KoopCast
Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
Sports Nutrition Labels & Quality Control with Untapped CEO Doug Brown #227
Doug Brown is the founder and CEO of Untapped. In this discussion we review how nutrition labels are created and what the quality control process looks like for a nutrition product that is derived from natural components.
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Trail and ultra runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the coop cast. As always, I am your humble host, coach jason coop, and on this episode of the podcast we have the ceo of untapped doug brown, and, in light of the recent controversy surrounding spring energy, I wanted to bring Doug on the podcast because his products are actually really good analogs to what we are seeing in the community. He takes, and his company takes, maple syrup and turns them into all different kinds of sports nutrition products. So I wanted to bring Doug on the podcast today to discuss how that actually happens, when you have an inherently invariable product or a product that does not have a lot of homogenous properties to it, and you turn it into something that at the end of the day, when the users actually consume it, it is in fact a homogenous product that we can trust that it contains what the label actually says it contains. We go over that manufacturing process where the quality controls are within those manufacturing processes, as well as how a nutrition label actually comes to be.
Speaker 1:I have always appreciated Doug's banter and his friendship. Over the years he's even put up with me grilling him over some of his ingredient decks as they have come out with products in the marketplace and we start out with a little bit of banter around that particular subject. So y'all buckle in. Here is my conversation with the CEO of Untappd, doug Brown. Thanks for having me, jason. No, I appreciate it. Man, like there's been so much kind of emotion, kind of swirling around the sports nutrition world, I feel like I need to produce some content that brings everybody back down to earth and reality a little bit, and I could think of no better person than you, since you and I have had really good interactions in the space.
Speaker 2:But there's been a little bit of emotion between us too, but that's all that's true.
Speaker 1:That's true, as anybody that I've worked with for any period of time, I mean. I always tell it as it is, doug, you remember you and I we talked about your products, ingredients and things like that, and where they're coming from Within 10 minutes of meeting you.
Speaker 2:I think you were telling me what I do wrong.
Speaker 1:It's an authentic experience. Doug, I'm glad you brought that up, unprompted and unscripted it. Unprompted and unscripted. Okay, before we get too, before we go too far down the jovial lane here and start to just tell a lot of personal anecdotes between you and I, just introduce yourself to the audience, like who are you and what is your role in Untappd, and then we'll get into kind of describing Untappd as a company to kick things off driving untapped as a company to kick things off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I am one of the co-founders of slope side syrup and untapped untapped was an outgrowth of slope side syrup that now feels like it's more of the main event than slope side is, though the slope side is still here. What do I do here?
Speaker 1:everything from driving the truck and trailer to events or as I can attest to seeing you at the running event in Austin. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:We got the trailer back two days ago, and yesterday I was cleaning out the drink machine that we pulled out of the trailer after being out at unbounded gravel and then up to product formulation, we finally hired somebody last year as the sort of production manager, and so I stepped back from that role a bit, but up until then I was. I was the production manager, sales marketing. I've done it all, and I'm really fortunate now to be working with a great team of about 10 people that help to do things better than I did and can do, and so I try to support that team and fill in where I can. I guess by title I am now the CEO, but as a little as with any, as with any small business, you're also the chief bottle washing officer as well it seems like and um so you already you already went into this.
Speaker 1:One of the things, one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on, is because you are also a small business and you produce sports nutrition products from natural sources, and I think that both of those provide a really good analog for what we've been discussing in the ultra running community for the past several weeks now, with the spring energy controversy community, for the past several weeks now, with the spring energy controversy, and before we get into the manufacturing piece and nutrition labels and things like that, which are going to be the meat of the conversation, what is untapped and slope side I don't think a lot of people know this and it was really kind of unbeknownst to me until maybe a couple of years ago in terms of where your business also plays Describe those two companies and the division between the two, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Yes, Slopeside started as a maple farm in 2010 and sort of bounced along as a small to medium-sized commercial maple farm in Vermont for a couple of years, and then we got into a lot of food service business and so now the Slopeside brand is really focused on the food service business both restaurants, takeout food, subscription boxes, that sort of thing. In 2013, we teamed up with Ted King and Andrew Gardner, two other folks out in the athletic realm my background is in alpine skiing, is a Cochran family, is a well-known ski family here in Vermont and launched Untapped to bring maple syrup to athletes, and so Untapped is really focused on whole food, clean, all-natural ingredients and getting those into the hands of athletes as a fuel that is better for their bodies and better for the world but your maple syrup product, which is kind of like the core key ingredient, would you?
Speaker 2:yes, agree with that. Like a description carbohydrate we use.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that product goes into the restaurant pipeline and it's my understanding that snooze is one of your primary restaurant providers, correct? So if I go into any snooze across the entire country and I have a Belgian waffle, your syrup?
Speaker 2:is going to be poured on top of it. Neat is one of the one of the that usually has it on there. It is on the menu in every snooze across the country.
Speaker 1:That's really cool yes, yeah, yeah, really cool, one of my favorite restaurants, but then you also are using that same kind of that same core ingredient in sports nutrition products. And so what's the lineup of sports nutrition products that this, that the maple syrup, this kind of critical ingredient for you guys, goes into?
Speaker 2:We started it was just pure maple syrup, so 100 calories about one fluid ounce.
