YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Sisson

lines on the record: 99
first: 2024-03-11
most recent: 2024-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, they have the individually articulated toe boxes, as we like to say, which has just been done before, but it's a five-toed shoe with an attractive upper”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the US and catch up as far behind at a billion. Who knew? I didn't. And yet because that was the first thing we were able to produce, we sold a lot of it. So yes, luck, timing, skill, you know, this is a mix that you have to have all of them and you have to be willing to put the time in and you have to be willing to fail. I tell my kids I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up until I was 47. And then I changed my mind again when I was 61. And by the way, I just changed my mind again at 68. Now I'm in the shoe business.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You cannot discount luck. I think hard work is necessary, timing is important. I think if I'd started a primal kitchen five years earlier, it would have failed because five years earlier there wasn't the awareness of healthy fats, of avocado oil being a beneficial oil and seed oils being as bad for you as kind of find out. Luck that the first product that we introduced was a mayonnaise. Like it has a $2.5 billion a year market share.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have anything to do with each other. They all have their own silos of who they sell to. So when Kraft acquired us, They were like, oh my God, you guys are setting a trend. We're buying you because of who you are, not because we want to change you. Which I greatly appreciate.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got pretty big. Yeah. There might be 85 on the team now. And a lot of people have an issue with big food and, you know, they're going to buy all these healthy brands and then destroy them. In our case, nothing could be further from the truth. Kraft Heinz Corporation is a publicly traded company that's owned largely by Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway. Really, Kraft Heinz Corporation isn't really a brand. It's a collection. It's a portfolio of 50 different brands, Velveta and Kraft Mac and Cheese and Oraida Potatoes. And Crystal Light and Kool-Aid and Oscar Meyer Wiener and none of these companies.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm still in. I attend. Certain meetings. I am on phone calls. I cheerlead with the team. By the way, this has been an amazing process, and I'm ever grateful to Kraft Heinz Corporation because they let us keep the team in full. Nobody was fired.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I knew that I was going to go on to something else and I was very happy to remain the face of the business and to participate, which I have. I wound up with a seven-year Consulting agreement where”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so by the end of 2017, November, December, we had interviewed a number of banking firms. And we selected a banker in May, April or May of 2018. I think around October, November, we had three bids. And the one that was, I think, the overwhelming favorite was Kraft Heinz Corporation. It's public knowledge, but it was for $200 million. And then we spent November hammering out the details of the deal The deal almost fell apart three or four times We hammered something out the two days after Thanksgiving, and then we closed January 3rd of 2019. So effectively, we had an offer less than four years after we launched our first product.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, if you lose $2 on every plate of food you serve, the more you serve, the more money you lose. And that's essentially what was happening to us. So it just was not a viable operation. And so I had to make the decision to shut them all down In 2017, I paid off all the franchisees. So I made all the franchisees whole. It was horrible. At the end of the day, it probably cost me four and a half million dollars.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's incredibly difficult. I wish I'd learned my lesson back at Kool Licks, but I didn't. No, and the nature of what we were trying to do, and the reason you won't find many restaurants like this, trying to maintain organic vegetables without preservatives, trying to maintain. Grass fed All that stuff that is three times as expensive as regular stuff and goes bad quicker.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct Then we started building the restaurants, and once we opened, we realized that the business plan was not a viable business plan, that we had lots of traffic and we were selling lots of meals and losing $50,000 a month.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Andrew Wiles. Yeah And we spent a year and a half writing up the franchising agreements. We went to market and we sold 18 franchises. At our first meeting in the first year And we didn't have an operating unit.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's an entirely different saga a person came to me who was a consultant to the franchising industry, who had followed my programs and had lost 50 pounds and thought it would be appropriate to build a number of restaurants that serve nothing but grass-fed beef and organic vegetables.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hanging over me. She reminds me this all the time, that there was a time when I would have walked away for, that was my walkaway number, right? Yeah. But then things, they were always looking positive, and we were getting such amazing feedback from customers. We won awards at food shows at Expo West, for instance. We got Consumers Choice Award for our Ketchup the Year that launched. So I knew we were doing the right thing. It was just a little nerve-wracking at times.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More than a little nerve-wracking. Yeah. I mean, there was a time two years in when I think I went to Morgan and I said this is a little too much for me to bear. And if somebody came and offered us $30 million for it right now, I'd take it. I didn't like having that line of credit.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The TV show, yeah, exactly. I was still, I still had that New England frugality, if you will, right? Like I wasn't going to go deep into debt without some sort of a backstop.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no. So it was against my home. It was against a 401k. I had a defined benefit program at the time. I had enough, you know, again, I'd been doing well enough over my career in the prior. Two decades But for those occasional times when I dipped in and bet a million dollars on something that didn't turn out.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was all self-funded. Now, when I say self funded, I had a line of credit and I was a guarantor on $6 million worth of credit that we were using to finance the operations, finance receivables, to prepay for avocado oil that wasn't due to arrive until eight months down the road. And that was a scary time for me because”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the next one was Publix, and we actually got into Publix, we got accepted into Publics by the end of 2016. And so we opened up in, I think, 1,700 public stores, which was really fast tracking.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So by then, we had continuously been working on other products because we recognized we wanted to be a family of products. We wanted to be ultimately, there was a point at which we wanted to be in pretty much every aisle that had anything to do with sauces or dressings or toppings. So by then we had a couple of flavors of mayonnaise. We had a Chipotle lime mayonnaise. We had a garlic aioli mayonnaise. We had six flavors of salad dressing by then. We were starting to develop our first ketchup.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We set out to do that, and we set that as a budget of doing $6 million in sales in 2016. And by June of 16, we had done $6 million in sales.