Food Chained

Vasa (00:43.721)
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Food Chained. Today we have Elan and Kiki from Sour Milk on the show. Welcome guys.

Elan & Kiki (00:55.768)
Thanks for having us.

Vasa (00:57.937)
I'm very excited about this one. I've been seeing a lot of rumblings and tumbling on Twitter and LinkedIn about how you guys are building penetration in your local market. It's kind of reminiscent of certain drug dealings that might have happened in the city as well. I've been talking about you guys for the past two weeks on this show and they'll go live this week and next week. I'm excited to get all of the info straight from the source. So tell me more about how you got started initially with Benny and then switched over to Sour Milk.

Elan & Kiki (01:28.098)
Yeah, so Kiki and I met undergrad while at Stanford. We actually bonded in a food sort of systems class that talked about nutrition and health and the intersection of how those things affect us as a society. And kind of both realized we have this passion for how food plays a role in our overall health and wellbeing. We then went on to our separate careers. I studied computer science at Stanford, Kiki studied human biology, but she went on to be in private equity and I was a product manager for four and a half years at a tech startup.

And around the same time last year, we both started thinking about what we wanted to do next in our careers. And simultaneously, like over the past couple of years, I was facing all of these gut health issues. And this is super interesting because it manifested in bizarre ways. Like most often when people think about gut health, think, I'm bloated after I eat, or maybe I'm not going to the bathroom very regularly. For me, it was like brain fog and those things as well, but also like

hormones were really, really low. was having super low energy, like all of these things that were really downstream from like what I was consuming, at least, so I thought. And I just kind of came to realize how insanely important your microbiome and gut health is in just like how you feel every single day. I think it's a wildly underrated aspect of our health and is now a growing field of research and kind of people are starting to pay attention to it in a really interesting way. But in the process of trying to heal my gut, I...

realized one of the best ways to do so is by consuming probiotics. And at first I was like, great, I eat yogurt every day, so I should be in the I was actually an athlete in undergrad and so yogurt was like a part of our like post-practice like regimen. It was a part of my diet already, which is really important. I'll come back to that shortly. But I thought I was in the clear because I was eating yogurt every day. And then when I looked at all the yogurt on the shelf and actually dug into the science, I learned that none of it is

And you know, it doesn't mean it's bad for you, right? A lot of yogurt is high protein and low carb. And if it has no sugar in it, it can be a great food for you. But it's not doing anything for my gut health. And so what I decided to do was actually design a new yogurt from the ground up and really like reverse engineer it to be first and foremost, a probiotic supplement, and then figure out how to make it taste good.

Elan & Kiki (03:45.55)
I was making that product for myself for a couple of years and Kiki and I were roommates in San Francisco at the time, so she was subject to all these biohacking endeavors. That's really what sour milk is today. The overall thesis that we have is two-thirds of Americans have digestive issues and that's just self-reported, so probably plenty more do. Ninety-two percent of Americans are also consuming yogurt.

Vasa (04:12.117)
Damn.

Elan & Kiki (04:12.598)
What we thought was rather than selling them a pill or a powder or a supplement that isn't a part of their everyday dietary habits, we can actually take this thing that they're already eating every single day and make it extremely good for their guts. And so that's how we kind of think we can like quote unquote win in health is actually meeting people where they are in their habits, just like I did for myself, as opposed to like buying supplements or pills or powders.

Vasa (04:39.103)
Very smart. And how did Benny come into play? What was the thought process behind that? And then what made you pivot over to sour milk? I like both, but sour milk really hits.

Elan & Kiki (04:47.95)
Yeah, for sure. Well, the name is obviously, mean, for anyone who has branded anything or built any company, it can keep you up at night and you can give yourself, you can spend weeks, if not years trying to come up with the perfect name. And so ultimately, it's sort of an emotional decision where I think you just have to go with it and, you know, see how it plays out. With Benny, you know, we were trying to start the company and this was that was sort of the initial name that we had.

