165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder

Summary

Episode Summary: The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - Episode 165: Steven Rofrano on Toxic Chips and Smarter Snacking

In Episode 165 of The Ultimate Human, host Gary Brecka engages in a deep and insightful conversation with Stephen Rofrano, CEO and co-founder of Ancient Crunch, the innovative company behind Masa Chips. The episode explores the pervasive issues in the snack food industry, particularly the toxicity of seed oils, and delves into Stephen’s journey of creating healthier, nutrient-dense alternatives without compromising on taste.

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1. The Scale of the Snack Food Problem

Stephen Rofrano opens the discussion by highlighting the monumental scale of the snack food industry:

“Frito Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, et cetera, people buy $30 billion worth of that a year. So when we say massive problem, food in general is big...” [00:00]

Gary Brecka concurs, emphasizing the toxicity of the industry's staple ingredients:

“The non GMOs, that industry is one of the most toxic sources that supplies our food system.” [00:10]

2. The Genesis of Masa Chips

Stephen recounts the pivotal moment that led to the creation of Masa Chips:

“One of my friends was eating a bunch of tostitos one morning... After a bit of a rant about seed oils being toxic, he challenged me to create a healthier alternative.” [02:19]

Determined to find a solution, Stephen began experimenting with tallow-fried tortilla chips, aiming to produce a snack that was both healthy and delicious.

3. Understanding and Eliminating Seed Oils

The conversation delves into the history and detrimental effects of seed oils:

“Seed oils went from 0 to 25 to 30% of the average American's calories... They’re not part of our evolutionary diet.” [10:00]

Stephen elaborates on the origins of seed oils, tracing back to early 20th-century commodification and highlighting their widespread use in modern food production:

“Procter and Gamble had a lot of cottonseed oil left over... They hydrogenated it to make it a solid fat, leading to margarine and later, liquid seed oils.” [10:00-13:34]

4. The Health Implications of Seed Oils

Gary draws parallels between seed oils and other chronic toxins, stressing their cumulative impact:

“The difference between cumulative dose toxicity and single dose toxicity... Toxins that have safe levels in a single dose accumulate and they back up and blow the engine.” [14:00-17:05]

Stephen adds insight into how multiple toxins processed by the same biological pathways can overwhelm the body:

“The same enzymes that process ethanol in the liver... process polyunsaturated fats from seed oils... It’s quite likely that your total dose of both alcohol and seed oils should be lower.” [17:05-18:48]

5. Crafting a Healthier Chip Alternative

Stephen details the meticulous process of developing Masa Chips, focusing on ingredient quality and nutrient density:

“Our chips are fried in grass-fed beef tallow, packed with essential vitamins like A, D, E, and K2... Masa’s corn undergoes nixtamalization, making it easier to digest and boosting its nutrient profile.” [19:20-50:21]

He emphasizes avoiding artificial additives and GMOs, striving for real, nutrient-dense ingredients:

“Every single thing on that label needs to justify itself. It’s a lot of fricking work.” [40:02]

6. Overcoming Production Challenges

Transitioning from a backyard operation to a scalable business posed significant hurdles:

“We couldn't find a factory willing to work with grass-fed tallow... So we had to rent a commercial kitchen and handle much of the production manually.” [24:37-27:55]

Stephen discusses the high costs associated with manual production and the strategies to mitigate them, including automation:

“We’re looking at machinery that can produce 10,000 bags in an hour with just eight people, down from our current 24-person operation making 2,000 bags in eight hours.” [37:10-38:35]

7. Ensuring Quality and Flavor Without Compromise

Maintaining superior taste while enhancing nutritional value was paramount:

“Our flavorings are all real. For example, our lime chips use actual lime powder instead of artificial substitutes like citric acid and lime oil.” [41:49-43:49]

Stephen shares the labor-intensive process of creating authentic flavors:

“Our lime powder is $40 a pound because we use organic limes, slice them, dehydrate, and grind them into a powder.” [43:31-44:08]

8. Scaling Up and Future Plans

As demand for Masa Chips surges, Stephen outlines plans for expanding production and reducing costs through automation:

“We can make approximately 100,000 bags a month manually, but with automated lines, we aim to meet the growing demand without compromising quality.” [55:24-56:19]

He envisions Ancient Crunch as a portfolio of brands that redefine classic American snacks with real, nutrient-dense ingredients:

“Our goal is to have a portfolio of these mini companies, brands of classic American snack products that people really enjoy... making it as best as it possibly can be.” [52:48-53:22]

9. The Broader Impact on Health and Culture

The duo discusses the cultural significance of snacking and its impact on modern health:

“Americans spend only 11% of their budget on food now compared to a third in the 1950s... but the quality has suffered because of this.” [32:51-33:30]

Stephen asserts that investing more in food quality today can prevent chronic illnesses and improve overall well-being:

“If we're focusing on fixing food to fix our health, we need to spend more on quality ingredients.” [34:37-35:11]

10. Defining the "Ultimate Human"

Closing the episode, Stephen reflects on the concept of being an ultimate human:

“It would be potentiality. Maximizing our ability to do stuff... enhancing our health and mental acuity to engage fully in life’s activities.” [57:06-58:43]

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Key Takeaways

• Seed Oils are Harmful: A significant portion of American calories comes from seed oils, which are linked to chronic health issues due to their inflammatory nature and cumulative toxicity.

• Nutrient-Dense Alternatives are Viable: Stephen Rofrano successfully created Masa Chips using grass-fed beef tallow and non-GMO, organic corn, proving that healthier snacks can be both tasty and satisfying.

• Challenges of Scaling a Health-Focused Startup: Transitioning from manual production to automated factories is essential for meeting demand and reducing costs, but requires significant investment and strategic planning.

• Importance of Real Ingredients: Avoiding artificial additives, preservatives, and GMOs is crucial for maintaining the nutritional integrity of food products.

• Cultural Shift Needed: There's a need for greater investment in food quality to prevent chronic illnesses and promote a healthier society.

• Ultimate Human Defined by Potential: Achieving optimal health is about maximizing one's potential to engage and thrive in various aspects of life.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Stephen Rofrano [00:00]: “People buy $30 billion worth of [Doritos, Tostitos, Lays] a year. So when we say massive problem, food in general is big...”

• Gary Brecka [00:10]: “The non GMOs, that industry is one of the most toxic sources that supplies our food system.”

• Stephen Rofrano [10:00]: “Anyone who understands this idea of how we're evolved... No one has evolved to eat seed oils.”

• Gary Brecka [14:00]: “The difference between cumulative dose toxicity and single dose toxicity...”

• Stephen Rofrano [24:37]: “We couldn't find a factory willing to work with grass-fed tallow...”

• Stephen Rofrano [43:31]: “Our lime powder is $40 a pound because we use organic limes, slice them, dehydrate, and grind them into a powder.”

• Stephen Rofrano [57:06]: “It would be potentiality. Maximizing our ability to do stuff...”

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Conclusion

Episode 165 of The Ultimate Human offers a compelling exploration of the intersection between food quality and health. Stephen Rofrano’s journey with Masa Chips underscores the importance of making conscientious choices in our snacking habits. By prioritizing nutrient-dense, real ingredients and overcoming significant production challenges, Masa Chips stands as a testament to what is possible when health and taste are given equal importance. The conversation reinforces the idea that optimizing our diet is fundamental to achieving overall well-being and realizing our full potential as ultimate humans.

Transcript

[Stephen Refrano]

Frito Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, et cetera, people buy $30 billion worth of that a year. So when we say massive problem, food in general is big, the organic and.

[Gary Brecka]

The non GMOs, that industry is one of the most toxic sources that supplies our food system.

[Stephen Refrano]

If we understand that fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think we need to be focusing more on this area.

[Gary Brecka]

Is there an antidote to our current incredibly unhealthy snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit, but replacing it?