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Expensive and we had 14 months in advance, we had to commit to contracts. So when we set out to create a budget for 2016, we thought, well, God, a million seven the first year, that's pretty good. Can we do 6 million in 2016? And so we started.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In 2015, we did a million seven. And then as we set out to plot a strategy for the next year for 2016, in this business, because there are long lead times, like 13-week lead times for some of these production runs, and because we were fast becoming one of the largest buyers of avocado oil in the world, and avocado oil is a rare commodity.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the plan, partly because I knew that I was going to be, you know, in my late 60s by the time an exit occurred, if that were the case, partly because my kids didn't want anything to do with the business. Almost most importantly, I recognized that with particularly startups, you can get to a certain sales volume with a particular team, but then at some point you need assistance. You either need a different team or you need more investors and in our case I wanted to find a partner in a large food company, what we call a strategic acquirer, that could leverage what we'd done.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was, I'm going to say, another four weeks. And now we're back ordered on our product. And they're going to run the mayonnaise on the weekend. Well, I'll never forget that weekend because Morgan and I had been kind of freaking out and she was in the midst of maybe breaking up with her boyfriend, but they were getting back together again. Monday morning rolls around and I go to the office in Malibu, and Morgan rolls in, and she said, You're not going to believe it. We made mayonnaise, and I'm getting married. So those little moments, that's that sheer terror of being a small business owner and thinking that maybe your business won't survive the night”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“your recipe. Maybe there's a reason that people didn't make mayonnaise with avocado oil. It has different fatty acid profile. It has different. So we're scratching our heads. We're freaking out because this is the business. Maybe this is the end of it. And so we get one more time on the line. And in investigating where we'd been making the mayonnaise, they said, well, you know, we'd made the first couple of badges on our chilled line, and these weren't on our chilled line. And we realized that the oil has to come through a chiller before it reaches the vat. And that's what gives it the emulsification properties that this particular oil needs.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally went down the drain. Okay, let's try again. And so because we are a small player with a large copaker, it's not like you can try again tomorrow. It's like maybe we can 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. We couldn't make it again.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 co-packer. 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...”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 co-packers. In food that have issues and 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've put in place.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, online Just online because very early days we approached Whole Foods. We went to the buyers at the Rocky Mountain region, which had 33 stores, talked to the buyer, and his name is David Woods, great friend, and tell him the story. And normally it takes about 18 months for a new product to get into Whole Foods. But Dave Woods was a big CrossFit guy, and he was all about paleo, all about Primal. And so Dave said, this is incredible. This is what we've been looking for. We will build you an end cap in every one of our stores. So very quickly, we got into those 33 stores. And then next thing you know, we're in an equal number of stores in the Pacific Northwest. And so 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.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Primal kitchen mayonnaise. So in that first year, the two of us sold just an incredible amount of mayonnaise direct to consumer.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 that'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 built 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 quantities. So you signed up to become a member and we coordinated efforts to where I would assign them as the only place online that you can get.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shelf life. I don't want it on my shelves for over a year. And he said, well, we can make $12,000. And I really took a step back and I'm like, wow, 12,000 jars, that's the least we can make. Yep. So we made the 12,000 jar run and we sold out in two weeks.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 995 retail for a 12-ounce jar mayonnaise. Like, who's going to buy a Jaramays for that price when you can get it for $2.95 or $395 for a regular Jaramanese? Well, that was the bet I was willing to take. In fact, I went to my co-packer on that first batch that we made, and I said, I asked, like, what's the smallest batch that we can make? It only has a one-year-old.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. Okay. But it's this new thing, right? 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”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 enter the marketplace. And we're going to just going to see what happens.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. The year flew by quickly and we had really nothing to show for it except a mayonnaise.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in early 2014, I had a friend in San Diego who was a paleochef. He was known as a paleochef. 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 to catch up. 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.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And don't get me wrong, I was still making 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 hoped 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 I would have given up more equity than I would want it to have given up.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that was a critical decision I made early on that while I wanted to start a SAS company addressing economic 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 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. 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.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The herbs, the spices. And I noticed in the grocery store you could not find sauces and dressings. You pick up a jar of mayonnaise and it's got canola. It's got safflers. 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, certainly how big food looks at what they're doing.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everywhere across soy oil, soybean, 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,”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you eliminate sugars from your diet and sweetened beverages and you eliminate refined grains, you eliminate industrial seed oils, the insidious oils that we find”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the evolutionary behavior. And it just occurred to me that I should be selling food because I'm writing so much about it. 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 supplement. Supplements, yeah.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 $2 million a year in sales, in books.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 say we want.”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I did a lot of research, not just the studies, but also sort of 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 on 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 on the sofa. They expect us to not eat three meals a day, but in fact to eat sporadically, and all of these things that we've sort of”
2024-03-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT