YouSaid · the spoken record

Krishna Kaliannan

lines on the record: 88
first: 2026-07-06
most recent: 2026-07-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Mentors and advisors along the way, you know, and then just having a family, a wife that are kind of like a rock and that have helped me see it through to the end and not go crazy. You know, again, it's all luck. It's all being in the right place at the right time.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man. I think it's a lot of both. I talk to a lot of other people that have started successful businesses. There's no school or course or training that you can go through to basically prepare yourself to quote be an entrepreneur. You just have to do and then learn and do and learn and do and learn. You know, it's funny I was reflecting the name of your podcast is how I built this, but it's really how we built this. And it's not just me, but it's the retailers that support us, right? That enable us to get our products out to consumers. It's the ingredient vendors. It's the early investors, as well as other investors that have given us the money that's enabled us to get the equipment. And, you know, now we have 125,000 square foot facility in Indiana, much bigger, does much more volume. Again, have had some great.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about the journey you took and all the failed businesses that you started and then this thing, which is complete left turn, and then it really grows really fast. And it's, I think, you guys are doing more than $100 million in sales, maybe even higher than that. How much of your... Of where you got to now and the success of this product and brand do you attribute to the work and the grind you put in and how much you think had to do with luck?”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what it's freed up me to do really is one, focus on nutrition, basically nailing protein fiber and sugar. That's like the biggest three things you can do, right? I think people should be eating more protein and more fiber. I think very few people eat enough fiber. Fiber and protein actually work synergistically to help you feel full and stay feeling full throughout the day. So if you ask me, what do I think is coming next and how can people kind of make a step change improvement in their eating? It's not just protein, it's protein and fiber.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when I started the company, I was taking the cereal I was making, mixing it with almond milk, and then eating it out of a bowl for breakfast. Going back to talking to consumers to understand why they love and are buying what you're selling, I realized that a lot of them were actually snacking on our cereal rather than eating it as breakfast cereal. And then I see people riding into us writing letters saying, hey, look at what ChexMix is doing. We'd love for you to make a snack mix. And I realized, okay, we can take our same cereal squares, mix some cashews and almonds in with them, and then we can toss that in a, you know, call it a Parmesan garlic seasoning. And that's a snack”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So cereal was, I mean, it was your sort of main product, right? But I think pretty quickly, within two years, launch in Whole Foods 2020, roughly, right? Think the next year you expand out, so snack mixes and cookie bars and cookies. We can be a snack company”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One, you try to find new suppliers from new regions, right? Like, yes, the dominant supplier of sunflower seeds is Ukraine and Russia, but that doesn't mean that literally 100% of the ingredients are from there. And then two, you try to make changes to your recipe when you can, right? So we had, due to the tariffs on China, the price of monk fruit went way, way, way up. It was like an extra 85,000 dollars a pallet for us to buy monk fruit. It was a crazy increase And so, yeah, we're now working on like okay, how can we make the cereal taste sweet but use a little bit less monk fruit? So there's no one solution. It depends on the situation, but you're trying to pull those levers to keep your costs in check.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing that I feel proud of is we have worked hard to work around those spikes to avoid having to increase the price of our cereal. So, you know, a lot of people complain about shrinkflation. So another thing you can do is you can say, all right, the price of this has gone way up. Let's reduce the amount that's in the bag. We have never reduced the amount of cereal that's in our like, say, pouch of cinnamon toast cereal is nine ounces today. It was nine ounces when we started the company.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's been a really big challenge. Not going to lie. The prices of these, you know, commodities, as they call them, right? You can go online and look at the price of sunflower oil and see a graph of it over time on Google Images. And you'll see that when the when Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of sunflower oil skyrocketed because I believe Ukraine and Russia are two of the largest growers of sunflower seeds. So yeah, you occasionally have these major spikes in prices, which can threaten basically your whole business model.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things that is challenging, right, especially with the food business, is the fluctuation of prices like cocoa and different ingredients that are affected by the Ukraine war affected sunflower oil. The price of cocoa is skyrocketed, I think, in recent years. How do you manage those fluctuations? But you've got to sell the cereal for the same price.