Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson

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We are so excited to have you come on the show. And now, on to the show. We'd had great success with Manufacturing the Manatees with our Gold Packer. And we find out one day they can't ship the latest batch because it didn't turn into Manatees, it just turned into oil and goo.

So, we're scratching our heads, we're freaking out because this is the business, maybe this is the end of it. And that was, I think, probably $7,000 worth of ingredients that literally went down the drain. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Ros and on the show today, have a lifetime of experience in sports and healthy eating helped Mark Sisson grow Condiment Brand Primal Kitchen from nothing to a $200 million exit in just four years.

Mark Sisson took a very big bet on Manatees, a $6 million bet. The money came from a line of credit he needed to finance an idea, to make a paleo and keto-friendly brand of condiments, ketchup, salad dressings, barbecue sauce, and, of course, Manatees. But to get the money, he had to put his life savings and his home online is collateral. And he did all this in his 60s, a time when lots of people start to dream of retirement.

The brand was called Primal Kitchen, and the gamble would pay off in a big way. But the success of Primal Kitchen was built on the trials and errors of Mark's previous ventures. He ran a painting business, a frozen yogurt shop, was a personal trainer, sold supplements, hosted a failed TV talk show, and then, in his early 50s, Mark adopted a new diet. Grain-free, dairy-free, mostly meat and vegetables, known as the paleo diet.

He started blogging about it, and eventually, his blog became popular among people who were interested in paleo diets. The community, Mark cultivated through that blog, would become the readers of his books, including the Primal Blueprint, and eventually, they become the first customers of his paleo-friendly Manatees. Mark was born in the early 1950s, and he grew up in a small fishing village on the coast of Maine. By the time he got to high school, he was a standout track athlete, and he got the opportunity to attend a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire, where, at first, Mark struggled to fit in.

But that all changed one summer when he signed up for an outward bound course. I guess you would describe it as a survival course. It was a 28-day adventure that was really rigorous. There was a four-day solo where he spent four days alone on an island with minimal gear.

You were put in a boat with 12 other people that you'd never met before, and tasked with navigating that boat. This sounds like a West Anderson, but this sounds like a moonrise kingdom. It was a seminal moment for me. That summer transformed me.

It was amazing. I came back from that experience, really, I would say, a changed man. I excelled at some of the tasks that they gave us on the island. Every year, there's a seven-mile marathon, they call it, around the island.

It was all on the rockbound coast of Maine, so it was really a very rocky, seven-mile track. I won that event and set a record that stood for a number of years after that. When I got back to Exeter for my senior year, my grades picked up. I was captain of the track and the cross-country teams, and really came into myself and came into my confidence, not just as a person, but also as a runner.

That confidence carried through a bunch of Williams College. I spent four years at Williams. You were an elite runner while you were there. I think at a certain point, you qualified for the 1980 Olympic trials.

Not that long, I have to graduate. From what I've read, when you were at Williams, you weren't super focused on becoming a professional athlete. You had this whole other career that you thought you might go into. I did.

What happened was I had been a pre-med candidate at Williams. I got a bachelor's degree in biology. I was on a pre-med track until my senior year. I put myself through Williams as a painting contractor.

In summers, I would paint houses and make enough money to pay for my tuition and room and board. What you could do back in the 70s, unfortunately, today, you can't because of the inflation cost of college, but you could do that in the 70s. Absolutely. It's incredible.

At any rate, I had transformed my dorm room, which is basically a cement box, into an elite bachelor pad. I had built a box within a box to remodel my dorm room with maple wood paneling and walled with carboning. Wow. I built my own furniture.

On an alumni weekend, the occupant of the room the years prior came back to look at his dorm room and looked at my, when I'd done to the place and said, oh my goodness, what is this about? I said, well, it's just what I do. I'm pretty handy and I'm a contractor and I largely focus on painting. He said, what's your major?

I said, well, I'm pretty mad. He said, why are you going to do that? Why don't you do this? Well, at that point, I shifted my focus and said, all right, I'll take a couple of years off.

This running thing is going quite well. I'll take a couple of years off. Then I'll reconsider med school. So I graduated in 75.

I stayed in Williamstown. I built up a painting contract in business that was quite lucrative, which allowed me to travel around the world racing. And I wasn't really, I didn't have this strong feeling that I was going to be one of the top three to go to the Olympic Games. But I had enough success that I thought, okay, if I continue on this track, I'm certainly qualified for the trials and who knows, you know, maybe I'll have a good day.

