← Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Ilan Sobel - CO BioHarvest Sciences | The Supplement That Reverses Aging Through Blood Flow
01:33:49
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- [00:00]
Scott Clary
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- [02:00]
Elon Sobel
Phytomedicinal compounds in plants are found in such small levels that literally it's just not economically viable. You have to grow so many plants and extraction and by the time you have your final compounds in scale, it's just ridiculously expensive.
- [02:14]
Scott Clary
From driving a Pepsi truck to leading a biotech revolution. Elon Sobel is the CEO of Bioharvest.
- [02:19]
Elon Sobel
Sciences, the company behind Botanical Synthesis, a.
- [02:21]
Scott Clary
Patented tech that grows plant based compounds.
- [02:24]
Elon Sobel
Without growing the plant. I'm a very spiritual person. I like to say I have a gift from God because we as a company invested $100 million in a technology platform called Botanical Synthesis. Increasing blood flow affects every single system within the total body system. When you have more blood flow and you have more oxygen. You have more physical energy. Today, who doesn't need more physical energy? That's why we like to say better blood flow means better life.
- [02:50]
Scott Clary
Under his leadership, Bioharvest launched Vinia, generating $50 million plus in DTC revenue with 50,000 plus active subscribers. Previously, Elon spent 18 years in global leadership at Coca Cola and later helped scale Weissberger, acquired by Abianbev. This episode unpacks how Elon blends big brand experience with biotech innovation to shape the future of health and sustainability.
- [03:11]
Elon Sobel
The supplement industry is a huge industry. Average American household spends hundreds of dollars every single month on supplements. We were focused on driving differentiation on our product by education. Three questions you need to be asking of the supplement company that you're utilizing every single day.
- [03:38]
Scott Clary
How would you describe what you do for a living?
- [03:42]
Elon Sobel
Whoa. I think, firstly, I think I have the best job in the world, but I also think I have the world on my shoulders and I'll explain more about that in, in a, in a few minutes. How would I describe my job? I would call it, I'm a representative of the plant kingdom and representing 500,000 plants that are out there. And every one of those plants has unique phytomedicinal compounds or phytonutrients that are so, so critical for our overall functioning from a health and wellness perspective. And in many respects, mankind, human beings have walked away from the plant kingdom and they've walked away because ultimately, if you think about it, big pharma, they started with the plant kingdom and then they walked away because there were three major challenges. The first challenge is when you're dealing with phytonutrients or phyton, medicinal compounds from plants, they are found in such inconsistent means because they operate, plants grow in an ecosystem and it's impossible to be able to have consistency. Secondly, the most important phytomedicinal compounds in plants are found in such small levels that literally it's just not economically viable. You have to grow so many plants and extraction, and by the time you have your final compounds in scale, it's just ridiculously expensive. And thirdly, there's no patents. You can't patent nature. So if you look at the last 70 years, Scott, let's say industry in many respects, from a overall health and wellness perspective, they've walked away from this amazing plant kingdom. And at the same time, we as human beings, we've been harming the environment that this kingdom grows in. And we're seeing massive extinction of plants that literally have treasure that ultimately are waiting for human beings to unlock the secrets that exist within the plant kingdom as it relates to our overall health and wellness. So I see myself here in front of you as a representative, as the chief executive officer of the plant kingdom, ultimately, who has in his hands. I like to say I'm a very spiritual person. I like to say I have a gift from God. Because we as a company, Bio Harvest Sciences, we worked for 17 years and invested $100 million in a technology platform called botanical synthesis that is able to unlock those secrets that exist within the plant kingdom by leveraging the power of our botanical synthesis platform technology. And we're able to bring to the world those critical phytonutrients, phyton medicinal compounds, consistently with predictability, with economic viability. So we can democratize the power of those compounds to tens of millions, hopefully hundreds of millions of people. And yes, we're also able to do it with patents. So as we go down this path and make this significant investment, it's all about democratizing and having the IP there to make it worthwhile, obviously the significant effort. So ultimately, I call myself a CEO of the plant kingdom, but I'm actually, I'll invent a new title called the Chief Human Utility Officer. Human Utility Value Officer.
- [07:32]
Scott Clary
What does that mean?
- [07:33]
Elon Sobel
What is. Great question. So what does human utility value mean? Human utility value I define as the ability to drive transformational positive changes in people's human beings overall health and wellness. And as a company, Bio Harvest Sciences is maniacally focused first on. On driving human utility value. And when you drive human utility value first, shareholder value follows very, very quickly after that.
- [08:07]
Scott Clary
I think that's first of all very wise. If you do want to, if you do want to, you know, be successful, the more people you help, that's an easy path to becoming successful. That's, that's the answer. That's the unlock. People always try and like hack success or hack entrepreneurship, just help more people. And when you help enough people, the company, it does very well. You know, you mentioned something that's actually very interesting, how traditional health and wellness has sort of moved away from plants. And I think that people understand that plants have benefit. I mean, if you even look at traditional Chinese medicine, which is a very popular sort of segue that people take into plant medicine. But to your point, there's not enough money in it, there's no patents in it traditionally, and that means that pharma moves away from it. But I don't think that people really, really believe that pharma has all their best interests in mind all the time. And I think it's sad that people moved away from plants, but they, they don't know what's good because with lack of regulatory clarity, they don't know what's good, what's bad, what's helpful, what's harmful, what's, what's legit, what's. It's very hard for people to navigate if somebody has only ever sort of subscribed to the western medical ideology of pharma. And in my opinion, not even health care, but like sick care. Very. You know, you get sick and then they try and cure you with pills and drugs and listen, there's a lot of benefit to Western medicine as well, but I think that if you're going to tell somebody something about why it's important to look elsewhere, what they should look for, what they should stay away from when they navigate solutions that their GP is not going to talk to them about in the doctor's office. That's the first idea that I want to dive into because that idea alone enough people are exploring it right now, but I think they're exploring the idea of seeking alternative healthcare without true guidance.
- [10:08]
Elon Sobel
Look, the whole world of what I like to call integrative medicine is a world that's growing significantly, they say, in the US today, roughly 30 million people actually seek the counsel of integrated medicine specialists. And often what you find the best integrative medicine specialists are those people that are hardcore clinically trained, have amazing experience within the medical system, and then, similar to how you described it, they start to look for alternative solutions because the current solutions that exist to deal with, you know, specific indications out there or just preventative on the preventative side, are not optimal and ideal. And these people understand that there exist significant solutions out there in the plant kingdom. The challenge, as I mentioned earlier, is that prior to our technology coming to the global stage, you were not able to produce these phytonutrients or phytomedicinal compounds consistently. And consistency is king. Secondly, the economic viability is critical and because our technology is able to magnify the levels of the critical phytonutrients and we'll talk more about that, I'm sure, when I explain the technology itself and.
- [11:27]
Scott Clary
Also explain what a phytonutrient is, just because I think that just the definitions matter so people can understand.
- [11:32]
Elon Sobel
So ultimately, you know, plants, and it normally happens when a plant basically is in a stressful situation, the plant actually to protect itself, it produces either polyphenols or antioxidants and these polyphenols or antioxidants or saponins, these are critical for our overall health and wellness, for multiple different aspects of holistic health. So for these phytonutrients, it's critical that for you to be able to scale it in any meaningful way. And similarly, to be able to bring science together with nature, to go into clinical trials and to be able to replicate the outcomes, you got to be able to produce with unique consistency, you got to have predictability and you got to ultimately be able to do it in an economically viable way, to be able to commercialize something to the marketplace where ultimately consumers can afford this Quint.
- [12:29]
Scott Clary
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- [16:12]
Elon Sobel
It's a platform technology, so it's congruent for pretty much most of the plants in the plant kingdom where we take the plant once, just once, and our PhD plant cell biologists, they know exactly where in the plant to take the cells that produce the critical phytonutrients or phytomedicinal compounds. And we take those cells and we grow those cells in petri dishes. And like a science experiments, we do thousands of science experiments where we change the food that we feed the cells, we change the lighting, we change the temperature, and a number of other variables that, let's just say we'll keep them in the black box. And at this stage, we get these cells from the plant to do two things. One, we get the cells to actually produce the exact same actual mirror of the phytonutrients that the plant produces. We call this mirroring.