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think within six months, we became one of the top selling cereals at Whole Foods. If not the top selling cereal at Whole Foods. And the reason that happened is, I think, a couplefold. In 2019 or so, keto became very popular. Great buyer there at Whole Foods. She was very excited about what we were doing. And she said, hey, we want to take your cereal, but we want you to change the packaging so that rather than saying low sugar in big letters, it's going to say keto-friendly in big letters. So I then made that change. We'd been selling direct to consumer for close to two years or so at that point. And so we had a lot of people that knew us. But again, because of the cost of shipping online, we were selling four packs to people online and it was relatively expensive. It was like $49 for four pouches or something like that.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We went into Whole Foods first. Whole Foods had actually just moved from region by region buying to what they call global buying, which was basically one person that buys cereal for the whole country and puts it into every store. And so in 2020, in January, I believe, we got the cereal on shelf at All Whole Foods across the country.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So D to C was the way that I wanted to go. It was another thing that got me interested in starting the business in the first place as I was starting to see lots of stuff was being sold online. There was Dollar Shave Club as an example of a company which had kind of gone outside of the usual retail channel and had grown really quickly. I realized after some time that we weren't going to sell to the entire nation online when you're selling sunglasses is an example if it's like a hundred dollar pair of sunglasses and it costs like $7 to ship them to the consumer, you know, that works, right? But when you're selling a bag of cereal for $7 and then you're spending $7 to ship it to the consumer, that doesn't work. And so that's when I realized, okay, if we're going to get really big, we got to be in the grocery stores as well.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's crazy to say it, but social media connects a lot of people together. Also, it hired a marketer. And this guy was also obviously instrumental to helping with running ads on Instagram, running ads on Facebook, basically getting the word out.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So there's a few different ways of doing it. When I started, I was thinking about it and was like, hey, I just need something that's going to turn around and that I can put the cereal into it and it'll kind of spin around. And then I can put the cinnamon into it and then mix it all together, right? And so I actually started by buying a washing machine and just not turning the machine on and just having it spin and then having the cereal inside of the machine. And so that was the first way that I was getting the cinnamon and the chocolate onto the cereal.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Building in Indianapolis, and I basically moved into that building, bought a cot off Amazon, set it up in the office, and then I would do the cereal in the back.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought kind of like the hell with it, let's give it a try. I chose Indianapolis because it is somewhat close to the center of the country. And so from Indianapolis, you can ship both to California and to New York in one week. So I've gotten a little smarter at this point from back when I was making things in my kitchen. And I started to realize from buying ingredients, if you have your thing located in New York, you're paying a lot more to ship those ingredients, say, from Chicago to New York, right? where a lot of the ingredients come out of the heartland than to just have your place right where the ingredients are coming from. And then if you're in New York and you're shipping your finished pouches of cereal, say out to California, that can be two weeks for them to get over there on trucks. So I looked at different places. I ended up renting about a 3,000 square foot space in an office.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. I took a big risk, honestly. At least it seemed like a big risk in my mind because at this point when I couldn't find anyone else to coat and package the cereal, that was the first time that I kind of asked myself, man, should I keep doing this or should I shut this thing down? Because I had emailed a million in one food companies. A lot of people are like, you're too small. A lot of other people are like, we don't do that, or we can do this, but we can't do that. And so I was kind of thinking, all right, am I going to stop doing this or am I going to do it myself? And can I do it myself?”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was no one else I could find that was a good fit. And just to go into a little bit more detail, there's three steps here, right? There's the making of the serial squares. There's then the tossing of them in things like cinnamon, or tossing them in cocoa to give a chocolate flavor. Then there's the packaging. And so I needed a company that could toss it in the seasoning and then put it in the packaging. Many of the companies that could do that also had some other sort of manufacturing process before it, which I didn't need. And they wanted to use.