By the way, what's the fastest you've ever ran a marathon in? So in the US National Championships in 1980, I ran 2.16, 37. Two hours, 16 minutes, 37 seconds. Wow.

So you tried out, I mean, you qualified for the Olympic trials for the 1980 US team. Did you make the team? No, in fact, a couple of things happened. First of all, the training was, and this is what literally created a new career path for me.

I got so injured from both the amount of training, the amount of miles I was doing and the diet that was required. You were like 28, 29 years old at this point, which is sort of like when you were really starting to hit your stride as a marathon runner. Right, exactly. And, you know, most days it was, you know, all about carbohydrate loading and you carb loaded every single day.

Possed dinners and anything goes. By the way, the furnace will burn anything. So it was a lot of beer, a lot of bread, a lot of pasta. You were running, you were probably running 10 to 15 miles or more a day.

I was averaging 100 miles a week for several years. Yeah. It can't be good for you. No, no, no, it's not.

I am here to tell you, it's not good for you. Right. It is something that humans can do, but it's not good for us. I want to just zoom in for a quick moment and ask you about this because from what I read about you, when you were training, and one of the reasons why you stopped training, and this is a lot of people will find this surprising is that you actually, your health was in like free fall.

Like you were, you were doing so much cardiovascular exercise that you had like, I mean, I'll let you describe it, but I read things like 10 to 9 is arthritis. Okay. But like irritable bowel syndrome, like you couldn't control your bowels at certain times. Like, it reflects like, you know, I was a wreck.

I mean, you know, I sort of roll my eyes. I was on the cover of Runners World magazine three times as exemplary of a really fit runner. Yeah. And yet I was falling apart on the inside.

And as you said, I had, I was developing arthritis in my feet. And that was in my twenties. Yeah. And that was partly from my diet, partly from these overly cushioned shoes, which we'll get into later.

And I had 10 and I just in my hip irritable bowel syndrome that dictated pretty much my every move throughout the day. I literally had to figure out where the nearest bathroom was just in case. Yeah. I woke up every morning with severe gut pain.

Now I find out later on that was entirely a result of my diet and my dietary choices. But those choices were contemplated to give me enough calories and enough carbohydrates to be able to run the distances that I felt I needed to run to be competitive. So you were, I mean, you were obviously an elite runner, but not, I mean, elite elite elite. There's elite and then there's the people who make the Olympic team.

And of course, 1980, there was a boycott, you was boycott of the Moscow Olympics. So you would not have gone to the Olympics anyway. But it sounded like that kind of you're 28 and you're kind of broken at this point. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. So in 1980, I was actually 27 and for a while, I was quite down on myself because one of the things that happens as an endurance athlete is you sort of build up this tolerance to pain and discomfort.

Yeah. And then you almost require it on a daily basis. And people talk about the runners high. They talk about the endorphins and the addiction and all that is true.

But I don't know. It's in a, they also call it a good addiction. I'm not sure. It's a good addiction.

And by the way, were you living on the in the in main at the time? Sorry. By then I lived in Williamstown through 1978, 78. I packed up everything and I drove across the country to Palo Alto and Menlo Park in that area of Northern California.

Because you can run you around. Absolutely. So I had this, I was jonesing for exertion. Some form of activity.

So I started riding a bike. And as I was riding more and more miles, I met a guy and friend I'd known from across town who said, Hey, man, I'm training for this thing over in Hawaii. It's called the Iron Man. You should join me.

And I'm like, you're crazy. I have no inclination. There's nothing in my constitution that would suggest that that would be fun. And after a couple of rides with him, he kind of convinced me that this would be at least a worthy pursuit.

So I signed up for the 1981 Iron Man, which was the first year they had it in Kona. I finished like 21st or something like that. It wasn't, it wasn't bad at all. It was bad.

It was horrible, but it was, it was not a bad first time finish. By the way, that was my first triathlon ever. I never entered a triathlon prior to that. And I didn't know how to swim.

So I had to teach myself how to swim. It's interesting because you had, you just talked about how your body was broken because you were running 100 miles a week. And now you're talking about doing Iron Man. Like I'm thinking you're about to say, and then I just gave all that up and I stopped doing that.

But you jumped into another. Yeah. Even like, yeah. Well, all of this informs the next 40 years of my life because there was a point at which after I finished 4th at the Iron Man in 1982, that's when I just realized, you know what, I think it's out of my system.

I don't need to compete anymore. And I, because I'd been a business person most of my life, I had a blonde, my business when I was 12. And then I would start painting houses when I was 14. So I needed to make a living.

