Udaiyan Jatar | Former Coca-Cola Brand Executive Launches Health Beverage

Product brands surround our everyday lives, but few truly understand what is required to create a brand that is preeminent and enduring. Udaiyan Jatar (UJ) held prominent positions in both P&G and Coca Cola. In the latter he was one of the youngest Global Vice-Presidents where he led the strategy, innovation, and marketing for Global R&D. Now UJ is the co-founder and president of Tecton, a multi-functional health beverage that provides nature’s optimal fuel — exogenous ketones — to promote brain health, boost physical endurance and support weight loss. UJ shares his inside knowledge of making great brands and his latest endeavor to conquer the health beverage space.

Transcript

UJ

I'm Jean Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series Experience Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success. If you are working on a product or a service considering how to best establish or grow the brand, our guest today shares his years of experience at Coca Cola as global vice president, where he led strategy, innovation, and marketing.

Udayan Hattar, known to everyone as UJ. is now an entrepreneur, recently launching Tecton, a multifunctional health beverage. UJ, thank you for being a guest on Experienced Voices. It's really great to be here. Thank you for inviting me, Jean. I'm very interested in hearing about the range of innovation you've undertaken over the course of your career, but let's start with your latest beverage innovation, Tecton, and why you chose to develop that product.

Thank you. Um, yeah, it's, it's a labor of love and, um, you know, it's. It's something that I got into quite accidentally as it happened. After I left Coca-Cola, I started to do training programs for scientists, uh, that were being, uh, awarded, uh, from a hundred thousand to a million dollars a year by the Gates Foundation.

And I trained about, I don't know, maybe near nearly a thousand scientists. And through that network. I got introduced to this gentleman, really impressive man. He's, I'm proud to call him one of my best friends. He is my best friend and co founder, Mike Chesney, and he has, uh, you know, he was a double purple heart awardee.

He is a Delta force combat medic. And after he retired from the army, he was out training, you know, building healthcare systems out in the Middle East. And he came across a requirement for soldiers during Ramadan to get them a higher quality nutrition. A source that could, you know, be taken before sunrise and after sunset, but would help them to, you know, be able to be productive during the day.

And he came across an innovation being funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon. And what they were trying to do is help the U. S. military improve productivity and performance. and they had started to look into exogenous ketones. Now, I want to kind of step back a little bit and give you a little bit of my background.

My father was a fighter pilot and he had PTSD as it's what would have, it's not what was diagnosed then, but now we know, um, that PTSD is a long lasting effect that a lot of veterans suffer from. And he died at the age of 59. And Mike himself has. You know, suffered from PTSD, but he's had severe traumatic brain injuries, and he got intrigued by DARPA's research because it could help brain health.

And so when I got introduced to him, this was one of my projects where I said, you know, anything to help veterans I'm in, what can I do? And what we found over the next seven, eight years and a lot of research and a lot of trial and error is that exogenous ketones, which are exactly the same as what your own body produces, your liver will start to burn your stored fats and convert them into ketones so that you have energy when your body is depleted of carbs.

My bet is. One, there's only one natural way to get into what is called ketosis. You starve yourself for 48 hours, or you completely cut out carbs to the level that you have only 30 grams of carbs a day, which is equal to two toasts. So almost everything in our diet today has processed carbs. So it's really, really, really hard to follow a keto diet.

Now the U. S. military wanted the benefits of ketones for soldiers. Because ketones, molecule for molecule, are more optimal as a source of energy for your body, for your cells, for your functions, for your brain and heart health. But putting people, or soldiers in particular, into a keto diet is just not sustainable.

And so, that's where exogenous ketones come in. We looked at exogenous ketones and said, what is the ideal? value that we can provide as a, as, as two co founders. And what we found is that most exogenous ketones that had already been designed or developed with some DARPA funding and from funding from other sources, including Silicon Valley, were not capable of being administered to people beyond a certain number of doses a day, two to three.

And if you have a traumatic brain injury, your brain stops to metabolize glucose in those areas cannot recover. So we needed something that would give your cells an alternate source of energy throughout the day. So we spent the next seven, eight years figuring out how to create, and Mike is the inventor of this, to create a ketone molecule that could be consumed at very high doses.