[Stephen Refrano]

Tortilla chips, they're junk food, right? Could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made. Well, we make moss chips, which are tallow fried tortilla chips. So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak, and also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all.

[Gary Brecka]

But where is the brand going? I mean, is this an expansive snack category that you actually want to expand into?

[Stephen Refrano]

People buy $2 billion of Doritos a year. So like, hm, obviously people want.

[Gary Brecka]

Ultimate Human. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything, anti aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's guest made his way into my house through my kitchen and, you know, with, with one of the best products that I have in my kitchen, one of the best products on the market. And this is never a podcast about products and services, as you guys know. But in this particular case, I wanted to go deep down the rabbit hole. Food safety on the backs of the Baja movement and what we can do and add to our kitchen to maybe replace some of the toxic compounds that our families and our kids are eating. Great ways to add snacks to your, to your daily routines. And you know, I have an episode called what's in Gary's Kitchen? And I do lateral shifts where we take all kinds of different foods that you love to eat and swap them for things that are more nutrient dense, that feed your cellular biology. And so if you're into that, today's podcast is going to be a much must watch. So welcome to the podcast. Stephen Refrano.

[Stephen Refrano]

Thank you. Great to be here.

[Gary Brecka]

So what's your role with Masa? And then I want to take a step back and I really want my audience to kind of get to know you and know a little bit about your story and what actually brought you.

[Stephen Refrano]

Sure. You hear the CEO and co Founder of ancient Crunch. We make moss chips, which are tallow fried tortilla chips, and also vanity crisps, which are tallow fried potato chips. And I started this with a friend about almost three years ago. At this point, two and a half years ago, we. One of my friends was eating a bunch of tostitos one morning. I think this is.

[Gary Brecka]

This college.

[Stephen Refrano]

This is after college. This is like a New Year's trip, actually, in Fort Lauderdale.

[Gary Brecka]

Okay.

[Stephen Refrano]

Not too far from here. Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

Which is in Fort Lauderdale this morning.

[Stephen Refrano]

So basically New Year's two years ago, plus a month, my friend eating tostitos. And this is after the whole seed oil summer. I like to call it 2021. When seed oils really became mainstream.

[Gary Brecka]

Yes. When the news about them.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, when the news about. Right, right, right.

[Gary Brecka]

They've been out there for a long time, but, like, people started exposing the term seed oil.

[Stephen Refrano]

Like, people started talking about it then. Yeah, yeah. And so I was just kind of going on a rant to my friend about, why are you putting this in your body? Seedles are poisonous. This is toxic. What are you doing? He's like, I'm just trying to eat, like. Like, I'm hungover. I'm just trying to eat my breakfast.

[Gary Brecka]

Like, which is worse because he's like, he's already recovering from. Now he's going to back in the sedol.

[Stephen Refrano]

And it's like the liver thing too. Right. Because alcohol and seed oils are processed with the same liver enzymes. And so it's like, this is. Yeah. Already a horrible situation Anyway, so I'm not helping it by lecturing him about why he's making poor dietary choices. But ultimately we get to talking about how there could be, you know, he's like, tortilla chips, well, they're junk food, right? I'm like, no, no. You could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well. And I started describing ingredients that could be made to put into tortilla chips that. That would actually be healthy for you. And he starts listening, is like, okay, intrigued. All right, well, where can I go buy. Where can I go buy these? And I said, well, that's the thing. You can't. They don't exist.

[Gary Brecka]

This is, in theory, in my mind.

[Stephen Refrano]

This is in my mind. Literally in my mind.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yes. I just come up with a recipe on the spot. And then so he basically challenges me, like, hey, why don't you go make them? You know?

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

If I can't buy them, go ahead. And so I'm like, all Right. Challenge accepted. And then a few months later, I got a turkey fryer, a box of tallow and some corn tortillas and fried up the first prototype.

[Gary Brecka]

In your. In your house?

[Stephen Refrano]

In my parents backyard, actually.

[Gary Brecka]

Really?

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

So you got. So first of all, where'd you just go get beef, dad, you went to the Whole Foods and you bought.

[Stephen Refrano]

I think I got it online. I forget which brand it was, but I think was Amazon. I just found some like grass fed beef tallow bought online. And the turkey fryer I think was Costco.

[Gary Brecka]

Okay.

[Stephen Refrano]

You know, Thanksgiving turkey fryers, I think RFK's video. Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

A lot of people blow themselves up.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, exactly. Turkeys are much harder to fry than tortilla chips, I'll say that.

[Gary Brecka]

You know, it's crazy not to get off topic, but I actually, I, I heard that you can't put the turkey into the fryer when it's frozen or it can literally explode.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

It has to be room temperature.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

And like every year around Thanksgiving, thousands of people that are actually frying these things for the first time take a own frozen turkey and drop it in there and the whole thing blows up.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. And they do it fast. And I mean, if you put ice cubes into a deep fryer, like that's not fun.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, right.

[Stephen Refrano]

Because like the act of frying is basically rapidly boiling the water. And so if you have like the, the ice, I don't know, it's. It's denser or something because it doesn't spread out. Whatever. Yeah, it's not, it's not a good time. So. Right, don't do that.

[Gary Brecka]

It's not a good time.

[Stephen Refrano]

Don't do that.

[Gary Brecka]

So, so you're in your parents backyard and you. And you take like flour.

[Stephen Refrano]

I got tortillas, actually. I found a guy who made organic corn tortillas and like ordered a case from him. He's based in Massachusetts or something.

[Gary Brecka]

And they're, they're flexible at that point.

[Stephen Refrano]

Like you go to Mexican restaurant. The tortillas that come in that little bowl with the weird little lid, that. With the paper. Yeah, that kind of thing.

[Gary Brecka]

Okay.

[Stephen Refrano]

I chopped them up on a cutting board into triangles and I toss them in the fryer outside, of course, not indoors. And the first thing I noticed about them was that they didn't taste beefy or anything, which kind of surprised me at that point. Yeah, I was expecting, hey, if we, if we use beef towel, it might taste meaty or greasy or kind of weird. But I was very happily surprised that they were neither greasy Nor beefy. And so the, the ultimate test came. This is actually at Easter. Some, my extended family was over. The ultimate test came when I brought them inside and started feeding them to my extended family, a lot of whom are not interested in health.

[Gary Brecka]

No.

[Stephen Refrano]

And so these are the type of people who, as a lot of people are out there, who, who might say something like, I'd rather enjoy my life than be healthy. I'm sure you've heard this a billion times.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, a billion times.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. And so, yeah, healthy is nice, but they want to eat what tastes good and.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

And other sort of things. So you expect the same people that have made fun of me for eating beef liver.

[Gary Brecka]

And, you know, I kind of envision you out there in your backyard, you know, with the fryer and like, being like, hey, anybody want to invest? This is my startup company. Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. That would come later.

[Gary Brecka]

Your seed round starting, like right out there in the backyard with your Uncle Joe, you know.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. I have my PowerPoint, my, my business plan.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah. This is why. No, guys, really, this is going to be a big thing. Who wants to, who wants to get in now before we launch?

[Stephen Refrano]

Well, I didn't even know any of that yet because, again, I would. I just found out five minutes prior that they didn't taste beefy, so it was like, news to me. So, yeah, I fed this to my, my family members who ate them and were like, wait, this is actually pretty good. Because I have a lot of, you know, these are people who I, if I fed them liver, they would freak out.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

You know, or like, they would not want any part of what would normally be considered health foods. And so the fact that they like them, that set a light bulb off in my head because most health foods, as at least people think of them, taste bad. Kale smoothie, it's chia seed pudding. It's like, gross. And on the contrary, most things that taste good are considered unhealthy. You know, McDonald's fast food, chips, you know, candy, whatever. So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak at this time, and also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all, that's a pretty novel thing. And that was that, that was the idea that I was like, wait, this could actually go somewhere. This, this is actually impactful. Because I think one of the reasons, and we were talking about this before the show, one of the reasons why a lot of people don't adopt health is because they perceive it as either unpleasurable or inconvenient. And so people like us, you know, will go be healthy either way. But if you're, if you want to eat things that taste good and you're prioritizing that enjoyment, which I'm not saying there's anything wrong with, that's 95% of people. If the health foods are unenjoyable, you're not going to eat them, right?