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we had this company that was packaging the cereal into the stand up pouches. The owner of that company was a type 1 diabetic like I was. And so he was very passionate about kind of helping me with this. The challenge was they are a very large company. They do probably tens of millions of packages of food every day. And we are a very small company. So we weren't really a good fit from the go-ahead. And so eventually they kind of came to me and said, Hey, we're just not going to do this anymore. Your volume's not big enough. Our equipment's having problems putting the cereal into the pouches. We're done. So that was probably the first time that I was really trying to figure out what to do. And so I basically moved out to Indiana and started doing it myself.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a pouch. Yeah. Yep. And I was, you know, for better or for worse, I was insistent on the standup pouch from day one. The reason was I had spent a lot of time as a kid trying to get the bag of cereal back in the box after I'd taken it out of the box. And it got grown very frustrated with the bag in the box. Also, if you open that bag up, you then have no way to reseal it. So you now need to go find a paper clip or something else before you put it back in the box. I thought the pouch is easier to carry around. It reseals itself because it says its own zipper. To me, it's just better. So they were making the cereal and then I had a second company, which was putting it into pouches for me. And then from there, I was able to take it and ship it out to customers as they ordered it.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I went back and forth. This company's based in the Midwest. I was in New York. There were two things that were going on. One, I wanted to make sure that it tasted great and that everything went according to plan. So every time they would make Catalina Crunch cereal, I'd go there and watch them make it. Number two was they could make the cereal squares, but they could not package the cereal itself. They could only put the cereal into the bag and box model if I wanted to do that. They couldn't put the cereal into stand-up pouches.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so first investor was a good friend of mine from college. And yeah, he wrote me the first check that enabled me to do a lot of this work that I talked about in making the serial.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I then met a partner, a company that specialized in do this sort of thing. Again, they were already making crisps for the protein bar industry and working on some baby cereals and some other more organic products. And so once I was working with them, I could then make rather than making 50 pouches a day or whatever it was in the commercial kitchen, they could make 10,000 pouches in a day, right? Far, far larger quantities of it. But, you know, the thing is, when you have this big equipment, all of a sudden it costs a lot of money to do the work on it because you need to buy bigger quantities of ingredients in the whole nine yards.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, they're the experts. They're not geniuses. And experts every so often find themselves in the expert's dilemma where they have all this knowledge, but that knowledge becomes outdated over time. And so the world's moving forward. There are new ingredients, right? So you talk about it being hard, but a lot of these folks haven't tried some of these new ingredients. So yes and no on whenever someone tells me something's not possible my first question is why is it not possible and if I can't get down to the first principle's reason as to why it's not possible then I walk away believing it's possible and that we just need to do more work”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, hey, so cereal, you know, it stands for cereal grains, right? Which to your point, you know, like corn is a cereal grain. So, what I was doing with the protein powders was highly unconventional. And so what was challenging about it was everyone I talked to, no one said I was going to be able to make the cereal that I was making it in large volumes. You know, they're saying that it wasn't going to work for one reason or another.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have way puffs. They have pea protein puffs. They have many different ingredients. But those are also made on cereal making equipment. And you can think of Waypuffs if you added cocoa powder to them. You could think of them as miniature cocoa puffs made high protein. And so as the bar market was growing, demand for this same manufacturing process was growing and hence investment in it was growing.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. Yep. So you learn about that. You learn about equipment to package food products as well. And you go into any modern food facility. They don't have a bunch of people just sitting there scooping cereal and putting it into bags. They have scales and better ways of doing it, right? So I learned a lot about that. The other thing that happened in this world was bars, you know, so protein bars became more popular in an ingredient into protein bars is protein crisps.