- [17:17]
Scott Clary
So what you've done is you've literally recreated the conditions in a controlled environment.
- [17:22]
Elon Sobel
In a controlled environment to get those cells to produce exactly what they were producing in the plant. But I don't grow the plant, I just grow the cells. And then, so we call this mirroring. And then what we figured out is how we could, how we can optimize. And today we use a lot of AI in this, how we can optimize those conditions so that we focus on one hero molecule that we want to magnify by an order of magnitude and we call this magnification. So, for example, in our vineyard, red grape cell superfood, blood circulation superfood, we focused on mirroring the phytonutrients. So we have catagen, quercetin, anthycinins and tannins. Our cells produce all the same phytonutrients as the plant. But then we realized that the hero was a compound called a molecule, I should say called Pisces resveratrol. Now, it's important that the audience, I'm sure many of your audience have heard of resveratrol, but unlike human beings, resveratrol is not created equal. Paisi resveratrol is the gold standard. It's like the Rolls Royce of resveratrol because it's 25 times more water soluble and it lasts in the body much longer than regular resveratrol. Our, our studies show that our P resveratrol lasts in the body for at least 12 hours with a peak after one hour and a peak after five hours, and then is out the B. And compared to regular resveratrol, that's out the body in three to four hours. So what we figured out that this hero molecule called P resveratrol was so critical that we focused on magnifying it 100 times at this level. And then we lock the cell bank so we never have to go back to the plant and we create this cell bank that we haven't, you know, we did this back in 2014. We haven't gone, literally, we've never had to go back to the plant. And today we just utilize our cell bank. So that's the mirroring and the magnifying. But then we had to climb Mount Everest and back to figure out how do you take a cell from a petri dish and grow that cell in an industrial scale bioreactor with thousands of liters in liquid media. So you're taking it from solid media in a petri dish to liquid media in large scale industrial bioreactors. With sheer forces. Now, plant cells are like human cells. They have memories. And we figured out over time how to almost condition strengthen these cells so that we could take them from a petri dish and put them into these large scale bioreactors where in an 18 to 21 day they multiply and they grow. And because we're controlling the environment, that elicit those critical phytonutrients or phytomedicinal compounds and we then harvest the cells. So we drain all the water out of the bioreactors and we're left with a final end product which is highly soluble, highly efficacious and bioavailable. And we dry that product, simply dry that product. So there's no insecticides, there's no fungicides, there's no herbicides. It's a aseptic environment in these bioreactors and we simply dry the material. And that's what today you have, for example, in our, that's what we have circulation superfood. You have in each capsule the same amount of pisaed resveratrol as a thousand red grapes or one bottle of red wine with no sugar, no calories and of course no alcohol. And that's because going back to the technology where we mirror, magnify and multiply the cells in this process, bringing this consistency, going back to the beginning of this discussion, this unique consistency, and it's economically viable because today we sell this product in the market at roughly a dollar a day for a capsule. All these benefits that you get for a dollar a day and obviously anchored in our clinical trials, where today we are the king of blood flow. Because this product from our clinical trials, after consuming one capsule of our vineyard every day for 90 days, we're able to significantly increase the dilation of your arteries and more dilation of arteries means blood flow. And I think today people are discovering that blood flow is such a critical part of the body's operating mechanism, to say the least.
- [22:20]
Scott Clary
But this answers my question as to why you chose to focus on the. Because this technology could be replicated for a variety.
- [22:28]
Elon Sobel
So Scott, it's important to understand that with our botanical synthesis process, the platform itself and the compounds that we produce from the platform technology, they are all non gmo. So we do not in any way change the actual molecular composition of the compound. So in the case of vineyard, the molecular composition of the compound is exactly the same as what it is in the plant. All we're doing is optimizing the conditions, the outside conditions for that cell to be able to elicit the critical phytonutrients at the magnified levels. So it's changing the food we feed the cells, the lighting, the temperature, and a number of other critical variables that we don't like to talk about because they're in our black IP box. But ultimately the technology is non gmo, and that's really, really important because the world today is demanding non GMO compounds from plants.
- [23:49]
Scott Clary
The other competitors that you have, do they. Are they gmo? Is that like a pot?
- [23:53]
Elon Sobel
So when you think about it, you have something called. You have chemical synthesis. Yeah, right. That's chemically synthesizing. Then you have what they call biological synthesis. Biological synthesis is when they use yeast and mold, so they use like host plants like yeast and mold to be able to grow different compounds. And those different compounds basically are always one molecule. Okay, so you can't synthesize with chemical synthesis and biological synthesis. We could talk about this, actually. It's kind of interesting. Are you filming still?
- [24:30]
Scott Clary
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:30]
Elon Sobel
Okay. So what's interesting is with our technology of botanical synthesis, is that where, because of our ability to mirror and magnify the critical phytomedicinal compounds in the production of the cells versus the plants. So we're literally mirroring the same production of the phytonutrients in our cells that are in the plants. And then we magnify the levels. And what's important is that we're leveraging the power of the plant in the way that really God made the plants. Because inside plants, it's always not just one molecule, it's multiple molecules working together in. In synergy. So in the case of our vineyard red grape cell circulation superfood, you have catagens, you have anthocyanins, quercetin and tannin. These are all really important antioxidants. Working together with our hero polyphenol pisaed resveratrol. It's almost like an orchestra that works together to give you that critical synergistic effect.
- [25:49]
Scott Clary
And.
- [25:49]
Elon Sobel
And it's that synergistic effect that our cells are able to produce, because the cells are producing the same mirror of phytonutrients as the plant. We're just magnifying our hero poly hero polyphenol. In the case of PI seed resveratrol, so you're able to get the power of the synergistic effect. This is very unique with our technology because if you take other technologies out there, if you look at what pharmaceutical companies do with chemical synthesis, they're always synthesizing one Molecule. It's. They choose one molecule from a plant that they decide to synthesize in a laboratory. They can do it very cost effectively, very consistently and with patterns. And then you have also biological synthesis where basically companies use yeast or mold as hosts in order to grow a molecule. But it's always a single molecule. It's not the power of multiple molecules coming together to really create a compound.
- [26:50]
Scott Clary
And the reason why they would do that is just a cost.
- [26:53]
Elon Sobel
It's. It's more the nature of the technology. It's just technology is not able.
- [26:58]
Scott Clary
So they miss out on a massive amount of benefit.
- [26:59]
Elon Sobel
You miss out on the synergistic effect.
- [27:02]
Scott Clary
Yes.
- [27:02]
Elon Sobel
Right. And I think very much today, scientists are understanding the impact of the synergistic effect of all the, the molecules, all the, in the case of the plant, all the phytonutrients working together. In some cases they call it the entourage effect. Right. Or the synergistic effect. And people are really understanding that it's the way that these polyphenols all work together in harmony, which is ultimately providing the best overall outcomes and efficacy inside our human bodies. You can't just strip out one, because when you strip out one, it doesn't work as well when it doesn't have the synergistic effects of the others.
- [27:45]
Scott Clary
It's funny how we always try and recreate nature and play God and sometimes.
- [27:52]
Elon Sobel
We just have to realize that, that basically the way nature is, is the best possible way. And then it's our responsibility to use science to basically leverage the power of nature and be able to really democratize it in a way that, you know, we can industrialize it in the way that the world can utilize it in, in a way that's economical and in a way that also doesn't affect the, ultimately the, the natural ecosystems out there.
- [28:25]
Scott Clary
One thing that's always bugged me about the health and wellness space is how unregulated a lot of it is. And people put out pills and supplements and whatnot. And I used to be very into sports and I used to be into bodybuilding. And I know that Canada, U.S. i don't think there's much of a difference. The majority of supplements, they can just kind of like say whatever they want on, on the label and then they don't. But so you actually went through, so clinical trials.
- [28:50]
Elon Sobel
It's important to clarify the, the, in the case of the US The FDA is very clear guidelines and the FTC is very, very clear guidelines as well. From an FDA perspective, every time a company A supplement company makes what they call structure function claims. It has to be done according to FDA guidelines. Those claims have to be lodged with the fda and then ultimately the onus is on the company to make sure that they have the clinical evidence right. To be able to back up those claims. And that also would be how the FTC would look at this kind of situation. So I don't want to comment on other companies.