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah. So true. And, and I mean, you and I see eye to eye on seed oils effect. You know, before we got on the podcast, you were talking about how you were watching my Rogan podcast when I was actually a guest on Joe Rogan. Yeah. And, and I was talking about seed oils, and that was going back a little while. And Paul Saladino was really, I think, probably one of the earliest movers in our space that I recall anyway, talking about seed oils because he was actually breaking down the different forms on these polyunsaturated fatty acids and talking a little bit about the history of it. And I remember being suspect of the seed oil history being so sinister. I was like, there's no way that these are machine lubricants. And you know, here we go with the next conspiracy theory, right? It's a machine lubricant. And you know, and then after the war, we had all of this excessive machine lubricant. We didn't know what to do with it. And so we started actually putting it into food supply. And knowing what I know now, nothing surprises me. We do it with fluorosilic acid, as, as fluoride. We use commercial bleach chlorine to, you know, chlorinate the water. And then we know we don't filter it back out, which I'm okay to sanitize with chlorine, but then filter the out. But so for the few folks of mine that, that are listening to this that aren't really sure what a seed oil is, what is. Why are they so damaging? And, and maybe why, you know, such a high percentage of our snack foods are deep fried and normal. Everything you find in the grocery store is deep fried in seed oils or even not fried in seed oils. They're just a part of the base ingredients. One, because they're dirt cheap. But give me your take on, on seed oils. Why, why they need to be removed from our diet, especially from our kids diets.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, I think a good entry point into this discussion is the history of seed oils. So the first commercially available food seed oil for consumption was Crisco, and Crisco is hydrogenated cottonseed Oil. And it was, I think first sold in 1924 or 1912 or something in the early 1900s. And the issue was the Procter and Gamble had a lot of cottonseed oil left over from something. I forget what industry it was that they were.

[Gary Brecka]

What were they using the cottonseed oil for?

[Stephen Refrano]

Well, so it was a waste product. So you had the cotton gins and you would pull the seeds out because the cotton gin separates the cotton fibers because that's what you use to make clothing. And you separate the seeds out of it. And so you had all these seeds left over and it was waste product they didn't know what to do with. And if you are in industry, you will have mountains of waste of whatever kind. If you can sell that, that's new revenue line and you want to do that. So I think for a long time they had been trying to sell it for something, but it had never worked. Because at that time, Americans did not eat oil. Like literally, olive oil wasn't a thing. The Italians had brought it over. They were not, you know, Mediterranean culture hadn't shown up yet. Coconut oil was certainly not a thing, even though it's solid, room temperature avocados. No one had even heard of an avocado in the US in the early 1900s. So there were. And there were no vegetable oils. There was the only fats that Americans. And I think I heard Max Lugovara talk about this on your podcast too. I think 90% of fat consumption was animal based fats.

[Gary Brecka]

That's right.

[Stephen Refrano]

Butter, lard and tallow. So Americans didn't eat oil at all. And so which we call it Procter and Gamble was unable to sell a liquid oil product to American consumers. So it kind of sat on the shelf for a few decades until some guy invented a process to turn the liquid oil into a solid fat. That's called hydrogenation. Anyone who lived through the 90s knows about hydrogenated fats or margarine, all that stuff. And so that guy invented this process that allowed them to turn cottonseed oil into a solid. And now all of a sudden, people, because it was consistent with American culture, hey, we can eat this. It looks like lard, it looks like tallow. It's a solid thing. I can scoop it out. That's familiar to me. And so they began selling that. And it was obviously so cheap, right? Because you're taking this waste product, it's basically free, you know, or you'd even pay to get rid of it in some cases. So you have this thing that's basically cheap, that's basically free. And now you're selling it to compete with something that actually costs money, whether it's lard or tallow or something. So you can undercut it on everyone else on price. And a lot of their marketing at the time was touting this whole like futurist, modernist idea of like develop technology. Like instead of that dirty animal fat with those smelly farmers who, who have pig poop on their boots, you know, eat this thing made by science in a lab with guys in white coats and that, that sort of idea, which is kind of the opposite today. Most people think, if it's made in the lab, I don't want it back. Then it really resonated with the American culture who was like this forward looking, like scientific, like we want this kind of technology in our lives. So that's kind of how it got started. And then that was a very, very big success for them, obviously because the inputs are so cheap and ultimately led to them starting to sell liquid seed oils starting in the 50s and beyond. So anyway, all of that's to say that this entire category of products was invented. There was a point in time in history when people did not eat this at all. That's not true about corn, that's not true about wheat. Well, at least in recent memory, people have been eating all these things, you know, butter, they've been eating, they've been drinking water, for example, eating sugar for at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. Seed oils were not eaten in any form or fashion. Like these types of oils, the industrial processed ones prior to say the early 1900s.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

So I think understanding that history makes it a lot easier to understand why we shouldn't really be eating them. Because anyone who understands this idea of like, you know, how we're evolved, right, we talk about we're evolved to get sunlight. You talk about how we're not supposed to be wearing sunglasses outside because we want to get the sunlight in our eyes and that helps us make the melanin that we need to protect our skin. All these things like live how we're evolved. Same thing with food. No one has evolved to eat seed oils. It's not possible that anyone's evolved to eat seed oils.

[Gary Brecka]

Right?

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. So it's kind of like this shocking. And the last piece I'll say about this, and I've been talking for a minute, is that it went from 0, literally 0, to 25 to 30% of the average American's calories. Calories.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow. A quarter of their calories.

[Stephen Refrano]

Wow. Or more.

[Gary Brecka]

And by the way, those types of fats should be 2% or less of your total dietary intake. Just as a matter of reference. So if it's, if it's 10, 11, 12 times that, you know, there's a whole other cascade of issues. And the challenge with a lot of these is that you don't get sick right away. You know, if you ate some of these highly processed foods and, you know, it instantly made you nauseous, you know, that would be its own self correcting error. The problem is that it makes you chronically ill.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right.

[Gary Brecka]

And, and chronically ill is just a moderate rate of suffering over a prolonged period of time.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right, right.

[Gary Brecka]

It's not extreme suffering because that would drive you to the er, the urge and you know, it's just a sort of a low grade.

[Stephen Refrano]

And even worse, extreme suffering would drive you to go sue the person who caused your suffering.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

And so then pro, like if seed oils were that acutely toxic, then Proctor again will get sued and then they would stop making that.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, I talk about this all the time. The difference between cumulative dose toxicity and single dose toxicity. Single dose toxicity theory theorists say, all right, well the dosage determines the poison. Okay, so, but I always use the analogy, well, nobody got, you know, mercury poisoning from a single piece of tuna fish, right? But if you had some mercury in, you know, tuna fish and you ate it every single night over a long period of time, you could end up, you know, with mercury toxicity, it wasn't the single dose, it was the cumulative dosage. And I think, you know, the awareness now of the amount of cumulative toxins that are in, you know, the toxic burden. Fluoride, chlorine, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, glyphosates, you know, herbicides, sex sites, pesticides, preservatives, then all of these, you know, quote unquote, generally regarded as safe. Toxins that have safe levels in a single dose accumulate and they like exhaust, right. They back up and they blow the engine. If you know me, you know, I'm a huge believer in the benefits of hydrogen water. H2TAB delivers cost effective portable tablets that generate ultra clean molecular hydrogen at 12 parts per million, one of the highest concentrations on the market. With over 1300 published studies showing benefits of oxidative stress, energy recovery, brain function and so much more. Taking charge of your health has never been easier or more cost effective. Just drop a tablet in water, let it dissolve and drink it back. It's less than a dollar a day, science backed and part of my daily routine. I never travel without this. And it is my favorite biohack. Visit drinkh2tab.com that's drinkh2tab.com and upgrade your hydration today. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

