The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Shannon Weston Transforms Health with Vibe Foods’ Organic Offerings

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Shannon Weston Transforms Health with Vibe Foods' Organic Offerings Lovevibefoods.com About the Guest(s): Shannon Weston is a former insurance executive and a dedicated mother of four whose journey into the realm of health and wellness was galvanized by a personal challenge. When her son was diagnosed with celiac disease after years of misdiagnosis, Shannon turned her attention to understanding the impact of nutrition on health. This led her to found Vibe Foods in 2017, a company that emphasizes 'food as medicine'. Vibe Foods is dedicated to producing high-quality, natural food products free from chemicals and artificial ingredients. The company now boasts three locations in Colorado and is preparing to expand with an online store. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Voss Show Podcast, we explore an inspiring journey of discovery and entrepreneurship with Shannon Weston, the founder of Vibe Foods. Shannon's personal journey began when her son was diagnosed with celiac disease, a realization that catalyzed her deep dive into the world of nutrition and health-focused eating. Shannon shares how her family transitioned from traditional eating habits to a health-centric lifestyle, underpinning her mission to provide readily accessible clean food options devoid of chemicals and artificial ingredients. Highlighting Vibe Foods' commitment to quality, Shannon discusses overcoming the challenges of entrepreneurship during significant events like the COVID-19 pandemic and her resolute dedication to offering trustworthy, health-promoting food options. Listeners will gain insights into Shannon's passion for holistic health and the transformative power of nutrition with a specific focus on food as medicine. This episode is rich with SEO-optimized content, discussing vital themes such as healthy eating, gluten-free diets, and entrepreneurship in challenging times. Shannon articulates her dedication to clean eating through the lens of Vibe Foods, illustrating the positive impact that dietary changes had not only on her son but on her entire family's well-being. She shares her vision of expanding Vibe Foods’ reach to communities across the nation via a soon-to-launch online store, embodying the phrase "eat to win." Key Takeaways: Shannon Weston turned her son's celiac disease diagnosis into an opportunity to understand the impact of nutrition on health, leading to the establishment of Vibe Foods. Vibe Foods prides itself on providing clean, nutritious, and health-promoting foods without chemicals or artificial ingredients. The company's philosophy is rooted in the concept of 'food as medicine', advocating that diet has a profound impact on both physical and mental health. Vibe Foods navigated the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, maintaining focus on expansion and launching an online store to offer their products nationwide. Shannon’s story exemplifies how personal conviction and a drive for better health can blossom into a successful entrepreneurial journey. Notable Quotes: "Healthy food can actually be delicious." "The human body is amazing; it wants to pull you back towards homeostasis." "Life is such a gift. Every day we're here is a gift." "We do not compromise." "Eat to win is everything." Resources: Vibe Foods Website: lovevibefoods.com Instagram: @vibefoodssuperfoodbar Discover the transformative power of prioritizing health through nutrition with Shannon Weston's insights. Listen to this episode to dive deeper into her entrepreneurial journey and to learn more about the philosophy and products of Vibe Foods. Stay tuned for more enlightening content from The Chris Voss Show Podcast.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Cause you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster

with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, there are things that makes official for over 60 years, 20 episodes of the Chris Voss Show. The CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, Pulitzer Prize winners, the people who share their journeys, their stories, their lessons of life with you to

make your life better. And if your life is better by the end of the show, just keep listening to it over and over again until you get it. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today we have an amazing young lady on the show. We're going to be talking about her company, some of the work that she's done that's really cool. Shannon Weston is a former insurance executive and mother of four who was called to action when one of her young children was diagnosed with celiac disease after years

of misdiagnosis and unnecessary suffering. She turned this into education and an obsession to learn how to find a vibrant health for her family and friends. And through the urging of her children, she expanded this passion, expertise in supporting the health, nutrition, wellbeing and snacking of her local community by founding Vibe Foods in 2017. Vibe Foods now has three locations in Colorado and is thrilled to share their message of food as medicine to a greater audience with an online store launching next week.