Because you weren't making, you weren't making money doing that. This is before you could make, I mean, now the sponsorships and things like that. Right. But so you were, I mean, you're 30 around this time when you, when you placed 4th at the 82 Iron Man.

But I guess around that time, I read that you had started like a frozen yogurt shop in Palo Alto. That's right. So this was February of 1982. So a few months later, a friend of mine, a classmate of mine from Williams who'd come to Northern California under the Merrill Lynch Stock Brokerage Training Program had seen how much money I was making as a painting contractor and decided to become a painter.

You were painting houses in Palo Alto? Yes. And you could just make a ton of cash just doing basic, you maybe hire one or two people and that was it. That was it?

Yeah. After I retired after that 82 Iron Man, I said, you know what, I'm going to treat this more like a business. So my friend and I had started, because he saw how much money there was to be made in this painting contract. So we started a company called Marathon Painters of all things.

In Palo Alto. In Palo Alto Bay. Yeah. Correct.

And we did reasonably well, but we were kind of itching to get into other stuff. And we were both entrepreneurial. And so we saw this emerging market of frozen yogurt shops. Yes.

The 80s frozen yogurt and California or some California's penguins. I don't know if they had them up there. Yes. It was exploding.

Frozen yogurt. TCBY. It was going to be happy. Yeah.

Right. So we opened a frozen yogurt shop in Palo Alto. How did you guys get the cash to do it? Was it not that expensive or?

No, it was relatively expensive. We put $40,000 on about 10 credit cards. And you had some cash from the painting business presumably? Yes, we did.

But we were also reinvesting into the painting business. And I have to tell you that one of the things that happens when, especially in that business and painting, I made so much money as a sole proprietor as an individual when I was doing work myself. When we started running two vans and nine employees and had to find work all the time to keep them busy and employed, profit margins dropped. Of course.

So you guys decided to go into the frozen yogurt business because you see this frozen yogurt boom let beginning happen in America. This is 82ish around 82. Yes. Okay.

So we opened in early 83, I think. And it was a great success. We probably netted $175,000 on that 550 square foot location the first year in profit. Wow.

That's amazing. That's a lot of money in 1982. No, it was incredible. What was a frozen yogurt place called?

Cool licks. Cool licks with a C or with a C. Cool licks. All right.

It was great. And he's good name. Yep. And so you were crushing it with.

So now the obvious next step in the playbook is let's go to the let's build another frozen yogurt shop. Right. Right. Exactly.

Okay. However, my partner had a girlfriend who lived in San Diego and he would go down and visit her every other weekend. And there was a place emerging in San Diego called soup plantation. Do you remember that?

I do. Yeah. I do. Yeah.

I went bankrupt a couple years ago. It was awesome. Get soup salad. Yeah.

So we thought, okay, if frozen yogurt is good. What if we had frozen yogurt, a 60 foot long salad bar muffins because brand muffins were the big thing? Yeah. Fresh baked cookies because Mrs.

Fields was just coming on the scene. Taking this is the I keep going. I love it. I want.

Yeah. Yeah. I put it all into one, you know, under one roof. And so we secured a location about a mile and a half down the road from Apple computer.

We built this 60 foot long salad bar that was refrigerated from underneath. We put in, you know, eight frozen yogurt machines. We put in a soup bar. We hired one of Mrs.

Fields top managers to oversee the cookie and the muffin operation. But it was 1983 and 84. Yeah. And to open the place, we had to borrow money.

And we were thrilled to get a loan rate of 17 and 3 quarters percent. 17 people are complaining about six, 7% home loans today. Yeah. 83, you got a 17% interest rate to borrow money for a business.

And that was normal. And nobody that was just like that. That was what it was. In fact, it was 18 and a half.

So we were thrilled to get it down to 17 and 3 quarters. Which meant that we had to make like 15,000 lower month profit out of the gate. Just to pay the service to debt. Just to service the debt.

And a bad series of events, if you will. While we were building out the location, the landlord put a gym next door that offered aerobics classes at noon. And so all the parking spaces would fill up. And so when people left Apple computer or any other business to come have lunch, they drive through the lot and they're all the space to be taken.

So they just go on to the next location. So we got kind of nailed by the parking problem. We got hammered by the loan. And so after about a year and a half of struggling to make that place work, my partner and I came to an agreement that we would part ways and that he would take over the restaurant.

I was happy to give it to him. And he would get the referral shop, which was still very profitable and the restaurant and the painting company. And I was happy to start over again. So I guess by this point, you're in the early 30s and you've done a bunch of different things.