[Stephen Refrano]

The biggest problem is that all of these things, or many of these things, might be processed by the same, you know, like, biological pathways overloading them. So when you do the test on, oh, I'm going to feed the mice this one toxin, and it takes this much to kill them or this much to cause them harm. Well, what about, like you said, all the toxins going through the same pathways? It decreases the amount you can be exposed to any one of them, because if you add all of them up together, the total quantity of toxins, whatever they are, will overwhelm the liver or the kidneys or whatever the detox pathways we're talking about. I mean, we mentioned this before. The same enzymes that process ethanol in the liver is called aldehyde dehydrogenase that processes polyunsaturated fats and which, which come from seed oils. So it's, it's quite likely that your total dose of both alcohol and seed oils should be lower if you have both, than it would be one or the other. Right, right. And so I think it's. There's a, this is a pet theory I have. I've, you know, not confirmed this, but I'd be interested to hear your take. There's a common thing on the Internet about how the founding fathers, after they signed the Declaration of Independence, like, rented out some bar in Philadelphia and just like, drank obscene quantities of alcohol, even for, like the most, you know, alcoholic of modern, you know, say, frat bros or whoever, just like handles of whiskey per person, like this kind of thing. And I, I can't help but wonder, and I know people used to drink a lot more in the past, actually. Like, if you go to the cafes and bars in Europe, you have these, you know, big, giant shelves, all of the liquors and stuff. No one's drinking that anymore. Yeah, and people talk about how Gen Z doesn't drink that much, yada, yada, yada. I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that we literally can't process alcohol in the way that our ancestors did because our livers are so tied up with, I'm sure, you know, seed oils, but I'm sure other things too, but predominantly seed oils.

[Gary Brecka]

And that's another thing, you know, we talk about the toxic burden in a lot of these snacks. It's not just the cedar oils. I Mean, what originally drew me to ancient grain? You know, a friend of mine told me about you named Ben Greenfield and who I'm a huge, huge fan of, and he brought my attention to you guys and I started looking at your ingredients. You know, non GMO corn, organic grass fed beef tallow, sea salt, you know, spices I could recognize, I think, I think in your traditional ones, that's, that's all you got in there is the grass fed beef tallow and grass, organic.

[Stephen Refrano]

Corn and then the salt or organic or better spices.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, yeah. And that's that the, the organic and the non GMO is another one. Because that industry as a whole, in my opinion, is one of the most toxic food sources. You know, sources that supplies our, our food system. And what happens is as a base ingredient, it makes its way everywhere. Like, it's like, you know, seed oils are kind of like the root and they go into this trunk and they just branch out into all these different. You, if you pick up a salad dressing on the, you know, on the grocery store shelf, you know, very likely it's corn.

[Stephen Refrano]

And corn and soy are basically in everything, even things that aren't food. Right. There's corn in your gasoline. I don't know how many people know that. A lot of plastic, especially the biodegradable plastics made of corn. Soy protein is pretty much everywhere. Clif bars, even people, like normal people think that's like a healthy protein thing. Cliff bars, it's like soy protein.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

No, it's everywhere.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's literally everywhere. So, so, you know, it's, it's sounds like just a really interesting journey. And, and so you get your family to love these chips and you realize, you know, the light bulb goes off in your head. Ding. You know, I'm onto something. And how did this transition into an actual operating business? Because I'm always fascinated by people that, and I'm making an assumption about you, so tell me if I'm wrong, but who don't have any specific expertise in a certain market. I assume you didn't.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, absolutely. I, I have Xerox professional experience in food or anything.

[Gary Brecka]

And, and, you know, but I also find, and I say this all the time on my podcast, you know, some of the most passionate, driven, purposeful entrepreneurs I've ever had on this podcast, including yourself, they solve some kind of problem in their life and, and they're actually solving a big problem for other people. I mean, you're solving a massive problem. And that is, Is there an antidote to, you know, our current incredibly unhealthy snacking habits without just killing your snacking habit but replacing it. You know, I call this lateral shift. And, and the answer is clearly yes. I mean, so it's a massive problem. And so talk a little bit about this transition from backyard turkey fryer.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

To when it became.

[Stephen Refrano]

Sure.

[Gary Brecka]

A real thing.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. Just a point about the massive problem. Just for some context. Frito Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, etc. People buy. In North America, people buy $30 billion worth of that a year.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. So when we say massive problem, this particular, like food in general is big. Snack foods is huge. Food is even bigger. But like just this one tiny little industry. Tortilla potato chips, basically.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

30. And that's just free to lay.

[Gary Brecka]

I found fascinating that you, I heard you on, on another podcast talking about this and one of the things you said it was a, it was just a podcast, it was, it wasn't video. And one of the things you were talking about how. Is how the manufacturer actually manufactures possibly for multiple brands, maybe 10, maybe dozens of brands. And so you're essentially getting the same source, different labels, but you're essentially getting the same ingredient.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right, Exactly. So packaging around it. So. And that's one of the things we had to navigate. So to your question before about how we turned, you know, turkey fryer chips. So the first thing we realized was that it tastes good and it's healthy. So it satisfies these two competing, often competing interests in a way that's helpful to everyone. The second thing we did was like, okay, how are we going to go make it right? I can't be turkey frying on my backyard and sell that on the Internet. Right. So we, we hired a food startup consultant to. These are characters that basically come in and say, you don't know anything about, you know, food, the food industry, but you have grandma's recipe or your recipe. How do we turn into a business? The first thing he told us, after thinking about it for two weeks, he comes back and says, yeah, this isn't going to happen. You can't make this. I'm like, well, what do you mean? Why not? And he said, there are no factories that exist that will make your product in grass fed beef tallow for you. I'm like, okay, interesting. So what are we going to have to do? And he said, well, you could use coconut oil or avocado oil if you want to avoid seed oils, but that's pretty much it. If you want to get a factory to make it for you, you have to do one of those two things. And I said no to that pretty quickly because I don't think coconut oil. Well, first of all, I don't like the fact that you have to import coconut oil from across the Pacific Ocean. It's just like a wasteful thing. It's like costly, burns a lot of energy, you have to deforest rainforest. It's just, it doesn't seem right to me to like sell a product in the US that's heavily dependent upon some ingredient from very far away. Possible, but not ideal to me. Avocado oil also is like fraught with, you know, issues. That whole industry, 85 or 86 of avocado oil in the market was tested to either be fake or rancid by some people in uc, I think.

[Gary Brecka]

EWG Environmental Working Group.

[Stephen Refrano]

No, this is a University of California. Okay.

[Gary Brecka]

EWG pub. Not published. But broadcast this.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. Anyway, avocado oil is the whole issue. And then drug cartels own avocado farms in Mexico. So whatever. I, I was like, I maintain that TAL is the best frying fat, not only because it's high in saturated fat, it's not seed oils, it's also nutrient dense, unlike plant fats. So it does have vitamins. It has fats like vitamins in tallow. And the last thing is it doesn't make stuff greasy. I've, I've fried some coconut oil before it comes out greasy, shiny, you know, it gets on your fingers like I don't know. Yeah, I don't like that. So tallow is the ideal frying fat. We couldn't get someone to make it for us. Then we were like, okay, crap, so we're going to have to go make it ourselves. That was the next fundamental realization. And so we thought about like, how are we going to do this? We're going to rent a commercial kitchen because you have to have, you know, a food safe place to make your products. We ended up finding one not too far from, as I said, my parents house, which is where the prototype was made. So this is where I grew up. So I, I know the area well. We found a kitchen, we had to go buy a fryer, we had to get people, we had to buy a machine to get the pouches, we had to do all that stuff. And we were like, as we were planning this out, we quickly realized this is going to cost a lot of money. Yeah, this is going to cost a lot of money.

