease or a gluten intolerance. Gluten free is, is the great reason for gluten free products to exist. And they. It's a trend for people that do not have gluten intolerance or celiacs and misattribute other symptoms to gluten. That is putting yourself on shaky footing. Right. And so I think Gluten Free, maybe 15 years ago grew tremendously in popularity on the backs of this kind of mainstream interest in gluten almost as a fad. Now it's kind of come back down and is growing slowly on the basis of the real, really, I think mostly celiac disease and some people that have a gluten intolerance. So if I were sitting in someone's shoes trying to figure that out, I would be asking what's like the cause and effect that's driving this? Is it really, quote, better for a certain group of people or new for a certain group of people? And if so, it's really worth leaning into if, if, if you can't credibly say that that's happening, I think it's worth, it's probably worth avoiding.

[Mike]

So what's keto? Is keto. Do you think that keto was a fat or a trend?

[Krishna Kalianan]

I think that, I think with keto I think it has both components again. Right. I think that the underlying fact pattern is that if you eat in that, in, you know, in adherence with a keto friendly way of eating, I think you can reset or eliminate your type 2 diabetes if you have it. I think you can lose a lot of weight if you're in shape. I think it'll help you stay in shape. So I think there are a lot of good reasons to eat that way. It's also very difficult to eat that way. And so I think there's a portion of the population that is able to sustain eating that way and then I think there's another portion that's not right. So I think it similarly has both a trend element and a fad element in one. But again, I think that it's a great way of eating and so I don't feel like there's anything wrong again in going after it.

[Mike]

That's fair. That's fair. Final question for you. What's one book that's inspired you personally and one book that's inspired you professionally?

[Krishna Kalianan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. That is a hard question. I, as I was giving this some thought, I, I read a lot of books. I don't read any books purely for personal reasons, unfortunately. So I'm going to merge it into one. I really like the book Man's Search for Meaning. It was written by an Auschwitz survivor. Highly recommend it to anyone who has not read. Talks about meaning and purpose as kind of like a fundamental drive in human behavior. And for me it has two things going for it. One is like the story of surviving Auschwitz, which was fascinating and just frankly incredible. But two, it was and it just gets back to purpose. Right? Which is if you're operating a business to make money, it's really hard to succeed. You have to have, in my opinion, an underlying purpose in way that you're making the world better, that you strongly believe in that. I think that it's really important that you truly believe what you're doing is doing that and then that you're sharing that with your employees, your investors, your retail partners, your ingredient vendors, everyone else. So I took an enormous way amount away from that book and recommend it to to anyone that has the chance to read it.

[Mike]

I thank you so much for, for, for sharing this book. We've had a couple others. I know Rishi Garb also also also shared this book as well. Shout out to Rishi. I think he came back on. I think he came on the show in like 2021. Yeah, I totally agree with you. And that's also I appreciate what you said as well in terms of starting a business and the reasons why to start a business as well. If it's just for the purposes of making money, it's probably gonna be pretty hard to be successful. Not that there aren't people that are successful if that's a sole purpose, but if there's meaning behind it, trying to make the world a better place, seeing an opportunity that that isn't there, then then you have a chance. Krishna, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

[Krishna Kalianan]

Thank you, Mike. It's been great talking with you.

[Mike]

So great talking with you. I'm going to stop right there.