Speaker 2:Just a different delivery mechanism You're just putting it in Just pure maple syrup in a sport portable package and when we launched it was in that classic gel packet shape and we've changed that. But that core ingredient, just the pure maple syrup, has remained the same. The sugars that are there you know, the sweetening topping that we're all used to is sweet because it's got sugar in it. It's a mixture of predominantly sucrose and then glucose and fructose, which, for the chemists in the audience, sucrose breaks down into one glucose and one fructose in your body. But some of it's already present as glucose and fructose in the syrup. And then it's also got amino acids, electrolytes, minerals, antioxidants.
Speaker 2:We're just taking the blood of the tree everything the tree needs to live and boiling it down. So it's got a lot of the stuff that your traditional athletic nutrition is adding back into the really heavily processed stuff that they're putting in the packet. We find it's a lot easier on your stomach, it's easier to get it down. It is just pure maple syrup. So some people find that a little sweet, but it's a really great way to get around that.
Speaker 2:But you have different sports nutrition products that are made from this core maple ingredient right, it's that gel category is where we started, and then we've got a few different infused maple syrups. In this gel categories we've got five different gels I like that.
Speaker 1:I like the term infused.
Speaker 2:You're flavoring it yeah, I try to avoid the f word. You told me I could come on and drop f-bombs, but the reason I don't like the word flavor is even natural flavors. The food system that we are in is a really strange place, and so a natural flavoring does not necessarily have anything to do with the compound that we're with the like. Natural raspberry flavor does not come from raspberries, and so when we say something is flavored and I don't take your pick, seltzer, my spin, ice cream, whatever it is my mango orange spin drift that I'm drinking right now has no mango or orange in it, drift might spin drift that's right, mango
Speaker 2:puree and orange juice. There you go, there you go, but so many things. Where we talk about flavoring, it's it does not contain the real ingredient, and so everything we do has the real stuff in it, and so I really try to avoid that flavor word because it connotes something different than what we do. But so we've got the five gels, six different kinds of Stroopwafel and now five liquid concentrates for drink mixes, and all of them primary carbohydrates, maple syrup we're not adding in any other sugars, so no maltodextrin, brown rice syrup, cane sugar none of that and then really limited ingredients. So the gels and the drink mixes, three to four ingredients in all those, and the waffles. Obviously you need a little bit more just to make the structure of the waffle, but trying to really limit what we're putting into our products.
Speaker 1:Can you describe, within that ingredient, within those ingredient lists, which ones are, like your ingredients? Cause you mentioned the maple trees, right, you're taking a lot of the maple trees which ones are the ingredients that like untapped and slope side syrup whatever the proper name of the company, kind of like own and is proprietary to them, versus you're getting from third parties?
Speaker 2:So at this point now we're getting everything from third parties. We're no longer a farm. My cousins have taken over running the farm that that we grew from. I ran it through 2019, but the food service side had already grown enough by that point that we needed to be working with other maple producers as well. And then beyond that, you know we don't own an industrial raspberry farming operation or grapes or so.
Speaker 1:But you're getting all the maple syrup from this one family owned farm, or are there other maple providers kind of coming in the mix?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got about three dozen maple farmers we work with now. Most of that volume is going to the food service side, and then there are three or four farmers we work with where that syrup will wind up in the untapped products.
Speaker 1:Okay, perfect, okay, that's actually really good context. Okay, we're going to switch over to how nutrition labels are born.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you and I were talking. No, I brought nothing as a show and tell here.
Speaker 1:That's okay. That's okay. We don't need a show and tell on this one. So once again, we're going to set the food service product side of it aside for a second. I think that's really good background that you have these different channels that these products are kind of going into and really move over and really move over to the sports nutrition side. So you have all of these different products. It started out as pure maple syrup and now it's evolved into infused maple syrup and other products, the drink mix product, the waffle and things like that. When you are going through that development process, you have to ultimately determine this is the macronutrient composition, this is how many calories, this is how many carbohydrates. Everybody is very familiar with the nutrition facts labels that are on foods. Right now, from your perspective, when you're developing those products, take the audience through the steps that you have to go through to get that nutrition label produced.
Speaker 2:So I guess, to off the bat, there are supplement labels as well. I know nothing about supplement labels, other than that they're less regulated than food labels.
Speaker 1:Your food product right. It's a nutrition facts would be the.
Speaker 2:There are athletic nutrition products that use a supplement label, the food nutrition facts labels. So there are sort of two ways that you can go about making your labels. There are sort of two ways that you can go about making your labels. One you can put together your product and then send it out to a laboratory and pay them to say this is what the carb content is, this is the dietary fiber, the sodium, this is the rundown, the whole list of things that you see and plus a lot of other things you don't see on the nutrition facts label. That you see and plus a lot of other things you don't see on the nutrition facts label. Or you can take uh data from various sources and your recipe and I, you know I have an Excel sheet.
Speaker 2:This is how we get our nutrition facts. With a simple product, it's a lot easier to do this than with a more complex product, but with something that's% maple syrup, 4% raspberry juice, 1% sea salt, you can take the nutrition facts. The USDA maintains databases of a lot of various products and then from the suppliers, we can get nutrition facts for all of those ingredients as well. So the raspberry juice concentrate that we use, they send us for every 100 grams of concentrate. It's this many carbohydrates, this much sugar, this much sodium, this much magnesium, manganese, and runs the whole list.