- [29:27]
Scott Clary
No, but the reason why I'm saying that is because so many companies I don't think do clinical research and you don't, you don't have to comment on other companies. This is just an observation that I've made. I've sat down with other supplement founders before and I don't think I've ever heard of somebody putting up the cash, which is very expensive. I know this because there was a point in my life when I actually tried to build a supplement company and then it did not work out and we killed that idea. But it's very expensive. If you are, listen, if you are going to be talking to the fda, you're going to be talking. Well, I don't know if you talk to the ftc, but I'm pretty sure they make sure you stay compliant. But the fda, sometimes you do have to talk to them and you put these claims and you put these trials together. And if they know that you're putting a trial together, like, I don't think people understand the monumentous task of putting a trial together and making sure that it runs properly and all the guidelines you have to adhere to. It's a lot. It's. It's a lot.
- [30:21]
Elon Sobel
It's a very important investment and very, very critical when you're bringing science to consumers. And I think what we, when we entered into the US in May 2021, people said to me, you know, how are you going to differentiate your PI seed resveratrol? Because every other company out there, they're utilizing resveratrol from Polyginum. We call that, we call that naked resveratrol. So as I explained earlier, PI seed is the gold standard because it has 25 times more solubility and much better bioavailability. It lasts. Our PI seed, based on our clinical trial, demonstrated ability to stay in the body for 12 hours with a peak after one hour, peak after five hours, regular resveratrol, trans resveratrol in and out the body three to four hours. What's important to understand is that when it comes to the Pisces resveratrol, it's so Unique because it has an extra molecule attached to it called a glycoside. And that glycoside that's attached to the resveratrol molecule basically gives it the better solubility and bioavailability. And this comes back to your initial point earlier around the supplement industry is a huge industry. And Americans spend. Average American household spends hundreds of dollars every single month on supplements. And when we came into the marketplace in the US we were focused on driving differentiation on our product by education because we felt that as a company we had to change the narrative and not talk about how much you have of one ingredient versus another ingredient. No, it's about changing the narrative and educating consumers. And there's education around three areas. And I always say to people out there that are on multiple different supplements, you need to make sure you're focusing on three things and three questions you need to be asking of the supplement company that you're utilizing every single day. One is, is it soluble? Okay. Solubility is critical. You have to make sure that the supplement that you're taking is going to be solubilized in your intestinal tract. Our internal trials demonstrate that literally 82% of our PI seed resveratrol is solubilized in the intestinal tract. 2 is bioavailability. Bioavailability is how it gets into your bloodstream, your blood plasma, and how it works from, in the case of our vineyard red grape cell superfood. We know it takes 20 minutes, and we validated 20 minutes to go from the intestinal tract through the membrane into the blood plasma. And as I said there, we last for 12 hours with two peaks. And these peaks are really important because this is how we're able to get that consistent energy for consumers. You have two peaks of the resveratrol after one hour and after five hours. So second question is make sure that the product is bioavailable. So one is solubility. Two is bioavailability. And then the third question is, do you understand efficacy? Are there, is there clinical trials, is there scientific research about the ingredients, about the product? And obviously, as a company, we invested, you know, millions of dollars in our clinical. We have, we have multiple scientific studies, we have in vitro, we have in vivo, and then we have actual clinical studies, all published in peer reviewed scientific journals or presented at national symposiums like the American Diabetes association symposiums. And it's critical that consumers out there go through those three checkpoints. Solubility, bioavailability and efficacy. And there are companies out there that you know, basically fit and you can tick the box. But there are also a lot of companies out there that don't. And that's really, for us, we felt that as a company that's a science based company, that it was important for us to change the narrative and to educate consumers. And obviously we educate consumers by talking about our product and demonstrating the solubility, bioavailability and efficacy of our product.
- [34:33]
Scott Clary
I think it's very smart and, and I think that's the way that you have to take a product to market that science based, that's the people are so focused on their health and longevity and living longer and living not just longer, but living longer with more energy, which we're going to talk about why, why blood flow is so important for any of that. But when people are so interested in living longer and living with more energy, people take advantage of that sometimes. And that's what I really want to highlight, how much I respect how much effort and energy you put into the studies. I know this is because I've been in this industry before and I think people have to understand that that is not always the norm. Not every company spends millions of dollars doing their own studies and just sort of like, hats off to you for doing that. I want to talk about the actual health benefits. So you've mentioned blood flow, arterial dilation. So your clinical trials that you've run, they show a 70 increase in arterial dilation after 90 days.
- [35:34]
Elon Sobel
So versus baseline, baseline versus baseline versus placebo group.
- [35:38]
Scott Clary
So explain if somebody does not understand the benefits of blood flow, what does that actually mean? So I think.
- [35:47]
Elon Sobel
So let's, yeah, let's, let's dimensionalize it because it's a big statement to be able to say that, you know, blood flow is such a critical part of your body's operating mechanism. And, and it all stems from the fact that, you know, we all go through an aging process and as we age our levels, the body's levels of flow mediated dilation, dilation of arteries gets reduced over time. Between the age of starts pretty much at the age of 30 and all the way through to, you know, 70, 80 years old, there's a decline in the, in the FMD. So basically with, with our product vineyard, increasing flow mediated dilation of arteries, we're increasing blood flow. Now increasing blood flow affects every single system within the total body system. And you can break it down in a few different ways. So let's first talk on a basic level. More blood flow means more oxygen and more nutrients flowing to the body. The tissue the cells and the organs. And when you have more blood flow and you have more oxygen, you have more physical energy. And Scott, today, who doesn't need more physical energy?
- [36:59]
Scott Clary
Today's episode is brought to you by Vanta. Now listen up. This matters for your business. In today's digital landscape, security isn't optional, it's essential. Without it, deal stall sales cycles stretch on and scaling becomes very difficult now. Why? Because investors, customers and partners all expect businesses to demonstrate strong security practices before they commit. If you can't prove trust, you lose opportunities. So whether you're a startup founder trying to land that first big client or an established company scaling your security program, Vanta helps businesses of all sizes prove that they're trustworthy by Automating compliance across 35 frameworks like SOC to ISO 27001 and HIPAA, the exact certifications your prospects are demanding. Here's why you need to pay attention. Vantv gives you back precious time that you're currently wasting on compliance. Their platform automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance work. It helps you respond to those endless security questionnaires up to five times faster. And it connects you with experts to get your security program running immediately. The results speak for themselves. A recent IDC report found that Vanta customers achieve over 535,000 thousand dollars per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just three months. So you're going to join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Quora and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. And don't miss this for a limited time, only my listeners can get a thousand dollars off Vanta. That's real money back in your pocket. Visit vanta.comscott right now before this offer expires. That is. V a n t a.com Scott Prolon is a success story partner. Now long weeks and busy weekends can leave everybody feeling depressed and tired. We work non stop and that's why I love Prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet. I absolutely love this company. Let me explain how it works. Basically, they have a fasting mimicking diet that rejuvenates you from the inside out. They deliver plant based soups, snacks and drinks to keep your body in a fasting state while giving you the nutrition you need. And when your body's in fasting state, this triggers cellular renewal and it actually works. This is why I've loved intermittent fasting for so many years. This is the magic of Prolon. And the exciting news is they just launched Their next gen five day program. It has all the benefits they had before. But now they have 100% organic ingredients in all their foods. Better taste and ready to eat meals. They make the whole process easier. I tried the original Prolon program. I feel incredible whenever I do it. I personally can't wait to try this new and improved version. And if you've never tried them before, you're in for a treat because the old one was great. I can't even imagine how good this new Prolon five day program is going to be. And for a limited time, Prolon is offering success story listeners, you guys, 15% off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five day programs. Just go to prolonlife.comclary to get your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Prolonlife.comclary well, I, I would assume that like the average person with a bad diet who isn't focused on their health, even if they're trying to go to the gym, it's like they just, I don't think people are very healthy today. I feel like their health isn't optimized. Right. So I think that blood flow is like one of the most important things they could focus on. But I like when, when, when somebody goes through their day, I think most people just take their low energy levels for granted. They just think this is, this is how life is.