[Gary Brecka]

I assume you weren't just independently wealthy on Your own?

[Stephen Refrano]

No. Okay. No. Still, I'm not okay.

[Gary Brecka]

But such is the life of an entrepreneur, brother.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yes. So we realized it was going to cost a lot of money, and so we were trying to, like, figure out how this is going to work. I looked at the price on the shelf of, like, Doritos, and I'm like, this doesn't even make sense. Not. Not even about the ingredient quality. Because, of course, towel is way more expensive than seed oils. Organic corn is way more expensive. All the salt is way more expensive. Even ignoring all of the cost of the ingredients, it was. The math still wasn't adding up. We could use Frito Lay quality ingredients, and still it was going to be too expensive. So we figured that we learned more about this. We realized that the reason why Frito Lay is cheap is not merely because they use bottom barrel ingredients. Frito Lay, as I mentioned before, this is like 30 people buy $30 billion worth of this a year in the US and Canada. Frito Lay has 30 factories in the country.

[Gary Brecka]

30.

[Stephen Refrano]

That's about like, one factory for every two states. They have a giant factory with, like, robotic equipment and giant fryers and, you know, assembly lines and all that stuff. 30 factories. They have 200, 250 distribution centers.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

Around the country. So that's like five on average per state. Fertilized facilities. They have, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees all. All this stuff. They also have negotiated special deals with grocery stores that allow their products to appear on shelves that. With a lower markup than other people's products. So, like, for example, if I'm on the. On the shelf at Publix or a similar. I'm not naming Publix specifically, but that kind of store. If I'm on a shelf, Publix might take 35 to 45% of the sticker price.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

For their margin for Frito Lay, they might take 25%. Because Frito Lay has this massive volume. They negotiate this better deal. Yada, yada, yada. So. So many structural reasons why. Oh, and the last. The last thing. Reasonable. And Frito Lay's bottom barrel ingredients are not only cheap, inherently, they're even cheaper because the government subsidized them.

[Gary Brecka]

Right? Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

AKA your tax corn.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

AKA the listeners. Tax dollars subsidize.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

So. So there's a lot of reasons why it's. It's cheap. And so thinking about this, it's like, obviously, we're going to have to make this more expensive in order to survive. In particular, to survive without accepting a ton of outside investor money, which we didn't really want to do because we intend to control and own the business for a long time.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

So we realized that the products are gonna have to be expensive, which I think, all things considered. Right. For me personally, if I'm not eating mush chips, I'm not just not gonna eat them.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

You know, they're more filling. I, I would probably people.

[Gary Brecka]

They are actually more filling.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

So are the Vandy chips, by the way.

[Stephen Refrano]

Oh yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

Like you really can't overeat them. Which, which you know, one of the things I talk about a lot on the podcast is nutrient density. And you know, I mean, chips and snacks really shouldn't be the main source of our meal. You know, it shouldn't. That shouldn't be. Yeah. It's an accessory and nutrient density is what our GLP1 responds to. You know, now we have all these ozempic guac and you know, Manjaro essentially trying to mimic what we already make in our gut. And we make more GLP1 in response to. Response to nutrient density. If you actually look at side by side trials with Mark Hyman talks about this all the time. Side by side trials of highly processed diets versus deeply nutritious or, you know, whole food diets that have nutrient dense foods, you'll find that even when they gave the exact same amount of calories, highly processed calories versus nutrient dense calories, the highly processed group got hungrier more frequently and, and hungrier faster.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

And so the important point about that is that when you eat satiating nutrient dense foods, you have less of a tendency to overeat.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right.

[Gary Brecka]

It's really hard to overeat ribeye. It's hard to overeat avocados. You're not going to sit down and eat five avocados.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right.

[Gary Brecka]

Because they're just too nutrient dense.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right.

[Gary Brecka]

I feel the same way about these because, you know, they're, they're a lot more nutrient dense and caloric and fat dense than, than their counterparts. So you're not going to sit down and eat bags and bags.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right.

[Gary Brecka]

Hi guys. Gary here. I want to take a few minutes of your time to invite you to my ultimate human VIP community. This is a private community with front row seats to my most advanced health protocols exclusive monthly Q and A calls, a private podcast where you can ask my guests and me your most pressing questions and my own personal wellness blueprints and everything you need to optimize your health. You'll connect with like minded folks in this community. You'll get firsthand access to cutting edge insights and enjoy special discounts on products that I trust the most. And here's the best part. Membership is just 97 bucks a month, a fraction of the cost my private clients pay for the same deep dive guidance. If you're ready to supercharge your wellness and skip the guesswork, I'd love for you to join us. Head to theultimatehuman.com VIP that's theultimatehuman.com forward/vip right now to become one of my ultimate human VIPs. This is your fast pass to better health, so don't miss it. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

[Stephen Refrano]

There's an interesting layer on this in addition to the vitamin content because, you know, vitamin A, we talked about the nutrient density, but the, the saturated fat versus seed oil thing is interesting. There's a guy, Dr. Michael Eads, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he talks about, there's a very, very cool study where they took a bunch of kids and they said, hey, like it was a lunchtime whatever. I think it was a school lunch related study. They said, hey, we're going to feed you. Kids are gonna split you into groups and feed you as many calories of a particular meal that you want until you stop eating and, you know, eat as much as you want. We're gonna measure how much you ate and when you're done, we're gonna, we're gonna figure out the, the calories you consumed. There were a few different groups. They were all variations of a carb, of a carbohydrate plan plus a fat seed oil versus saturated fat. And I think most of the carbs are potato. So basically we had a baked potato with butter versus like seed oil, fried french fries, this kind of combination. And the seed oil plus carb group ate on average 250 to 300 more calories in their meal.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

Over in a meal, in a meal.

[Gary Brecka]

In a single. Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

And their kids and their children in one meal.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

Eating several hundred more calories until they were full. And like you said before, who knows? I'm sure they're getting more hungry faster.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

Than, than the kids that ate the saturated fat. And so there's an added layer. And Michael eats, talks about the whole like metabolic reason for this. There's like FADH and NADH ratios involved. It's, it's all very complex. I think you'd really like it. I'll send this to you afterward.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, send it to Me, I really love it.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, It's a whole, it's a very interesting framework of like our cells telling us when to stop eating based on caloric density from nutrient density.

[Gary Brecka]

Caloric density. Totally agree.

[Stephen Refrano]

That's it. You will eat more calories when you're eating seed oils. And obviously people count calories. I'm not a big calorie counting fan myself, but I think it's somewhat helpful for, for some people. But yeah, people will eat more calories when they're eating seed oils as they're fat instead of tallow.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

So there's. Yeah. And then the other thing about cost, which I think is very interesting, is something about expectations. Right. So in the 1950s, 30% of our household budget went to food.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah. That's.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. Like a third of people's income. Food.

[Gary Brecka]

That's a sizable amount of money. Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right. Nowadays it's 11.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow. So it's a third.

[Stephen Refrano]

A third of what it was in the 50s and 100 years before that it was like your entire life was a farmer because 97 of people are farmers.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah. So like the, so you, you worked to eat.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. You work to eat.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

So it was like 100% of your income, basically, or your time or whatever. Yeah, equivalent. So over the past like 200 years, we've progressively gone from our entire lives were dedicated to food to now 10% of our income is due to food and we complain about it. Obviously, financial circumstances are what they are. However, people's diets, like the quality of the food that your dollar purchases has suffered because of this.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

And so if we're thinking, if you're of the mindset where like, okay, food actually affects health, if you understand, oh, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna save money in food now and I'm gonna be sick later and that's gonna cost even more money in addition to the suffering. Like, what about suffering? Like, money is one thing, but like being physically healthy and vibrant is, is worth more than money, in my opinion. So if you add up all these factors, we, we actually are spending, I think, way too little money on food collectively.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

And I'm not just saying that because I sell expensive snacks, don't even buy my, my snacks, go to the farmer's market, buy grass fed beef instead of going to Costco and getting whatever the heck they're importing from God knows where. Right. Like if, if you increase your, if you're an average American and you spend 11% of your budget on food, if you, if you were to increase Your food budget by 50%. That would only have a hit to your overall budget of 5%. Oh, yeah, right, because 11% turns into 15. Yeah, but that's a 50% growth. It's like a relative risk.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

So it's like, if we understand that food is the. Is the fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think that's certainly, like, we need to be focusing more on this area.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah. You know what? I love that we were starting to talk about it. You know, before the podcast, we were eating lunch, and you talked about constantly pushing the, you know, the capacity of ancient grain. And I'd love for you to talk about that.