Welcome to the show, Shannon. How are you? Thanks. I'm awesome. How are you? I am awesome. It's great to have you. Give us your dot coms if you would please, people you might be interested in there. Okay. So our website is love, L-O-V-E, vibefoods.com. And that actually kind of links to all of our social media and everything else, but we're on Instagram at at Vibe Foods Superfood Bar.

Love the name Vibe. It's got a vibe to it, if you will. Kirsten Yeah. Pete Give us a 30,000 overview of what you guys do there. Kirsten Okay, so we're pretty much a place where a restaurant would be the most apt description today, although that's changing next week, where you can come in, you know, you would think of it as a juice bar. But the big difference between what we do and pretty much what, like any other place like that I've been, is that we don't have a single chemical, a single artificial ingredient, a single colorant, a single gum.

We go to the ends of the earth to make sure that all the juices, the bone broths, the healthy baked goods, the things that we make there are like so good and so clean for your body. Pete Slauson What's the fun in that? I mean, I like all those chemicals and poisons and toxins and forever chemicals and stuff. They're good in the belly, they feel good. Kirsten Yeah, right. They do until they don't. Pete Slauson They do until they don't, trying to poop them out.

Kirsten Yep. Pete Slauson So, now you said one of your children had celiac disease. What is that for people that may not be familiar with it? Dr. Jennifer Linn So, it's actually like for him to back up, he was diagnosed in 2008. So he is a healthy 25-year-old who went on to not just survive, but to thrive. But we, you know, you can imagine back in 2008, nobody even heard of gluten-free or knew what was going on.

So he, my husband and I have four kids. And when he was born, he's our third, he was a mess. The cutest little mess I've ever seen, but I knew he was a mess. People look at him and be like, oh my God, is that like your baby? Like they were struggling not to say his whole face is scabs or he's got chunks of hair missing or he had all these things constantly happening to him. And we went from doctor to doctor to prescription to prescription, you know, all over the board, just trying to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, I was working at almost, you know, very high, very high level in my former career.

I was the first generally woman to hit that level. And we were busy, you know, so trying to just live our American life, go through the drive through, get all the kids to sports, keep everybody alive. You know, that's a lot of work just in and of itself. That parenting is hard keeping those damn things alive. I can't even do a plant. Right? I know it is.

It's challenging. You know, we were just on the struggle bus trying to figure it out. But you know, like, it's one of those things, you will do things for your kids that you will not do for yourself. And so watching him just continue to struggle, he was such a good kid. He was great at school, cared about everything, ran his first 5K when he was three, because he had so much pent up, I don't know how to explain it, like energy, like he was just so miserable, that that was one of his outlets. Pete Slauson Wow. He ran a 5K at three? At three, without stopping.

And she's never too small, by the way, so that was- Oh, what he's doing. You know, he was just like a mess. Like he just was agitated constantly. There was so much going on. And finally, when he turned eight, he ran a 10K and he couldn't catch his breath. And I had just about had enough of all, I wanted to get to the root of what was going on with him. Like he was helping 10 fingers and he couldn't catch his breath. And I had just about had enough of all,

I wanted to get to the root of what was going on with him. Like he was helping me 10 fingers and 10 toes, like what was going on with this kid? And so I found a doctor who was an OBGYN, who was totally holistic on another side of her practice. And so he had a knock on the door just right and we got him in. She pulled a bazillion labs.

I'm a very sciencey person, I'm not a woo-woo girl at all. And poor kid was literally deficient in everything. He was a mess. And she was like, this is all food. And it was the first time anybody, I mean, of hundreds of doctors visits had told us this is food. And we did some further exploration and found out that he was having a severe autoimmune reaction to anything with gluten in it. Back then, nobody even knew what gluten was. It's a lot easier in today's world, but back then it was really hard. When we found out, we were in Maui, I pulled up his test results and the guy was shoving donuts in his mouth. And I looked over and I thought, Oh my God, what are we going to

do? Like how is this going to resolve itself here? So we had to make a crazy like pivot in our life and figure out how to make everything from scratch. It wasn't just that he was celiac, there was a lot of other things that were kind of going on at the same time. But it was all very much tied to his food. And so we had to go down a rabbit hole deep, like deep in rabbit hole, read every, every label, understand what every preservative ingredient is, what it was, what it would do, make sure he didn't have a scrap of gluten.

And he really, you know, we watched him in six weeks, his labs went back to perfect. And then like, this is awesome. And then I was like really pissed off cause I'm like, wait a minute here, you've offered me drugs that could give kids cancer. That was like a side effect. You've given me all these no solutions. This is what it took.

Are you kidding me? That really mobilized me to action. That really, I just became obsessed with it. I would read everything and get my hands on. The internet was sort of new back then. I mean, to the extent of all this, you know, the information is so plentiful now. I had to go really looking for it, find doctors and people online that I trusted and learn how to make everything from scratch. Imagine, you know, being eight and you're trying to go to a birthday party and your mom has to send you with her own

homemade cake or whatever. But it really was awesome. And we have really good friends who coach in the NFL and we were at a bunch of the tailgates, we'd go to all the player and coaches lots. I started bringing cookies that were made totally organic, the free range everything, not a single preservative, no gluten. And people would be in line at our tailgate to get these cookies. And that's when I realized, okay, healthy food can actually be delicious.

My first bite of pizza post diagnosis, I told him we found a gluten-free pizza. And I was like, hey buddy, look, it's gonna be okay. We can have pizza. And we took a bite and I was like, this is never, ever, ever gonna be okay. I was like, oh my God, you know, cause food is emotional for us.

And when you can't have something that ties you to your memories, your culture, your, you know, those happy, good vibes, it's really a bummer. So we figured it all out. So people don't have to, yeah. And how do you get to the stage of where you're making, what are you making at Vibe Foods and how did you get the state of making those?

Jennifer Lundgren So, we really, Vibe is, so, we figured this all out in 2008 and then we started Vibe in 2017. So, there was a big nine-year gap in there. And my kids literally bullied me into starting vibe. I'm not even kidding when I say they bullied me. But I, we- Pete Slauson They didn't expect to beat you up or take your lunch money? What was going on over there?

Kirsten No. So I had, I had, I had loved my career forever. And then I got to a point where I was just like missing. I needed like a stay at, my husband had a big career. All my companions, all my compadres had stay at home lives. I was like, I need to stay at home life. Like I were like dying trying to take care of these four kids, make everything from scratch work. So I hung up my career and I thought this will be fun. I'll dive into this. And for a year I did everything. I was like running huge tailgates. I was doing everything because I was like, I'm too much of a hyper person.

And finally, my kids sat me down and we'd always talked about if we did a restaurant, what would we do? How would we make it so that people could enjoy it the way because we couldn't eat out forever? How could we change the world a little bit? What would we do? And so they would just sit there at dinner and just be like, Mom, you're so competitive. Someone's going to do it and they're not going to do it well and it's going to make you mad. Just do it.

Come on, what are you, chickens? Of course. I know. Pete Slauson These are from Nike, man. Jennifer Lund I know. Literally, they were. And finally, I was like, okay, I'll try it. I mean, I knew nothing about running a restaurant. I mean, I knew how not to have claims and, you know, things from insurance. I knew, but I had, I knew good people. So, I'm very lucky for that. I had a really good personal board of directors and people I could tap into and ask questions because I didn't even know how, when you run a credit card, how does the money end up in your account? That seemed like magic to me. I was like, what?

Mad Fientist 2 Magic. It's still magic to me. I'm still trying to figure out where it's going to come from. Right? It is. It's all these things. So we just stove in and did it and we serve organic juice super picky about it being organic. And we do like different kinds of smoothie bowls. We do different kinds of smoothies, but our smoothies are unusual. They're not, I wouldn't say they're like you're they're definitely not I don't want to name competitors, but they're not like that. We use really interesting adaptogens, we are very careful

about the macros in them, we don't have any processed sugar. So we can make something really sweet just by using really healthy whole foods. We do bone broths, which is something that we've made back since 2008 to help heal our son's gut and to try to replenish everything. So we go out to farms. We make sure the animals are treated Well, we make sure they're fed the right way and we make the most delicious bone broth I used to have to beg people to try it when we first opened I'd be like just please take it No, thank you bite. But now we we sell out we can barely keep it on the shelves. It's such a popular thing Yeah for fasting bone broth. Oh my god

Great collagen in it too. Yeah, so many minerals So good for fasting bone broth. Oh my God. Great collagen in it too. Yeah. So many minerals. I mean, it's like this trendy food, right? But except for it's not like the cavemen used to make it. So okay, whatever. Our grandmas were super trendy, I guess.

But it is so good for you. Actually one of the funny stories when we first started making it, I left to go on a business trip and I put everything in the pot. It has to cook for three or four days. So I told my husband, I was like, okay, feed the kids the bone broth when it's done. And so I got a bunch of phone calls from the kids and they're like, mom, mom, call us right away. Dad's doing something weird.

And I was like, what's going on? What's he doing? And he said, I called him and he said, Oh no, they won't eat it. And I was like, they won't eat it really? And he's yeah, they say it's got too many bones in it. He just took it out with the bones in it and served him. He's making me eat like a bowl of bones. And I was like, okay, I love how he's trying to enforce my, you know, my thing, but no wonder the kids were crying. They were eating like mushy bones. So they're allowed to tell, but it's delicious. It's really good. We do toast. Everything we have

is gluten-free. It's all, obviously that's like number one for us. And people can eat safely in our store. We've got a lot of weird doing paleo baked goods, so we make like gooey, gooey brownies with no recycling. Yeah. Everything's like super clean and you can enjoy it and be like, gosh, I can't believe I just got all this protein, all this fiber, all these minerals, all these antioxidants, but I didn't get a face full of stuff you shouldn't have. Yeah. So it's a lot of fun. It's good. Nice and healthy.

Yes. Nice and healthy. What's next up? You said you're opening a shop to maybe ship or sell some of these supplies worldwide? Yeah, so we get a lot of people that come in that are traveling through Colorado and have been like, hey, where can we get your stuff? I'm addicted. How can I get it?

And we're like, you don't live in Colorado. That's so sad. But exactly. But we've been working on this for a long time. So we're going to starting next week, be able to ship our organic bone broth, our organic juices, and our paleo baked goods out. And so yeah, we'll have a lot of different options. We have a lot more coming too. We've been working on a lot of different recipes and things that we've used personally in our family. I mean, that's kind of our whole thing. I wouldn't serve anything to you that I wouldn't put on my family's table and I wouldn't eat it every single day. And that's it. We do not compromise. There was a day that we had to get lemon juice and there was an organic lemon shortage. And so I sent my husband on a quest to go find lemon juice and he kept texting me from

all these various stores. What about this one? I'm like, no, look at the ingredients. Why isn't lemon juice just lemons? Let's ask ourselves, why is there sodium benzoate in it or potassium sorbate? Like sodium benzoate, when you can Google this, when you add vitamin C to it, it turns into a benzene, which is a leukemia causer. So why is that in all lemon juices except for two grams? And so that's the kind of thing our customers wouldn't know. Most

of them, honestly, maybe wouldn't care, but we care. And I'm not going to serve you something that could ever possibly hurt you that way. It's something we're just really, really committed to. That's good. That's good. And so people will be able to order up the things. Are you going to be able to send refrigerated stuff across or? Okay.

Yeah. Any sign of any franchising on the way, if anybody's out there is interested in LinkedIn? Lauren Ruffin Yeah, you know what? We get asked a lot about that. We have not done that yet. For me, when we make that move, we had a couple stores in Tennessee that we just actually closed last month, which was a hard decision, but we did it so we could focus on doing our e-commerce. which was a hard decision, but we did it so we could focus on doing our e-commerce. And franchises are tough. A lot of people get into them and they lose their life savings for me. Somebody is going to invest. I have to know they're going to make a lot of money and do well by doing

good things in the world. So someday when we're all organized, possibly. Pete Slauson You started this in 2017, right? Lauren Ruffin Yes. Pete Slauson What was the journey like to start your first business and try and make all this stuff work? You kind of had a framing of a business widget model with what you're doing with tailgates and selling your stud wares. What was it like to start the company and go through that? Was it kind of an interesting gauntlet, I suppose, of education learning?

Katie Fisk It's a lot. Like it really is. I was so lucky that I had friends that all knew something about something because I really, I didn't. I'd always been a corporate person from day one and suddenly you're not just the accounting person, you're the janitor. You're kind of everything. Everything. Everything. Yeah.

It was really challenging. But for anybody who's thinking about starting a business, I mean, I feel like the biggest thing that was advice I could give is reach out to your community, your friends, your neighbors, everybody knows a little piece of something. It's like the story of the elephant with the blind people and everybody touches a piece of the elephant and is describing what it is, but they can't see the whole picture. But when you get all those people together, you can see this glorious elephant and it kind of helps you really figure out how to move forward. And I think people want to help. That's the other really nice thing is people

want to spread the good and if they have information to share, they want to share it. So I think if you're wanting to start a business, you'll be amazed at how many people step up and want to contribute with what they can with their knowledge. Yeah. Just be careful with naysayers, the people that are like, oh, you shouldn't do that. You might fail, you know, stuff like that. And you've opened three stores now? Yeah, we've had five. We have three right now, and we did all that during COVID. So we had our first score. And then it was like, Hey, it's let's expand. And we, we put feelers out to an airport had the RFP canceled COVID hit. So then suddenly, we couldn't even travel to where we had

signed our leases in Tennessee. We I mean, we've had I could literally write a book about the funny like, are getting our equipment in, you know, everybody stopped manufacturing, but we'd ordered all this equipment. They're like, hey, did you still want it? You're like, yeah, I did, I paid you for it. Okay. Yeah, well, we're gonna charge 20% more.

I'm like, in what world did you get to pay for it? Yes, like, stuff that was absurd. We had inspectors that were like, oh, you need to go get these plans. And we were like, no, we don't. And by the time we did and paid for it and had to get that were like, oh, you need to go get these plans. And we were like, no, we don't. And by the time we did and paid for it and had to get somebody out there, that inspector had quit and they couldn't find anybody else because it was COVID. And we lost four months of rent.

It takes a lot of perseverance to be an entrepreneur. It really does. It takes a lot of grit. You have a lot of setbacks, a lot of valleys, but then the highs are super high. So you just have to be willing to kind of ride that. But boy, that COVID and the post pandemic, we were laughing. We had one of our stores, because we opened four in that period of time. One of our stores, all the equipment came in and it was just kind of like,

we're going to send this little shelf with this piece. Nothing like they scrapped everything out of the warehouse. Like whatever junk we have together, let's send that out and see if it works. Like we didn't get one piece of equipment that was actually functional the way it was supposed to be, but. It sounds like a book for sure. You got, you got it right. And so I mean COVID, I mean, good for you, man.

I mean, that was a challenging time. I knew a lot of new businesses that they opened for COVID during, or during COVID or right before COVID and COVID was a killer. It was a death knell and they didn't survive. There was a lot of companies that were around for a hundred years and didn't survive COVID. It was tough, but it's good for you that you made it work and stuff. I imagine you have a pretty good following of people that, you know, there's a lot of folks that gluten does bug them and they have celiac disease or at least, you know, they get uncomfortable with gluten. And you know, and let's talk about medicine as food because I think we mentioned that

in the bio, you know, eating right and what a difference that can make. Lauren Ruffin It's huge. You know, when we made all those changes for our son, we didn't really have a lot of options at that time to buy processed gluten-free stuff. It just didn't really even exist. So we moved to a diet that was much more, you know, like my daughter always laughs that we're like an ingredient household, meaning when you want to snack all there is, is a bunch of ingredients to put together. But we saw all of our health get so much better. Just doing what we were doing for our son, all, you know, everything for everybody just started getting so much better. Just doing what we were doing for our son, all, you know, everything for everybody

just started getting so much better. And I have to say at my age, I feel better now than I did then by far. And I work way harder now and I have more stress on me running a business, but I'm so grateful for my health. And so sometimes it's like those things that you go through that are really hard

actually are like the best thing that could have happened to you because it puts you on a new trajectory. We really, really feel that way. Food for me is medicine. I feel like the body, all the research that I've done, and I voraciously read a half an hour of food or science or health news about stuff every single day. That's my thing, and I'm not a fiction reader.

I just really believe that the body can heal itself if you take the poisons away, you give it the right stuff. The human body is amazing. It wants to pull you back towards homostasis. There's mountains that can be moved just by making small shifts. You look at our food supply in the United States, it's poison. It is absolute poison. What's allowed in our country is not allowed anywhere else in the world. It's marketed from the time kids are little. It's absolutely atrocious what's going on.

And so I've been beating that drum for a really long time, which is why with Vibe, yes, it is all gluten-free, but it's not really tailored to the gluten-free people. Of course, we have a lot of people that come in and they feel safe eating there, but most of our customers by far and away are just your normal people who could tolerate gluten, but they love the food. They know that they're getting something that has been fully vetted that makes their body sing, that makes their immune system feel happy. makes their body sing, that makes their immune system feel happy. It's really important in our country that we make a shift to really start thinking about what is it that we're actually doing to ourselves here? Because you just see the amount of sickness dropping younger and younger and younger. We hire mostly, I would say most of the people that work for us are like super athletic and they're athletes and you know, they're a lot of them are sick, you know, and they'll start

telling all these medicines they're on and I'm like, God, when I was a kid, nobody had any of this. So what is going on? And I think it's just it's hitting kids younger. It's creating mental health issues because so much of your mental health depends on your gut health and the neurotransmitters that are being made there. So we just, as a country, we need to make a fast shift if we want to continue to dominate. So eating to win is everything. Eat to win. I like that.

Maybe you should make some coffee cups or shirt that says that. But yeah, eating to win. I lost 100 pounds just by switching to veganese, I call it, which was just eating more healthy salads and stuff like that. Quitting drinking pop, Mountain Dew, eventually during COVID, quitting alcohol. Just listen to my body and just how much my body really appreciates good, healthy eating. And if you season it well, you can make it taste like, you know, McDonald's and In-N-Out burger and stuff. You know, you just got to be wise how you season stuff. I mean, crap, you can take, oh, it's not durian.

It's, you can take, it's a variation of durian, the big melon, and you can take that fruit from it and you can barbecue it and make it taste like barbecue ribs and stuff. It's insane. Like jackfruit? Jackfruit. That was who I was thinking of. Yeah. Yeah. The durian's a little smelly, but you can take jackfruit and it's like eating bubble gum when you eat it. It's like bubble gum fruit, but then you can season it all sorts of different ways. Like you can turn it into pulled pork. I've done that and you're just like, this tastes like pulled pork in my brain. I'm eating pulled pork and it's healthy. It's the healthiest fruits you can eat.

That's hot. And a lot of people, I think they're getting more and more tuned into their bodies. They're tuned into what they're putting in their bodies. And yeah, a lot of people, they get sick because of what they're eating and it's designed to make them sick. Like you say, there's a lot of countries that are like, we're not going to eat this, but give it to the Americans, they're ready to eat silly or anything. And it's legal here, it's not legal in other states or countries and you're just like,

man, is this a good idea? Yeah, it is absurd. Congratulations on losing 100 pounds. That's an amazing accomplishment. Think of all the life you've extended, how many great things are to come because you took that step and it's not easy. That's kind of our, I think culturally, sort of our issue is that we expect everything to be really easy and quick. We have no patience, but doing something and doing it right takes commitment, takes patience, takes some discipline. And then it's crazy at the end of that when you hit that journey and you've actually accomplished that. Just how the whole process, it's not even just the end goal, it's like the process,

it's the climb of it. It's such a great thing to do. And we're just about, you know, fast and easy. So let's pour some, you know, color dye cereal balls. I mean, I grew up eating crunch berries like crazy. I ate two dozen of coke for dinner until I was like 35, like twice a week, I thought it was delicious. I mean, I was that person, which is really why I get it. You know, like I remember thinking I had no concept at all of what went in my mouth had anything to do with my health. And I have friends who are physicians

that back then used to say, oh, whatever you eat, it doesn't matter. Like, doesn't matter at all. That's literally been the conditioning that we have gone through. My mom worked when I was growing up, which is unusual. That was the era of all this fast food and quick packaged processed food. There was a good thing that happened because it allowed women to step into the world of

business if they wanted to or whatever it might be, kind of freed them up. But then there was this like negative to it too, because everything just became about fast, easy packaged, no longer food, it doesn't resemble food. It doesn't even have ingredients that resemble food. You know, it's just a really, it's a big issue, but I'm really hopeful. I think we're starting to see some changes in the country.

And I feel like a lot of like social media and podcasts and things are really sort of waking people up. I had to be shaking out of my slumber and woken up. It took my son to do it, but once you wake up, you can't go back. I bet if you had a moundsy now, you'd be like, what? Pete Slauson It's so gross. Jodi Wadden It's so gross. Pete Slauson Like, it's kind of fun for the first couple tastes of sugar hit, that dopamine hit. And then after that, you're just like,

jeez, how did I ever drink 10 to 15 of these a day? I literally did. Nicole Soule- Oh man, yeah. Dave Kemp Oh yeah, I was consuming a lot. And I mean, but once I started eating healthy, I was dropping two to three pounds a day. It was insane. It just fell off me. And because I was just eating so much junk and I started eating live foods, I started paying attention to what I was eating and that was crazy what I was doing to myself, just stupid. Right?

That stuff is made to be addictive. So it's engineered to be that way. It's marketed that way. All the fast foods, they all have chemicals in them designed to basically give you the same sort of dopamine hit you get from opioids and stuff. And that's why you feel good, but then later you're hungry again because you didn't really get any nutrition. You just got, I remember a judge called it Frankenfood.

Yes. The chicken McNuggets that McDonald's had. I don't know what's in here, but probably the best description is Frankenfood. Now I've got that associated image of Frankenfood in the thing. So, what's the, anything more in the future you want to talk about? Any promotions or anything special things going on to make people aware of? Lauren Ruffin So we have our store launching, which is going to be awesome. We also are working right now on one of the things that's near and dear to my heart is when you realize you have to make a change, how do you make it age?

It's hard. People don't make a change because of money. They think eating healthy is more expensive, right? Time. Oh my God, how am I going to do this? I'm used to just grabbing a Mountain Dew and driving through, you know, and then also just for taste, There's really kind of three things that hold people back. And I think as a mother, it's particularly hard because your

kids kind of fight you. You know, you have to have, it's hard enough to make a change yourself, but then you're like trying to move a whole family a certain direction. So we're working on some resources to kind of help that since I've lived that. And honestly, like one of the things I'm really passionate about is like food allergies and things like that too. So when somebody says, oh my gosh, you know, today I was talking to somebody and they're like, I have to go gluten free

and I can't have soy sauce. And now I'm having coconut aminos, my food tastes sweet. I'm like, no, no, no, Tamari. I got a sub for you. Like I could literally give anybody a sub for anything. So I'm kind of working on some resources to share that way, which will also be available on our website to kind of make things easier and to answer questions. And I've lived it a lot.

And I do know our son, I mean, he ended up graduating top of his class in school. He played college football. Like he didn't just like survive it. He thrived it, thrived through it. And that's what all of us can do. We all have the power to make those changes in our life so we can live our best life. I mean, life is such a gift.

Every day we're here is a gift, nothing, you know, and it's gosh to be able to feel your best and, you know, live your life out the way you want to and have vibrant health is amazing. And we can achieve that by just getting rid of a lot of our American foods. So... Pete Slauson Get rid of the American foods! Right?

Pete Slauson I can attest to everything you say and it's so great that things are going on. So as we go out, give people a final pitch to come by, check out your stores. Is the website going to be the same for the shop thing? Yes. Yeah, it'll be the same. We'll just have a tab on there for shop online. If you're in the Colorado area, we do have three locations where you can come and pick

up, order online, it's really easy. And it's something we're so proud of because like I said, most healthy places, if you really dig in, they're not that healthy. It's disguised, you know, and we're really proud of what we serve every single day. We have a huge following, we have fantastic customers, we have a fantastic team. We're very lucky to be able to serve our community. Pete And you're succeeding in it. It's great that you make the world a better place on top of what you had to do for your son. So, thank you for coming to the show. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, it was so fun. Thank you. Thank you, Shannon. And thanks for watching and go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1, the Tik Tok, all those crazy places. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.