- [40:37]
Elon Sobel
And, and obviously there are multiple ways to improve your, your physical energy. You know, when you think about it, just exercise. When you're exercising, you're utilizing, there's more blood flow. When there's more blood flow, there's more oxygen. So this is how it all comes together. And ultimately the, that increase in blood flow, it's not just the physical energy, but more blood flow to the brain. Think about this. The brain represents 2% of our physical body mass, but it utilizes 15% of the body's blood flow. There are literally 400 miles of capillaries inside that. Literally inside your brain There are 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries inside the human body. And we want those arteries, veins and capillaries to be operating like a four lane highway, not like a little slip road. So going back to the brain, when you have 400 miles of these capillaries, you want to make sure that you've got more blood flow. Because more blood flow to the brain means more oxygen. More oxygen to the brain allows us to be able to have that better mental alertness specifically because when you have more blood flowing, you're also able to remove the cellular toxins. Because, you know, the cells in our brain that produce oxygen, they also, they're like factories. They also are producing toxins. And you want to get those toxins out of the actual brain. So what Vinnie is able to do is we're able to actually get below the blood brain barrier. What is the blood brain barrier? When, when human beings were created, whether you believe in God's creation or other. Other thought processes, there. There's a barrier that protects our brain. It's amazing. And so our Pisces resveratrol is able to get below that blood brain barrier and is able to improve the blood flow. And as a result of that increased blood flow, you have more oxygen, you have the removal of cellular toxins. More mental alertness. Goodbye brain fog. Okay? Brain fog affects literally one in three Americans waking up in the morning, and they're just not as sharp as they were, you know, 12 hours before. And it takes three, four hours when. You know, I love the fact when people talk about being on vineyard, that vineyard effect, when you wake up in the morning because you've got that increased blood flow. You're on, you're on. You have that mental alertness.
- [43:12]
Scott Clary
What would be some of the other benefits of this increased blood flow? So I think that people, when people think sort of go down this longevity rabbit hole, they think, okay, I want to have more energy. I want to be. I want to increase my. My mental alertness, my mental awareness. I want to also make sure that in the long term, my heart health is optimized and my brain health is optimized. Because really, what. How do people, how do people pass? Right? It's, it's, it's heart. It could be stroke or it could be Alzheimer's.
- [43:46]
Elon Sobel
Yeah. I wanna, I wanna focus really on the aging process and how you optimize the aging process.
- [43:51]
Scott Clary
Yes, exactly.
- [43:52]
Elon Sobel
And so, so basically, the more blood flow you have, the more physical energy, as we talked about, the more mental alertness. This is the new Maslow's hierarchy today. Okay? We have shelter, we have food, we have most cases, relationships and other things. The new Maslow's hierarchy is physical energy and mental alertness, which is so critical. That's why we like to say better blood flow means better life, because you're able to get more out of your life with more physical energy, more mental alertness. In addition, when you have more blood flow, we've been able to demonstrate that Vinya is able to support blood pressure within normal ranges. Okay. And obviously this is critical as people get older to maintain their blood pressure within normal ranges. Also what we've been able to demonstrate is to be able to help reduce the oxidation of LDL cholesterol and reduce oxidative damage to your cells. As you get older, your cells have oxidative damage, and as a result of increased blood flow and the benefits of this, you're able to reduce that level of oxidative damage. These are all aspects of making sure that your. You're. Obviously, we can't change time, right? But we can change the quality of time, right? And that's what we're trying to do by providing people out there with better blood flow with our unique vineyard red grape cell superfood molecule.
- [45:17]
Scott Clary
Obviously, tons of benefits to tevinia. And when you start to take this, you start to notice these benefits. But what is actually going on in your body? Because I think everybody has heard about drinking red wine before, but I mean, it's not very practical for people to be drinking a bottle of red wine every single day. This is a great alternative. But when somebody takes this pill, what's actually happening?
- [45:42]
Elon Sobel
Without going too deep into a biology class yet, those 60,000 miles of arteries, capillaries and veins are all aligned with what we call endothelial cells. And what lands up happening is when the Pisces resveratrol and the other polyphenols get solubilized into the blood plasma and they start to go towards those critical endothelial cells, the endothelial cells basically take on board those critical phytonutrients and they start to produce more nitric oxide and less endothelial one. Now, why is this important? As you get older, your body produces less nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator. And I'm sure many of your audience are aware of this. At the same time, your body produces more of ET1. ET1 is vasoconstrictor. So what we call the mechanism of action on how vinia works, and we validated this in in vitro research, is that the endothelial cells start to produce more of the good stuff, which is nitric oxide, that gets reduced literally over time, our body produces less of and we reduce the production of the bad stuff, which is ET1. And as a result of increasing the good stuff, the nitric oxide, and reducing the ET1, the bad stuff, you get this increase in dilation of arteries.
- [47:25]
Scott Clary
When somebody starts to take Vinia, you say 90 days is kind of the benchmark that you say this is when you start.
- [47:33]
Elon Sobel
Our clinical trial is based on 90 days. So we always say that, that, you know, for best results, take the product for 90 days. But for some, sometimes people will feel the effect. And it all depends on basically your, your DNA, it depends on your genetics and multiple factors. So sometimes you find like a normal distribution curve. You, sometimes you'll find that people will often feel the effect in the first four to six weeks. And there are some people that need up to 10 to 12 weeks to feel the effect, which is why we recommend 12 weeks of taking the product for best results.
- [48:09]
Scott Clary
And when you say feel the effect, how does their life change? Like, what, what would you say is the marker of. Ah, now I get it.
- [48:17]
Elon Sobel
So it's a great question. And I would say to the people out there listening, the best way to understand that is to go onto our website, vinea.com you'll see we now have more than 9,000 verified reviews with a verified rating of 4.8 out of 5. And read what people tell you are the changes, the fundamental changes that it has on people's lives. And to be honest, Scott, this is what I live on. This is the customer reviews. I, as CEO, I made it like a mandate that every review comes into my inbox and I read every single customer review that comes in. It's normally 40 to 50 reviews a day. And wow, it's. It's my source of strength in, in, in scaling this business because you, you understand the magnitude of change that we drive in people's lives through better blood flow. So, you know, you have people from, you know, vastly different ages. You have, you know, people who are 40. When we look at our best way to describe, when we look at our consumer segmentation, we have what we call super active consumers. And they're pretty much people like you. All right, I'm gonna guess, you know, 35 to 45.
- [49:37]
Scott Clary
Yes. Right.
- [49:38]
Elon Sobel
Focused on, on building their professional life, also balancing challenges in family life, but also looking to look after themselves from an overall health and wellness perspective. These people, when they take vineyard, they seeing the benefits of more vascularity in their lives. Right? So when they go to the gym, they feel like they can work out a little bit longer and a little bit harder. They feel like they've got more energy during the day and at work, they've got more alertness to deliver what they need to deliver. Then you take, we'll go up and before we come back, we'll go up to super seniors. Right. Basically, the super seniors are people that are at a stage in their life where time is important and they want to maximize every bit of time in their lives. They want to be able to keep up with their grandchildren. Right. Many people today, and it's amazing, I've seen so many reviews where you have people 65, 70, 75, they're still working full time and they need that energy to work full time. So it's amazing when our product is helping to give them that physical energy to literally continue to be in full time employment. Because financially they need to work full time.
- [50:46]
Scott Clary
So they have the energy, they have the mental alertness.
- [50:48]
Elon Sobel
Right, right. And, and so, you know, basically these benefits from physical energy, mental alertness and it's, it's a game changer as far as the overall quality, quality of life that you lead.
- [51:02]
Scott Clary
One of the things that's the hardest to do as an entrepreneur is change somebody's habits, change somebody's routines. That is why when you're bringing a product to market, sometimes it's easier to be a copycat of something that already exists as opposed to creating something new and novel. So you haven't just created something new and novel, you found ways to bring it into somebody's routine. So I want to understand why you chose to do all these different variants of the product, but also from an entrepreneur's perspective, for somebody listening that would say, okay, so I like the supplement idea. I'm trying to get into health and wellness. Should I do a coffee, Should I do a tea, Should I do a pillow? How do you think through these problems in terms of commercializing the product?