So the idea was to help soldiers and especially those with PTSD and TBI. What subsequently came about Gene, that was a little surprising to me because I got into this because of the purpose of helping soldiers and veterans. But it turns out that exogenous ketones have a lot greater value than just TBI.

And we can talk about that in more depth, but that is kind of the genesis of the idea and the company. Now, you mentioned 70 years of, uh, research or, you know, getting your arms around a direction for the idea. So tell me a little bit about. Why seven to eight years and, and having done so much innovation before, is that really typical of what's needed to bring a, an innovative product to market or for at least for development?

So the, the answer is it depends. Now this is a revolutionary scientific advancement and that's why it took longer. Now keep in mind, it also took longer because we were a startup. And so we did not have unlimited funding. It can take six or seven years to build a great brand, but typically most of my previous innovations were done within weeks.

Not, it didn't take years to get the technology developed itself. In this particular case, we had to go through subs, you know, take an idea. Developing in a lab, our first sample of our molecule was given to us by a scientist at Georgia Tech in a little vial containing one milliliter of the product, and we were tasting it with toothpicks, literally.

But then we had to take it to a pilot plant level, then to manufacturing scale, then make sure the toxicity studies that take a long time to conduct were done. So there's a, you know, and the studies had to be published in a peer reviewed journal that that takes time. So the whole period that it took for us to commercialize a product from the time that we had the idea till Mike had the idea to the point it was in a product that you could drink like this can in my hand here took seven years.

What is the target segment for that product? So this is a really great question. So I want to step back a little bit and explain what exogenous ketones are a little bit more now. So as I said, you know, your body can make ketones. Your body and our human, the human species for the last 60, 000 years, for the majority of the time, ate one meal a day perhaps.

We did not have access to processed carbs and therefore our bodies had accustomed to burning fat and converting it into ketones. And as I mentioned earlier, ketones, molecule for molecule, are better than glucose. So now, in terms of energy output, poor ATP burned. So, what ketones do now, and the way we see ketones being the next revolution in diets and in people's nutritional sources.

Ketones can provide up to 20 percent of your daily nutritional needs in terms of energy. And as I said, they cross the blood brain barriers. They help the cognition and mental equity. Ketones also help you with, uh, reduction of a hunger pangs. that come from a hormone called ghrelin that your body or your stomach produces that was supposed to alert you, hey, it's time to go out and hunt and forage.

But now you don't need it because you can get your food in the fridge right next door or in the next room. And so it turns off that hormone. So now you can actually, you know, reduce your hunger pangs. And when you do eat, you don't overeat. So there's a great weight loss component to this. It improves metabolic health over time.

And so the total addressable market is massive. You take weight loss, you take, uh, you know, metabolic health and by aging people are, you know, diabetes is. expanding rapidly, brain health, and then you've got sports and performance, right? Because that was the original reason why the military was interested in it.

So, you know, muscle recovery and, you know, uh, helping you with being able to exert more, uh, be able to do it back to back, uh, and, you know, not take, you know, breaks between leg day, because, hey, you're in the military, you don't get breaks. You've got to run every day if you have to. So, it has a lot of different, uh, benefits and applications.

So what we're doing is we are segmenting the market according to need and demographic and then providing the product through different channels and different ambassadors to each of these different, uh, need states. One of the things we'll talk about later in more detail is we don't look at things as is what is the total addressable market.

We look at it in terms of the total addressable need states. So what are the unmet needs out there? And how do we design a product that can meet those unmet needs and create a market and grow the market in time? And that's kind of what I feel truly great brands do. In what you just explained, are you Using the approach of what they call first adopter or early adopters, which are the segments that embrace something innovative and don't see it as, as having an element of risk.

Absolutely. This is really crucial, especially if you want to launch a new brand with a new technology into the market. This goes back to a book written, a seminal book written in the 60s by Everett Rogers on the dispersion of ideas and innovation. It's now called the Innovation Adoption Curve. It is probably the most empirically proven model for innovation and how it grows in the world.