But I read that after the failure of the restaurant, I guess you moved to Southern California to LA to kind of reboot your car. And I think you went into personal training, right? Yeah. So as I was living in Southern California, I started becoming a personal trainer and I found I could make a lot of money teaching other people or training other people as a personal trainer, how to train.

A lot of people were trying to train for triathlon in those days. So my credit there was such that I got a lot of clients. Yeah. And eventually that I parlayed that into becoming the coach of a professional triathlon team.

By this time triathlon was professional, you could actually make money. There was prize money. So I coached a professional team. And at some point in 1988, I got called out by a friend who was on the board of directors of the United States.

triathlon Federation. And I was asked to participate in the creation of a drug testing document for the sport that prevented athletes from taking advantage of performance enhancing drugs. So I got, I was on this committee. I was also asked to go to be the one to present the completed rules to the board of directors of the Federation.

And a few weeks later, I was asked, would I be willing to come to Colorado Springs and take over the running of the Federation? Wow. And I did. And so that's the next chapter in my life.

So your job basically in the late 80s and into the early 90s and Colorado Springs, you went to go work for the triathlon Federation. This was your, that was your employer. Correct. But I guess at a certain point, it's around sort of mid 90s, you decided that you wanted to start a kind of a side business selling supplements.

Tell me about how that came about. So I was executive director of the US Federation from 89 through the end of 91. I had asked my girlfriend to move to Colorado Springs with me. And her response was, okay, I'll do it if we get married.

So we got married in Colorado Springs and we had our first child. So I have to tell your wife today, I should say. My wife today. Same wife.

And, but after a couple of years there, felt like my work had been done and my wife hated Colorado Springs. She was an LA girl. So we came back to LA and I took a job as the chief operating officer of a supplement company. And because of my early investigations into the anti-doping movement and knowing a lot about the difference between steroids and pre hormones and pro hormones and caffeine and ergogenic aids and blood, you know, I had a pretty deep knowledge of what was appropriate and what was not in terms of at least the rules governing sport.

I wound up working for this company for five years. That was making that was making supplements, making supplements and all over the place from multi vitamin, multi mineral, antioxidant supplements. We were some of the first people to make a carbohydrate powder that you put into a bike water bottle. By the way, what was the name of the company?

It was called the winning combination, TWC doesn't exist anymore. But my friend is very good friend of mine who started it and ran it became one of the top vitamin guys in the world. But I left after five years. I didn't have any equity in the company and there was none on the horizon.

And so I decided at that point that I knew enough about supplementation. I knew enough about training. I knew enough about performance that I would start my own company. And so I left in 97 to start primal nutrition, a company that initially I looked at making preparations that athletes could take as opposed to resorting to banned substances.

All right. So this is 1997. I mean, you were like in your 40s at this time. I was 43.

I was 43 or even in 40s. I should say, yes. I left my well-paying job, but I had no money in the bank. I had no money saved up.

I didn't have a retirement program. And I had at that time I had a wife and two children. So that was the first dangerous step I took as an entrepreneur that had consequences if I failed. Yeah.

Borrowed some money from my mother's husband and then set off on creating this company to sell these sorts of formulations to athletes. And it was called a primal nutrition. And tell me like who was your target audience? Was it triathletes?

Was it athletes or was it like Jim Rhett? Yes. No. So it was initially it was my peeps, a triathletes or runners.

And I quickly found out that those guys and girls don't like to buy product. They all want to be sponsors. So I wasn't selling much in the way of these products. And they were multi vitamins and...

Yeah, they were just formulations that were specific to maybe recovery or focus, mental focus, right. You know, sleep. And was it relatively easy to find? Is it like cosmetics?

You know where you could find a manufacturer that works with a hundred companies and you basically tell them what you want in your capsules? Exactly. Yeah. Right.

So, but that's how do I get you a product? Now you have to sell it. Yeah, you have to sell it, right? And it turns out you actually figured a pretty lucrative way to sell it.

And I guess you started to become a guest on like a Christian TV show, like a health and fitness show that was on a Christian cable network? Yes, yes. I met somebody who had a TV show on a cobbled together network of faith and family religious type programming called FamilyNet. His show was called Know the Cause.

So I went on his show one day and we talked about all the things I know about training for the average person and all of these things that resonated with his audience who were, you know, they were... They used to use the term anti-aging back in those days. They were sort of leaning toward that anti-aging concept. And I sold like $20,000 for the product at the end of the show.

And what it was, in those days, again, this is 99, it was an 800 number that you had to call. Operators are waiting. They're standing by for your call. Classic, you know, infomercial type pitch.