Speaker 2:And then plug that into an Excel sheet and figure out what's the total weight of the product in a packet need to be to get to a hundred calories, and you know it tastes really good when it's 4% raspberry juice. So you can imagine the math that needs to get done to say we need to hit a hundred calories where this is a salted product. So we want to hit. You know 60 milligrams of sodium, and so what is the ratio of those things want to hit? You know 60 milligrams of sodium, and so what is the ratio of those things need to be and what's the total weight need to be to to hit all those various macro micronutrients that that we're turning to.
Speaker 1:But fundamentally you're taking a recipe and accessing like an institutional database, so to speak. With the recipe that you have kind of created right and you've gone through iterations, we're going to take the product development piece of it out. Let's just say you have the product, you have the final recipe and things like that. You know what you want from a sodium perspective and things like that. You're taking that recipe, you're putting it into a nutritional database and then you basically have an artist or somebody that is in that field graphic designer produce a nutrition label from that Correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it's. There are rules about what font you have to use, what size font. It has to be where things are placed, what has to appear. If that doesn't appear, then you have to include it in the not a significant source of statement at the bottom. The rules even have, like, the stroke size on the different bars that go in between all the different nutrients it's a standard format, right, so everybody standard format but and you can pay a professional company to make those.
Speaker 2:There are professional companies that you can send your recipe to and they'll pull all the nutrition facts together and send you back a label, or you can figure it out yourself and have your own graphic designer do it and, as you can imagine, pricing runs the gamut from fairly affordable to fairly expensive.
Speaker 2:So the companies that you send out for testing when you send final product to somebody for testing is that's going to be the most expensive route. You know, some of these tests that have been run on various products in the last few weeks seem fairly affordable. You know I run far. I think was sending out products that maybe a couple hundred bucks, a sample or something, and if you're only looking for a few of the nutrients it's pretty affordable. But when you're trying to run the full label and all the different micronutrients that might be required to be shown in the nutrition facts label, it can get fairly expensive. And so we rely on our suppliers to provide the nutrition facts for the products we're getting from them. And then, uh, each batch that we get, they have a testing of the larger. So the you know the bricks is a measure of sugar content. So that's one of the big ones that we're looking for, especially in maple syrup, and so from that you can tell yeah, this is on spec, this is something we can use. It's within a couple percent variation.
Speaker 1:Okay, I want to get into that in just a little bit. Let's stay on the nutrition label piece. So you mentioned some of the testing that gets done and various sports nutrition manufacturers will choose to do either or both of those routes. They'll either have a recipe. They'll cross-reference it with the database, calculate the composition of the product, produce a nutrition label there. Some of those companies will have a sophisticated analysis done.
Speaker 1:So, in an effort of full transparency, the ones that I did, which is a full nutrition analysis those cost me just under a grand a piece per product.
Speaker 1:You have to send in 12 ounces of sample for them to have enough sample product in order for them to run the analysis. You can also have what's called approximate analysis done, which is what a lot of the data that was presented on IRONFAR was done, which is kind of a light version of this whole nutrition analysis. You'll still get the macronutrient composition and things like that, so perfectly valid for that type of assessment. And then you also have third-party certifiers that you can send that will either verify various components of it, whether it's we're very concerned with this in the elite sphere to make sure that the products are free of performance-enhancing drugs. And so you party third parties that will certify for that. You'll have 30 third parties that will certify for the composition or different components of the of the actual mix. The picture that I'm trying to paint here is that all of those roads lead to the same standardized nutrition label that you actually see on the package, and how that company got to that is relatively unbeknownst to the consumers, right? Because?
Speaker 2:sure. Yeah, it's very opaque and not regulated. There's nobody saying this is the way you have to do it. There's no. I guess when you get up into the NSF for sport certifications and that sort of thing, which are really important in that elite sphere for making sure we're free of anything that might get you a positive test result, there's a little bit of third party regulation there, but there's no governmental regulation in the United States. I guess this is where my experience is, and so in the EU that sort of thing I'm a little bit less familiar. But in the US there's no governmental entity that's going to come in and say no, your nutrition facts are wrong, or you have put them on a label wrong or you're doing something misleading. It is. It's pretty much you got to police yourself or somebody else after the fact can come in and file a complaint with the FDA.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, really important point because I think a lot of people previous to this in the community kind of thought that the FDA would come in and audit you guys before the fact and produce the label and that's anything but yeah, no.
Speaker 2:It's nothing like that, nothing like that at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's nothing like that, nothing like that at all. The.
Speaker 2:FDA can come inspect our facility but they generally will not look at any of the packaging beyond ensuring that it's food grade packaging or that sort of thing, but they're not looking at the label that we apply to it.
Speaker 1:I mean, assume you've had FDA inspections, Can you kind of open up the we actually haven't had an FDA inspection yet.
Speaker 2:I've heard they are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you guys have been in business for a long time we've been in business for a long time, the fda, and maybe now we will know that now we're having this conversation. So there are some food industries where there are inspectors present every day, every hour that they're doing production that specifically is meat, and the usda does that inspection. For basically everyone else. There is some governmental oversight. So in Vermont we have to register with the Vermont department of health and they will do. All of these entities can come inspect anytime. So once you're registered with them you are open to surprise audits. But generally the Vermont Department of Health will come once a year or a little bit less frequently if they're busy, but we have to re-register with them every year.
