How I Built This with Guy Raz - Primal Kitchen: Mark Sisson

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Mark Sisson made a big bet on mayonnaise, and won: four years after launching his Paleo-friendly condiment company Primal Kitchen, he sold it for $200 million. He succeeded partly because he drew lessons from his previous failures and accomplishments - as a marathon runner, Ironman triathlete and coach, frozen yogurt proprietor, sports supplement founder, TV show host, and Paleo book author. But Mark’s biggest business came at an age when most people contemplate retirement. He developed a recipe for avocado-oil based mayonnaise, then added ketchups and other condiments. After Primal Kitchen was sold to Kraft Heinz Corporation in 2019, Mark launched a totally new business: minimalist shoes.This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei.It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Melia Agudelo.Our engineers were Gilly Moon and Maggie Luthar.You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there. That's 1-800-433-1298. And that's it. hope to hear from you soon and we are so excited to have you come on the show and now onto the show we'd had great success with manufacturing the mayonnaise with our co-packer and we find out one day they can't ship the latest batch because it didn't turn into mayonnaise it just turned into oil and goo so we're scratching our heads we're freaking out because this is the business maybe this is the end of it and that was I think probably probably $7,000 worth of ingredients that literally went down the drain. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,

and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a lifetime of experience in sports and healthy eating helped Mark Sisson grow condiment brand Primal Kitchen from nothing to a $200 million exit in just four years. Marksison took a very big bet on mayonnaise, a $6 million bet. The money came from a line of credit he needed to finance an idea to make a paleo and keto-friendly brand of condiments, ketchup, salad dressings, barbecue sauce, and of course mayonnaise. But to get the money, he had to put his life savings and his home on the line as collateral. And he did all this in his 60s, a time when lots of people. people start to dream of retirement. The brand was called Primal Kitchen, and the gamble would pay off in a big way. But the success of Primal Kitchen was built on the trials and errors of Mark's previous ventures. He ran a painting business, a frozen yogurt shop, was a personal trainer, sold supplements,

hosted a failed TV talk show, and then in his early 50s, Mark adopted a new diet, grain-free, dairy-free, mostly meat and vegetables, known as the paleo diet. He started blogging about it, and eventually his blog became popular among people who were interested in paleo diets. The community Mark cultivated through that blog would become the readers of his books, including the primal blueprint, and eventually they'd become the first customers of his paleo-friendly mayonnaise. Mark was born in the early 1950s, and he grew up in a little 1950s, and he grew up in a lot of the first customers, a small fishing village on the coast of Maine. By the time he got to high school, he was a standout track athlete. And he got the opportunity to attend a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire,

where at first, Mark struggled to fit in. But that all changed one summer when he signed up for an outward bound course. I guess you would describe it as a survival course. And it was a 28-day adventure that was really rigorous. Yeah. There was a four-day solo where you spent four days alone on an island with minimal gear. You were put in a boat with 12 other people that you'd never met before and tasked with navigating that boat. By the way, this sounds like a West Anderson.

This sounds like Moonrise Kingdom. Yeah. So it was a seminal moment for me. That summer transform me, it was amazing. And I came back from that experience, really, I would say, a changed man. I excelled at some of the tasks that they gave us on the island. Every year there's a seven-mile marathon, they called it, around the island. But it was all on the rock-bound coast of Maine.

So it was really a very rocky kind of seven-mile track. And I won that event and set a record that stood for a number of years after that. So when I got back to Exeter for my senior year, my grades picked up. I was captain of the track and the cross-country teams and really came into myself and came into my confidence not just as a person, but also, you know, as a, certainly as a runner. Yeah. And then that confidence carried through. I went to Williams College.

I spent four years at Williams. And you were like, became an elite runner while you were there. Like I think at a certain point you qualified for the 1980 Olympic trials. not that long after you graduated, but from what I've read, when you were at Williams, you weren't super focused on becoming a professional athlete, right? Like you had this whole other career that you thought you might go into, right? I did. What happened was I had been a pre-med candidate at Williams.

I got a bachelor's degree in biology. And I was on a pre-med track until my senior year. I put myself through Williams as a painting contractor. So in summers, I would paint houses and make enough money to pay for my tuition, room and board. Which you could do back in the 70s. Unfortunately, today you can't because of the inflated cost of college. But you could do that in the 70s. Absolutely.

It's incredible. At any rate, I had transformed my dorm room, which is basically a cement box, into an elite bachelor pad. I had built a box within a box to remodel my dorm room with maybe. wood paneling and wallpaper carpeting. I built my own, built my own furniture. Nice. And on alumni weekend, the occupant of the room, the years prior, came back to look at his dorm room and looked at what I'd done to the place and said, oh, my goodness, what is this about? And I said, well, it's just what I do. I'm, you know, I'm pretty handy and I'm a contractor,

and I largely focused on painting. And he said, well, what's your major? And I said, well, I'm pre-med. He said, why are you going to do that? Why don't you do this? Wow. And at that point, I kind of shifted my focus, and I said, all right, I'll take a couple of years off. This running thing is going quite well. I'll take a couple of years off. Then I'll reconsider med school. So I graduated in 75.

I stayed in Williamstown. I built up a painting contracting business that was quite lucrative, which allowed me to travel around the world racing. And I wasn't really, I didn't have this strong feeling that I was going to be one of the top three to go to the Olympic Games. But I had enough success that I thought, okay, if I continue on this track, I would certainly qualify for the Olympic trials. And who knows, you know, maybe I'll have a good day. By the way, what's the fastest you ever ran a marathon in? So in the U.S. National Championships in 1980, I ran 2.16, 37 seconds. Wow. So you try it out. I mean, you qualify for the Olympic trials for the 1980 U.S. team. Did you make the team? No. In fact, a couple of things happened. First of all, the training was,

and this is what literally created a new career path for me. I got so injured from both the amount of train, the amount of miles I was doing, and the diet that was required. You were like 28, 29 years old at this point, which is sort of like when you're really starting to hit your stride as a marathon runner. Right. Exactly. And, but you know, in those days, it was, you know, all about carbohydrate loading and you carbloaded every single day. Pasta dinners and, yeah. Anything goes. By the way, the furnace will burn anything.

So it was a lot of beer, a lot of bread, a lot of pasta. And by the way, you were running, you were probably running 10 to 15 miles or more a day. I was averaging 100 miles a week for several years. Yeah. It can't be good for you. No, no, no, it's not. I am here to tell you it's not good for you. Right.

It is something that humans can do, but it's not good for us. I want to just zoom in for a quick moment and ask you about this because from what I read about you, when you were training and one of the reasons why you stopped training, and this is a lot of people will find this surprising is that you actually, your health was in like free fall. Like you were, you were doing so much cardiovascular exercise that you had like, I mean, I'll let you describe it, but I've read things like tendonitis, arthritis, okay, but like irritable bowel syndrome, like you couldn't control your bowels at certain. times like acid reflux like you? No, I was a wreck. I mean, you know, I sort of roll my eyes. I was on the cover of Runner's World magazine three times as exemplary of a really fit runner. Yeah. And yet I was falling apart on the inside. And as you said, I had, I was developing arthritis in my feet. In your 20s? In my 20s. Yeah. And that was partly from my diet, partly from these overly cushioned shoes, which we'll get into later. And I had tendinitis in my hip, irritable bowel syndrome that

dictated pretty much my every move throughout the day. I literally had to figure out where the nearest bathroom was just in case. I woke up every morning with severe gut pain. Now I find out later on that that was entirely a result of my diet and my dietary choices. But those choices were contemplated to give me enough calories and enough carbohydrates to be able to run the distances that I felt I needed to run to be competitive. So you were, I mean, you were obviously an elite runner, but not, I mean, elite, elite, there's elite, and then there's the people who make the Olympic team. And of course, 1980, there was a boycott, U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics, so you would not have gone to the Olympics anyway. But it sounded like that kind of, you're 28,

and you're kind of broken at this point. Yeah. Physically. Yeah, no, for sure. So in 1980, I was actually 27, and for a while I was quite down to myself. Because one of the things that happens as an endurance athlete is you sort of build up this tolerance to pain and discomfort. Yeah. And then you almost require it on a daily basis. And people talk about the runners high. They talk about the endorphins and the addiction. And all of that is true, but I don't know, and they also call it a good addiction. I'm not sure it's a good addiction. And by the way, Were you living in Maine at this time? Sorry, by then, I lived in Williamstown through 1978.

78, I packed up everything, and I drove across the country to Palo Alto and Menlo Park in that area of northern California. Because you can run your route. Absolutely. So I had this, I was jonesing for exertion in some form of activity, so I started riding a bike. And as I was riding more and more miles, I met a guy, a friend I'd known from across town. who said, hey, man, I'm training for this thing over in Hawaii. It's called the Iron Man. You should join me.

And I'm like, you're crazy. I have no inclination. There's nothing in my constitution that would suggest that that would be fun. And after a couple of rides with him, he kind of convinced me that this would be at least a worthy pursuit. So I signed up for the 1981 Iron Man, which was the first year they had it in Kona. I finished like 21st or something like that. It wasn't bad at all. I mean, it wasn't bad.

It was horrible, but it was not a bad first time finish. By the way, that was my first triathlon ever. I'd never entered a triathlon prior to that. And I didn't know how to swim, so I had to teach myself how to swim. It's interesting because you had, I mean, you just talked about how your body was broken because you were running 100 miles a week. And now you're talking about doing Iron Man. Like, I'm thinking you're going to, you're about to say, and then I just gave all that up

and I stopped doing that, but you jumped into another. Yeah. Even more so. Yeah. Well, all of this informs the next 40 years of my life because there was a point at which, after I finished fourth at the Iron Man in 1982, that's when I just realized, you know what, I think it's out of my system. I don't need to compete anymore.

And because I had been a business person most of my life, I had a lawn mowing business when I was 12. And then I started painting houses when I was 14. So I needed to make a living. Because you weren't making money doing that. This is before you could make, I mean, now there's sponsorships and things like that, right? But so you were, I mean, you're 30 around this time when you placed fourth at the 82 Ironman. But I guess around that time, I read that you had started like a frozen yogurt shop in Palo Alto.

That's right. So this was February of 82. So a few months later, a friend of mine, a classmate of mine from Williams, who'd come to Northern California under the Merrill Lynch stock brokerage training program, had seen how much money I was making as a painting contractor and decided to become a painter. You were painting houses in Palo Alto? Yes. And you could just make a ton of cash, just doing basically you, maybe hire one or two people, and that was it. That was it. Yeah. After I retired, after that 82 Iron Man, I said, you know what, I'm going to treat this more like a business. So my friend and I had started, because he saw how much money there was to be made in this painting contract in business. So we started a company called Marathon Painters of all things. In Palo Alto, in South Bay, yeah. Correct. And we did reasonably well, but we were kind of itching to get into other stuff. And we were both entrepreneurial. And so we saw this emerging market of frozen yogurt shops.

Yes, the 80s, frozen yogurt and California or Southern California is penguins. I don't know if they had them up there. Yes, yes. Exploding. Frozen yogurt. TCBY was going to happen. Right. So we opened a frozen yogurt shop in Palo Alto. How did you guys get the cash to do it?

Was it not that expensive? No, no, it was relatively expensive. We put 40,000 bucks on about 10 credit cards. And you had some cash from the painting business, presumably? Yes, we did. But we were also, we were reinvesting. into the painting business. And I have to tell you that one of the things that happens when, especially in that business in painting, I made so much money as a sole proprietor as an individual

when I was doing the work myself. When we started running two vans and nine employees and had to find work all the time to keep them busy and employed, profit margins dropped. Of course. So you guys decide to go into the frozen yogurt business because you see this frozen yogurt boomlet beginning happen in America. This is 82-ish around. Yes. Okay. So we opened in early 83, I think, and it was a great success. We probably netted $175,000 on that 550 square foot location the first year. In profit. Wow. That's amazing. That's a lot of money in 1982. No, it was incredible. What was the frozen sugar place called? Cool licks. Cool licks with a C or with a K? Yes, with a C. With a C. Okay. Cool licks.

It was a great name. And he's a good name, yep. And so you're a good name, yep. And so you were crushing it with, so now the obvious next step in the playbook is, let's go to the, let's build another frozen yogurt shop, right? Right, exactly. Okay. However, my partner had a girlfriend who lived in San Diego, and he would go down and visit her every other weekend, and there was a place emerging in San Diego called soup plantation. Do you remember that?

Oh, yeah. I do. I do. Yeah, they went bankrupt a couple years ago. It was awesome. Get soup, salad. Yeah. So we thought, okay, if frozen yogurt,

is good. What if we had frozen yogurt, a 60-foot-long salad bar, muffins, because brand muffins were the big thing, fresh-baked cookies, because Mrs. Fields was just coming on the scene. You're taking Mrs. Fee, I keep going. I love it. All I want you. Yeah, yeah, and put it all into one, you know, under one roof. And so we secured a location about a mile and a half down the road from Apple computer. We built this 60-foot-long salad bar that was refrigerated from underneath. We put in, you know, eight frozen yogurt machines. We put in a soup bar. We hired one of Mrs. Fields' top managers to oversee the cookie and the muffin operation. But it was 1983 and 84. And to open the place, we had to borrow money. And we were thrilled

to get a loan rate of 17 and 3 quarters percent. 17. People are complaining about 6.5%. seven percent home loans today. They're like 83. You got a 17 percent interest rate to borrow money for a business. And that was normal. And nobody, that was just like that was what it was. In fact, it was 18 and a half.

So we were, when I say we were thrilled to get it down to 17 and three quarters, which meant that we had to make like $15,000 a month profit out of the gate just to service the debt. Oh, God. Just to service the debt. And a bad series of events, if you will, while we were building out the location, the landlord put a gym next door that offered aerobics classes at noon. And so all the parking spaces would fill up. And so when people left Apple computer or any other business to come, have lunch,

they drive through the lot and all the space to be taken. So they'd just go on to the next location. Oh, wow. So we got kind of nailed by the parking problem. We got hammered by the loan. And so after about a year and a half of struggling to make that place work, my partner and I came to an agreement that we would part ways and that he would take over the restaurant. I was happy to give it to him. And he would get the frozen yard shop, which was still very profitable and the restaurant and the painting company. And I was happy to start over again. So I guess by this point, you're in your early 30s, and you've done a bunch of different things. But I read that after the failure of the restaurant, I guess you moved to Southern California to L.A. to kind of reboot your career. And I think you went into personal training, right?

Yeah. So as I was living in Southern California, I started becoming a personal trainer. And I found I could make a lot of money teaching other people or training other people as a personal trainer, how to lift weights, how to train. A lot of people were trying to train for triathlon in those days. So my cred there was such that. I got a lot of clients. Yeah. And eventually I parlayed that into becoming the coach of a professional triathlon team. By this time, triathlon was professional. You could actually make money. There was prize money. So I coached a professional team.

And at some point in 1988, I got called up by a friend who was on the board of directors of the United States Triathlon Federation. And I was asked to participate in the creation of a drug testing document for the sport that prevented athletes from taking advantage of performance enhancing drugs. So I got, I was on this committee. I was also asked to go, to be the one to present the completed rules to the board of directors of the Federation. And a few weeks later, I was asked, would I be willing to come to Colorado Springs and

take over the running of the Federation? Wow. And I did. And so that's, that was the next chapter in my life. So your job, basically, in the late 80s and into the early 90s in Colorado Spring, you went to go work for the Triathlon Federation. This was your, that was your employer. Correct. But I guess at a certain point, it's around sort of the mid-90s, you decided that you wanted to start a kind of a side business selling supplements.

Tell me about how that came about. So I was executive director of the U.S. Federation from 89 through the end of 91. I had asked my girlfriend to move to Colorado Springs with me, and her response was, okay, I'll do it if we get married. So we got married in Colorado Springs, and we had our first child. She's still your wife today, I should say. She's still your wife today, same wife. Yep. And but after a couple of years there, felt like my work had been done, and my wife hated Colorado Springs.

She was an L.A. girl. So we came back to L.A. and I took a job as the chief operative. officer of a supplement company. And because of my early investigations into the anti-doping movement and knowing a lot about the difference between steroids and prehormones and pro-hormones and caffeine and ergodgenic AIDS and blood thinning, you know, I had a pretty deep knowledge of what was appropriate and what was not in terms of at least the rules, governing sport, I wound up working for this company for five years. That was making supplements.

Making supplements. And all over the place from multivitaminol, antioxidant supplements, we were some of the first people to make a carbohydrate powder that you would put into a bike water bottle. By the way, what was the name of the company? It was called the winning combination, TWC. It doesn't exist anymore. But my friend, it's a very good friend of mine who, started it and ran it, became one of the top vitamin guys in the world. But I left after five years,

I didn't have any equity in the company, and there was none on the horizon. And so I decided at that point that I knew enough about supplementation, I knew enough about training, I knew enough about performance, that I would start my own company. And so I left in 97 to start primal nutrition, a company that initially I looked at making preparations that athletes could take as opposed to resorting to ban substances. All right. So this is 1997. I mean, you were like in your 40s at this point. I was 40. I was 43 or you're in mid 40s, I should say yes. Yeah, mid 40s. I left my well-paying job, but I had no money in the bank. I had no money saved up. I didn't have a retirement program. And at that time, I had a wife and two children. So that was the first.

dangerous step I took as an entrepreneur that had consequences if I failed. Yeah. Borrowed some money from my mother's husband and then set off on creating this company to sell these sorts of formulations to athletes. And it was called what you called a primal nutrition. And tell me like what, who was your target audience? Was it triathletes? Was it athletes or was it like gym rats?

No. So it was initially it was my my peeps. Triathletes are runners. And I quickly found out that those guys and girls don't like to buy product. They all want to be sponsored. So I wasn't selling much in the way of these products. And they were multivitamins and... Yeah, they were just formulations that were specific to maybe recovery or focus, mental focus, you know, sleep.

And was it relatively easy to find, is it like cosmetics, you know, where you could find? mind a manufacturer that works with 100 companies and you basically tell them what you want in your capsules. Exactly. Yeah. Right. So, but that only gets you a product. Now you have to sell it.

Yeah, you got to sell it, right? And, I mean, it turns out you actually figured a kind of a pretty lucrative way to sell it and kind of an unexpected way. And I started, I guess you started to become a guest on like a Christian TV show, like a health and fitness show that was on a Christian cable network. work? Yes, yes. I met somebody who had a TV show on a cobbled together network of faith and family religious type programming called Family Net. His show was called Know the Cause. So I went on his show one day, and we talked about all the things I know about training for the average person and all of these things

that resonated with his audience who were, you know, if you wanted to use the term anti-aging back in those days, they were sort of leaning toward that anti-aging concept. And I sold like $20,000 worth of product at the end of the show. And what it was in those days, again, this is 99. It was an 800 number that you had to call. Operators are waiting. They're standing by for your call. Classic, you know, infomercial type pitch. And by the way, do you have a sense of how big the audience was? You know, I do. It was probably, on any given day, there were probably 40 or 45,000 people watching. So you saw the success of being on that show once, and you were like, I got to figure, I got to go back on this thing.

And this guy, the host of the show, his name is Doug Kaufman. He was paying for his time to do the show. Correct. Okay. And so I became one of probably on any given month, five sponsors, five guests. You would sponsor the whole episode, and then you'd be the guest. Yeah. So I was paying maybe $20,000 or $30,000 a month to start with, and it escalated up to $60,000 and $70,000 a month. But it was paying off in spades. I mean, it was incredible. And I would have to fly from Los Angeles to Dallas and then drive the Fort Worth to the studios. And I did this every two weeks for almost 10 years. Wow. But it works so well. And every time I'd get home or I'd actually finish the show and I'd call my call center and kind of get an indication of how many calls we'd gotten.

And it was really quite exciting. So we grew, I grew like 5, 6% a month, you know, for a couple of years. Just out of curiosity, how big, I mean, how much were you doing a year in sales? I got to the point where I was doing between 7 and 9 million a year in sales. Wow. So that was a pretty successful. Yeah. And you probably did not have a big team.

It was like your painting. business, right? Exactly. I operated out of my house, and we picked and packed out of the garage for a lot of this. And how many employees did you have at its peak? I mean, $7 to $9 million in sales. How many people did you need to run the business? The most I had was seven.

What an efficient business. Yeah. And it didn't even get up to seven until later on when we had a pivot on the marketing side of things. So what happened was in the early 2000s, as the Internet was becoming a thing, the number of channels on television exploded with cable TV, cable and dish and direct. This idea that 40,000 or 50,000 eyeballs, people were watching you every day on a show, kind of that receded into the past. Because fewer, there were so many more options that there was this disaggregation, fewer eyes. eyeballs on one show, essentially?

Point one and point two is, I think there was some exhaustion on the number of infomercials on TV. Look, in the late 80s, all the way through the 90s, infomercials were cool, man, oh, look at this, there's just new gadget on the, let's look at it, let's watch for 30 minutes. Now, by then, by the early 2000s, because of all these cable channels, there would be 10 infomercials on at the same time. You literally had channels that were just infomercials. Yes. And you started to see your business decline, the revenue decline?

Yeah. So the first thing I did was I said, I'm pretty good at this content thing. I'm going to do my own TV show. So I spent a year, 2005, writing, producing, starring in along with a guest host. I shot 50 half-hour episodes of a health talk show called Responsible Health. Wait, hold on. Let me just. So you decided to make a show.

A half-hour show. Yes. And the idea was, hey, like, really, I want to build my brand out as Marxist, and I want to be more known to a broader audience of people and I'll do it through this TV show. Was that the idea? Part of it. Part of it was just I thought I could recapture this same concept that I'd done with Doug Kaufman for the prior bunch of years.

And so I poured well over a million dollars into this. I had guests on every time. So I would have a guest on my show, you know, physically. Antigants, anti-aging people, authors of books. And you would advertise your supplements. And I was the advertiser. Right. Now, understand that once you produce these shows, you have to air them.

Yeah. So I bought time on Travel Channel. So for several months, I was on at 8.30 in the morning on Travel Channel in 95 million homes. Wow. But here's where we have to like, you look at the business model and you go, wow, 95 million homes. That's a lot of homes. But if you think about what's going on on television at 8.30 in the morning... This is like 2005, 2006, right? 2005. First of all, 80% of people are not watching TV. So that leaves 20% of people that are even able to watch TV. Of those 20%, 80% are watching ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox.

Okay. By the time you get to Travel Channel, I guarantee you there were not 1,400 people. watching. So a couple of months in, I'm like, I'm losing my ass. I thought it would work. Pretty much gone through all of my savings at that time. And you weren't selling product? The ads weren't working? No, the ads weren't working. It was one of the most stressful years of my life because of the amount of time it took to write, produce, and shoot these shows. Yeah. And I had to take a step back and say, at some point, I got to pull the plug. Otherwise, I'm taking my family down with me. When we come back in just a moment. moment, Mark starts to build a new audience around the paleo diet, first with a blog, then with a book, and then with a new recipe for mayo. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2006, and Mark's

health and fitness show on cable TV is not panning out. And at this point, he's used up most of his savings, and he needs a new plan. So what happened was I took a step back and I'm like, I'm good at creating content. I think I will start a blog. And I will write about something every day for a year. And by the end of the year, I will have written about everything I need to write about and that'll be the end of it. And you would sell, you would link to your products. And that would be the platform that I would link to my products.

Yeah. And so were you, I mean, presumably when you started the blog, you had no readers, right? Right? Zero. Zero. And so were you still advertising on TV to get? No. To get, no. You were just, you were focused or you were depending on repeat customers for your supplements at this point? Exactly. Yeah. All right. So you had the blog. The idea was the blog is going to replace that audience I had on television, right? I mean, you're going to build that audience there. So you're writing something every single day. And after a year of doing this, how big did it get? So the first year, I think it was like 1,200 a day. By year two, it was three to four thousand a day.

And were you discouraged? Yeah, because I thought, from day one, I thought, oh, you know, within a couple of months, I'll have 100,000 readers a day. And this will far surpass anything I did on television. But I started writing about the paleo diet. And I called my own particular version the primal blueprint. But I was writing about the paleo diet as one of the first guys to do that. And there have been a book written a few years earlier by Lauren Cordane called The Paleo Diet.

But I was really starting to write about the lifestyle. And apparently I wrote enough compelling content that people started saying, look, man, you should write a book about this. This is, you know, like, I love your blog post, but I don't want to have to go back and read every single one. Can you put it all in a book form? Well, just tell me about the paleo diet for a moment. I know it. I've been on it myself. But how did you get into, like, I need to change my diet and I want to try this?

So after my 2005 experience with producing the TV show and being under incredible amount of stress and having horrible gastroids, gastric issues, IBS, which had been with me since I was 14, but now I'm 47 and it's even getting worse, or whatever age I was. I was writing a lot about grains, and I started to think maybe grains are kind of not good for your health. Maybe humans are not evolved to handle the tightly wound proteins that are in grains, the gluten, the glitinens, the designs, all of these proteins that are in corn and wheat, so on. So my wife, just one day, she's like, Mark, you're writing about all this stuff about how bad grains are, why don't you just do 30 days of not being on grains? And I did, and it transformed my life.

My IBS went away, my gastrofosophageal reflux went away, and it was like a light bulb went on. All right, I'm going to put a caveat here because we have had founders of paleo and, you know, oriented companies in the show who have similar stories. I have similar stories. I don't eat grains. Okay, occasionally I'll cheat a little of a cookie. and that's a different episode of the podcast. And I'm a big believer in this diet,

but in no way do I want to say, this is going to work for everybody, or it's the end-all-be-all. Like, I think there are lots of people who believe in whole grains, and that's fine. I mean, and I think you'd agree with me, like, do your thing.

But for you, this was transformational. It does, really, you do see massive, positive benefits in your life. Absolutely. Yeah. So that led to my creating a life way, a template for living that included dietary implications, but also addressed sleep and sun exposure and movement and play and using your brain. So I decided to write a book, which I called the Primal Blueprint.

And that came out in 2009 and was an immediate big seller. Now, when I say immediate big seller, I couldn't find a publisher for it. So I self-published it. And by that point, how many subscribers to your blog did you have? So by then, I was up to probably 20,000 regular to 30,000 regular readers a day and maybe a million to two million uniques a month. Wow. And people finding it by doing Google searches on paleo. Yes. Okay. So because this was really when it was started to take off, that whole paleo.

And I think 2013 I read that paleo was the most searched food term on Google that year. And you were, I'm curious, Mark, because obviously. you're a very intelligent guy. You were an elite athlete. You were in the supplements business. You studied biology. So you have some background. But at the same time, like, you know, you're not a board certified physician, which you don't have to be.

There's lots of people who know a lot about nutrition who aren't. But how did you come up with your theories or your ideas? Were you doing research? Or was it just based on your own experience with your own body? Oh, I did a lot of research. Not just the studies, but also sort of the evaluations of the studies over the years. So I did have a background in biology. I had sort of a secondary major in evolutionary biology, so I'm certain that today we're

walking around with a genetic recipe that was crafted over two and a half million years of human evolution, that our genes expect us to do certain things. They expect us to go to sleep when the sun goes down and wake up when the sun comes up. They expect us to lift heavy things once in a while. They expect us to move around all day long. and not sit in the sofa. They expect us to not eat three meals a day, but in fact to eat sporadically. You know, and all of these things that we've sort of created a society around, a civil society around,

that is thwarting our genetic predisposition to be healthy and strong and lean and fit and all of the things that we say we want. I mean, basically, right? I mean, the key to living a healthy life is exercise every day, eat mostly, You know, whole foods, ideally, vegetables, lean meats, fish, and get good sleep and have some friends, right? Like, if you do those things, you're pretty much it. That's pretty much it. And so what you're talking about are sort of like minor modifications of those basic principles.

Exactly. So the book got out there and I started writing more books. I became my own self-publisher. I started publishing a house. That generated some income. We did, you know, we did two million a year in sales in books. So you were basically becoming this kind of this guy who's known as a paleo guy. That was branding.

But I was still kind of disappointed with the effect that this blog, which had now half a million subscribers to a newsletter, and it wasn't selling supplements the way I had anticipated. given the size of the audience. Given the size of the audience. And so really this realization that for the last six years, I've been writing about food a lot and how so much of our good health depends on natural foods that are consistent with the evolutionary behavior. And it just occurred to me that I should be selling food because I'm writing so much about it.

And I was telling people eat a great diet. And you don't need supplements by that, you know, that much. And oh, by the way, here's my supplements. Here's my supplements. Yeah. So if you eliminate sugars from your diet and sweetened beverages and you eliminate refined grains, you eliminate industrial seed oils, you know, the insidious oils that we find everywhere. Soybeans oil.

Soybeans, canola. You come down to a pretty short list of foods that you can actually depend on eating. meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, maybe some starchy tubers once in a while. It could be a boring menu, but for the myriad, almost infinite number of ways that you can prepare these. It's the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, the herbs. The herbs, the spices. And I noticed in the grocery store, you could not find sauces and dressings, you pick up a jar of mayonnaise. It's got canola. It's got safflower. It's got soybean oil in it. And so people would say, in the health food industry, would say, this is the

mayonnaise. It tastes great, but use it sparingly because it's not good for you. And that got me started down this path of creating a food company that would ultimately, I think, revolutionize how, certainly how big food looks at what they're doing. So this is like, 25,000. So this is like 25, 14, you decide to start to work on this project. And you're in your 60s. I mean, this is not, like, you've been down this path before. And, but you could see the opportunity. So let me first start, just kind of break this down. Did you kind of wind down the supplement business or did you keep that going just as a hedge? Well, kept it going. In fact, it funded the startup, if you will, of the, of the food company. Because you didn't start a separate company, right? This was like a subsidiary. Right. Yeah, okay. Right. And that was a, you know, a critical decision I made early on that I, while I wanted to start a Sosses company addressing a convent company, I didn't want to start a new company for a couple of reasons, one of which was within my existing business, I already had a warehouse. I had fulfillment. I had credit card processing so I could sell directly to the consumer. So I had all of these. this infrastructure in place. And also, I didn't want to take a dollar out of my supplement company and then pay 37% to the federal government and 13% to the state of California.

Yeah. And then take the remaining 47 cents and start a new company with it. So it was very beneficial for me to develop the product line within the existing company using what I would call pre-tax dollars. So, and you had a name, you already had a company called Pramil Nutrition selling supplements. So, so you basically were able to, with the existing supplements company, kind of create this sort of other product line, essentially, which was going to be condiments. So I have, I mean, initially, I guess you could, you could be self-funded. You didn't have to find outside funding. Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I was still, I was still making two, two and a

half million dollars a year on the supplement business. But I was taking the money that I would have put in my own pocket and just using it to finance this new product line, which I hoped would become its own company. But I didn't know. I mean, it was early days. It was an experiment. On the other hand, if I'd started a new company, I probably would have gone out and raised money from outside sources. I would have given up more equity than I would wanted to have given up. All right. So I want to get back to the period of time before you had a product, right? Because you had been doing recipes on your blog and you knew how to cook. Yes. But you also were trying to figure out because I think you wanted to make a bunch of different products, right, from the get-go.

So who did you bring on to help you do this? Like, did you find a chef? Did you find, like, how did you even start? So in 2000, early 2014, I had a friend in Sandy. who was a paleo chef. He was known as a paleo chef. And so I brought him on as an R&D consultant, and I hired his wife to manage the business for the year with the intent of arriving at a suite of products. I wanted a couple of salad dressings. I wanted a mayonnaise. I wanted a ketchup. I wanted a barbecue sauce. And I wanted to enter the marketplace with a suite of products. So I actually not only hired them, I gave them a tiny piece of equity. And at the same time, I went out and I found a person who had been in the marketing department of a sparkling probiotics company called Kavita.

I hired her on an hourly basis, very part-time. This is Morgan Bueller. This is Morgan Bueller. I hired her on a part-time basis to be my marketing consultant as we prepared to be ready by the end of 2014 to launch this suite of products. Well, the year flew by quickly, and we had really nothing to show for it except a mayonnaise. Just a mayonnaise. Just a mayonnaise. And at that point, we agreed to part ways.

And I actually bought their equity back from them, and everybody was happy and friendly. But here I am a year into this. That's just you and Morgan. And at that point, Morgan was still part-time. And I looked at Morgan, and I said, look, we're going to do this. I'm hiring you full-time. It's you and me. We're going to take this one mayonnaise and these two.

salad dressings that are halfway there, and we're going to enter the marketplace, and we're just going to see what happens. You said, hey, we're selling mayonnaise. Yep, yep. But it's new thing, right? It's mayonnaise that's good for you. It's based on avocado oil as the healthiest fat that's out there. It tastes great. Because you have to understand in the paleo world, mayonnaise, people love mayonnaise. I didn't realize this. I know. I love mayonnaise. I didn't realize this. But, you know, when I entered the space, I didn't know anything about food. And so I always assumed ketchup was the huge market and mayonnaise was second. Maintays is twice the market that ketchup is. Yeah. So the first product that we were able to commercially make was an avocado oil-based mayonnaise. And I said, let's make a mayonnaise

that is demonstrably the best in its category, using the best possible ingredients. Let's build it first and price it later. In other words, whatever it takes to make it, let's see what you're what those costs come out at, and then let's price it at retail according to a formula that would give us a reasonable margin. And so I entered the marketplace at 995 retail for a 12-ounce jar of mayonnaise. Like, who's going to buy a jar of mayonnaise for that price when you can get it for $2.95 or $3.95 for a regular jar of mayonnaise? Well, that was the bet I was willing to take. In fact, I went to my co-packer on that first batch that we made, and I said, I asked, what's the smallest batch that we can make? It only has a one-year shelf life. I don't want it on my shelves for,

you know, over a year. And he said, well, we can make 12,000 jars. And I really, I took a step back and I'm like, wow, 12,000 jars, that's the least we can make. Yep. So we made the 12,000 jar run, and we sold out in two weeks. How? I mean, What happened? Like, how did that happen? What happened was people in the paleo community who wanted to eat a variety of foods had long since taken tuna salad, chicken salad, potato salad off their menu. They're like wheat-fessed egg salad. We can't have it because it requires mayonnaise, and mayonnaise is bad for you. And now here we are bringing on this product that's now going to open up their menu to include all of these plus, plus, plus, everything else that you put mayonnaise on. So coincidentally, I had been an early investor in Thrive Market, which build itself as Costco

meets Whole Foods online, a membership organization where you could go get all the things you could find at Whole Foods, but at Costco prices, but not at Costco quantity. So you signed up to become a member, and we coordinated efforts to where I would assign them as the only place online that you can get primal kitchen mayonnaise. So in that first year, the two of us sold just an incredible amount of mayonnaise direct-to-consumer. So first through the blog and then through Thrive Market. Well, online. Online, okay.

Just online. Because very early days, we approached Whole Foods. And? We went to the buyers at the Rocky Mountain region, which had 33 stores. talk to the buyer, and his name is David Woods, a great friend, and tell him the story. And normally it takes about 18 months for a new product to get into Whole Foods. But Dave Woods was a big CrossFit guy, and he was all about paleo, all about primal. And so Dave said, this is incredible.

This is what we've been looking for. We will build you an N-cap in every one of our stores. So very quickly, we got into those 33 stores, and then next thing you know, we're, in an equal number of stores in the Pacific Northwest. And so now, because we're doing so well at all of these Whole Foods, the rest of the Whole Foods buyers, they all got on board. That was in year one? That was in year one. How did you find the, you know, the copacker to do this? And was it a local place in Southern California that could, I mean, because it's not that complicated, right? You find a place that can make the man, you managed your recipe and then put

in the jar and seal it up. Yes. It's not that. complicated. On the other hand, if you're a startup and your co-manufacturer is doing $20 million a year with this company and $50 million a year with that company and you come in and say, I think we can do 100,000 jars this year if we're lucky, it's tough to get in the door with some of these operations and especially the ones that are going to be able to make your product consistently. I mean, that's a huge thing. There are lots of co-packers in food that have issues and you want, you know, you're dealing with food. It's a very sensitive area.

You want to be able to rely on the safety and the procedures and everything that you've put in place. Yeah. But it's a good thing to point out because we almost went out of business. And the reason was we'd had, I think, two or three big runs of mayonnaise that we'd sold out of. And we were getting ready to do another one. It might have been the third or fourth run. We'd had great success with manufacturing the mayonnaise with our. co-packer. And we find out one day that they can't ship the latest batch because it failed.

Well, what do you mean it failed? Well, it didn't turn into mayonnaise. It just turned into oil and goo. And that was, I think, at the time, probably $7,000 worth of ingredients that literally went down the drain. Okay, let's try again. And so because we are a small player with a large Copac, it's not like you can dry again tomorrow. It's like maybe we can find time on the line in three weeks. Okay, let's find time. Let's do it again. So three weeks comes, we get the news, it broke again. We couldn't make it again. And they're blaming you. They're saying it's your, it's your recipe. Maybe there's a reason that people didn't make mayonnaise with avocado oil. It's, you know, it has different fatty acid profile. It has different. So we're scratching our heads.

were freaking out because this is the business. Maybe this is the end of it. And so we get one more time on the line. And we, in investigating where we'd been making the mayonnaise, they said, well, you know, we'd made the first couple of badges on our chilled line, and these weren't on our chilled line. And we realized that the oil has to come through a chiller before it reaches the vat. And that's what gives it the emulsification properties that this particular oil needs.

So it was, I'm going to say, another four weeks. And now we're back ordered on our product. And they're going to run the mayonnaise on the weekend. Well, I'll never forget that weekend because Morgan and I had been kind of freaking out. And she was in the midst of maybe breaking up with her boyfriend, but they were getting back together again. And Monday morning rolls around. And I go to the office in Malibu, and Morgan rolls in. And she said, you're not going to believe it.

We made mayonnaise and I'm getting married. So those little moments, that's that sheer terror of being a small business owner and thinking that maybe your business won't survive the night. When we come back in just a moment, Mark encounters more moments of terror as he floats the business on a personal line of credit and opens himself up to more risk by deciding to launch a restaurant. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the first year of Primal Kitchen, and Marks made it through the great mayonnaise meltdown of 2015. And he's feeling better about the business, but he doesn't want to hold on to it for too long, maybe just three to five years before he exits.

That was the plan, partly because I knew that I was going to be, you know, in my late 60s by the time an exit occurred. if that were the case, partly because my kids didn't want anything to do with the business. Almost most importantly, I recognize that with particularly startups, you can get to a certain sales volume with a particular team, but then at some point, you need assistance. You either need a different team or you need more investors. And in our case, I wanted to find a partner in a large food company, what we call a strategic acquireer that could leverage what we'd done, you know. Yeah.

So you launched this thing and you really kind of hit this wave. I mean, you launched at a time when paleo is really getting a lot of interest. And you could see at that time already, you know, coconut oil and all kinds of products that were designed, grass-fed meat that were designed for that kind of diet. You could start to see it. And in your first year, I think you guys, I mean, what were your sales that year? In 2015, we did a million seven. Right.

And then as we set out to plot a strategy for the next year for 2016, in this business, because there are long lead times, like 13-week lead times for some of these production runs, and because we were fast becoming one of the largest buyers of avocado oil in the world, and avocado oil is a rare commodity. And expensive. Expensive. And we had 14 months in advance. We had to commit to contracts.

So when we set out to create a budget for 2016, we thought, well, God, a million seven the first year. That's pretty good. Can we do $6 million in 2016? And so we- That's a massive, wow. Yeah. We set out to do that, and we set that as a budget of doing $6 million in sales in 2016. And by June of 16, we had done $6 million in sales.

And that was only on mayonnaise, or were there other products by $2? No. So by then, we had. had continuously been working on other products because we recognized we wanted to be a family of products. We wanted to be, ultimately, there was a point at which we wanted to be in pretty much every aisle that had anything to do with sauces or dressings or toppings. So by then we had a couple of flavors of mayonnaise. We had a Chipotle lime mayonnaise. We had a garlic aoli mayonnaise. We had six flavors of salad dressing by then. We were starting to develop

our first ketchup. And barbecue sauce eventually would come. And barbecue sauces and then pasta sauces, yeah, yeah. And you, as you mentioned earlier in 2016, you more than exceeded your $6 million in sales. I think you hit $13 million in sales. And by this point, I mean, you were in Whole Foods and many Whole Foods. I think probably by 2016, you were an all of a million. Okay.

Yes. You were also selling on Amazon. Yes. And then you started going to some other big retailers like Kroger and, and, and others, right? So the next one was Publix. And we actually got into Publix. We got accepted into Publix by the end of 2016.

And so we opened up in, I think, 1,700 Publix stores, which was really fast-tracking. And you had not raised any outside capital? No. It was all self-funded. It was all self-funded. Now, when I say self-funded, I had a line of credit. And I was a guarantor on $6 million worth of credit that we were using to finance the operations, finance receivables, to prepay for avocado oil that wasn't due to arrive until eight months down the road. And that was a scary time for me because...

Because you weren't profitable, right? Correct. We were not profitable. Even though you're doing $13 million in sales in 2016, you were losing money. We weren't losing a lot of money. So it was a manageable loss. But you finance this in part through a line of credit that you had to probably take it out against a home or I don't know. Yeah, no.

So it was against my home. It was against my, I had a 401K. I had a defined benefit program at the time. I had enough. You know, again, I'd been doing well enough over my career in the prior two decades. Yeah. That, but for those occasional times when I dipped in and bet a million dollars on something. that didn't turn out. Like a TV show. Like the TV show. I was, yeah, exactly. I was still,

I was still, I still had that New England frugality, if you will, right? Like, I wasn't going to go deep into debt without some sort of a backstop. But, I mean, still, I have to imagine that was a nerve-wracking because there's always a possibility that could go south, and then you've got to use your assets to pay back the loan. More than a little nerve-wracking, yeah. I mean, there was a time two years in when I think I went to Morgan and I said, this is a little too much for me to bear. And if somebody came and offered us $30 million for it right now, I'd take it. I didn't like, you know, having that line of credit. Hanging over me. You know, and I'm just, she reminds me this all the time that, you know, there was a time when I would have walked away for, that was my,

that was my walkaway number, right? 30 million. Yeah. But then, you know, things, you know, things, They were always looking positive, and we were getting such amazing feedback from customers. We won awards at food shows at Expo West, for instance. We got a Consumer's Choice Award for our ketchup the year that launched. So I knew we were doing the right thing. It was just, you know, a little nerve-wracking at times. There's something I'm curious to ask you about because there's this, I mean, clearly you were looking, you were constantly looking at interesting ideas, right? like you guys, a certain point, put out an energy bar.

And then I guess at a certain point, you started down the path of opening a primal kitchen restaurant, which never really got off the ground, I guess. What's a story around that? Well, that's an entirely different saga. A person came to me who was a consultant to the franchising industry, who had followed my programs and had lost 50 pounds and thought it would be appropriate to build. build a number of restaurants that serve nothing but grass-fed beef and organic vegetables. Sort of like true food kitchens, like the- Correct.

Andrew Wiles. Yeah. Right. And we spent a year and a half writing up the franchising agreements. We went to market and we sold 18 franchises at our first meeting in the first year. Wow. And we didn't have an operating unit. Operating unit means you didn't have a restaurant.

We didn't have a restaurant. You just sold the franchises based on the concept. Correct. Okay. Then we started building the restaurants, and once we opened, we realized that the business plan was not a viable business plan, that we had lots of traffic and we were selling lots of meals and losing $50,000 a month. Because the restaurant business is so hard. It's incredibly difficult. I wish I'd learned my lesson back at Cool Licks, but I didn't. No, the nature of what we were trying to do, and the reason you won't find many restaurants. like this, trying to maintain organic vegetables without preservatives, trying to maintain grass-fed meat, grass-fed meat, salmon, all that stuff that is three times as expensive as regular stuff and goes bad quicker. The costs to do this, this type of restaurant are so prohibitively

high that it's almost impossible. Yeah, I mean, if you lose $2 on every plate of food you serve, the more you serve, the more money you lose. And that's essentially what was happening to us. Yeah. So it just, it was not a viable operation. And so I had to, I had to make the decision to shut them all down in 2017. I paid off all the franchisees. So I made all the franchisees whole.

It was horrible. At the end of the day, it probably cost me $4.5 million. Yeah. All right. So you wind that down. 2018, you are now three, this is now your third full year in business. Yes. You guys get an acquisition offer that year.

Yeah. So by the end of 2017, November, December, we had interviewed a number of banking firms. And we selected a banker in May, April or May of 2018. I think around October, November, we had three bids. And the one that was, I think, the overwhelming favorite was Kraft Hines Corporation. It's public knowledge, but it was for $200 million. And then we spent, you know, November hammering out the details of the deal. Wow.

The deal almost fell apart three or four times. Yeah. But we hammered something out the two days after Thanksgiving. And then we closed January 3rd. of 2019. So effectively, you know, we had an offer less than four years after we launched our first product. And part of that acquisition agreement was, did you want to stay on at Primal Kitchen or did you know that you want to transition out soon after? Well, I knew that I was going to go on to something else, and I was very happy to remain the face of the business and to participate,

which I have. I wound up with a seven-year consulting agreement where I... Which you're still in. I'm still in. I attend certain meetings. I'm on phone calls. I, you know, cheerlead with the team. By the way, this has been an amazing process, and I'm ever grateful to Kraft Heinz Corporation because they let us keep the team in full. Nobody was fired.

And by the way, at its height, how many employees did you have a Primal Kitchen before you were acquired? I mean, I think we had 65 or 70. So you got pretty big. Yeah. There might be 85 on the team now. And, you know, people, a lot of people have an issue with big food and, you know, they're going to buy all these healthy brands and then destroy them. In our case, nothing could be further from the truth. Craft Heinz Corporation is a publicly traded company that's owned largely by Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway. Really, Kraft Heinz Corporation isn't really a brand. It's a collection. It's a portfolio of 50 different brands, you know, Velvita and Kraft mac and cheese. and horsetopin potatoes, and chrystalite and Kool-Aid and Oscar Meyer-Weiner and none of these companies have anything to do with each other. They all have their own silos of who they sell to. So when Kraft acquired us, they were like, oh my God, you guys are, you're setting a trend.

We're buying you because of who you are, not because we want to change you. Yeah. Which I greatly appreciate. When you think about this journey you took, you know, and where you are now, how much of this do you attribute to the work you put in and how much do you think is just luck, just that you got lucky in certain cases? You cannot discount luck. I think hard work is necessary.

Timing is important. I think if I'd started a primal kitchen five years earlier, it would have failed because five years earlier there wasn't the awareness of healthy fats, of avocado oil being a beneficial oil and seed oils being as bad for you as kind of find out. Luck that the first product that we introduced was a mayonnaise. Like it has a $2.5 billion a year market share in the U.S. And ketchup is far behind at a billion. Who knew?

I didn't. And yet because that was the first thing we were able to produce, we sold a lot of it. So, yes, luck, timing, skill. You know, this is a mix that you have to have all. of them and you have to be willing to put the time in, and you have to be willing to fail. I tell my kids I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up until I was 47, and then I changed my mind again when I was 61. And by the way, I just changed my mind again at 68. Now I'm in the shoe business. That's Mark Sisson, founder of Primal Kitchen. And yes, he's now in the shoe business.

Early in 2023, Mark actually co-founded a new company with his son. It's a minimalist shoe brand called Paluva. Think shoes with thin soles where you can easily feel the ground beneath your feet. It's like you're walking barefoot. Like I could walk 12 miles on pavement in these and feel great. So these are designed for walking, not for running. Yes, correct. These are walking shoes. You're walking shoes and weightlifting shoes and training shoes.

And they've got the five toes, like the five-finger. Yeah, they have the individually articulated toe boxes, as we like to say, which has been done before, but it's a five-toed shoe with an attractive upper. So that's my new cause. you will. And this is self-funded now, entirely self-funded, this business. Would you expect anything else? Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Romporentine Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Malia Agadello and engineering by Gilly Moon

and Maggie Luthor. Our production staff, also includes J.C. Howard, Catherine Seifer, Sam Paulson, Alex Chung, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.