And by the way, do you have a sense of how big the audience was? You know, I do. It was probably on any given day, there were probably 40 or 45,000 people watching. So you saw the success of being on that show once and you were like, I got to figure, I got to go back on this thing.

And this guy, the host of the show, his name is Doug Kaufman, he was paying for his time to do the show. And so I became one of probably on any given month five sponsors, five guests. We would sponsor the whole episode and then you'd be the guest. Yeah.

So I was paying maybe 20 or $30,000 a month to start with and it escalated up to $60,000 and $70,000 a month. But it was paying off in spades. I mean, it was incredible. And I would have to fly from Los Angeles to Dallas and then drive the Fort Worth to the studios.

And I did this every two weeks for almost 10 years. Wow. But it worked so well. And every time I get home, I actually finish the show and I call my call center and I get an indication of how many calls we got and it was really quite exciting.

So I grew like five, six percent a month, you know, for a couple of years. It just had a curiosity. How big, I mean, how much were you doing a year in sales? I get to the point where I was doing between seven and nine million a year in sales.

Wow. So that was a pretty successful. Yeah. And you probably did not have a big team.

It was like your painting business, right? Exactly. I operated out of my house and we picked and packed out of the garage for a lot of this. And how many employees did you have at its peak?

I mean, seven to nine million in sales. How many people did you need to run the business? What I had was seven. Wow.

What an efficient business. Yeah. And it didn't even get up to seven until later on when we had a pivot on the marketing side of things. So what happened was in the early 2000s as the internet was becoming a thing, the number of channels on television exploded with cable TV cable in addition to direct this idea that 40,000 or 50,000 eyeballs, people were watching you every day on a show kind of that receded into the past.

Because there were so many more options that there was this disaggregation, a few eyeballs on one show essentially. At point one and point two is I think there was some exhaustion on the number of infomercials on TV. Look in the late 80s, all the way through the 90s, infomercials were cool. Man, oh, look at this.

This is new gadget on me. Let's watch for 30 minutes. Now, by then, by the early 2000s, because of all these cable channels, there would be 10 infomercials on at the same time. You literally had channels that were just infomercials.

Yes. And you started to see your business decline, the revenue decline. The first thing I did was I said, I'm pretty good at this content thing. I'm going to do my own TV show.

So I spent a year, 2005, writing, producing, starring in along with a guest host. I shot 50 half-hour episodes of a health talk show called Responsible Health. Wait, hold on. Let me just, so you decided to make a show, a half-hour show.

And the idea was, hey, I want to build my brand out as Mark Siss and I want to be more known to a broader audience of people. And I'll do this TV show. Is that the idea? Part of it was just I thought I could recapture this same concept that I'd done with Doug Kaufman for the prior bunch of years.

And so I poured well over a million dollars into this. I had guests on every time. So I would have a guest on my show, you know, physicians, anti-aging people, authors of books. And you would advertise your supplements.

And I was the advertiser. Right. Now, understand that once you produce these shows, you have to air them. Yeah.

So I bought time on Travel Channel. So for several months, I was on at 8.30 in the morning on Travel Channel in 95 million homes. Wow. But here's where we have to look at the business model and you go, wow, 95 million homes.

That's awesome. But if you think about what's going on in television at 8.30 in the morning, and this is like 2005-2006, right? 2005. Okay.

First of all, 80% of people are not watching TV. So that leaves 20% of people that are even able to watch TV. Yeah. Of those 20% are watching ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox.

Okay. Yeah. By the time you get to Travel Channel, I guarantee you, they were not 1400 people watching. Wow.

Wow. So a couple of months in, I'm like, I'm losing my ass. I thought it would work. Pretty much gone through all of my...

Oh. ...savings at that time. And you weren't selling products? The ads weren't working?

No, the ads weren't working. It was one of the most stressful years of my life because of the amount of time it took to write, produce, and shoot these shows. Yeah. And I had to take a step back and say at some point I got to pull the plug, otherwise I'm taking my family down with me.

When we come back in, just a moment, Mark starts to build a new audience around the Paleo diet. First with a blog, then with a book, and then with a new recipe for mail. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Build This.

Hey, welcome back to How I Build This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2006, and Mark's Health and Fitness Show on cable TV is not panning out. And at this point, he's used up most of his savings, and he needs a new plan.

So what happened was I took a step back and I'm like, I'm good at creating content. I think I will start a blog. And I will write about something every day for a year. And by the end of the year, I will have written about everything I need to write about, and that will be the end of it.