Speaker 2:We're also certified organic, so that's another inspection. They're not food safety in particular, but they have food safety in the rules as well, and so they inspect for that too. We're also third-party audited. We're not at that NSF for sport level, we're at a lower level called good manufacturing practices, and so there's an annual audit for GMP certification. And then all food producers who are making food available for animal or human consumption in the US have to be registered with the FDA and the FDA can come inspect anytime. But I think the FDA focuses more on higher risk industries.
Speaker 1:They're resource limited and so but just to clarify your GMP certification, which has been brought up, that's a voluntary thing on your side. You do not have to do that. Am I understanding that correctly, or it's very it is.
Speaker 2:There is something in the rules in the federal code, that is good manufacturing practices defined, and so you are required to follow those, even if you are not certified to be following them. Okay, that would. Those would be the things that the FDA would come in and check on. Okay, the a GMP certification is a voluntary certification For us. It is driven by our customers, and so some of these larger institutional customers will say, hey, you need this level of certification. And so, on a low risk industry like ours, we can get away with a lower level of certification, like just being GMP certified.
Speaker 2:On more complex operations, more complex products, there are higher levels SQF, safe quality foods, brc, british Retailer Consortium, and then within those there are levels as well, and so SQF 123, sf does its own certifications, but everything's voluntary, but usually required by customers and that's so. It's a voluntary like no, I don't like getting audited because it takes days out of my life, and so it's not something I'm going to go out and be like yes, I want to get GMP certified. It's, it's a requirement, but not a requirement from the government.
Speaker 1:Got it. You'd rather be washing water bottles and cleaning out cleaning out your trailer all right, okay, so let's move on to kind of like maybe some people might think this is the crux of it, but I think it's certainly a big part of it and that's the natural variation piece. So you use a product that you're deriving from a tree. You described it as the blood of the tree.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there are inherently going to be variations in that core product and remind the audience for we'll just use the gel as an example what percentage of an untapped gel is the core maple syrup?
Speaker 2:It varies from a hundred percent. So that first product that we started with pure maple syrup it is a. It is a felony to call something pure maple syrup. It is not not actually pure maple syrup. So that one's a hundred percent. And then the gels I think the lowest syrup content is maybe 93% maple syrup. Okay, that's what I wanted to get.
Speaker 1:It's a big component of it. It is mostly maple syrup. Okay, Got it, Got it Now. Inherently in nature, there are variations everywhere. I mean the size of the tree, the maturity of the tree. When you're extracting it out of the tree like how much rain has there been and the nutrients in the soil and on. You're extracting this natural product from all of these different not you, but the company that you now get the maple tree maple syrup from, has all of these trees that have an infinite number of variations to them. Right? What goes into ensuring that, ultimately, the product that gets put in the package is a homogenous product in terms of the macronutrient composition, the carbohydrate content and things like that? How does that actually happen when you're taking an inherently variable source product and turning it into a homogenous, consistent product that people then consume?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it depends a little bit about which nutrient you're talking about. So, in terms of the carbohydrates, that is the thing that we directly measure in the maple syrup, and so when we're putting a batch of syrup together, the thing we measure is how much sugar is in this, and so there's a standard in Vermont has to be 67% sugar to be called maple syrup, percent sugar to be called maple syrup, and so that is the thing we are ensuring is the same in every batch of syrup we put out has to be between 66.9 and 67.5 percent sugar. Pretty tight tolerance, pretty tight tolerance. And so that means you know this barrel of syrup we received in with 66 percent sugar, and so then we need to find a barrel of syrup that's 68% sugar, and we can put those two together in the same batch and get something at 67%.
Speaker 1:But the standardization hold on. I want to back up. The standardization as you're describing it right now is within the sugar content itself. That's the point that you are saying. We are trying to standardize for this component.
Speaker 2:That is the thing that you are saying. We are trying to standardize for this component. That is the thing that we are required to standardize actually Vermont law. It has to be in that tight tolerance and so Y'all are serious about your maple syrup man That's-. There are federal rules about it too.
Speaker 1:Seriously.
Speaker 2:Federally it has to be over 66% sugar. So federal rules are a little bit laxer than Vermont, you guys, that's what I'm saying. Y'all are serious. Yeah, we're pretty serious about it. So that's the thing that we are really and and that's, I would say, the biggest piece of especially what we're talking about now is how many carbs are in this packet, and so that thing we directly measure in the products that we're making. How do you measure it?
Speaker 1:Like peel.
Speaker 2:I don't have any here with me right now. That's called a hydrometer. I don't know for those who have made beer or wine they'll be familiar with that but it looks like a thermometer, almost a big thermometer. But you float it in the syrup and depending on how much sugar there is in the syrup, it'll change the density of the syrup. And then you have this thing that is a fixed mass, fixed volume, so it's a fixed density, and so it'll float at a different height in the syrup and it's got a scale on it that you can see, see where it's floating. You have to do a temperature compensation as well, because the density changes with temperature, and so we're measuring these things down to tenths of degrees Fahrenheit and tenths of brix, which is B-R-I-X is the sugar content measurement that's used mostly in the maple industry and then, like the wine industry, uses a little bit as well.
Speaker 1:But you're able to use that because you have this core product, this core maple syrup product.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That is, it's a pure carbohydrate product, and so you're using density essentially as the proxy for how much sugar content there is. Yeah, it's not like you're putting it in a bomb color colorimeter or something like that. You're literally like putting a bobber like a sophisticated bobber in there right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we're relying on our producers to say this is pure maple syrup, and and since it's pure maple syrup, we know that most of the stuff in there is sugar and water. And then there's some more. There's some micronutrients there as well that are really important. But when you're putting the sophisticated bobber in, yeah, the thing you're measuring is the sugar in the water I don't want to.
Speaker 2:I don't want to downgrade your bobber I mean, it is, that is what it is I used to use that, so I know exactly what it is okay.
Speaker 1:So you kind of mentioned this. Right, you're relying on your supplier, which you have an intimate relationship with. Right, you went through the family farm and stuff like that. They're not going to like screw you over or whatever, would you? You know, though let's just say let's just remove the family tie right, or say that you started getting in more products from other people that were you didn't have the same business relationship with. How would you go about knowing that they're not selling you a bill of goods? They're not selling you like high fructose corn syrup that looks like maple syrup as opposed to like real maple syrup. We taste it too. You have like maple syrup sommeliers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say I'm a maple syrup sommelier.
Speaker 2:I don't doubt that. You can tell maple flavoring apart from real maple syrup. You know if somebody was stretching their product using, you know, a 10% cane sugar blend to try to stretch that product into 10% more than it really is, that would be hard to tell. There are some fairly sophisticated tests you can do on what the carbon composition of the sugar is. Those tests are done by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture. Food and Markets will sometimes randomly take syrup and test it. Yeah, but that's really not something that is being done, unless there's a suspicion of some fraud in the industry.
Speaker 1:But you're using like taste testers, along like the QC line at some point, just to make sure that the product is what it says it is essentially. And I'm sure that's like also, first off, the flavor is part of the variance, the natural variance that I was talking about.
Speaker 2:That I was talking about earlier Delicious maple syrup and really terrible maple syrup.
Speaker 1:That's all. Natural, actual maple syrup from an actual maple tree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we can dive into that, but that's a different podcast. For sure, the trees later in the season, as the buds come out, the flavor goes bad, and so buddy syrup is not something that we're gonna put in a packet and deliver to a runner, because it's really it's a pretty offensive taste and not something that's gonna feel great at mile 10 or mile 240 if you're doing coconut, but it's not that like it's not.
Speaker 1:That happens on a light switch either, right? I mean, you're that flavor profile that you're describing changes throughout the course of the season and you have a growing season or a maple season I don't even know how to describe it and you guys are kind of you're testing for that.
Speaker 2:You're literally taste testing for that the good syrup tastes different from one farmer to another, or from, you know, late february to early march, and so we're trying to mix barrels together to wind up with a fairly consistent flavor profile, in addition to the getting that sugar content right. And I guess we also haven't talked about the natural variability in all of the other nutrients. So getting that fuel number right is really important. But then when we're saying, hey, there's 60 milligrams of sodium in this, that's really important for people to be getting that hydration piece.
Speaker 1:And that sodium is coming from the maple syrup predominantly and you're adding to it as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah so the pure maple packet has about five milligrams of sodium.
Speaker 1:Okay, so a little bit, Not much yeah.
Speaker 2:And that I would say there's more variability in that how much sodium is in this maple syrup versus that maple syrup. That's really going to be dependent on what's the soil composition like versus what's that soil composition like Sodium testing all the batches of maple syrup is not something that we do. We just rely on the various USDA databases that are a compilation of tests to say, hey, on average, maple syrup has five milligrams of sodium in 100 calories milligrams of sodium in 100 calories. When we're doing a product that has more sodium in it, we're using sea salt as our sodium content, and that's a little bit easier to say. Sea salt is sodium and chloride and you can look at the elemental weights of those things and figure out. If you're putting in 100 grams of sea salt, you're putting in this many grams of sodium, and then do the math from there to get to how much salt do I need to put in to put 60 milligrams into all of the servings that are in this batch?
Speaker 2:But that's also. There's a lot less variability in that. The sea salt has some micronutrients beyond the sodium chloride, but it's not very variable. So we're standardizing that biggest macronutrient, that is really the headline number, and then just taking an average of where's that variability landing for the other micronutrients. And then when we're putting in something that's got a different headline number the coffee infused maple syrup, for instance and saying there's 27 milligrams of caffeine in this, our coffee supplier says the product that we provide you, the caffeine content, is within this range. And then you know that range is plus or minus about 5% and so it's yeah, there's variation there, but it's a pretty tight tolerance. We're talking a milligram of caffeine one way or the other and we're okay with that variability.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, there's more. There's like a hundred times more variability just in Starbucks coffee if you go one day to the next in terms of the caffeine composition. So that's a whole different rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, you already excuse me. You already touched on this aspect just a little bit. And this is where, along the entire chain of events, would you catch things when they go awry? Because that happens in every business, across any number of different businesses. You think you know you're producing a product, you're producing a service, you're you know booking time to do consults and things like that. Just stuff happens. I mean, there's nothing's perfect.
Speaker 2:You've kind of already described I mean there are hundreds, thousands of different things that can go wrong and that you have to catch at different places, and so some of those things can be hey, when you're making maple syrup, you're making hundreds of gallons an hour of maple syrup, some of the syrup you produce. Some of those barrels are going to be 65, 66 bricks. Some of those barrels are going to be 68, 69, 70 bricks. We catch that sort of problem when we're making the batch and so that's coming in from the producer, making sure that the product we're getting in, not that it's necessarily consistent, but that we can turn it into a consistent product going back out. So we know product we're getting in, not that it's necessarily consistent, but that we can turn it into a consistent product going back out.
Speaker 1:So we know what we're receiving that's really important right because you know you're getting a variable product and you're turning it into a more homogenized product or homogenous product sorry yeah, and then for the things that we're getting less of.
Speaker 2:So you know, our cocoa we're buying in five to 10 gallons of that a year and so it's not like we're buying in enough that we can sort of make a homogenous product. But the people we're buying the cocoa from have already taken the cocoa bean and turned it into a standardized cocoa product that we buy and then they provide us with a certificate of analysis to say, here, this is the specification sheet, this is the range that you can expect the pH to be in, the sugar content to be in, and this is where it is in that range. And so we have the specification sheet ahead of time. And then with each lot that we buy in, we get a certificate of analysis saying, yeah, it's in that range, and those ranges are pretty tight. So we talked about with the coffee. So those problems, you catch those problems pretty early. I wouldn't even say they're problems, it's just sort of part of the manufacturing process.
Speaker 2:Once in a while we'll make a you know 500 gallon batch of maple syrup and be like oh shoot, this is 66 and a half bricks instead of 67 like you tested at the end of the line as well, like after everything's happened or whatever well, we'll test the whole batch, yeah, so like we put it all together in a tank, mix it up and then we test it then and if at that point we realize, oh, we messed up, we did, we didn't get the, the bricks right, there are several things we can do. We can All the employees get maple syrup.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm imagining. Everybody goes home with a few jugs.
Speaker 2:Christmas presents for everybody. We do not have enough employees to deal with 500 gallons worth. We can boil off some water. We're not, you know. I don't know if the listeners have been to a maple farm before, but that's what it is. It's boiling off water and really set up for that. We're not set up for that quite as well, but we have the ability to boil off smaller amounts of water and so that sort of problem pretty easy to deal with. You catch it really early. The QA testing at the end of the line we do that as well.
Speaker 1:Describe what that actually is. Everybody like here's this kind of nebulous term quality assurance testing. What is it actually? Are you running it through a microscope? Are you putting another bobber on it? Are you visually inspecting it? Are you taste testing it like?
Speaker 2:like, be specific here, as specific as you can, I guess the most common test we're doing is fill weight, and so there'll be some. We're having to heat the product up to put it into the packages so that it's all aseptically packaged, so that it'll be shelf stable and that it's not like we hit 190.0 degrees the entire time when we're packaging, and so there'll be some fill weight variability and the machine has some slop to it and so we check I would say maybe around 10% of the packets we check the fill weight on.
Speaker 1:So you're just like seeing if it has as much product in it as you as you want it to have, yeah, and then fine, tuning it here and there.
Speaker 2:Where in it as you as you want it to have, yeah, and then fine, tuning it here and there where that needs to be, where we need to be, making sure that we're getting that right, and so that's really that's a huge piece of. If I say there's a hundred calories in this packet, we need to have a fairly tight tolerance of sugar content and the fill weight. So those are the two things that are really going to drive how many calories are in this packet, and so we talked about the sugar testing and then, yeah, fill weights, the fill weights. The other piece of that, the other QA testing we do, is organoleptic, which is a fancy word for taste test.
Speaker 1:I'm going to use that by the way, organoleptic, these are the maple syrup. Sommeliers, rightolytic, these are the maple syrup sommeliers.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, these are the maple syrup sommeliers. And then we'll do burst testing on the packets to make sure that there isn't some problem with the machine or with the film, so that you can take this put in your pocket and not wind up with a sticky leg. And then we do not test everything quite as much for the sugar content at the end, just because we've verified it before we put it in the packet and there's no intervening step where it could lose or gain water.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask that. I was going to ask that. So you're doing a beginning of the chain analysis, essentially because there aren't multiple steps within that chain where you're adding different products it's closed pipes all the way from where the batching is done to when it goes into a packet and is there any chance of like settling or like that?
Speaker 2:that happens, like in those batches no, so we're stirring it the entire time that we're packaging it, yeah, and then pulling out of that stirred batch and within a minute of pulling out of that batch it's put into a packet. Some of the products you know the cocoa likes to settle. So if you leave that overnight, yeah, you'll come back and find some cocoa settled out the next day. And even if you take one of our cocoa packets and pour it out into a glass or something, you can see kind of the cocoa particulate in there. So we're making sure it's homogenous before it goes into the packet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, perfect. Okay. What else is involved in this whole nebulous QC piece? Or is it really just that simple?
Speaker 2:It's pretty much that simple. So fill weight. So there's the beginning of the chain analysis. Like you said making sure the thing that we're putting in is what we say is going in there, and then making sure we're putting in the right amount and then making sure that the customer experience is going to work in terms of the packet being able to be opened and not opening when it shouldn't, and then that exploding on their leg. I like that description much better.
Speaker 1:And then the organoleptic does this taste right? Okay, so I'm going to switch to kind of a different, like a different not a different topic, but something that might be like a little bit more sensitive. Right, you have products that have that are in the marketplace. Those products have gone through some type of r&d, right, even the Even the maple syrup product, which is pure maple syrup. You still got to figure out how to put it into a form factor that people are going to want to consume on the bike and the run. That's part of the R&D process, right? Just like your taste testing. When you want to have a raspberry flavor, you've got to go through different amounts and flavoring profiles and things like that.
Speaker 1:Whenever you've either been through the R&D process or actually have had a product out on the marketplace for a significant length of time, has there been any time where the consumer had a chance to buy the product and consume the product and it wasn't what you actually wanted it to be across any of it? The flavor, or how much of the product was in there, or the carbohydrate content or anything like that? And the reason I want to bring the R and D process in is because I realized that there are things that you figure out during the R and D process that you then smooth out to the general manufacturing process. It's kind of like a like you know, if you send something to you or ted or any of the other people, like taste test, and it's all screwed up, no big deal. That's part of the deal. Like the taste test, it doesn't taste well or for whatever reason, the packaging is not working out correctly.
Speaker 1:I can remember when goo was introducing their chomps, which is a chewable product, they were having a hard time getting the number of the correct number of chomps into the package because they were sticking together and the equipment wasn't separating them. And that's part of the R and D process, right, just as much as the composition of the of the product. So I'll turn the floor over to you. You can either tell it as a funny story that had a happy ending or something where, like, you caught something along the line, but I think something like that would be insightful. Like, like. Where along this process have you actually experienced something going awry like that?
Speaker 2:we don't have a lot of qa issues that have made it out into the marketplace. You know, once in a while we'll get something that had mold in it or a packet that bursts open when I shouldn't have. Sometimes that's on us, sometimes that's a consumer issue Like oh, I thought I could leave this bottle of maple syrup out for three months. No, I need to keep it in the fridge. And we do a fairly low risk product.
Speaker 2:So when you're putting this low water activity is not just how much water is in a product but how much available water is in the product for bacteria or other things to feed on or not feed. You know, feed on water but live on. So we're low water activity, which makes it low risk. We're packaging it really hot, which kills pretty much anything in there, which makes it low risk. We're pretty lucky to have such a low risk product that we really haven't had many issues, and some of that's been. Yeah, I mean I can think of a machine issue that we had that we sent a couple thousand raspberry packets to a customer and then the next day identified that we were having a pretty high leaker rate and so we told them hey, you're getting a bunch of product that might be leaky. We'll send you replacements right now, and don't open it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you can salvage it, give it to a high school team or something you know like. Use, use your own risk on those, but not a food safety issue, not a not a quality issue, where you're going to go out and not be getting the calories that are supposed to be there. Yeah, so we've never that I'm aware of, and a lot of these things are. You're relying on the final customer to tell you hey, I got a packet that had nothing in it and so our waffles. Once in a while there'll be an empty waffle wrapper that goes to somebody, and that's just. I mean, that's the nature of the beast, when you like. Sometimes an empty waffle wrapper winds up like a waffle. Just didn't go into that.
Speaker 1:There's two somewhere there's one, there's a package with two of them.
Speaker 1:When you describe that it's surprisingly little Like, once again I realize you're describing it as a low risk, you know relatively uncomplicated process where you know you have one kind of core product that's taking it, taking up between 93 and a hundred percent of the entire product that the end user actually consumes. But there's still high variability in that because they're like actual living organisms that you stick something into to extract the juice out of it. You know, I mean like literally I've been, I mean I've been around those farms and I've seen your employees like go from tap to tap and they, they actually like attest to that variability oh, this one's sweeter, this one's darker, or whatever. And I never really put together how that variability turns into a product that is relatively or is homogenous across the board. So when I hear you describe that and you're being honest and transparent about it, I'm kind of surprised that there's not more like shit show behind the scenes. Maybe there is that, you just don't want to tell me, but like it's a kind of it's kind of a remarkable story.
Speaker 2:There was the first time that we were doing it. So the way we do our, our product development, is hey, this is the line of stuff that we can get that meets our needs. You know, it's the pure ingredient. It's just raspberry juice concentrate without any maltodextrin in it. It's, you know, a lot of these whole food ingredients sometimes can be hard to work with, like a lemon juice powder. Basically any lemon juice powder you can buy has silicon dioxide or maltodextrin or both in it, and so we have fairly strict product needs, and so we have a list of these are the products we can get, and so let's try mixing them together, see what tastes good, and then, once we've made something that tastes good, figure out this is how much we need to get to the nutrient level You're laughing at me, I love it To get to the nutrient levels that we're trying to hit, and so we'll do that, as you know, like a couple ounces of test product in the middle of the office, just in a little you know pint glass, swirling it up from there. Once we've narrowed it down, we need to scale up, and we'll usually do a scale up, that's, you know, a couple of gallons, and then we'll scale up from there to tens of gallons and try to put it in finished labeled product. And then we'll try to scale from there to the full size. You know three, four or 500 gallon batches.
Speaker 2:The first time that we did salted cocoa in that, once you get off the bench, past the past, the just oh, we're doing a couple of gallons. I was mixing it up and I did a. I had a math error and I went to mix the cocoa in it. Boy, this is more cocoa than I thought we were going to be using, but I guess you know that's what the paper I've got in front of me says I need. I forget how many pounds it was. I need 23 pounds of cocoa in this batch. Like, cocoa is really expensive, I didn't think we were going to be using this much of it, but all right. Cocoa is really expensive. I didn't think we were going to be using this much of it, but all right, I got it mixed up and then figured I'd go back and double check and it turned out that I was off by a factor of 10.
Speaker 2:You misplaced the decimal point.
Speaker 1:I mean no, but here's the deal. Man, like I know that once again you're human, you make those math errors. But when you describe that process of scaling it up, so you're literally just making a few pints of it for your 10 person staff, and then you scale it up to a few gallons, and then tens of gallons, and then hundreds of gallons. Though you figure out what you're describing is you figure out those math errors. You figured out where you, in this case you could have blamed your intern, but you took the responsibility.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you I appreciate that Right could have blamed your intern, but you took the responsibility. I appreciate you. I appreciate that right, like you, literally misplaced a decimal point, which actually happens, but it's not happening at the final product.
Speaker 2:It's happening when you're at some point of the r&d process yeah, and so that was a product that we were trying to put into packets, but not finished, not labeled, so that we've got some just white packet film that we'll put test stuff into so that we can send it out to ambassadors, we can take it out on the run ride ourselves, and just things taste different when you're out exercising versus sitting here in the office, and so that was something where it was like a hey, this feels wrong, let me double check it. Oh yeah, this is way too cocoa-y. And then how do we fix it from there?
Speaker 1:But it's your ambassadors that you're primarily leveraging and your employees that you're primary leveraging kind of field testing, the product to be an initial detective in this entire process?
Speaker 2:Yeah, In this case, we caught that issue before we put it in packets. But yeah, it's it.
Speaker 1:you got to beta test everything you got to get it to the got to get it to the full up test of the people that are involved in that beta testing process, because once again you're kind of it's in the middle of it. I guess is what I'm saying, the middle of this whole chain of events of you mix stuff up, you're tasting it in the office, you mix some more stuff up and maybe it's like you and a small handful of people. Now you've got it into white labeled. You know, white labeled packaging to a broader audience. What does that look like for you specifically in terms of the number of people, and how long will that actually run?
Speaker 2:It depends on the product. We're small and fairly nimble, so we can turn stuff around from concept to finished packaged in real packaging within a couple months which is pretty fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no kidding, we generally are not quite that fast. You know, we've had products where we want to go faster and are able to do that. I mean, we've had products in development for years that still haven't seen the light of day beyond. You know, eliza's taking them out for for a run because she likes it better than she likes some of the other products and so there's just happens to be some left in the fridge and so she goes and grabs it A lot of the stuff once we get out of the bench, so once we're out of just the office, we'll get it into that white labeled packaging and either we'll go a little bit broader audience and go to just our ambassadors.
Speaker 2:Either we'll go a little bit broader audience and go to just our ambassadors, or we'll try to go to a couple times. We've done a larger beta test pool where we open it up to more of our customers, but we're talking tens of people and getting some feedback on, for instance, our salted citrus gel. We made something that we liked. It was pretty citrusy, but we liked it was pretty citrusy, but we liked it. We sent it out for feedback and the feedback was and this is just too tart and so we, we came back, brought it back to the bench, dialed back some of that citrus and then, you know, came out with version two and and that was better received, and then scaled it up to the full, full thing from there.
Speaker 1:So, even as a small company, you guys are still leveraging your employees, your ambassador network and your customers to give you feedback on what you're cooking in the kitchen.
Speaker 2:essentially, yeah, yeah, and not everybody's going to like everything. That's why you have multiple different products. But when the you know, if you send it to 50 people and 40 people say, hey, this is too tart, and 10 people say I love it, well, maybe you need to dial it back. Yeah, you gotta listen to your customers.
Speaker 1:All right, man Doug, I appreciate you coming on and being so transparent. I think we need a lot more of that kind of across everywhere, and what I hope is that as more and more companies continue to kind of like coexist in the space, that kind of the transparency across everybody and the confidence across everybody increases simultaneously. So I appreciate that it's not easy to open your doors and say, hey, you know, this is where we screwed it up and this is how what our manufacturing looks like. You guys are, like I said, a small company. I'm taking you away from bottle washing or mobbing the floors or whatever else you're going to do next duck.
Speaker 1:So I appreciate your time as well. I do know that you guys are really hard working. Every time I've seen you at an event, one of the things that I appreciate about y'all is it is your employees and you're all hands on deck. The same people are serving up the soft serve ice cream or the creamies, as you guys say in the Northeast, serving up the creamies are the ones that are developing the products. You know you're actually interfacing. It's a very small team and I kind of appreciate the way that you guys have scrapped together and hustled and, you know, just had dogged determination to, you know, put products in front of people and even taking my silly little feedback on some of your formulations at times.
Speaker 2:So.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you, man, I appreciate you a lot.
Speaker 2:That means a lot to me A big voice in the ultra world, to say that I appreciate that a lot. And thanks also for being part of the team that's keeping us all in the nutrition world honest on how things are going and what we're doing with the products. Thanks, man.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. We'll cut. We'll have you back on whenever you come out with a new product and you can tell us how good it is. How's that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we'll have to get Eliza on to get that Some, some some version of maple syrup, something that's all you can divulge. No surprise, it's maltodextrin.
Speaker 1:Oh, man, they might kick you out of the state. All right, doug, I appreciate it. Man, thanks, cooke. Talk to you soon. All right, folks, there you have it, there you go. Much thanks to Doug for coming on the podcast today peeling back the curtain on his own processes in order to give us a little bit of confidence and clarity to what goes on behind the scenes with these companies that take natural products and turn them into sports nutrition products. I hope you, the listeners out there, have gained some clarity and some confidence from listening to the conversation that Doug and I had, because, at the end of the day, I do think that is something that we need to restore within the community with all this chaos that is actually going on. That's it for today, folks. As always, I appreciate each and every single one of you. We will see you guys out on the trails.