- [51:46]
Elon Sobel
So firstly, I always start by thinking consumer first. And that's probably from 18 years of training being part of the Coca Cola company. And so when you go back to the consumer first and you look at our consumer segmentation, you have super active super seekers, super seniors, right? The super seniors are happy with a capsule, right? This is their normal way of life. Now we've differentiated with our, this segment with the fact that we bring in the Rolls Royce of Resveratrol PI C Resveratrol with all the benefits we've talked about for the last 20 minutes. When you then start to look at other age groups and you understand the, the consumer behavior of those age groups, those super seekers and then the super actors. Super seekers are also people 45 to 55. That's that longevity hardcore focus. These consumers are looking at every category out there and are thinking about I want more health and wellness in everything that I consume. And therefore we decided to go into multi billion dollar categories where there had been minimal disruptive differentiation, where consumers were seeking more than ever to have better for you health and wellness in everything that they consumed and were willing to pay a premium for it. So we started with multi billion dollar categories called functional tea and functional coffee. And so when you think about functional coffee or coffee in general, America runs on coffee, right? And this is also when we found that the consumer behavior was perfect for the proposition that we could bring to consumers to be able to give them amazing utility value. So let's take coffee. People normally drink coffee, it's not just once a day, it's three to four coffees a day. When you understand the behavior of the average American coffee consumer, it's at least three coffees per day.
- [54:00]
Scott Clary
Day.
- [54:02]
Elon Sobel
Well, with Vinia and the fact that you're getting your physical energy from blood flow, we wanted to change that behavior and we found that coffee was a perfect delivery mechanism because you're getting the benefits of your caffeine kick from the coffee. And in our case we're using, you know, top class 100% Arabica coffee beans with a great tasting product that we've done quantitative testing to make sure that all of our products, they are at least parody, if not better to market leaders before it goes out of the bio harvest or the vineyard stable. And so now when you take the equivalent of one capsule of vineyard and you combine it together with this great tasting coffee in a K cup, compatible K cup or compatible Nespresso pod, you're now basically giving an amazing proposition where for the consumer, they, they get their great tasting coffee, they'll get their caffeine kick. And then because of blood flow, once you're on the product for long enough, because of the benefits of blood flow, you're getting that physical energy, that mental alertness, the benefits of blood flow all through the day. So maybe you don't need to take three or four coffees a day, maybe just one vineyard superfood coffee is going to be good enough for you to have that physical energy and mental alertness that you need. So we all, you can see how the two created unique value for the consumer, right? Disruptive innovation, more health and wellness convenience because you have supplement and coffee all together, but in a meaningful way and providing it in a great tasting way. So there's absolutely no taste compromise. Which is why today we've sold nearly $3 million of Coffee Direct to consumer. We're probably the most premium coffee out there in the marketplace. But consumers are willing to pay because of the functionality and we highlight the strategy. We call it superior science, superior efficacy and superior taste. And then we did it again with our decaf. So when you think about decaf, think about it, right? Decaf consumers, why do they drink decaf?
- [56:17]
Scott Clary
They like the taste of coffee.
- [56:18]
Elon Sobel
They like the taste of coffee and they drink decaf because they don't want the jitters and the crash, right, from caffeine. But now, voila, they can enjoy the taste of coffee but get the physical energy, but not from caffeine, but from better blood flow.
- [56:34]
Scott Clary
So there's no more crash, right?
- [56:37]
Elon Sobel
So you're giving them that extra functionality by giving them physical energy, mental alertness through better blood flow and there's no jitters and there's no crash. And in the case of our coffee decaf version, we went one step further and we use Swiss water decaffeinated coffee, which is very important. Many of your listeners may not know, but in, in a number of decaffeinated coffee brands, they use chemicals to actually extract the caffeine. Now with Swiss, the Swiss Water Company, they use a very unique process where there are no chemicals utilized to actually take the caffeine out. It's all done through a unique water process. So we use amazing, great tasting Swiss water coffee together with our vineyard. You're really hitting that sweet spot of the decaf coffee consumer, which is why decaf is a significant part of our sales because we have a winning, unique, better for you proposition which brings superior science, efficacy and taste to the consumer, giving them ultimately a really, really strong value proposition.
- [57:44]
Scott Clary
I'm so curious, why do more supplement companies not leverage existing habits? I like when you say it, it sounds like such a common sense thing, but I would have loved a coffee that has a multivitamin in it.
- [58:00]
Elon Sobel
So you see, you start to see now that the whole area of functional coffees and functional teas are growing significantly. But it's challenging. There's a lot of R D that's required. You've got to make sure that what you're putting in, you're getting out. You know that the stability of the actual, the actual ingredients are there after they've gone through the extraction process. And we spent literally hundreds of hours making sure that everything was in place to be able to guarantee the consumer that ultimately when they've got that final cup of coffee in their hand, they're getting the same amount of Pisces Resveratrol goes back to the same amount of Pisces Resveratrol that's in one capsule of vineyard.
- [58:40]
Scott Clary
It's just, it's a lot of work.
- [58:42]
Elon Sobel
It's.
- [58:42]
Scott Clary
Yeah, it's.
- [58:43]
Elon Sobel
And I would say going back to the theme, you know, we've never taken the easy path as a company. Right. And it goes back to my job description as chief human utility value officer of the plant kingdom. This is, you know, we believe in what we're doing. We're building a movement of change. That movement of change, you know, goes from supplements all the way through to in our CDMO business, us, you know, taking on board other opportunities to really develop life changing compounds from plants which are going to be for the supplement industry, the nutrition industry, the cosmetic industry and of course in the pharmaceutical space. I just want to come back to, you know, we talk coffee, we then move to teas.
- [59:27]
Scott Clary
Yes, right.
- [59:28]
Elon Sobel
And so the teas came along because consumers basically said to us, wow, it's amazing what you've done in coffee. Why don't I have this in tea? And then I, you know, literally, I looked at the numbers. You know, literally 160 million Americans drink tea every single day. It's crazy. And some of that is iced tea, but a lot of hot tea. And specifically for those younger demographics, the coffee and the tea, really important ways for them to be able to have that additional supplementation. So again we went and we back to the consumer. The consumer was looking for organic teas, we have organic teas. The consumer was looking for sustainability. Sustainability is so important in everything that we do and it's at the core of our technology. So we needed to make sure that we were really had best in class sustainability from a sourcing perspective on the tea side. And everything that we have is Rainforest alliance certified. So basically is going through the best sustainability practices and then again making sure that we had that one equivalent of one capsule of vineyard. Together with the teas we have a English breakfast tea, a signature green tea, a matcha green tea, which is a growing segment. And then for those people that don't want any caffeine, we have a cranberry hibiscus tea, which is actually our bestseller after our variety pack, which is a combination of all of them them. So that's the coffees, that's the teas. And I guess the one we we're going to be launching in the market very, very shortly is our 2x formula chew. And this came from those super active consumers where we have a younger consumer base. Many of those people are athletes. Right. And we started to do some work with athletes and we saw that with athletes, you know, one, one capsule Vinea. The obviously the benefit of blood flow was great, but we saw, you know, anecdotally Improved overall their ability to deliver the results that they wanted to deliver. They saw an improvement with two capsules of vineyard.
- [61:34]
Scott Clary
Well, I was actually just going to ask for certain populations, is there a compounding effect or is, or is there diminishing returns if you take.
- [61:41]
Elon Sobel
Well, just because, because you're. So firstly, you know, everybody's different.
- [61:48]
Scott Clary
Yes.
- [61:49]
Elon Sobel
And so, you know, our clinical trial is based on one capsule of vineyard every day for 90 days. Right. But some people, you know, based on their differences, you know, they, they may require up to two capsules a day. That's what we found specifically consumers that are slightly on the younger spectrum. So we develop for those super active, and we're talking specifically more also athletes, a chew product which we call our 2x formula, which has two capsules of vineyard inside every single chew. And this is Informed Sport certified. So it's third party certified by Informed Sport to make sure that we're.
- [62:28]
Scott Clary
You don't mess around.