[Stephen Refrano]

How.

[Gary Brecka]

How you will, you know, you are eventually looking to get the price point down and dramatically increase production. I think you told me you're having, you know, 20 people involved in making 2,000 bags, and eventually you'll have eight people involved in making 10,000 bags.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. It's insane.

[Gary Brecka]

And that would, you know, that'll Eventually.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. Going back. Going back to that Frito Lay discussion. So one of their factories is like a massive automated machine. In contrast, because we didn't have a factory, we couldn't. You know, going back to that story, we couldn't find a factory. We had to do it ourselves. These factories that make everyone's. These. These are factories that make everyone's food for them. And so they have. I don't know, they're 400,000 square feet. They have huge amounts of equipment.

[Gary Brecka]

400,000 square feet.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, we know of one. Some people, the guys that are making our potato chip equipment for an upcoming factory that we're building, they have an installation in Pennsylvania's 400,000 square feet. It's like, casual, you know?

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, casual.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. Massive, massive operations. And so there's like, I don't know, a dozen, 100 maybe. Maybe whatever. A thousand. A very small amount of actual food factories in the country.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

That make the vast majority of packaged foods. Your protein bars. All the main. Same factory or same handful of factories. Candy is true. Same handful of factories. Your chips, snacks, cookies, crackers. All of its same handful of factories. And so when you go to the grocery store and you look at this apparent diversity of options, you think, oh, wow, we really got all the bases covered. I have 20 different cookies that I can choose from.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

They're probably coming from, like, three different factories. And so that's just like the. The. The reason for this is that food production lends itself to scale.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

And so for costs to come down, it's like you really want to be making large quantities at once. And so this is, was our problem from day one and it's, it's still our problem today. Vanny is a good example. So the potato chips sitting over there, we make those, we, we make that eight hours a day on our second shift. And we have about 24 people in that crew.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

And we make 2,000 bags in that shift. So it's like, what is that? Why can't I do math? That's like a hundred bags per person. About.

[Gary Brecka]

You're going to transition this to much, much bigger scale. I mean, talk a little bit about how you're going to do that.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, exactly. So you think about, and the reason for this is we, we have a row of deep fryers and we have baskets and we have like a few, like glorified salad spinners and like pots where we spray filtered water to rinse the potatoes. We got, we have this little potato slicer device, but we have 24 people basically manually frying, like dipping a tray in. And if we're, you know, not watching a video, it's like making the frying motion and then you're pulling them out. Your, your quality control, you're putting salt in them by hand with a salt shaker.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

Stick them in bags by hand, sealing them with a machine by hand. And so that is a very labor intensive process and that greatly contributes to the expense of the products.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

So in contrast, we're looking at some equipment right now. I just got back from visiting the equipment vendor. It's a whole production line for potato chips. This set of machinery does the same process with our same ingredients and it will, you know, we have to modify some things for tallow compatibility and whatever, but same ingredients and it will make, I think, what did I say? It's about 10,000 bags of those chips.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

In an hour.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

And eight people run the line.

[Gary Brecka]

So 24 down to eight.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. And 2,000 down to 2,000. Eight hours to 10,000 one hour.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah. That's incredible.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. So that's the type of thing that you get when you're big in the snack industry. And part of the issue is that most startups have some amount of access to that type of scaled manufacturing capacity because they go to one of the thousand. They're called co manufacturers, these companies that make food for a lot of different brands. If you can go to one of them, you can benefit from their machinery and if you benefit from their, you know, economies of scale. But if you're us and you're over in a commercial kitchen with a, you know, bunch of manual fryers.

[Gary Brecka]

Right, right, right.

[Stephen Refrano]

Doing this by hand, turkey fryers. You don't, you don't get to benefit from any of that. But again, the reason why we do this is because the big factories only they're, they're seed oil factories. They don't, they don't like working with new fangled ingredients, which is ironic because the entire industry of food production 100 years ago was frying everything in tallow.

[Gary Brecka]

I mean, I completely agree with you. So how do you avoid using artificial additives, preservatives or other compounds? Because, you know, when you, when you look at a, you know, commercial chip, I'm not going to name any brand names, but everybody has the brand names. You don't, you don't just have the seed oil. You've got the msg, the monosodium glutamate. You've got the, you know, multiple red dyes.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

And other dyes, orange dyes, yellow dyes. Just look at the number of dyes. You often have something called carigean. You have quote unquote, natural flavors, which is, can be fine, but most of the time it's sinister cover up for.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

Shouldn't, shouldn't be there. And then you have the food dyes. And so when you think about the kind of bomb that you're putting in your body between the seed oils, the, the iodized table salt, the, you know, the, the food dyes and then the monosodium glutamate, I mean, these things substantially add up. Not setting aside the fact that they're not only not organic, but they are gmo, they're part of that. Genetically modified.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. Well, that's a great question. And it often goes underlooked. And I think seed oils are easy to talk about because it's so obvious they're 20% of calories. I think it's a very high impact thing to look at. But if you're, if we're optimizing, which of course you do, we're looking at everything. Right. We want to look every, every single thing on that label needs to justify itself. And the short answer how we do this is it's a lot of fricking work. That's how.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

And that's why no one else does it.

[Gary Brecka]

Well, it's like very, it's very labor intensive.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right, so. Well, I'll tell you a story. So, so our lime chips, which were our second flavor that we ever came out with, and the reason why is because you know. Everyone knows Tostitos. Lime, hint of lime or whatever. Like, that's a very common tortilla chip flavor. So if we're gonna make flavors, we're gonna branch out. Obviously, we should go with lime. I thought, okay, that seems easy. It's just one thing, right? It can't be that hard. So I started looking around for lime powders on the Internet to try to find a supplier, and I couldn't really find anything. Everything was not organic. And if it was organic, it had maltodextrin or some other filler or whatever. I'm like, huh, that's weird. How do these other people do it? So then I went to a grocery store, and I went through all. I went to the chip section to look at all the lime chips, and we're trying to find out, like, on their ingredient label, what they used. Yeah, maybe I could copy that. So I forget the exact full list, but basically, there's two camps. You get lime juice powder, which has maltodextrin in it, and lime juice.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

And I think that's probably what Tostudos uses. And then there's this one. Shocked me, actually. This is. And then the. The health. Some health brands, which I don't want to name.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

Their lime chips were lime oil and citric acid. Citric acid, as I'm sure we know, comes from, like, these giant bioreactor farms in China. It's like black mold basically produces citric acid. So citric acid was there for the sourness, and the lime oil was there for that, like, fragrance of lime. But there was no. There was no lime in any of these chips. And I was just, like, sitting there, like, thinking, like, the healthy chips and the junk chips, all of the lime flavors. There's no limes. Where are the freaking limes? And we actually ran a few ads after, like, a while back, just where the headline was, where is the lime? And we showed, like, our ingredient label and other ones. And so in order to make this work, I had to. I was like, okay, we have to go get some limes. We got some limes, sliced them up with a deli slicer by hand after washing them. Organic limes, of course. And then we stuck them in a dehydrator, like, in rows of, like, little lime discs. Like, you would see in, like, sometimes you go to a bar, you'll see these dehydrated lime discs. And then we ground them up into a powder. And that was. That was our lime chip for, like, six months.

[Gary Brecka]

Wow.

[Stephen Refrano]

Was some guy's full Time job slicing and dehydrating and grinding limes. Yeah, this is a super labor intensive, super labor intensive. And then ultimately we, we, we found a guy who has a dehydrate freeze drying factory. And I learned about freeze drying. It's better than dehydrating because it preserves the vitamin content. It doesn't like lead to oxidation. Because dehydrating, it's not high temperature, but it's high enough that it causes oxidation. So like the dehydrated limes, the slices would be a little brown, but then when we freeze dried them, they mean they remained like pale green. And so vitamin C content is preserved and all that stuff. So then we started freeze drying and then we kind of outsourced that. But still the lime powder today remains our single most expensive spice ingredient.

[Gary Brecka]

Really?

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, it's like $40.

[Gary Brecka]

Because you're buying actual.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, because we're buying pounds of organic limes and then grinding them up into a slurry and freeze drying. And freeze drying itself is expensive, right? So yeah, our lime powder is $40 a pound, which like, that's just a lot of money for spices.

[Gary Brecka]

But you know, like we said, you know, eventually this is working its way down. Yeah, because you're going to automation.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, I mean you get, you get a, you buy your own freeze dryers. And to be fair, the seasonings themselves, like, of course they contribute, but like the seasonings are relatively, a relatively small percentage of our overall. Like.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, we look at things that are in some of these other ingredients like msg, you know, which is also seasoning, you know, the sodium glutamate, you know, very often you'll see caragean or, or other, other kinds of binders like a soy lecithin or you know, something even in snack foods that are competing with.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, supposed to be healthy. Yeah, well, Ms. Street, that's an easy one that vegan companies use that to mimic the flavor of cheese because cheese naturally has msg. It's like the umami flavor or whatever they call it. And so you'll have, again, don't want to name names, but you can easily find this if, if you know, you go to a healthy grocery store, a lot of the vegan cheese or vegan queso, this and that, whatever, like it'll have either MSG right on the label or they use the term yeast extract because yeast extract, yeast produce msg. And so if you take an extract of yeast, it's msg.

[Gary Brecka]

It doesn't sound as sinister either, but.

[Stephen Refrano]

It doesn't sound sinister like oh, yeast. That's in bread or that's like a. That's natural.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, it's like when we put folic acid in the food supply and we call it fortified or enriched, you know.

[Stephen Refrano]

Oh, that sounds like vitamin.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, it's fluorinated water, but it's really fluorosic acid water. But if you said fluorosilic acid, people like, wow, that sounds sketchy. That sounds sketchy.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. So a lot of vegan foods will use, like, for example, I actually don't think Doritos, their nacho cheese flavor has msg. I'm pretty. Like, they actually have cheese in it.

[Gary Brecka]

One of them. One of them.

[Stephen Refrano]

I'm sure one of them does.

[Gary Brecka]

It's gotta be Cheetos or. Can we look that up?

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, but, but, but, yeah, you'll see yeast extract. And so I think that's the big one, The. The food colorings. I think there's just no excuse for that.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

Like, I think our cobonero chip is. It's spicy. It's like. Like, I don't know. Tomato. Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

It's got Redmond salt. You've got.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, yeah, There's. There's tomato powder, there's beet powder for a little bit of sweetness. And, like, that creates a pretty nice color. Honestly, like, I don't create a good color.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, it. See, I think this. I think the disuniformity, you know, brings us back to something that's more in its natural form. Like, you know, avocados are not perfect when you cut them open. You know, one of the things I notice about seed oils, for example, in the grocery store, you ever just notice how you go down the aisle and, like, the Western oil or the vegetable oil, they're all exactly the same color. Like, exactly. And. And they're exactly the same consistency. They have that beautiful yellow hue to them. They got the heart healthy label on there.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

And, you know, that's not how things occur in nature. I mean, if you. If you compressed 100 or a thousand seeds and produce the oils and you put them in all these bottles, there'd be all kinds of different.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, it should be very. There should be lots of variations.

[Gary Brecka]

Be darker.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. We have this, like, with our potatoes, for example, like our potato, we have two harvests. There's two different suppliers. One's in Idaho. The other is, I think, Florida. I forget. So we have potatoes for six months. They're stored well, but because we don't use toxic storage methods, so there's this thing called CIPC. I actually forget what it stands for, 85% of potatoes in the US are sprayed with CIPC. And it prevents the spores or the eyes from sprouting because obviously there's, there's only two potato harvests. If you want potatoes all year round, you got to store them somewhere, right? And so we have to prevent them from spudding. And so if you just like gas them with this toxic crap, like, yeah, you can, you can prevent them from creating eyes, but we can't, we, we won't use that stuff. So, yeah, you can do things with temperature and humidity and keep them dark. Right. Potatoes actually are sensitive to light. Like, literally, like, they will wake up. So you have to trick them into thinking they're underground, all these things. But even still, they will change. And over time, some of the starch is turned into sugar in potatoes. And so that creates like, there's about a, you know, six month cycle of variation or potatoes where you'll see brown spots and whatever stuff. But it's like you want a potato chip that's not made with crap, that's what you're going to get, right? It's actual potatoes. It's like french fries in a bag. I think someone said that earlier today. Like, that's what it tastes like. That's what it is.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

You know, it's not like Frito, like lays where everything is the same shape and color and texture and size and consistency. It's like, that's not, that's not how food works, right?

[Gary Brecka]

When it comes to snacking, Masa is flipping the script on what real food should look like. Masa chips are crafted with grass fed beef tallow, one of the healthiest fats on the planet. These chips are packed with essential vitamins like vitamin A, D, e, and vitamin K2, all of which play a role in keeping your skin vibrant, your immune system strong, and your bones solid. But here's the real magic about Masa. Masa's corn goes through an ancient process called nick stimulization, which makes it way easier to digest and it amps up its nutrient profile. Plus, these chips are low in PUFAs, so you won't find any of the inflammatory seed oils that you find in most snacks. And instead, Masa uses pure Redmond sea salt, giving you a natural hit of minerals that keep your cells hydrated and your energy steady. So don't just snack reach for Masa. It's real food, real health without any of the junk. Grab a bag and I promise you'll feel the difference. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Now for you, where is this. So Ancient Grain? Is the, Is the parent company Ancient Crunch? Sorry, it's the parent company. And I almost. And I, And I like that because I, I identify most with your Masa brand. But. And then when I started, you know, eating the candy and feeding those to my kids, to my family, it's. It's actually great way to make. I used it this, this season when I made party platters for. For the holidays, because people are always like, well, how can you make a healthy platter for. For the holidays? And. And the, the interesting thing is you can actually recreate it in a way that is really nutrient dense.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right.

[Gary Brecka]

And healthy and kind of guilt free.

[Stephen Refrano]

And it's not like any compromises. Like, it's actually good.

[Gary Brecka]

And it actually looks really good too. You know, it's esthetically pleasing. You can lay it all out on there. I get a lot of these raw cheeses from my. From my local farm here and Local Amish farm, which I. Which I love, and yours make a nice mix with that. But where is the brand going? I mean, is this an expansive snack category that you actually want, you know, Ancient Crunch to expand into? Are you going to get into other.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. So. So we started out with Masa. That, that was. And back when we started, I was like, this is literally, we're only doing original one flavor. I didn't even have ambition for other flavors. I'm like, what other flavors do you need?

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

But then I'm like, oh, yeah, that's it. People buy like a billion dollars of Doritos or God knows what, $2 billion of Doritos a year. So I'm like, obviously people want the spices. And the fun thing about the spices is that there are no artificial flavors in the sense that, like, the flavor, like, there are artificial substances that create flavors, but the flavors are all real. There's Vanillin, which creates a vanilla flavor.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

There's lime oil and citric acid, which creates a lime flavor. But none of the flavors, it's like, is there a fake color? All the colors exist. Like, they're just real colors.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

It's like. So the fun thing about spices is that any flavor that exists in the junk food world, we can just make with real stuff. In most cases, it'll taste even better because we're not using. The reason why they do their fake stuff is not because they want a fake flavor. They just want to save money. And so if we're not beholden to this idea of, like, we have to get the cheapest thing possible in every single way. Because we don't. We want the realest thing possible, not the cheapest thing. We can make better flavors. Right. Like the cheese that are going to go into the one day moss and nacho cheese flavor is going to be better cheese than the cheese that goes into Doritos. Yeah, right. And it's still going to taste like cheese. It'll just taste better. So we realized we could do the flavors. So then, then we got to thinking with this whole, the whole long term idea here is that there's a, there's certain, like American snacking is like a big part of American culture. You go to the center of the grocery store, there's like five, four aisles dedicated to these things. Comes in bag. Comes in bags and boxes that people snack on and that's. It makes up a lot of our calories, for better or for worse. And so our goal is. Yeah, yeah. I mean, not so. Yeah. The snack. Yes. Olson activity is like. Yeah. I mean, I actually don't really snack on these things. I eat them as part of my meals. It sounds like you do too. We had lunch earlier today. But regardless, Americans buy this stuff, they want this stuff. And so my job is to go in and say, all right, that's next. We're going to do that. But like make it real. If it's bread, it's going to be sourdough. If it's, you know. You got the idea.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

So. So our whole goal with Ancient Crunch is to like have a portfolio of these mini companies, brands of, of a classic American snack product that people really enjoy. That's not going anywhere anytime soon. We're just making it like turning up all the dials on the real food level and making it as best as it possibly can be.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah. And talk a little bit about the sourcing of the actual raw ingredient, the corn, because. And what are the detriments of. I've talked about this before, but I love your opinion on the detriments of the genetically modified corns and this area of snack foods. You know, wheat, soy, corn. Yeah. These are some of the most, not only pesticide laden corn and chemical laden crops, but also they're the majority, if not all of them are genetically modified.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

Why is that an issue?

[Stephen Refrano]

So I think the main issue from my perspective, understanding with GMOs is that it's not to say because a lot of people are like, you don't believe in science like GMOs. It's like, what's wrong with that. And it's like. And then some people say, you're playing God. And it's like, that's not the strongest argument in my opinion. The problem with GMOs is not that they're modified, it's that what are they modified for? And the vast, vast majority of cases, GMO crops are modified to be more resistant to pesticides.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

And that's pretty much Roundup ready. So more resistant to pesticides means that the farmers can put more poison on it, and that means you can eat more poison and the crop doesn't die.

[Gary Brecka]

Yes.

[Stephen Refrano]

So it's not like if someone were to GMO something and, like, make it more nutrient dense, I'd say maybe. But also, food, when properly grown, is as nutrient dense as it needs to be. Like, it's our. It's already there for us. Like, nature put it there.

[Gary Brecka]

Right.

[Stephen Refrano]

You don't need to make it better. We're not going to put more vitamin A and beef liver. Right. There's enough. There's enough where it is. Yeah. So I think that's the main issue with GMOs. And corn is an especially nasty crop. Like, parts of the Midwest are just like, the groundwater is literally polluted with atrazine and like, glyphosate is everywhere.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

It's like, it's not just the food, it's also the, like, corn farmers have a lot get cancer at higher rates than, you know, other professions. It's, like, absolutely devastating. And I think it's either only 1% or 7% of corn in America is not GMO. And among non GMO corn, it's a lot of. It's still not organic. And so I think for us, organic corn is like the absolute bare minimum standard over the next two, three years. I was mentioning this before. I want all our corn to be regenerative organic, which is possible.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah. I love that you're going for organic and then eventually regenerative organic. And a lot of what we talked about before, before the podcast, was what you're doing with your factory in Pennsylvania, you know, and the automation, really getting the labor cost down, which is your highest cost cost of goods sold now. And once this happens, do you foresee, you know, price points in. In your products dropping?

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah, I mean, across the board and availability increasing? Because I think the main thing. Yeah. I mean, it's. It's kind of supply and demand at this point. Right. Like, we're really tapped. I think we made. We can make, I don't know, 100,000 ish approximate bags a month. And you know, we can get a little bit more out of that with our manual methods. However, the real issue is that we like, why are we not on shelf at some bigger grocery stores? I don't have enough product to put there. Right, right. So I think that's the, the real thing is like, the more availability is like the laws of supply and demand just kick in. As of right now, it's like, oh, why is it, you know, why is it, why is this flavor out of stock or whatever? It's like, I can barely keep up, I think. So today's Friday.

[Gary Brecka]

High class problem, right?

[Stephen Refrano]

Today's Friday. We're making chips that were likely sold, I think Wednesday. So, and we're shipping them today. So it's like a two day kind of backlog. So it's like, I can't, I can't keep up. I mean, I'm trying.

[Gary Brecka]

That's great though.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

You know, it's amazing to see products and services like this getting back into demand. And, you know, I'm, I'm a huge fan. My audience is a huge fan. I love that you're on the seed oil bandwagon and the, in the artificial ingredients bandwagon and the non GMO bandwagon because you didn't just fix one of the problems, you fixed all the problems.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah.

[Gary Brecka]

And you know, and first of all, and I really want to, I appreciate you coming on the podcast. I'd like to actually do a follow up with you as you start to expand, you know, your lines and whatnot. But every guest that I bring onto the podcast, I sort of wind things down by, by asking them the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be a, an ultimate human?

[Stephen Refrano]

I can't, I'd be lying if I said I didn't prepare for this because I, I, I was honest enough. He was like, I was listening some of your episodes and I'm like, oh, oh, okay. That, that one. I actually think I thought about this before, though, in my head. Even when I heard the question for the rest, I was like, ah, I know the answer. My answer, it would be potentiality. So I think organisms are designed to be able to do a certain set of things inherently. And as humans, we can typically like, stretch the amount of things that we can do, but at the same time, we could also shrink them. Right. If you're sick or, you know, you have brain fog or you're overweight, that limits, say, your ability to play with your kids or go climb a mountain or go mountain biking or do whatever. Like, if you have brain fog, it limits your ability to, like, I don't know, read books or do play chess or any sort of, you know, mental, physical activities kind of things. And so I think as we're talking, especially in the realm of bio hacking, health optimization, all this stuff, the goal, of course, we're always talking about how to make ourselves healthier, but for me, it's like, once I'm healthy, then what I don't just, not just I want to be healthy, just to sit around and be healthy all day. I want to go do stuff.

[Gary Brecka]

Right, right. Sit around the whole day.

[Stephen Refrano]

Right. And so I think, I think we want to be like, maximizing our ability to go do stuff, basically. And that's what I think it's easy to forget in the health space where, you know, it's talking about trends and how to optimize this variable, which is all important. But then at the end of the day, like, how can we take our health and mental acuity and all the stuff that we have that, you know, we're frankly blessed with relative to the standard state of health in the modern world and, and do that and like, do something useful with that.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah.

[Stephen Refrano]

So that's what, that's how I answer.

[Gary Brecka]

That's amazing, brother. Stephen, I, I, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I'm excited to see where this journey, you know, goes for us. I'm a big fan of what you're doing. My, my audience is, is, is a huge fan. I appreciate more and more companies like yourself coming in and being diligent about their ingredients, being diligent about the way that they're sourcing their nutrients and actually making nutrient dense foods. Because what's really, really ironic about what you're doing is you're just circumventing the system and just going back to the basics.

[Stephen Refrano]

I literally invented nothing.

[Gary Brecka]

Yeah, that's what I mean. It just basic.

[Stephen Refrano]

Yeah. It's like I am a time traveler from 1940 and I make tortilla chips and potato chips, and here they are, present day humans.

[Gary Brecka]

Well, brother, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[Stephen Refrano]

Thanks for having me.

[Gary Brecka]

We're gonna have you back again. And until next time, guys, that's just science.