And in the world of business, there is no other more proven model. So what we are doing is, Being very surgical and extremely disciplined about focusing all our attention on the innovators and that adoption curves. These are nutritionists. These are entrepreneurs who are extremely focused on improving their own physical and mental performance.

Athletes, we're really looking into healthcare professionals who understand already the value of ketones so that the burden of education is not on us. It's on the people who already understand it, they already get it, and they're the ones who are providing a credible source of information and knowledge to the rest of the market.

So share a little bit about your marketing approach, because you've done the analysis, you've segmented the market. But now you have to message out to those, those groups in those segments. So you have this great experience with Coca-Cola, and other large corporations, but now you're doing this entrepreneurially.

So in that interface with your marketing, let's say your, your marketing consultant or your outsourced marketing agency, how did that go? So, you know, one of the unintuitive, uh, things about. My career at Coca Cola was that I was always on the forefront of pushing the company into doing something the company had not done before.

That's the very definition of innovation. And because the Coca Cola company carries the Coca Cola brand, everything the company really focused on was the bigger brands, the global brands. And so, as an entrepreneur at Coca Cola, I never had big budgets. Tch. And it turned out to be a great blessing in disguise.

It forced me to do what the greatest entrepreneurs and founders of the greatest brands on earth have done, which is dream massive, but start tiny. And I still follow, even if I raise a hundred million dollars tomorrow, I'm going to act like I have a half a million in the bank and that's the best way really to grow a new company and a new brand.

Well, when you, when you, again, you're no longer in Coca Cola, um, but you have a contact or a network that you tapped into that you were confident you could now take Tecton2 and say. Develop a strategy, develop a product design. Who did you tap into and how easy or hard was that now that you were no longer in Coca Cola?

The, you know, just surprisingly easy, uh, because one, you have a great network of people who trust you and who you trust. That, as you said, you develop over, you know, a long career. The second piece is us being in Atlanta helps a lot because Coca Cola, for whatever reason, has given, you know, lays off people every year.

Uh, they have, uh, they give early retirement to extremely bright, highly experienced, uh, and still very energetic people. And so now they don't have a massive financial, uh, burden on them because they got that early retirement package. So we've been able to pick up. A great number of incredible people onto the team.

Uh, so our product designer, she is one of the initial founding members of the Snapple Ice Tea business. Then she worked at Coca Cola where she led global, uh, the non carbonated business, uh, from an R& D perspective for North America for Coca Cola. And so our, you know, operations head, you know, he's run global supply chain.

Uh, for, uh, for the McDonald's juice business for Coca Cola. So bringing in that network was, you know, I feel very blessed and very proud of the people that we have on our team, uh, because of that. Many entrepreneurs just end up in this situation of going it alone. And I think sort of what you're sharing is that there is a choice and pathways to take, and I've heard from other conversations with other entrepreneurs and innovators.

Is starting off with a support team early on, as opposed to doing it alone and then trying to back into other talents. Um, that's just sort of a general conclusion I've come to is, is, um, how the entrepreneur can move up their arc a lot faster. I think it's really, really important and it's a, you know, it's a discovery I had myself over time.

So my co founder and I, we share the same values and the same purpose, but we don't think alike at all. And it is a, I'm glad we don't, because if we did, we would not get the diversity of ideas and thoughts. And, you know, checking and balancing each other out is really, really important. And when you first start out, and I've been an advisor to quite a few startups, uh, over the last 10 years, and the first thing I tell them is first, identify who you are, what your strengths are, and where you need help, and go out and do whatever it takes, because sometimes people feel they will lose control.

Uh, they will, uh, you know, have to now argue and fight about decisions that they would love to make on their own, uh, that they could have just done easily. And my suggestion to them is it's better to have 1 percent of a billion than 100 percent of nothing. and you're more likely to create something great if you have some pushback, you have somebody to bounce ideas off and someone else who's got skin in the game is really important.

And people skills as well, because you have referenced the fact that you're different from your partner, but you work well together. Yes. So the people skills component is, you know, obviously everyone talks about it and it's a very highly rated. I find that it's an essential EQ that people talk about is perhaps not something you're born with it or you're not, but there are skills that you can learn.