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. So in this class, they have what they call pilot-sized versions of the equipment. That the bigger companies use to make cereal. Okay So, like, one of the first things you learn, for example, is in the commercial kitchen or in your own kitchen, you're baking in batches in this standing oven, right? But in bigger food manufacturing, they actually have continuous ovens, right? So you have like a conveyor belt.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, you know, so I think the chorus to your point Texas AM has an ag school. It's a lot of companies that maybe are thinking about getting into making cereal, and so they want to send someone from their company to understand how to make cereal.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what I was making out of the commercial kitchen, again, trying to make it quickly, you're making larger batches now. And there's variability in the baking process. And I'm basically only able to make so much each day. And so I was kind of going through this in-stock, out-of-stock pattern on our website, right? where we'd sell and then I'd have more orders than I could ship. So I'd turn it off and say out of stock, then make all the cereal, ship it, and then turn it back on again. And I realized that it was very physically demanding on me. And even still, we weren't making that much cereal. And so that's when I went to Texas AM. They have basically like a sec ed short course on how General Mills and Kellogg's and Post make serial”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so to your point, a lot of these new ingredients are actually byproducts of other ingredients. And, you know, we talk a lot about food waste. This is a way to avoid food waste by reusing some of the most nutritious parts of the legumes, the lentils, and whatever else.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. And so it has all the protein, all the fiber, and all the starch all in one. We started, or the food industry started removing the protein and removing the fiber as a way to make products taste better. And so that was the first iteration of this was going from whole wheat flour to bleached white flour and going from brown rice to white rice, etc. And so when you start taking out the protein and fiber so that you can get this isolated starch source, A, it's a lot less healthy for you. And there have been a lot of people writing about the problems with that. But B, well, where does the protein and fiber go It's just being thrown away.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's fascinating, and you're absolutely right and an interesting kind of side bit. But we talk about whole grains, right? So a whole grain has the bran, the germ, the endosperm, the entire grain.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the amazing thing about this to me is you couldn't do this in the year 2000, even in the year 2010 it would have been hard. But in 2018, you could get pretty much chicory root fiber, and you get powdered spinach. Whatever you need, you could just get online now.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So one of the things with the ingredients is I had also wanted to have a lot of fiber in the cereal, if I could. And I had been using almond flour and then coconut flour to put a lot of fiber into the cereal. And one of the challenges with fiber is if you put too much fiber into a food, it becomes hard to digest. And that's when I started to realize, oh, there's actually different types of fiber. And each of these fibers can act differently in the digestive system. I've spent many years trying to understand what combinations of fiber One, do I think and do I want my kids to eat? And I think that are best quote unquote for my health. And then also so that you can eat a significant amount of it, but without having an upset stomach afterwards.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the ingredients today are quite complex. I mean, they're still pea protein, but there are other ingredients that are not so obvious, right? Like corn fiber or pea fiber or chicory root fiber, that it's corn. It's a part of the corn that doesn't have as much carbohydrates. To get what you have today, you've mixed all these things. But imagine in that first year it wasn't so sophisticated”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to go back to the ingredients for a sec because in that first year of making it yourself and selling it, I mean, you were literally going to GNC and buying protein powder and ordering other ingredients probably through Amazon. That was it.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was intellectually enthralled by the adventure, and I was very busy. So there were challenging times when I questioned what I was doing. But at this point, like, when you're getting orders coming in and you're seeing the orders come in every day and then you're getting emails from people and they're loving what you're making, it's like, it's thrilling. It's really exciting. I don't know how else to describe it, but you've just put something new into the world and people are telling you that they love it. And so that was foremost on my mind at this time.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So this commercial kitchen was an industry city. It was very busy. So I had the last shift, which I believe was 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. or something like that. So I was working overnight in there and making the cereal, packaging it. And so I would go to the post office by my apartment with tons of boxes, drop them all off, and then kind of start that again.