And you would sell, you would link to your products. And that would be the platform that I would link to my products. Yeah. And so were you, I mean, presumably when you started the blog, you had no readers, right?

Zero. Zero. And so were you still advertising on TV to get? No.

You were just, you were focused, or you were depending on repeat customer's supplements at this point. Exactly. Yeah. All right.

So you had the blog. The idea was the blog is going to replace that audience I had on television, right? I mean, you're going to build that audience there. So you're writing something every single day.

And after a year of doing this, how big did it get? So the first year, I think it was like 1200 a day. By year two, it was three to 4,000 a day. And were you discouraged?

Yeah, because I thought from day one, I thought, oh, you know, within a couple of months, I'll have 100,000 readers a day. And so far as your past anything I did on television. But I started writing about the Paleo diet, and I called my own particular version of Primal Blueprint. But I was writing about the Paleo diet as one of the first guys to do that.

And there have been a book written a few years earlier by Lauren Cordane called the Paleo diet. But I was really starting to write about the lifestyle. And apparently I wrote enough compelling content that people started saying, look, man, you should write a book about this. This is, you know, like, I love your blog post, but I don't want to have to go back and read every single one.

Can you put it all in a book form? Well, just tell me about the Paleo diet for a moment. I know it. I've been on it myself.

But how did you get into, like, I need to change my diet and I want to try this? So after my 2005 experience with producing the TV show and being under a credible amount of stress and having horrible gastric issues, IBS, which I've been with me since I was 14, but now I'm 47 and it's even getting worse, or whatever age I was. I was writing a lot about grains, and I started to think maybe grains are kind of not good for your health. Maybe humans are not evolved to handle the type of protein that are in grains, the gluten, the glides, the designs, all of these proteins that are in corn and wheat, so on.

So my wife, just one day, she's like, Mark, you're writing about all this stuff about how bad grains are. Why don't you just do third days of not being on grains? And I did, and it transformed my life. My IBS went away, my gas-rose-oxygenal reflux went away, and it was like a light bulb went on.

All right, I'm going to put a caveat here because we have had founders of Paleo and, you know, oriented companies in the show with similar stories. I have similar stories. I don't eat grains. Okay, I can't eat a KGL cheat.

I'll have a cookie, and that's a different episode of the podcast. And I'm a big believer in this diet, but in no way do I want to say this is going to work for everybody or it's the end. I'll be like, I think there are lots of people who believe in whole grains, and that's fine. And I mean, and I think you'd agree with me like, do your thing.

But for you, this was transformational. It does really, you do see massive positive benefits in your life. Absolutely. So that led to my creating a life way, a template for living that included dietary implications, but also addressed sleep and sun exposure and movement and play and using your brain.

So I decided to write a book which I called the Primal Blueprints, and that came out in 2009 and was an immediate big seller. I couldn't find a publisher for it, so I self-published it. And by that point, how many subscribers to your blog did you have? So by then, I was up to probably 20,000 regular to 30,000 regular readers a day and maybe a million to two million uniques a month.

Wow. And people finding it by doing Google searches on paleo or... Yes. Okay, so because this was really when it started to take off that whole paleo.

And I think 2013 I read that paleo was the most searched food term on Google that year. And you were, I'm curious, Mark, because obviously you're a very intelligent guy. You're an elite athlete. You're in a supplements business.

You studied biology. So you have some background, but at the same time, like, you're not a board certified physician. You don't have to be. There's lots of people who know a lot about nutrition.

You aren't. But how did you come up with your theories or your ideas? Were you doing research or was it just based on your own experience with your own body? Oh, I did a lot of research, not just the studies, but also the evaluations of the studies over the years.

So I did have a background in biology. I had a sort of a secondary major in evolutionary biology. So I'm certain that today we're walking around with a genetic recipe that was crafted over two and a half million years of human evolution, that our genes expect us to do certain things. They expect us to go to sleep when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun comes up.

They expect us to lift heavy things once in a while. They expect us to move around all day long and not sit in the sofa. They expect us to not eat three meals a day, but in fact, it's theoretically, you know, and all of these things that we've sort of created a society around, a civil society around, that is thwarting our genetic predisposition to be healthy and strong and lean and fit and all of the things that we want. I mean, basically, right?

I mean, the key to living a healthy life is exercise every day, eat mostly, you know, whole foods, ideally vegetables, lean meats, fish, and get good sleep and have some friends, right? Like if you do those things, you're pretty much it. That's pretty much it. And so what you're talking about are sort of like minor modifications of those basic principles.

Exactly. So the book got out there and I started writing more books. I became my own self-publisher. I started publishing a house that generated some income.