And one of the top skills to learn is that have understanding how people's values, work related values work. So for example, Mike loves to make quick decisions and move fast. I love to try to figure out what are the risks and how to minimize them before I move. In some instances, I might be too slow, and in some instances, he might be too fast.

and both of us recognizing how we are different and how we bring value to a particular problem and at what if it's a billion dollar problem that's going to make a hole below the waterline it's better to be thoughtful but if there's already a hole below the waterline there's no time to think now you've got to start bailing so you've got to be very careful uh you know and be become self aware and that self awareness is something that can be taught.

I, I think that's a great example with the, the water rushing in and someone making a quick decision. Uh, so I spent some time, uh, listening to your TED talk, um, called the Seven Disciplines for Building Transcendental Brand. Um, now I saw that in terms of someone being within a large corporation and having the structure around them to go through all seven points.

And I don't want to redo your tech talk here, but what of the seven points do you think a innovative entrepreneur should be considering in how to. develop their product idea and how to, how to go to market for it. So the thing that's kind of really fascinating about how I discovered or kind of started to develop the seven disciplines of transcendent brands is the fact that after about.

Seven or eight years of having launched many brands. It just turned out that when I was 18, I was doing door to door sales, launching new brands, went to work for Procter Gamble. Ultimately, they launched a few new brands. Or them went to work for Coke and have launched many brands across the world. And you look back about seven or eight years later, you find that some of those brands did really well.

They were number one or number two in their category. But I want to introduce this concept of commoditization. into this discussion. What I found is when you look back and you look at distribution and sales and marketing and market share, the preponderance of discounts and sales to driving, to driving revenue and maintaining market share is really, really high.

And that to me reflects that your brand does not have as much power as the power of discounts and what the retailer puts out on the shelf. So that disappointed me and I was concerned with this new innovations that I was bringing to market that if I introduce them the same way as I've done all the other brands, they were all going to land up being commodities again.

So my instinct was to change the way we went to market and I started to study how founders of brands like Red Bull, Gatorade in the beverage industry and then Apple, Nike, Harley Davidson outside the beverage industry. had created brands that do not depend on discounts to sell. In fact, Apple will famously never give a discount on their product.

And that's kind of where the seven disciplines emerges. I found that we were all baking cakes, if you will. Great brands is what we wanted to make, but the order in which you put in the ingredients. And, and how you mix it and how you grow it makes a profound difference between whether you're going to transcend your category and your competition, or you're going to be one of the pack that has to fight tooth and claw for every market share point.

So if I was to give any advice to an entrepreneur, I'd say first start with the total addressable need. Don't worry about the market size because that'll come. Second, understand that selling a product is very different from creating a brand. Selling a product is relatively easier, but it almost forces you to do things that will be immediately copied if you're successful.

If you're not successful, who cares? The third point then is really the most important. I think the world has changed dramatically since I started my career in the eighties and nineties, early nineties. At that time, brands with great sales and distribution reach, uh, huge marketing budgets could really stamp out a startup.

Today, the opportunity is phenomenal for startups. There's a complete, uh, uh, you know, fragmentation of media channels. There's small companies and large companies willing to help startups grow. So the danger is a startup now has the same risk of commodities that commoditization. As a big company trying to launch a new product because they're so big, they have access, they immediately cross the adoption curve without having adoption.

So they are all pushing rather than getting pulled. So I would advise entrepreneurs to, to really kind of pay attention to how great brands are actually built. And realize that they're very comparable, but it's not the same, uh, the, the, the industry standards of getting as much distribution as you can, as soon as you can, are actually very, very bad for you in the long run.

It sounds like though, when an entrepreneur is bringing a product to market, from what I'm hearing, is that they're Probably is a juncture they reach in which they realize the limitations of their brand and that, um, outside competition will become fierce, but at that same juncture, other entrepreneurs.

Steve Jobs possibly is saying, uh, there are no discounts. The quality of our product is not negotiable. So is that really maybe a summary of the two paths an entrepreneur faces? Cause they're going forward into an unknown, whether you're in a corporation or you're in a, in a kitchen, you have the aspiration that you're going to conquer the world at the beginning.