- [62:29]
Elon Sobel
Yeah, look, we're, we're very serious about, you know, for athletes, giving them a solution. Because anti doping laws are very serious for athletes, whether it's NFL, ncaa, NBA. We need to make sure that if they're taking our product to help improve, increase the nitric oxide and to improve blood flow, that it's not going to get them into any problems. So we are third party certified by Informed Sport. Every single batch has to be tested and certified that it does not contain any ingredients which would violate any of the anti doping regulation. So that's the portfolio that we have in the world of Red Grape Cell. And I'm very excited to share with you that we are going to be launching a second super compound next year anchored in olive cells, which goes back to the power of the Mediterranean diet. And our, our olive cells, we go back to mirror and magnify. And I have some, actually, I brought some cells for you for the podcast. These are some of our olive cells. You can actually open it and smell the olive cells. And so we are now growing this at industrial scale. Yeah.
- [63:39]
Scott Clary
So these are, these are from the petri dish.
- [63:42]
Elon Sobel
This. No. In fact, these are grown in large scale bioreactors. We're now fully, you know, we've, we've scaled it. We're now going through all the appropriate clinical trial program.
- [63:52]
Scott Clary
And then what would be the compound?
- [63:54]
Elon Sobel
So this, what we've done, you go back to mirroring, magnifying. We magnified a molecule called verboscosine and the boscoside is one of the most potent polyphenols from the olives and in each 100 milligram of this material, it's the same amount of a Boscoside as approximately 2 liters of olive oil. Importantly, we're focused on liver health. So we've done our first set of in vitro trials which we actually announced to the market about six weeks ago, where we demonstrated in human liver cells the ability to significantly reduce the fat levels. Now, NAFLD is a very big non alcoholic fatty liver disease. I know is a, is a very big challenge for, you know, today more than 100 million Americans. And so we're now going down the path with this particular compound to work through the next stages and then we will figure out how we bring this to market. But we're really focused on liver health. We see this as a very, very big opportunity to improve the overall health and wellness. So really being able to support a healthy liver as people again go through that aging life cycle, part of the life cycle is going to be very important.
- [65:17]
Scott Clary
You can tell me what you're allowed to tell me, but, but have you thought with this technology and this process and the way that you figured this out, have you thought about future health needs that you could be solving?
- [65:30]
Elon Sobel
So we, everything goes back to the North Star of the company. And my job description we talked about before, the North Star of the company that we live and breathe by is to discover, develop, manufacture and democratize life changing compounds from plants that change the lives from a health and wellness perspective of hundreds of millions of people. Improving the health and wellness of hundreds of millions of people, but importantly, doing this in a way that protects the environment, the planet for generations to come. So we made a big decision. Everything as a company, everything we've spoken about up until now, everything related to our vineyard, superfood and olives that are coming in the future is related to our direct to consumer business. We don't sell through any retailers. You know, after 18 years of coke, I had enough of retailers. You know, running a large company in the U.S. you know, I used to be on a plane every quarter going to see all the major retailers. You know what, this time I want to build a direct to consumer business. And it was a gift because having today we have more than 50,000 active subscribers on Vineya and having that direct relationship with the consumer, it's a gift because of the feedback you get on how the product is really changing their lives. But we realized we were not as a company going to be able to deliver on the North Star of the company of positively impacting the health and wellness of hundreds of Millions of people by our direct to consumer business. Even if we scaled it across, you know, we'll continue to scale this business on going into more markets. You know, our next we, we're regulated obviously in the us In Israel, we have regulatory approval already in Canada as well. Next market will probably be Japan. But we're not going to get to the numbers. And we live by changing the world. We're building a movement of change with this technology to really change the world. And so we decided to open up the technology to be able to partner with other giants of industry, to be able to utilize the power of our technology. And we developed early first quarter last year we started a CDMO business. What does CDMO stand for? Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization. So Scott, what this means is that today we're working with some of the giants of industry. We're talking about pharmaceutical companies, cosmetic companies, nutraceutical and nutrition companies. And we have a process whereby you go from plant to final compound. It's a two year R D process. It costs anywhere between two and a half to $4 million in a milestone way. You know, we talked about mirror, magnify, multiply. We do the tissue culture work first, right? There's a fee for that tissue culture work. Once we show them the customer the final composition, they lock it. We move to a phase two where we grow the cells in small bioreactors and then a phase three where we grow the cells in the large industrial scale bioreactors. And today we grow plant cells in the largest scale in the world where we, we have bioreactors of north of 1200 liters and we continue to scale higher and higher. And so that process is normally a two year process to go from the plant to the final compound. Our partners, that is our customers, they have all the IP rights to the composition. We obviously own all the IP to the technology and the manufacturing and the process. And we produce for them under a royalty based relationship from a scaling and manufacturing perspective. So we have two significant deals already that we I'm allowed to talk publicly about. One is with a NASDAQ listed pharmaceutical company where we're producing for them an enzyme which is for them is a very important. It's an enzyme obviously from a plant which is a very important part of a drug that they have. This particular enzyme is very challenged from a supply chain perspective. Consistency, geopolitical, you name it. Everything that you can be challenged in supply chain. So they came to us and said, look, we want to control our supply chain. We want to control our destiny. We understand what your technology can do. And therefore we're now in stage one with this particular company and we're hoping to move to the next stages shortly with them. And then we have announced in December a major strategic partnership with the biggest sweetener company in the world, Tate and Lyle. And they're an amazing company that had identified a number of plants out there that they felt could be the next generation of non nutritive natural sweeteners.
- [70:57]
Scott Clary
I just want to take a second and thank Cornbread Hemp for supporting today's episode. Now, Cornbread Hemp CBD gummies have been this really nice addition to my wellness toolkit. I don't use them every day, just when I want to unwind after those extra busy weeks, but they're perfect for those moments when you want to take the edge off and just find your balance, really just shut off from work. And what makes them special is how Cornbread Hemp crafts them. They only use a flower of USDA organic hemp plants. That's the best part. For the purest, most potent experience. No fillers, no artificial fluff, just clean full spectrum goodness in delicious watermelon, berry and peach flavor. I keep them in my nightstand for those moments when I just need a little extra help relaxing. And I love how transparent they are too. Every batch is third party lab tested so you know exactly what you're getting. And they put together a special offer for all success Story podcast listeners. All listeners can save 30% off their first order. Just head to cornbreadhemp.com success and use code success at checkout. That's cornbreadhemp.com success code success for 30% off your first order of these amazing gummies. FreshBooks is supporting today's episode. And if you've ever wondered how successful entrepreneurs stay on top of their finances while growing their business, the answer is FreshBooks. The numbers don't lie. Over 30 million people have chosen FreshBooks, processing more than 60 billion in invoices and saving an incredible 192 hours every year on accounting tasks. Think about it, that's nearly eight full days you could get back to focus on what really matters. Growing your business FreshBooks is more than just accounting software. It's your all in one financial command center. Create professional estimates, track time, automatically, bill clients, and capture expenses on the go. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with over 100 business tools you already use, all backed by award winning customers. Service if you're ready to stop drowning in receipts and you're ready to stop chasing down payments, here's What I want you to do, head over to freshbooks.com to start your 30 day free trial, no credit card required. And for all you success story listeners out there, I've got something special. Get an exclusive 60% off for six months when you visit freshbooks.com pricing offer. Transform your business with FreshBooks today. That's freshbooks.com pricing offer for 60% off. How do you think, think when you start to create things that really focus on health care? Do you ever think about when you really, really get big, how traditional pharma and drugs are going to react when you start to create things that can delete? If you keep going, some of the stuff that you create is going to replace the need for some of the drugs that are out there.
- [73:33]
Elon Sobel
No, I don't think like this. You don't? I think about partnership, more model. You think it's all partnership model. Look, at the end of the day, there are amazing existing solutions out there, right? As it relates to, you know, key indications. Yes, we want to be the best partner for pharma. Literally. Like, you know, in the case of this, the, the, the one deal that I spoke about earlier, it's critical because ultimately you, you know, you're utilizing a enzyme from a plant. You've got to have consistency, you got to have consistency of supply. Okay? The world is changing like every single day with, with the environmental change of the climate, climate challenges, it's impossible to get that consistency right. So our technology is able to, to harness that consistency. Companies need consistency of supply. They can't have pricing changes all the time. No, that it's, and they need to own their IP as well. So this is where we play a very, very critical role and we believe that it's almost like going back to the future. We believe that, look, chemical synthesis, that pharma, because ultimately pharma walked away from the plant kingdom, pharmaceutical companies walked away from the plant kingdom because they felt that with chemical synthesis, you know, they didn't have to deal with the issues on consistency and economic viability where we started this discussion. But they, through chemical synthesis they could take the most critical molecule and synthesize it in a lab, cost effectively. So they could get the economics right and they could own the patents that has taken the world so far. And there's amazing, amazing developments, you know, that in modern, you know, in, in, in modern human lifestyles that, that have come from that process. Then you have biologics the last 25 years. Thank God for biologics, right? There's some amazing biological therapeutic Solutions out there in the market which are game changing and helping improve people's overall lives. But at some stage you start to understand that the opportunities that you haven't been able to generate with chemical synthesis and with biological synthesis, because in some cases you can't chemically synthesize certain molecules from plants. You have to go back to the plant kingdom, you have to go back to the future. And that's why our technology today we're the critical bridge, we want to be the critical partner. So when farmer do need to go back to the plants because the solutions ultimately there are many orphan indications as well as major indications that are not optimized. And the solutions may very well lie in the plant kingdom. But there needs to be a technology. This is when you bring science and nature together. There needs to be a technology that's able to take unlock the secrets of the plant kingdom using cellular biology to be able to produce with unique consistency economic viability and patterns so that we can be a critical partner to pharma for them to go and spend the millions of dollars as they need to do in clinical trials going through the right regulatory processes, but we could have the right biological material that ultimately can deliver those critical next generation science based therapeutic solutions. Where in the last 40, 50 years the plant kingdom hasn't really had the opportunity to have the light shine on it. We are shining the torch. Right. Remember I'm the CEO of the plant kingdom. We're shining the torch on the plant kingdom and we're also saying, look, we've got to be careful because as human beings were destroying that kingdom and every single day. Kew Gardens, who's the Botanical Gardens in London. Kew Gardens published a report 24 months ago where they talked about how many plant species are becoming extinct every day and what it means for the the future of the next generation of therapeutic solutions. We've got a technology that can harness, can build cell banks of those critical phytomedicinal compounds or phytonutrients and so that they can be used in the future if God forbid, they become extinct. Right. So there's multiple applications.
- [78:17]
Scott Clary
Is that an exercise you're going through now?
- [78:19]
Elon Sobel
In, in there are. There are certain, if there are certain plants out there that are so critical to the next generations of therapeutic solutions. This is a very real use case of our technology because once we create the sellbacks, we never have to go back to the plant. Yeah, right. So it's a very, very important use case or in some cases you have very critical plants out there. Which are grown in, are very scarce, very expensive and ultimately go back to our North Star. We want to democratize. All about democratization.
- [79:00]
Scott Clary
I want to, I want to decide, just pull out some last ideas for entrepreneurs that are listening that look at you and they're just thinking this is an incredibly disruptive business. Like, hats off to you for taking this challenge on. If you were going to give some words of wisdom, if you are trying to do something that's never been done before, how should an entrepreneur approach a problem as big as this? I mean, I know you didn't start the company, but now you've, you've grown it and scaled it and you bet on it when you invested in it.
- [79:32]
Elon Sobel
Yeah, look, it's interesting because as I explained earlier, I found a company that wasn't a gold mine of R D. They just didn't know how to extract the gold and bring it to the market. So my experience, 18 years of Coke, six, you know, six years building together with two partners a big data IoT and software company which we sold to AB InBed. That experience helped me in basically the commercialization, the bringing of the gold to the marketplace. But a couple of things when I step back and I look at it with perspective. Firstly, as an entrepreneur, when I came in, I just found the most amazing people. And also going from high tech to biotech, it was like a massive cultural change for me, the DNA of people in biotech. I said to my wife, I wish I would have done this 20 years ago because I have the privilege of working. And the founders of the company and the people that have built the company are a group of probably the most tenacious of Israeli female biologists that just have dedicated a good portion of their lives to changing the world. And every day they come to work and no matter how tall the order of the biological challenge or scientific challenge, they've been able to figure it out. And I realized coming into this that, wow, surrounding myself with such amazing people with such strong conviction on what they do every single day, it's infectious. You can see my passion is that passion is derived from them, plus all the customers out there who see such a big impact. And I get this through the reviews on utilizing our products. So this is first thing, make sure you're going into a company where you really believe in the people and the people have just unique conviction. And then the second factor, and that's something that I've held in my career, in every job, which has basically allowed me to have, you know, thank God, you know, good success and A career that, you know, I've been able to look back and be proud of is, I call it end to end. You have to understand the business end to end. And often entrepreneurs, they choose. They choose one end or they choose the other end, or they choose a swim lane. No, you have to understand every job in the company. And in the last five years, right. I have spent enough time in every sections of the company where I can maybe not understand everything. But, Scott, I can appreciate the jobs. I understand the roles, I understand the critical parameters. I can have the dialogue with one of my team members in our biological facility. I can have this dialogue. I can talk to him about the critical elements that he or she is doing in their role all the way through to be able to dialogue and challenge the top PhD plant cell biologists and that end to end. It's a compromise because it takes a lot out of you. But I don't think there's any chance for entrepreneurs to be successful without all the luck you need. And, you know, luck and mazal, as you call it in every respect. You have to have that end to end. Deep, deep, deep knowledge and appreciation. And that then helps you also engender the commitment of people.
- [83:20]
Scott Clary
One thing that I've noticed about you in particular is you're. You're so passionate about what you do as a CEO. I think that's also something that I don't know if you're aware of how I've met a lot of CEOs. I think that you live end to end because I can tell how into the weeds and into the science you are. Not every CEO is as into the science as you are. But we were talking before we pressed record about how I don't know if it's open sourcing, but also it's like, what was it? How do you, what, how do you describe the acronym that you mentioned when you manufacturing organization and you open up the technology to other companies? It reminds me a lot of what Elon Musk did with his electric cars and how he open sourced all the plans to anybody who wanted to build electric car because he had a big mission. So you have big mission, but you also evangelize that mission because. And similar to Elon Musk, he's a, he's a big evangelist of his own mission. But also he can have educated conversations with anybody in his company about them building that rocket or them building those solar panels or them building that car. Like he gets into the weeds and he can have those educated conversations. So he's not only passionate it, he not only cares about a big mission, but he also, he's also able to have these conversations in depth with the people that work around him. And I see a lot of those similar traits.
- [84:45]
Elon Sobel
I'm very, I'm very humbled by the comparison. We have a similar name, we both born in South Africa. But yeah, you know, the, the comparisons that you've, you've drawn as I'm truly. Thank you.
- [84:56]
Scott Clary
I'm truly humbled, but I recognize that and I just, I'm starting to see why that makes you, why you're successful. I think that those are all traits ultimately.
- [85:03]
Elon Sobel
Like if you look what Elon's done, like everything he's doing is building movement of changes. And I think it's all driven by changing the world and leaving the world in a better place for generations to come. And ultimately, you know, I felt when I came into this company at the age of 46, I'm now 51 and I think I'll do this for as long as I can possibly do this because I love what I'm doing. We're building a movement of change. We're trying to change the world and leave a legacy. Leave a legacy. You know, I have a 19 year old, a 16 year old, two boys and a daughter of 13. And I often say to my wife like, if I was like, you know, 20, 28, 29 all over again, would I want to bring three kids into this world? And this world today is a very, very challenging world for many, many aspects politically. Yep. You know, just look at it on a basic level. You have, have 8 billion, 9 billion people soon, 10 billion people in the next 20 years, how are we going to feed ourselves? So if we're not leveraging the power of these kind of technologies the same way, Elon's thinking about this in the context of his world. If we're not thinking about it in our, how are we going to feed ourselves? How are we going to make sure that where we have all the required phytonutrients, are we healthy? And in order to have better health and wellness as it relates to what we consume, as it relates to the next generation of therapeutic solutions, how do we make sure we do this in a way that's sustainable? I mean, in each one of our bioreactors, every time we produce our red grape cells, each bioreactor is basically producing the same amount of Pisces resveratrol as about seven to eight acres of land in a three week period. So we're utilizing a micro fraction of the Land, we're utilizing a fraction of the water and the fraction of the energy. We have to as human beings today, we have to leverage our knowledge of science with nature to be able to optimize the scarce resources that we have and protect those resources. Because if we don't do it, what's going to happen to our children? What's going to happen to our grandchildren? And I don't think enough people today are living outside of the now. And I understand that because it's not easy to function in this world. You're always thinking about now, but we have to be thinking about generations to come and governments have to be thinking about generations to come. But you know, we all know that that's pretty challenging, right?
- [87:32]
Scott Clary
And they move slow. They move slow, right?
- [87:34]
Elon Sobel
So entrepreneurs, you know, like the Elon Musk and little entrepreneurs like me, you know, this is why we're all trying to drive these movements of change. But the world's different today because in our movement of change, every single one of our, you know, in the case of the US 50,000 active subscribers on vineyard and growing at thousands every month, they're members of that movement of change. They're building that movement of change. Every time they talk about what the product does to them, bringing new people, we're building this movement of change one customer at a time. Our retail investors are helping us build the movement of change. The world is changing, changing. And this is what we've got to do. We've got to build these movements of change that impact people's lives so significantly because we've got to leave legacies. Ultimately it's about leaving a legacy so that we leave the world in a better place for generations to come.
- [88:27]
Scott Clary
What's the legacy you want to leave?
- [88:31]
Elon Sobel
Look, I go to bed at night with this technology. You know, as CEO, whether it's CEO of Bio Harvest Sciences or chief human utility value of the plant kingdom, I go to bed at night saying, don't mess this up. You've got a gift from God, a real gift. 17 years of amazing female scientist, Israeli tenacity that has got us here. Don't mess this up. You've got to make sure that you scale, scale this technology. You've got to make sure that you give this technology to major companies out there to be able to develop those life changing plant compounds out there. And one piece that we work so hard at is the economics. You know our facility today in Israel, it's a facility that cost us $5 million to build. This facility, this facility can produce 25 tons of our vineyard red grape cell powder based on what we sell it today in the marketplace on our major package which is $99 for a three month subscription that gets us to about a revenue about 65, $70 million annually on a $5 million one time capex. That's software economics in biotech. Which is why I like to call ourselves fast in America. You say fast where I come from it's fast, but fast biotech. And what this allows me to do, go back to what I lie in bed at night thinking about is ultimately we spent the last 18 months digitizing our facility, digitizing every single biological metric of all of our 140/bioreactors that we have on the floor at any time. There's no other facility that's growing plant cells at such an industrial scale in the world. And I know that by building the digital blueprint we can copy paste, we can scale this, we can scale this to have bio manufacturing plants in every continent and then in every single country. Because that's the challenge. There's this amazing technology out there. Many companies have amazing technology, but the numbers are the other way around. It's like $65 million in capex and at your first year you're making 5 million in revenue and maybe it takes you five years to get your payback. No, our technology, the technology that we've developed allows us to go back to the North Star, allows us to democratize, democratize these plant compounds. And that's the legacy that I want to leave. The legacy is to develop whether it's five or ten life changing compounds from plants that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people. And doing this in a way that we leave the planet in a better place for generations to come.
- [91:33]
Scott Clary
Where can people find out more? Where can people purchase, subscribe, follow, see all the new things that you're eventually going to put into the market.
- [91:42]
Elon Sobel
So on. If people are interested in vineyard, I encourage them. Go and look@vinea.com go and read our more than 9,000 verified reviews. It's just vinea.com also if people are crazy Amazon, you can go and buy us on Amazon. You know we have a really good presence on Amazon. You can buy our coffees on Amazon as well as our teas similar on our website. So that's in the case of vineyard, in the case of understanding more about Baharvest Sciences, we're listed on Nasdaq, our ticker is B H S T B H S T And you can go to bioharvest.com. you can also reach out to me elainbauharvest.com if you're interested. I have a service level agreement with all my, all our customers and investors of a 48 hour turnaround in response.
- [92:28]
Scott Clary
Pretty good.
- [92:29]
Elon Sobel
Yeah. Again, we're building a movement of change. So if people bother to reach out to you. Right. You want these people to come on board the movement of change. It's only respect to respond like this. I do my best. Sometimes things slip through the cracks. I'm only human and. Or you can contact Justin J U S T I n@barharvest.com he heads up our investor relations.
- [92:51]
Scott Clary
I want just to to close this out. You've given over so much. I think there's a lot for people to understand if they have not really thought about the, the health benefits of what this can do for them and how it could change their life. But if you want to just leave the audience, the audience loves obviously health, wellness, innovation, this is who you're speaking to. It's like right up your alley. Some last words of wisdom. So talk to them about what they should focus on in the future of their health but also maybe just tie in for the entrepreneurs some final words of wisdom about some of the innovation they should be excited about or that they should even think about building themselves. Like what does the world need to think about in terms of health and wellness and innovation from somebody who lives this every single day?
- [93:42]
Elon Sobel
Wow, that's a big question.
- [93:43]
Scott Clary
It's a very big question.
- [93:46]
Elon Sobel
So let me first go back to people. In the context of health and wellness, the most important thing is no. Today the world is so open and your access to information is so much easier. And I would say to you that you need to know and understand what different health and wellness solutions you're using and consuming. So we talked a lot today about solubility. Is it going back to, is it soluble? Is it bioavailable? Are there clinical trials behind it? The world is so open, you have access to so much information. So I think it's really, really critical. You know, ultimately we're all trying to do the best in order to optimize the time that we have on this planet. And in that context, it's so important to put the time into learning about the companies, put the time into learning about the technologies. Right. And if it works for you, because the companies are doing all the right things as it relates to ensuring that they are really delivering life changing compounds to you, become a partner in that journey, help them build a movement of Change because those companies that are trying to build things the right way. Wow. It's a heavy lift, right? It's a heavy lift. And I appreciate you saying you're seeing the passion that I have, but I have the passion because I have the conviction and I have the passion because I've seen the impact of this technology. And therefore it becomes infectious, right? It becomes, in a way, a sickness because you realize that you have the ability to drive such a magnitude of impact on people's lives. So how can you walk away from that? Right? And then as entrepreneurs, look like nothing's easy. And I always say, like, honestly, every day I kind of count how many times I had to climb up Mount Everest. And some days you kind of, you know, get to like, base camp and you have to climb to base camp. Sometimes you have to feel like you're really climbing to the top and it's hard. Build amazing people around you. Like, I'm, I'm so lucky in this company that I've been able to build a dream team from the two co founders, Dr. Yochi Hagai, Dr. Zaki Rakib. Just amazing people with great maturity, great professionalism. I'm surrounded by, you know, in biotech, or as I call fast biotech, age is everything. Age is everything. I mean, I have some technicians that are in their early 70s. I'm begging, I'm like, you are not retiring. You have a job here until whatever, right? You have a job here because the skills and the knowledge, knowledge and experience is everything. And coming from high tech, at the age of 45, I was the oldest guy in the company. I felt like a babysitter, babysitting all the, you know, the engineers, the computer engineers. And so, you know, surrounding yourself with experience, quality people that have souls, that have such great conviction to do what you're doing and then making sure that in everything you do every day you try and do things the right way.
- [97:08]
Scott Clary
Way.
- [97:09]
Elon Sobel
Do things the right way. From a moral compass perspective, I think you have the best chance of success. It's not guaranteed, but you have the best chance of success. But don't underestimate those things because those are the building blocks. I think they're the building blocks of great people, great teams and ultimately, hopefully what will be Legacy companies that have really leave a grandstand of a mark on the world by making the world a better place and ultimately driving transformational human utility value first before shareholder value. Right. And that's, I believe, if you really believe in that order, that sequence, I think, and you surround yourself with the right people. People. And you believe in the power of experience. I think we have a much better chance of success knowing that success is like climbing Mount Everest and back when you're driving movements of change. You know, I don't know, it's probably a hundred times. And you can't ever get tired. Right. So you have to have the virtuous cycle. We're so blessed in our company, honestly. Then there are days where I lie in bed and it's been a horrible day, tough day, but I lie in bed and I read the customer reviews and I have the energy to get up in the morning and to just do it again and figure out a solution.