We did, you know, we had two million a year in sales in books. So you were basically becoming this kind of this guy who's known as a paleo guy. That was branding. But I was still kind of disappointed with the effect that this blog, which had now half a million subscribers to a newsletter and it wasn't selling supplements the way I had anticipated.

Given the size of the audience. Given the size of the audience. And so really this realization that for the last six years, I've been writing about food a lot and how so much of our good health depends on natural foods that are consistent with evolutionary behavior. And it just occurred to me that I should be selling food because I'm writing so much about it.

And I was telling people eat a great diet and you don't need supplements by that much. And oh, by the way, here's my supplements. So if you eliminate sugars from your diet and sweetened beverages and you eliminate refined grains, you eliminate industrial seed oils. You know, the insidious oils that we find everywhere.

So I've been in Canola. You come down to a pretty short list of foods that you can actually depend on eating meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, maybe some starchy tubers once in a while. It could be a boring menu, but for the myriad, almost infinite number of ways that you can prepare these. It's the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, the herbs, the spices.

And I noticed in the grocery store, you could not find sauces and dressings. You pick up a germane, it's got canola, it's got safflars, it's got soybean oil in it. And so people would say, in the health food industry would say, this is the mayonnaise, it tastes great, but use it sparingly because it's not good for you. And that got me started down this path of creating a food company that would ultimately, I think, revolutionize how big food looks at what they're doing.

So this is like 2014, you decide to start to work on this project. And you're in your 60s. I mean, this is not like you've been down this path before, but you could see the opportunity. So let me first start, just kind of break this down.

Did you kind of wind down the supplement business or did you keep that going? Just as a hedge? Okay. I kept it going.

In fact, it funded the startup, if you will, of the food company. Because you didn't start a separate company, right? This was like a subsidiary. Right.

Right. And that was a critical decision I made early on that I, while I wanted to start a sauces company addressing a continent company, I didn't want to start a new company for a couple of reasons, one of which was within my existing business, I already had a warehouse. I had fulfillment. I had credit card processing, so I could sell directly to the consumer.

So I had all of these, this infrastructure in place. And also I didn't want to take a dollar out of my supplement company and then pay 37% to the federal government and 13% to the state of California. Yeah. And then take the remaining 47 cents and start a new company with it.

So it was very beneficial for me to develop the product line within the existing company using what I would call pre-tax dollars. So, and you had a name, you already had a company called Primal Nutrition, selling supplements. So you basically were able to, with the existing supplements company kind of create the sort of other product line essentially. Which is going to be condiment.

So I have, I mean initially, I guess you could, you could be self-funded. You didn't have to find outside funding. Yeah. And don't get me wrong, I was still, I was still making two, two and a half million dollars a year on the supplement business.

But I was taking the money that I would have put in my own pocket and just using it to finance this new product line, which I hope would become its own company. But I didn't know. I mean, it was early days. It was an experiment.

On the other hand, if I'd started a new company, I probably would have gone out and raised money from outside sources. I would have given up more equity than I would wanted to have given up. All right. So I want to get back to the period of time before you had a product, right?

Because you had been doing recipes on your blog and you knew how to cook. Yes. But you also were trying to figure out, because I think you wanted to make a bunch of different products, right, from the get-go. So who did you bring on to help you do this?

Like, did you find a chef? Did you find, like, well, how did you even start? So in 2000, early 2014, I had a friend in San Diego who was a paleo chef. He was known as a paleo chef.

And so I brought him on as an R&D consultant, and I hired his wife to manage the business for the year with the intent of arriving at a suite of products. I wanted a couple of salad dressings. I wanted a mayonnaise. I wanted a ketchup.

I wanted a barbecue sauce. And I wanted to enter the marketplace with a suite of products. So I actually not only hired them. I gave them a tiny piece of equity.

And at the same time, I went out and I found a person who had been in the marketing department of a sparkling probiotics company called Kavita. I hired her on an hourly basis, very part-time. This is Morgan Bueller. This is Morgan Bueller.

I hired her on a part-time basis. To be my marketing consultant as we prepared to be ready by the end of 2014 to launch this suite of products. Well, the year flew by quickly and we had really nothing to show for except a mayonnaise. Just a mayonnaise.

And at that point, we agreed to part ways. And I actually bought their equity back from them and everybody was happy and friendly. But here I am a year into this. That's just you and Morgan.

And at that point, Morgan was still part-time. And I looked at Morgan and I said, look, we're going to do this. I'm hiring you full-time. It's you and me.

We're going to take this one mayonnaise and these two salad dressings that are halfway there. And we're going to end of the marketplace. And we're going to just see what happens. You said, hey, we're selling mayonnaise.

Yep. And but it's this new thing. It's mayonnaise. It's good for you.

It's based on avocado oil as the healthiest fat that's out there. It tastes great. Because you have to understand in the paleo world mayonnaise, people love mayonnaise. I didn't realize this.

I know. I love mayonnaise. I didn't realize this. But when I entered the space, I didn't know anything about food.

And so I always assumed ketchup was the huge market and mayonnaise was second. Mayonnaise is twice the market that ketchup is. So the first product that we were able to commercially make was an avocado oil based mayonnaise. And I said, let's make a mayonnaise that is demonstrably the best in its category using the best possible ingredients.

Let's build it first and price it later. In other words, whatever it takes to make it, let's see what those costs come out at. And then let's price it at retail, according to a formula that would give us a reasonable margin. And so I entered the marketplace at 9.95 retail for 12-ounce jar mayonnaise.

Like who's going to buy a jar mayonnaise for that price when you can get it for $295 or $395 for a regular jar mayonnaise. Well, that was a bad I was willing to take. In fact, I went to my coat packer on that first batch that we made. And I said, I asked, what's the smallest batch that we can make?

It only has a one-year shelf life. I don't want it on my shelves for over a year. And he said, well, we can make 12,000 jars. And I really took a step back and I'm like, wow, 12,000 jars?

That's the least we can make? So we made the 12,000 jar run and we sold out in two weeks. How? I mean, what happened?

How did that happen? What happened was people in the paleo community who wanted to eat a variety of foods had long since taken tuna salad, chicken salad, potato salad off their menu. They're like, we eat this egg salad. We can't have it because it requires mayonnaise and mayonnaise is bad for you.

And now here we are bringing on this product. It's now going to open up their menu to include all of these plus, plus, plus everything else that you put mayonnaise on. So coincidentally, I had been an early investor in Thrive Market, which build itself as Costco meets Whole Foods Online, a membership organization where you could go get all the things you could find at Whole Foods, but at Costco prices, but not at Costco quantity. So you signed up to become a member and we coordinated efforts to where I would assign them as the first one.

So you can find them as the only place online that you can get Primal Kitchen mayonnaise. So in that first year, the two of us sold just an incredible amount of mayonnaise direct to consumer. So first through the blog and then through Thrive Market. Well, online.

Just online. Because very early days we approached Whole Foods and we went to the buyers at the Rocky Mountain Region, which had 33 stores. Talk to the buyer and his name is David Wood's great friend and tell him the story and normally it takes about 18 months for a new product to get into Whole Foods. But David Wood's a big CrossFit guy and he was all about Paleo, all about Primal.

And so Thrive said, this is incredible. This is what we've been looking for. We will build UN cap in every one of our stores. So very quickly we got into those 33 stores and then mixing it over in an equal number of stores in the Pacific Northwest.

And so they now, because we're doing so well at all of these Whole Foods, the rest of the Whole Foods buyers, they all got on board. That was in year one. That was in year one. How did you find the copacker to do this?

And was it a local place in Southern California? I mean, because it's not that complicated, right? You find a place that can make the managed your recipe and then put it in the jar and seal it up. Yes, it's not that complicated.

On the other hand, if you're a startup and your co-manufacturer is doing $20 million a year with this company and $50 million a year with that company. And you come in and say, I think we can do 100,000 jars this year for Lucky. It's tough to get in the door with some of these operations. And especially the ones that are going to be able to make your product consistently.

I mean, that's a huge thing. There are lots of copackers in food that have issues. And you want, you know, you're dealing with food. It's a very sensitive area.

You want to be able to rely on the safety and the procedures and everything that you put in place. Yeah. But it's a good thing to point out because we almost went out of business. And the reason was we'd had, I think, two or three big runs of mayonnaise that we'd sold out of.

And we were getting ready to do another one. It might have been the third or fourth run. We'd had great success with manufacturing the mayonnaise with our copacker. And we find out one day that they can't ship the latest batch because it failed.

Well, what do you mean it failed? Well, it didn't turn into mayonnaise. It just turned into oil and goo. And that was, I think, at the time, probably $7,000 worth of ingredients that literally went down the drain.

Okay, let's try again. And so we, because we're a small player with a large copacker, it's not like you can dry again tomorrow. It's like maybe we could find time on the line in three weeks. Okay, let's find time.

Let's do it again. So three weeks comes. We get the news. It broke again.