But some juncture arises. Is that basically it? They, they have to, they have to keep their ear to the ground. Yes. Um, you know, I will say that the decisions you make at every given point, you have two options, which decision is going to lead to a better brand consumer or customer experience and relationship.

And in the long run. and which decision is going to lead to a quick sale. And it's almost never, these two almost never overlap. So it takes an extreme amount of conviction and courage. to follow the path of building a long term brand. And, and so I'll give you an example from Steve Jobs since you bring it up.

So when he came back to Apple, one of the few areas of the Apple business that was doing well was big box retail. And the person who led that business came to him expecting to be awarded or put a pat on, on the back. And instead he fired that person. He said, we are not going to go big box anymore because I can't control the consumer experience in a Walmart or a Best Buy or Circuit City.

We are going to build our own stores. And that was an extremely courageous decision because that was literally the only area of the business that was growing at the time.

Is part of that because. He had self tested his idea and product sufficiently, challenged himself sufficiently, and he wasn't kidding himself that he had in place his own value system of checks and balances to, to know how to pursue such a grand vision. It's, you know, so when you know, at that time he was probably, so they did test their own stores in a warehouse.

in California, and they did prove that it works. It does drive customer appeal and customer experience. Before they scaled it out, it was not proven by any means. There was no proof that it would one day lead to a trillion dollar valuation for Apple at that time. What I think, where his courage and conviction comes in, is the part of this whole story that's a no brainer.

The no brainer part of that is, How do you feel when you walk into my little prototype Apple store versus how do you feel when you see my competitor's products at a Walmart? And there's just no question. For, I give this as a, sometime that I do my training programs, I'll tell someone, Hey, you like this person and you want to, you know, you want to take them out for a date.

Where would you take them out for a date? Would it take them to a Walmart or a McDonald's or perhaps a walk in the park if they're outdoors people, or for a concert if they're music people, or to a nice dining? The establishment if they are in a foodies, so you've got to understand your customer and your consumer and try to build that relationship in a way that is, you know, creates an emotional experience.

That's so important and a beverage can do that because you referenced Red Bull and Gatorade. as two products that most people would view as something almost simple and dismissive, but they have created a legion of unshakable followers. Is that true? Absolutely. If you look at people of my age and I'm in my early fifties, all almost to every individual I've ever talked to, they all remember the first time they tried a Red Bull.

And it was typically at some place mixed with vodka at a nightclub or a bar. And it was a, it was a great experience. Red Bull did, you know, Red Bull actually turned Coca Cola's business model upside down. Does best when it sends a big red truck with pallets of product to, you know, central warehouses. It doesn't do well selling to mom and pop stores up and down narrow alleys where these nightclubs typically tend to be.

So that's how they were able to go where Coke could not go to create the experience that Coke could not create with all its energy drinks. Gatorade is the same. It started with little leagues, you know, so, and so people's experience of the Gatorade was actually playing football in a park when they were a kid.

So it's, it's kind of different avenues and different pathways, but each of them leads to that emotional experience that I keep talking about. I think that's really a great experience. Two great examples to hear. Because it gives hope to the underfunded entrepreneur who's got a beverage product that they don't have to at the, at the beginning, go head to head with Coca Cola.

Now, Coca Cola, I think you will share, probably at some point saw competition come into the marketplace and I, I don't know at what time or place, but at the beginning, these products built their loyalty sort of in hidden places. That, as you said. Where the established brands don't have time or interest to go in that direction.

That's exactly right. And if you think about it, Red Bull was launched in the 80s. And to this day, Coca Cola does not have an energy drink that comes anywhere near in, in terms of, uh, you know, share of profit or margin of the entire energy drink category, which Red Bull dominates. And same thing with Gatorade.

I used to be the assistant global brand manager on Powerade once upon a time, and I can tell you Gatorade just swamped, uh, the, you know, our business at the time. So this has been a, a great discussion for me, UJ. Uh, I think we touched on Tecton, your, your new product, your background, how you came out of Coca Cola to, to take this on.