We liked it because Lebanese is an ancient Assyrian word for yogurt and it also meant for life. And so we loved that Benny was sort of a shorter version of that, easy for people to say, almost like a caricature in some sort of way of a person. And yet a nod to what our actual product was. And so we started building in public with that name, Benny, actually like, you know, giving the, dropping the whole reveal of the name, the logo, all of those things and building the marketing.

before we ever had any product in people's hands. And then actually we were, you know, I'm so glad that everything happened the way it did, but we were slapped with a cease and desist about six months after that. And that is why we changed our name to Sour Milk. There's another Benny out there and they found out about us, also a very young company and in a very, in a different category, but ultimately still within sort of the food CPG space. So it would have been, you know.

very dilutive for both of our brands. And unfortunately we didn't have senior rights. So we were put into a position to either fight this or to change our name and felt like, what an opportunity. This brand has been in the world now for six months. And we chose a name before it was in the world. Like that's sort of the catch 22 about choosing a name, right? It doesn't have a personality before and now it does. Let's actually take this moment to rename it from everything we've known now about marketing, about branding, about...

grabbing people's attention and how do we actually choose a better name that can fit who we are and then also what we want to be. And so that's how we got sour milk was it sort of fit those criteria of both being, what is this? So like actually still having some sort of meaning and nod to what our product is. Yogurt is fermented and alive and we want you to remember that when you say the name sour milk. The other is that

Elan & Kiki (07:07.01)
we wanna grab your attention, right? Everything is an attention economy these days. And so being able to sort of stop the scroll in real life and get your attention for a few seconds on the grocery store shelves was a big impetus for sour milk. And then the last is that it's just easy to pronounce and say. And so most people, you there's a lot of names that are fa-yeh, ciggy's, people don't know how to say those words. And so we wanted something that was very easy and digestible.

Vasa (07:33.899)
I think it's fun because there's another Icelandic provisions and there's skier and it's all so tough to pronounce. Sour milk, it's kind of throwing everything on his head. With gummy bears or gummy candy, there's rotten. You wouldn't expect that to be something delicious and I feel like it plays well this day and age. Back in the day 10 years ago, I don't think you'd be able to pull it off. Buyers would be like, no, that's a crazy name. We won't take that. But I feel like you can now.

Elan & Kiki (07:59.456)
Exactly, and I mean, you know, whether they like it or not, everybody remembers the name sour milk because, you know, usually it triggers a gut reaction, no pun intended, but of like, ew, what? Right? And then they, you know, peek a little bit more, but it's that like emotional resonance that actually creates some sort of memory in your brain about it too.

Vasa (08:10.602)
Mm-hmm.

Vasa (08:20.233)
I feel like you turned something that could have been rough if there was a huge amount of meaning behind Benny into something very, very positive because it does stop people in their tracks. And honestly, there's only improvement for like this. There's only up from here. You start with sour milk and it's delicious, I bet. And people are like, wait, you know, you can't get any worse. Yeah.

Elan & Kiki (08:36.17)
Expectations. It's all about the expectations. We get a lot of people who are surprised when they eat it. They're like, wait, it's so good. And we're like, yeah, of course. Of course it's so good. Yeah.

Vasa (08:47.723)
Let's talk about some of the logistical challenges. I've worked for a lot of different refrigerated food companies with my agency. And one of the craziest things is, and you guys talk about it in your building and public marketing, is shipping refrigerated, frozen, dry ice, whatever it may be, is super expensive. The MOQ would have to be like 150, 170 to be able to absorb that dry ice, which is like 40 bucks a pop. So you guys are doing something very, very interesting locally. And it's...

It has a lot of like Pablo Escobar-esque type movement to it with brown bags meeting on the corners of blocks and having like drop calendars of this day will be here. Just talk to me all about that stuff because I absolutely love it.

Elan & Kiki (09:19.63)
You're giving us a lot of credit.