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't remember exactly, but I think I had it in for $275 at 18 minutes or 250 at 18 minutes, something like that. Yep.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just had my trusty wife on the weekends. That was it at the time. And so, yeah, once again, you have these like sheeting belts in the commercial kitchen. You got rack ovens now, right? So you can put whole racks of cut crackers, you know, cereal. Into the oven.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I went from the kitchen in my apartment to a commercial kitchen. And in the commercial kitchen, I could make dough in bigger sizes, right? They have these Hobart mixers. So I think with like an 80 quart Hobart mixer, you can make like.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, actually, it kind of was more put the website up and the orders start coming in. Know one thing that happened was someone found out about it and then posted it on a like diabetes type 1 diabetes group inside of Facebook and then like 100 people from that group came and bought the serial. So we had a lot of what you would call gorilla marketing. It was a ton of really word of mouth offline word of mouth people posting about it on Instagram, Facebook, that sort of thing.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I started out, I was very focused on low sugar, because sugar in particular is what makes your blood sugar spike and go up and down and up and down. So I was very focused on the low sugar nature of it. It happened to be high protein and high fiber at the same time. And so people were eating it for a variety of reasons. And that goes back to something very important when selling something is like you might put something out into the world for a reason and then people might buy it for a different reason and you need to go talk to people to understand that, right? But yeah, I was very focused on the fact that it was low sugar.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very lucky. I have a very supportive family, but it's definitely challenging being an entrepreneur because an entrepreneur is like adjacency to being unemployed. When you go from working at a hedge fund, right, where you're making a ton of money and you're kind of in one of the most difficult, demanding and respected jobs in New York to all of a sudden, quote, playing around in these various ideas, there's pressure, quote unquote, from society. But no, my parents, my girlfriend, who's now my wife family, they were kind of, I would say, rocks in my life that helped me pursue these things with confidence.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm curious, I mean, clearly you liked cooking, you liked baking, but this was not how people identified you probably. People thought of you as a guy who was going to start a tech company. When you started to talk to people who knew you, maybe your family and others, that you were like, I'm going to make a go at this thing. I want to see if I can turn this into a brand. Did you get any pushback from anybody? Was everybody super supportive?”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It kind of has this premium feel to it, right? I wanted the name Crunch because I thought my snacks and everything I was eating was more mushy like eggs. And I was craving the pretzels, chips, crackers, cereal, the crispy, crunchy bite. So I wanted crunch in the name. And then I was trying to think of something. Chobani is a good example of it sounds premium, it sounds nice, it starts with a C, but I think that's like Italian or European of some sort. Cereal is a very American invention. And so I was thinking of something that was American and I knew the Catalina wine mixer from the movie Stepbrothers. I really loved the movie Stepbrothers. I think enough people had been introduced to Catalin Island through the movie Step Brothers. So I went with Catalina Crunch. It sounded good. It had a ring to it. Easy to say. I liked it.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'd grown up in California, and so I was aware of Catalina Island off the coast. One thing I did realize was that this cereal was going to be priced at a premium to other cereals on the market. And the reason for that was when I started to look at different ingredients, you look at the corn flour and the rice flour and the wheat flour, that's down at like 10 to 20 cents a pound. You go to GNC and you get one of those tubs of protein powder for like 30 bucks. You know, that stuff's like can be way, way, way more expensive. And so I realized, hey, I need to come up with a name that”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was an evolution. So there were a lot of mistakes I made along the way that anyone who was in the food industry wouldn't have made. But they were all learning for me. I think the first one was. Didn't do the math, right? I looked at my oven in my apartment, and it has like five layers on it, a racks. You really only ever use one rack. And so I thought to myself, oh man, I could just make a bunch of cereal right in this oven. Once you do the math, you realize that a sheet of dough doesn't really weigh that much. And so you're taking up maybe three racks of your oven just to make like one kind of stand-up pouch worth of cereal. And then you're baking it for a long time, you do the dough for a long time. You can really only make in an eight hour day out of your oven, maybe like five or six pouches of cereal.”
2026-07-06 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT