109. Step One Foods Founder Dr. Elizabeth Klodas

Frustrated that pills weren’t making her heart patients feel better, Minneapolis-based cardiologist Dr. Elizabeth Klodas went looking for other answers. She started with a simple question for her patients: “What are you eating?” and was shocked to find more than a decade ago ago that she was often the first medical professional to ask her patients that question. “All of a sudden it dawned on me: we talk about food as medicine, what if we took that concept and interpreted it literally? A dose of food.” She started experimenting with foods naturally high in fiber, antioxidants, plant sterols, omega-3 fatty acids and created a cereal that she shared with patients. They started feeling better. That led to the creation of Step One Foods, an e-commerce snack food brand based in Eden Prairie, Minn. that has seen 40-fold revenue growth since 2017. Of course, Dr. Klodas wanted scientific proof that her food products could improve heart health, so she sponsored a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic, where she had trained. The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, 2022, proved that Step One Foods could lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of cardiovascular events in patients who ate it consistently. Today, Dr. Klodas continues to see patients while also running her fast-growing food brand. It’s definitely not the journey she expected when she went to medical school. “I did it because no one was solving the problem I was seeing,” she says. “There’s a huge gap in care that needs to be filled. I’m one small company. If you think of the breadth of health conditions that could benefit from targeted nutrition interventions—that field between drugs on the one end and food on the other is vast.” Following our conversation, we go Back to the Classroom with the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business where marketing professor Mike Porter says many an accidental entrepreneur like Klodas is made by being open to discovery. Starting a food business was not her goal, rather a means to help patients. “Purpose was the accident, but everything she did after that was purposeful. If, then. The purpose drives her.”