Elan & Kiki (09:33.966)
Yeah. So I think the way we thought about it was actually like, you know, we call it the drug deal model and because that's kind of what it is, but really taking a step back, like there were a couple of problems we were trying to solve. Number one is how do we get product into people's hands as quickly as possible? And that means we're not going to have final packaging ready. We're not going to be in grocery stores. We're not going to have a distributor. Like it literally means me and Kiki making product and giving it to them. And that's like just full stop.

you get product in people's hands as quickly as possible. And so that was like a priority. And then number two was sort of this other idea of like

What if we were able to have thousands of people, customers, loyalists, people have been following us and eating our yogurt before we even stepped foot in a grocery store? And the reason being is because we think that there's a world of a difference walking by a new product on the shelf and being like, I met the founders of that company, or I tried that yogurt at a pop-up, or I met them on the street and saw they were selling yogurt versus...

walking by a new product at the store and being like, what is that new product? Like, it's just a world of a difference, feeling an emotional connection, like you were there and a part of building this journey. And so we wanted those two, to accomplish those two things. We wanted to build a customer base before we were in grocery stores. And we wanted to get product into people's hands as quickly as possible. And so we sort of took a step back and we're like, okay, how could we do this? And, you know, design this kind of like pickup model that was like, okay, you know, I, like I said, a computer science background.

I was like, okay, I'll build this extra layer on top of our Shopify website that basically doesn't allow customers to buy our product until they choose a pickup location in time. So it sort gates it to New York City. And Shopify does not have that natively. spent like, Kiki knows, I was like dusting off the coding skills to try and get this to work. And then we didn't have that first version of it and people were like...

Elan & Kiki (11:37.998)
there were a couple of hiccups, we're like, okay, what if we sent them a calendar invite? So we added this other feature on top that was like, we sent them a calendar invite when they check out. So just sort of like ironed out this flow that we've now just been like chugging along at. We've sold like 5,000 yogurts at this point through this drug deal model in a very like scrappy way. And on the back end, it involves me and Kiki loading up our cooler backpacks and running around on city bikes across New York City delivering yogurt to people. I mean, we have one tonight.

between six to seven p.m. We're splitting up. She's going to Williamsburg. I'm gonna be in the West Village and I have like 15 drops over the course of an hour and where people have already pre-ordered and signed up. also, you know, I usually bring a few extra just in case someone walks by and wants to buy, but it's all pre-loaded. So there's no sort of sale that's happening on the street. It's just folks who are coming by. And the one other thing I'll add is like, you know, we are...

Vasa (12:07.593)
epic.

Elan & Kiki (12:27.244)
like you mentioned, we're cold chain and so we can't do the classic D2C launch where we have our Amazon storefront and now we're online and you can pre-order and buy and get it shipped to your house. And so it's really difficult to get the data to show a grocery store, like, hey, we have traction and this is why you should take a chance on us. And this has been a really, really great way to actually leverage this data to get ourselves in the door at grocery stores that we would usually not have.

chance at, but because we can say we've sold 5,000 yogurts over the course of seven weeks in New York City in this incredibly high friction model. And I believe, you know, if we bring this to the store, we can just funnel all those customers who may not normally go to your store, right? But now they're a diehard fan of sour milk and they're going to go out of their way to get it. And so that's a very compelling story as well for like our next phase of growth and getting ourselves there.

Vasa (13:20.277)
This, I can't, I don't know if you can tell, but in my brain there's a wheel turning right now about how many fun and cool things you can do. I'm imagining a security guard with a briefcase and it's handcuffed to him and he's recording you guys and all of the shadiest things you possibly can do. then there's an inception of somebody recording the security guard and security guard's recording you. When you start.

Elan & Kiki (13:42.83)
I don't know. Yeah, we share some speaking plans.

Vasa (13:46.301)
One, it's probably helpful to have security around you guys when you're going around late in the city. But also, you're going to turn retailers into distribution centers for your guys' drug deal model. And I think it's so cool. if at the very least, yes, you can't show attraction to them and other retailers, but 5K sold in seven weeks, and you guys are the delivery people, that should be more than enough to land the bodegas and eventually tell that story to Whole Foods or Sprouts. I'll clip.

Elan & Kiki (13:50.797)
Ha!

Vasa (14:14.783)
I'm going to clip this episode for you so you just send them the video.

Elan & Kiki (14:17.656)
Totally, exactly. And I think to your point, a lot of times we look at different retailers, we're like, this location would be amazing for getting all of our Upper West Side customers. We already know we have a ton of Upper West Side customers, because that's one of our biggest drops in New York City. And we're like, if we were there, then we can drive all of those people that already exist to the store and have it be easier for them. So that is kind of how we're thinking about it now.

Vasa (14:40.991)
You can honestly probably sell the safety of it too because I don't know New York City that well, but I know that everything I see online, like the subway looks pretty scary and then riding bikes seems like it's pretty dangerous. I feel like there's floods or fires or something crazy happening. Like you could just say, hey, for our safety, if you brought this on, we can serve 2000 customers in your borough or whatever the words are.

Elan & Kiki (14:51.074)
Yeah.

There are.

Elan & Kiki (15:01.144)
There you go. There you go. Yeah, it's true. It's true.

Vasa (15:04.095)
I love it. It's one of the scrappiest stories in CPG that I can think of right now. Are there any other things that inspired you to go this route with the drug deal model? Are there other brands where you're like, hey, that's really cool, maybe we could do this in our city? More people need to know about the drug deal model that you guys are doing. It's epic.

Elan & Kiki (15:08.238)
Thank you.

Elan & Kiki (15:22.382)
I mean, I think that like farmers markets are the original inspiration for so much of what we're doing. you know, people always ask, why aren't you in farmers markets? And I think it's not because we don't want to be in a farmers market. It's like, this has become the most efficient and easiest path to getting product in people's hands without any overhead. So like, again, back to the whole point about a lot, how do we go from, there's such like ways of doing things in the, in the consumer space where you need to hire a broker, you need to do this sort of thing, you need to do this thing. It's like, actually, no.

let's just move from point A to point B in the quickest way possible. I don't need to go to A and a half, know, A three quarters and then to B. And so this was sort of one of those things where we saw farmers markets. That was a huge inspiration. There's so many CPG brands that start there, but actually how do we create our own environment where we don't need to rely on a third party to actually facilitate that. And we can just be the facilitator ourselves.

Vasa (16:12.235)
Amazing, so you guys probably have one or two days a week where you're producing and then the rest of the days you're doing your drops.

Elan & Kiki (16:17.134)
Yeah, we produce in large, it's funny, every time we do this, we gain more followers and more traction. So we go back and we're like, okay, we need this much product. And then we come down and we're like, oh shit, that wasn't enough. So it's constantly figuring out what the right amount is to produce. I mean, we produce because we're dairy, we are subject to, we can't be under cottage law. So we have to be in a big dairy manufacturing plant.

And so we are using a Comian Upstate four and a half hours away, but we're still very much on the ground and iterating on the process with them. And so we go up about once a month, make a big pallet or so of yogurt, have a warehouse down here in Long Island City, and we go back and forth every single day to pick up from the warehouse and then distribute to our drunk. We're basically bottlenecked by the amount of yogurt we can carry on our backs. So like we have to go back and pick up product from our warehouse.

every single day to fulfill the orders for that day.

Vasa (17:18.251)
You got to put like a Craigslist ad up or whatever the equivalent of that is these days. I'm showing my age right now of like additional drug dealers needed and find people to help you out.

Elan & Kiki (17:27.022)
We should, we literally should. I mean, it's funny, I think that's one of the hardest, most challenging parts is understanding like everyone's schedules, right? Like we set the time for the drop, right? We just decide, all right, I'll be in the West Village from six to 7 p.m. It's before my dinner. Like, great, that's easy for me as Kiki. Does that work for everybody else? We don't really know. people not, you know, is someone like not converting on our

because they can't do that time or that neighborhood. And so I think, yes, there's a really cool thing that comes with getting to meet the founder and this incredibly intimate experience and a bit of like a, you know, you know, sort of thing, which everyone loves in New York City. But also with that, obviously we are the bottleneck as well for people getting more yogurt. So ideally we would love to remove ourselves. 24 seven people who get yogurt, but.

Which is the grocery store. Of course it is grocery store. We know that we will be a grocery store product. That's like where people go and buy their yogurt right now. I think like the way we think about it is like obviously like our top line goal is to help people heal their guts. And we think the easiest way to do that is by meeting them where they are in their diets. So yogurt being things that 92 % of Americans consume. And the other thing that we have to do in order to make that happen is make it really easy for them to get. And right now like

Vasa (18:22.635)
Yeah.

Elan & Kiki (18:47.628)
We have a model for them to get it, but it's like super high friction, right? Like you have to go pre-order on our website, then you have to like find time out of your day to like come walk and meet us on a street corner. And like, it's fun and it's cool and you get to meet us and it's a weird, bizarre experience to do in New York, but it's not seamless. It's not, you know, the easiest way to get your yogurt. And so, you know, all of this said with the caveat of like, we think that the grocery store is going to be our best channel for actually reaching the most amount of people.

Vasa (19:16.757)
What are some of the, what's the word, the retailers, what are some of their aversions to bringing the product on as a new brand is probably like, we want more traction, we wanna make sure you sell it. What are you guys getting? Because I feel like if I was a buyer and you said, hey, we're doing all of these drops and going to different places and we sold 5,000 units in seven weeks, I'd be like, yeah, here's a few slots for you, here's some facings.

Elan & Kiki (19:41.23)
Totally. I mean, I think the biggest thing is just with our category. So it's less about sour milk and it's much more about yogurt and fridge space. So also for people who are like non-CMPG, fridge space is incredibly finite in every single grocery store. And you you are competing, you have to displace somebody to like usually get fridge space, especially in the markets we're going for right now, which are smaller independent stores and they don't have, you know, they have small.

cases. And so that's also that's like the biggest pushback that we currently get right now is just like, hey, let's talk again soon. But like we have limited space right now and we're not looking to expand this. And so it's truly a constraint on that. And like not feeling confident or comfortable yet to displace somebody else in in the sort of category set. So I think like once we get our first retail board on the board and like get those velocity numbers and those sell throughs, I think we will be easy to win over everybody else.

Yeah. Yeah. The caveat I would put there is that we haven't really started pushing on retailers yet. Like we, we got that feedback from one. Yeah. One out of like, then we reached out to five at like, what are we really seeing about our launch partners? And so we reached out to like five potential launch partners and four of them said, yes, we'd to be your launch partner. And one of them was like, Hey, our fridge space is small. And we went to the store and we're like, yeah, their fridge space is remarkably small. So.

I think that it's a sort of telltale for the foreseeable future and what we might get pushed back against, but at least for now, we haven't gotten a ton of resistance on retailers carrying us. Our strategy with retail is to be really intentional with who we're starting with and crush those retailers and then expand up from there and go beyond that.

Vasa (21:30.731)
Are you guys delivering yourself direct to the retailers?

Elan & Kiki (21:34.946)
Yeah, for the beginning we'll definitely do that. will become quickly unscalable. But currently, yes, that will be the best thing.

Vasa (21:41.589)
That's, it's the epitome of what is it, inch wide, mile deep though. It's so focused.

Elan & Kiki (21:48.084)
And that's our goal. Totally. Especially given our product. Like I think there's, there's, you can, you can build this in so many different ways, but we're very, we know very well the constraints of our product and knowing those constraints, like we want to make sure that we can like, like Alana said, like crush it and every initial thing we do, right? It's like this drug deal model, we need to crush before we ever can move to like any other retailer. And then once we're in two,

we need to make sure we have insane velocities. And then, okay, we can expand from there and expand from there, but there's a lot of cold chain logistics on the back end and everything else that we want to make sure are perfect.

Vasa (22:27.819)
I read that you guys can't even freeze your product because it messes with the consistency of the product. So what is, in a perfect world, what does expansion look like for you? Is like Whole Foods regional launch where now you have a distributor, cold chain distributor delivering to them or a dairy distributor? What does that look like?

Elan & Kiki (22:33.72)
Yes.

Elan & Kiki (22:48.556)
Yeah, I think that's fairly accurate. mean, our, we're very concentrated. Again, like you said, you know, inch wide, mile deep, we're very concentrated on New York City and New York State in general. Like there's 19 million people here. And I think it's a high concentration of our target demographic in terms of people who are a little bit more health conscious, like slightly willing to pay slightly higher for their higher quality product. And so I think that like in the, you know, immediate,

to short term, we're gonna be very focused on being ubiquitous in New York and New York City. I think Whole Foods is an awesome retailer for us down the line and we would love to do a regional and eventually national launch with them. Yeah, and what I'll just say is it's a difficult category, but we're not unique with other yogurt brands. so dairy distributors or other distributors who are used to the refrigeration reefers, we're not.

we have it worse than like the shelf stable and like the freezer, but at least we're like, we're not anything unique within the yogurt space in terms of that. And so yes, we definitely will be signing on with the distributor, like as we continue to grow because we won't be able to do it all.

Vasa (24:04.853)
Whenever the time comes and you need somebody in the Pacific Northwest, there's a group called Peets Milk Delivery. And they helped build Elenos back in the day, because they're a Seattle-based company. every time, I went on ride-alongs with them because they do some DSD for Perfie in the Pacific Northwest. And every one of them knew, like the guy that I was with at Peets Milk from like Elenos or whatever other dairy, I think they deliver the Alexander Farms or whatever, the glass bottle. They deliver all of those cool dairy products to the Pacific Northwest. I feel like there's

Elan & Kiki (24:10.903)
Okay.

Cool.

Vasa (24:34.791)
one of those and like every, like all sorts of them in each different state. And if you found one of those in New York, it'd probably take a lot of lift off of you, allow you to run the business versus like literally running the drops.

Elan & Kiki (24:48.194)
Definitely. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. I think that there will be a time where it's like a big trade off in terms of where our time is spent. Yeah.

Vasa (24:53.771)
Mm-hmm.

Vasa (24:57.333)
So what does the next three months look like for you guys? Or what does the next six months look like for you guys in a perfect world? What does the drug deal model turn into?

Elan & Kiki (25:06.99)
Yeah, so right now we're gearing up for our first big retail launch, which will happen in the fall. So we have our retail partner that we're going to launch with, and then we have a couple more that are going to follow after that, sort of like a fast follow. And I think everything that we're doing from now until then is continuing to build up our customer base for that launch and packaging. mean, you know, because you're in the CPT space, packaging takes a really long time.

And so we're putting in our packaging orders that they're going to come in time for that launch and pretty much gearing up for that, I would say.

Vasa (25:42.219)
That's so awesome. I feel like once you get, it's almost, I think of marketing or building a brand as a video game. Like you guys started with your Jugda model and it's like in Zelda when Link has a wooden sword and a wooden shield and then you start like upgrading and upgrading and upgrading and finally you have all of like the cool weaponry.

Elan & Kiki (25:43.811)
Yeah.

Elan & Kiki (25:56.418)
Literally, we're leveling up at every point. We're like, only use city bikes right now, which is like in New York, we have these like, have Lyft bikes, city bikes, and you just kind of like pick one up and can leave it at different docks. And we would just start the conversation of like, maybe we should get a car at some point. Like that might be helpful. So it would be like the upgrade from the bike to the car. We should talk about that after this. Yeah.

Vasa (26:20.363)
If you need people to chip in to get it wrapped so it's the drug deal mobile, hit us up. We'll throw in.

Elan & Kiki (26:26.39)
I love that. Honestly, would be sick to get it wrapped. a idea.

Vasa (26:30.603)
It needs to be one of those things, almost like the Ostermar Wiener has one, like the Wiener Mobile, the Red Bull has the Red Bull can thing, and then there's the, what is it, the cheddar company that has a badass cheddar mobile. Oh, I forget the name. Is it Tillamook? There's a cheddar brand that has the cheddar mobile. I'll find it, I'll send it, I'll probably have the editing team put a picture of it in the actual long form.

Like those sorts of things are so epic. think that one, it's hilarious that you use a city bike. Two, when you guys do level up to an actual vehicle, it's gotta be Raptor. There's gotta be some sort of fun thing with it.

Elan & Kiki (27:07.81)
Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. It's a good idea. It would be so fun. We just pull up and have our hood up. Yeah. We have the trunk up and we just start passing at you.

Vasa (27:19.849)
Like, probably like the Pink Panther theme song as your horn. You know, like as you're the drop. That's so great. Before we jump, I want to get a couple, I like doing predictions or not hot takes, think hot take artists are boring. But what are some of the brands in CPG right now that you look up to? And what are one of the brands that you might be looking forward to potentially exit in the very near future?

Elan & Kiki (27:23.61)
I know.

you

Elan & Kiki (27:47.178)
One brand that I really look up to right now is Alex Ice Cream. They're someone who has helped us in different ways. But I think anyone who's in the dairy space, we have major props to because now we know what it's like to be here. But I think they've really been able to make an incredibly delicious product that I think the flavors are delicious. It's just so yummy. Also sort of, and again, on the probiotic theme, they have this new skew, which is their probiotic.

Vasa (28:01.227)
Mm-hmm.

Elan & Kiki (28:16.59)
culture cups and sort of bringing back that nostalgia of ice cream in the little cups with the wooden spoon. And I think the whole marketing around that has been great. And then also just started a conversation around dairy to make it cool again. know, people are talking about A2 milk beyond just people who drink Alexander Family Farms, right? Like it's now entering mainstream in a really cool way. And I think it's changed the conversation and, you know, brought back some sexiness to dairy. Yeah. Who's going to exit?

Vasa (28:42.443)
Agreed.

Elan & Kiki (28:46.959)
who do we think is going to exit? Yeah. That's a good question. That's a hard question.

Elan & Kiki (29:00.27)
Thank you.

Like what's something that's interesting? Like know, a jar of fish wine or something like that.

Vasa (29:08.501)
As you're thinking about it, when you brought up the culture cups and the nostalgia of those old cups, all I could think about was the taste of the wooden spoon. Yeah. Yeah.

Elan & Kiki (29:17.114)
You know when you're sucking on it and it's like, yes, and it's kind of soggy with your own saliva. Yeah, those are so fun. I love those. And sometimes they just be like the vanilla with the chocolate swirl in it, like the chocolate syrup sort of swirl. So good. The cups are so good.

Vasa (29:32.491)
And there's something so joyful about pulling back the lid of it too. just like, it didn't pop, but it kind of just like, I don't know the word for it.

Elan & Kiki (29:37.122)
Yes.

Yes, it's like a yogurt. It's like a yogurt land where it's sort of like sealed. very satisfying. now I want to order culture cups. I we kind of think on the topic of dairy and cultured products, I feel like good culture is on the path to exit. They've been on the path. Yeah, like I think that their like, trajectory is like, you know, incredible right now. I think that a bigger dairy conglomerate

Vasa (29:45.669)
Yeah.

Elan & Kiki (30:09.485)
probably scoop them up pretty soon.

Vasa (30:12.155)
I was just thinking about them. One, I love the product that's in my fridge. Two, they have this, them and Gorillaz Pickles, I think are two of my favorite marketing fodder right now, because the receptacle is used to make other things and put it back in. And that's when you know you have a badass brand when people are using, when I was growing up, that meant you were poor. We would use, can't believe it's not Butterthings, and it would be our Tupperware for pasta. But now,

Elan & Kiki (30:24.226)
Bye.

Elan & Kiki (30:28.834)
Yeah.

Elan & Kiki (30:37.656)
Yes.

100%.

Vasa (30:40.861)
Now people are using it like the Griller's Pickles especially, like people are using Good Culture cottage cheese, blending it with like cheeses and jalapenos and stuff and then putting pickles in it, putting it back in either one of those two receptacles, which just really shows you that you have a brand when people are doing that.

Elan & Kiki (30:57.006)
The long-haul for you page is just good culture cops of people making random shit and they're good culture cops. It's great. Yeah, I love that.

Vasa (31:01.427)
Yeah, yeah, yep.

The chocolate on top that people are smashing with a spoon, those old deals.

Elan & Kiki (31:08.216)
Yeah, that's it.

Vasa (31:11.403)
Yeah. Well, you guys are so awesome. I'm so glad we got the time to chat. I can't wait to tell your story about the drug deals. And I'll link to your website and all of that good stuff. And I'm so happy for you and I'm rooting for you guys.

Elan & Kiki (31:22.988)
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, come die to a drop if you ever in New York City.

Vasa (31:27.837)
I will, I will. I'm gonna dress up really, really shady, but don't worry. It'll probably be like black ski mask with sour milk logo on the sweater.

Elan & Kiki (31:36.542)
I love it. love it. All right. So nice chatting. Thank you.

Vasa (31:38.581)
Awesome. Thank you guys.

Vasa (31:43.979)
All right.