And I think you've given some really great insight for aspiring entrepreneurs and, and innovators. I guess we could wrap it up by maybe by asking the hard question, if there's. One piece of advice you would give to a underfunded entrepreneur that they've got a great idea without a doubt, but they just simply don't have the money.

What's a pathway forward for them? So I'd like to say two things to this in closing. The first one is practical is the enemy of great. And you will get a lot of practical advice and they will slowly take something that is a pure, truly great idea and make it mediocre. So be really careful not to let that happen.

Pursuing the ideal, a truly ideal solution. is what truly separates a great entrepreneur from somebody who just sells something to make a bit of money. And ironically, I think the person who works harder at pursuing that ideal is more likely obviously to achieve a truly unicorn status, if you will. I'm going to give you an example of that.

So our own product, Tekton, I had a clear. One of my conditions to Mike, when I first joined, as I said, the two things I'm never going to sac, uh, you know, sacrifice in this business. One, we have to be purpose driven. Our product has to help disabled veterans. And so we give 1 percent of our revenue to nonprofits that work with veterans.

Uh, we also give veterans and active military first responders and medical practitioners, uh, employee friends and family price, which is 42 percent less than retail. But that, that hurts a startup in financially, but it is critical for us. So that's something we will never budge from. The second thing that I said to him is, I need to Be part of a product or a company that makes products.

I'd be happy for my Children to drink unlimited amounts off. It's got to be completely safe and clean. And I can't tell you how difficult it is to do that because the food and beverage industry is full of additives that stabilizers and stuff that is not good for you. And, you know, even small doses in some cases.

So we've aspired to that and I'm happy to say you can drink a Tecton or you can drink 20 of these a day, a hundred of them a day, and it is safe. The second thing I want to kind of have entrepreneurs really kind of internalize. is no matter how big your dream and how great your idea start really really small test it in your backyard test it with your friends and family first no matter how much money you raise if you don't have money you'll be forced to do what i'm telling you your greater danger is going to be when you raise money and you burn it But taking an idea forward faster than it is ready to go.

So test it really small. Test every assumption that you've got by being as scientific about it as you can. So when we launched Tecton, for example, I live in Brookhaven in Atlanta, and we tested it within a three square, uh, three, uh, three mile radius of my house. So that I could go there every day and understand exactly what the retailer was saying, what the consumer was saying, how the product was being perceived, how it was being communicated.

And it's been six months before we finally realized what really makes it work and what is replicable and scalable. So that urge, and we've raised over 15 million dollars now. And we still are going really slow and really careful and very methodically to understand the key assumptions before we start scaling.

If you're a beverage entrepreneur, is there a angel base that they can pursue for the domain experience that would be not just money, but also helpful to? Taking it forward, taking their innovation forward. I believe there are quite a few, uh, but I'll warn anyone trying to get in the beverage industry is that so Tecton is slightly different.

We are almost more a biotech. And it happens to be a beverage that we've launched, but we'll be launching dietary supplements, gummies, and a whole host of other products that will enable consumers to be able to have potentially, you know, 200 to 400 grams of ketones a day because it is so good for them from a multifunctional perspective.

So we are not a typical beverage startup. Uh, our investors range from, you know, owners of NFL teams. Uh, we've got, uh, most of our other investors are doctors and scientists. Uh, so it's, it's not the typical beverage industry, uh, investment pool, if you will. If you're a beverage investor or an entrepreneur, I'll say that it's the hardest money is to raise your first money in a beverage.

It'll come from friends and family. It's not going to come from angels in the category. Angels typically wait for you to have gotten some traction, some proof that people are not only willing to buy your product once, but they become repeat users and loyal users before they start stepping in. I think that's great insight for Um, the entrepreneur who's never raised any funding and they have to go through a learning curve and they start really sometimes with a naive perspective about why an investor comes on board and once they get past the, the utopian view of, of people using other people's money, you know, it comes down to the whole win win of the investor entrepreneur relationship.

So I think you've given, uh, you Jason great advice here today. Thank you for being a guest, uh, on Experienced Voices. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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