Filip Keuppens: 07:59
Yeah. So you’re talking about pickle brine. And to your point there, there are a lot of other things in there. But vinegar is, is a broad range of it’s sort of like alcohol, right? Where you have, like, beer on one end and hard liquor on the other end. It’s like vinegar has very similar types of ratings, and we call them grains. So the grain of vinegar. And that’s a proprietary component, like, but for instance, if you have, if you go to a store and you buy apple cider vinegar, that’s like a 3030 grain; the strongest stuff you can typically get off the shelf is like distilled white vinegar, which is like 55%. It’s a 55-grain.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:41
Cleaning like floors with that stuff. Yeah.
Filip Keuppens: 08:44
So, it goes all the way up to like 200 plus, which is glacial acid. And that you can’t be around it. And so caustic. But so we’ve identified a very narrow window that engages the exact same nerve receptors that cause cramping. So that’s how this works when you’re taking when you’re drinking, like brine or other acetic acid-type products, to achieve the same thing.
It’s kind of like shooting a shotgun at a, at a small target; you might hit it, you might not, you’re going to have other things to deal with. But with our product, it’s targeted. And in hindsight, calling it Pickle Juice was a great way to get it introduced to the consumer. But now we’re finding that it’s creating a lot of consumer confusion because people hear a lot of science about athletes using Pickle Juice.
And now we find ourselves educating people on the differentiation between brine and juice more than educating them on the general awareness. So, like I said earlier, it sort of suffered the same fate that, like, you know, Kleenex does. Nobody says, oh, grab me a disposable paper tissue or grab me an adhesive bandage. Right? You’re saying, like, get me a Band-Aid. So I think we’re kind of in the same boat. So now we’re trying to help educate the consumer because, unfortunately, now we have a lot of copycat products that are packaging brine. And we’re concerned that people aren’t going to have the same results as our product and then kind of put everybody in the same bucket. So that’s kind of what we’re dealing with now. So it’s kind of a victim of our own success, I guess.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:30
I mean, I guess I got it from the get-go. I just know, okay, Pickle Juice. It’s known for being good for muscle cramps and other things. Obviously, there’s a superiority to a product who have thought these things through, and they’re not just taking it out of a jar of pickles, of course, because when I looked at the ingredients, it’s like, you know, it also tastes really good too. And that’s kind of my next question is like, how do you decide on flavors, profiles? Obviously, there’s the, you know, the regular pickle juice flavor and you have the, you can see here the chili lime. Why those two?
Filip Keuppens: 11:13
So the original was kind of a happy accident, if you will. We, we used all the science that was developed by Doctor Kevin Miller and his group in 2010, out of BYU, that first indicated that muscle cramps are a neurological phenomenon rather than a physiological one. And he tested all sorts of kind of folk remedies and discovered unintentionally, I guess, that this was a neural thing rather than a physiological thing. So we then took that and just built and built and built on that science and figured out a way to disrupt that neural pathway, like in a very specific, acute way. And the byproduct of that research was something that tasted vaguely like pickles. We just sort of leaned into that because we figured.
You know, back then, when we were developing this product, if I were to tell you that, hey, we’re going to interface with your central nervous system, that would freak a lot of people out. So we wanted to remind people, like, look, we’re not tricking your system. We’re not doing anything crazy. We’re simply just overwhelming a neurological path with information, preventing that unwanted info from getting through. Kind of like if your nose itches and you get kicked in the shin, your nose won’t itch anymore because your body can only process so much information, right? So we leaned into the flavor, called it Pickle Juice. For like, well, nobody’s going to confuse this with brine because there’s no such thing as Pickle Juice. But alas, that we underestimated that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:53
The original flavor was just the regular original. Why? Tell me about why chili lime, and are you thinking of other flavors in the future?
Filip Keuppens: 13:03
We are exploring other flavors, so we have to stay within a very specific range of both P, H, and a few other trackable components so that we don’t get away from engaging those nerve receptors. So it’s unlikely that you would see us coming out with, like, a sweet flavor or something like that, because that masks the effect of the acetic acid. But we’re actually starting to work with, like, citrus and lemon and some of these other kinds of things that are also tart cherry things that live in the same family from a flavor and interactive processing perspective.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:54
There are three parts to the story of Pickle Juice. So how did it get started?
Filip Keuppens: 14:03
Yeah. So in the year 2000, the Dallas Cowboys played the Philadelphia Eagles. And it was, and I think still to date the hottest game on record. It was like 112 degrees on the field or something crazy. And the Cowboys were heavily favored to win, but ended up losing to the Eagles. And in the post-game interviews, the athletic trainers were being asked, hey, like all the Cowboys were cramping. The Eagles weren’t. Why is that? And they’re like, we’re drinking pickle brine. And that kind of spurred this research and innovation. So in 2001, somebody in Dallas who hadn’t been with the company in a very long time went to a pickle company, a golden pickle at the time that was doing commercial pickling. And one of the original partners, Steve Colette, owned it, and they started packaging brine. And they thought that’d be kind of a cool thing to do. They were savvy enough at the time to trademark the name Pickle Juice back in like 2001 or very early 2000. But at the end of the day, they were just packaging brine. Fast forward to 2010, that research that we referenced earlier, and now there’s some basis behind the science and understanding why brine could help, because a lot of people just assumed it was the high sodium, but it wasn’t. That was just a coincidental correlation-causation kind of situation. I joined the company in 2015, having come from big Fortune 50 companies. From the sales and marketing vertical.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:51
I know you worked at Kraft Heinz for a while too, and like some big, big products.
Filip Keuppens: 15:56
Yeah. Kraft Heinz, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century Fox, all in retail and consumer goods. But I was selling DVDs and Blu-rays, and that industry like stopped existing pretty much instantly. So I had to figure out what I was going to do. And having been an athlete myself and having gone to school for hospitality and food science and being, you know, pretty successful in the CPG space, I, I thought this was like super intriguing. So it kind of brought all three of those things together. So I joined the company in 2015. And then we started reformulating and making it like very scientifically based. And that’s really when the product changed because we are no longer packaging brine. We were now creating a product that was specifically made and proven to to stop, stop and prevent muscle cramps.
So that evolved into being like a clean-label USDA organic product. And then, so we were growing very, very rapidly from 2015 until last year, at which point we were acquired by a private equity firm, which then injected a significant amount of capital into the organization. And put some real horsepower behind it. And now we’re about 12 months in, experiencing great growth, and we’re really building to get to ten X growth in the next five years. And, you know, we we’re at probably, I think, 27% year-over-year growth so far.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:34
I love the I want to dig in to current. But going back to your experience. I want to get into the philosophy from a go-to-market perspective, but I know like you have a lot of experience, even with some of the other companies responsible for Amazon and Costco sales. Is there any learnings from like other CPG companies out there from who are like, oh, I’d love to sell into Costco? Any learnings there from the past?
Filip Keuppens: 18:05
Yeah, I, I think the advice I give people, and I actually, I get to, I get to teach at or collaborate in a course called the Entrepreneurial Mindset at my alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology. Go Tigers. But what I tell those students is the same thing I tell everybody is, present your products from the perspective of the buyer and the buyer’s consumer. So How? Forget about your needs because everybody wants to sell on Amazon and Costco, right?
But first, make sure that your product fits their consumer base and solves an actual need for that consumer base. Otherwise, you’re kind of spinning your wheels, right? So know, know your audience and, and then honestly, at a tactical level, if you get that meeting, know what your buyer’s KPIs are, know what that buyer needs to succeed in to make themselves look good to their boss, and speak that language.
It’s because we, we get obsessed with our needs and wants in these meetings that we forget that we’re fundamentally trying to convince somebody to try something that is new and should be revolutionary and should have a need in a marketplace, right? Because otherwise, why are you creating something if it’s already, if it already exists, if you’re, if your thing’s just another version of another widget? You’re wasting your time, right? You have to fill an actual need. So we have this tendency to just present it from our perspective. And I think people lose sight of understanding the consumer demographic of the retailers you’re trying to go through and the platforms you’re trying to go through. So that would be my biggest advice.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:53
And then talk about your philosophy from a go-to-market perspective.
Filip Keuppens: 19:58
Yeah. Kind of in the spirit of, you know, desperation, being the mother of all invention, we were sort of a bootstrapped company, didn’t really have a lot of funding, certainly didn’t have any external funding. So we got very creative. And we also had have some real philosophical things that we wanted to implement early and still embrace. So it’s kind of a hybrid between traditional CPG, mission-based, and experiential. And the way we pulled that all together was we wanted our product to be available through traditional CPG channels. And, you know, as you know, that’s the fastest way to market for consumables. It’s still the best way to generate revenue. It’s the best way to diversify your revenue streams. And essentially protect your growth. But we wanted other people to tell each other about this product, because we have a product that does the thing it claims to do in such a fast fashion that all I had to do was find you while you’re cramping. Give you this thing, and I’ve got a customer for life because there’s, there’s such an immediate gratification and true connection to this product.
It’s claim and its result that I didn’t have to tell you. And I think it was the president of Intuit who years ago said companies are no longer what they claim to be. They are what people tell other people that they are. And that really resonated with me. So rather than running around and telling everybody about this thing. I want everybody else running around telling each other about that thing because that is so much more powerful. Jimmy, if your friends that you run with while you’re training for your half marathons tell you, hey, this is a thing I believe in, you’re going to be much more apt to buy it and believe them than if something came up on your feed and was like, buy this because I, the maker of this thing, say it works. Right. And then the mission-based thing, we also know that we live in such a transparent society. Everybody knows everything.
And we want to make sure that not only are we creating a really good product, we are also removing all roadblocks to doing business with us. That means we need to be good people. We need to go to market the right way. We need to be forward-thinking. When it comes to being eco-sensitive. All of our packaging is 100% recycled. We source. We source everything locally. We produce everything domestically. We have really strict QC things. We. We pay our people well. We, I mean we, bonus our hourly production team. We. Everybody here has got a four-one K health care, all of these things, which is because of our size and the efficiency and we’re very technology-forward. So we’re a lean organization. None of that stuff is legally required. It’s just we feel it’s ethically and humanly required. Even our choice of private equity partners, we recorded by about 50 different private equity groups.
And we chose Azalea Capital. And by the way, for anybody who’s looking for a growth partner, Azalea is amazing. They’re incredible to work with. You go to their website, and I encourage you to do so. It’s Azalea Capital. And it talks about who they are. It talks about their values. It talks about their vision, their mission, and not it’s not like most private equity companies, who are like, do business with us and get a big bag of money. Like obviously, they want to be successful, and they want their LPs to be successful, but they believe in the process, and that the process will get you to the destination, which, having been an athlete, that’s the way it works, right? You’ve got to do those little things, that Kaizen mentality that comes to work and be 1% better than you were yesterday kind of stuff. And they’ve been a great partner for us so far as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:10
I wanted to bring you brought this up: the ambassador program, because people, other people, you know, people telling other people is really the key. And talk about how you think about and, you know, have launched your ambassador program, and here it is.
Filip Keuppens: 24:30
Yeah. So our ambassador program, we also kind of started backwards, and we would identify people that were were already what we call super users. So people that tagged us in social media or, you know, people that came up to us at one of the 300 events, the charity events that we, we work with, and be like, hey, you love our product. Do you want to represent our product? And you’re buying it anyway, so we’ll just give it to you for free. And you can tell everybody what you’re telling us right now. So that’s kind of how we went about it.
Rather than spending money on advertising, we spend money on education and PR, and we’ll go to, we’ll go to like the National Athletic Trainers Association conferences and teach them about stuff we’ll go to. Different events and races. We ourselves are participants in these things, and we need people that are really passionate about what they do. They’re passionate about our products and are aligned with our kind of ethos and our moral and ethical value systems, and it just kind of grows from there. We don’t only look at how big somebody’s following is. We think it’s important to partner with people that share our values.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:00
Yeah. You could see here, if you’re listening to the audio, the ambassador program, and you could see this person’s an Ironman triathlete, that’s pretty badass. Rock climbers, some tennis players, some ultra. I think I read somewhere, some ultramarathon runners, kind of a, a wide breadth of some bikers all over the place.
Filip Keuppens: 26:26
Yeah, yeah. The ultra runners are amazing people. If anybody ever gets a chance to experience an ultra marathon environment, it is so cool. It’s also, I think, the ultimate test of mental health from a competitive perspective, because most of the things we do, you can kind of will yourself through if things aren’t going well, not an ultra marathon. I mean, some of these races are six days long, right? Like, start on this day and on that day, whoever runs the most miles wins. It’s unbelievable. And I’ve got I’ve been so lucky. I, I got to meet, I got to meet, I get to work with, I get to hang out with some of the most fascinating, inspiring people in the world. It’s, it’s, it’s really, really nice perk of the job.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:13
Filip, what are some of your favorite products? Obviously, outside of pictures that you take, you’re heavy in. You’ve been having a rugby for a long time and other sports. What do you like?
Filip Keuppens: 27:29
I’m kind of like a clean. Product consumer guy. Like, you know, on race days. I’m very superstitious. I have this like shake I create, which is bananas, peanut butter, frozen strawberries, and protein powder. And I’m being an endurance athlete. I’m super scared of sugar. Like it’s like, I think if I, if I consume one kernel of sugar, I’m convinced I’m gonna crash and die. Not so with caffeine, because if you’re an endurance athlete in Texas, your races start really, really early. So I’ll crush some tea. But yeah, I try to keep it clean, you know? And I balance my diet with carbs, protein, and fiber, but it’s really I don’t use pre-workouts or anything like that. One of the things I learned from our endurance athlete partners is that it’s about how efficiently your body can use the stuff you’re putting in it.
And as we learn more and more about food science and we’re doing research with like VO2 Max, and we’re doing research with vasodilation and stuff like that. And I really look for natural products or products that use natural products in their packaged goods. So all of my gels, my waffles, all of that stuff, I, I try to lean towards anything that’s like USDA organic certified clean label because I just feel the body has an easier time processing those things. My. I’ve got a lot of family in Europe, and it’s fascinating that whenever I go there and their general food laws are a lot stricter and I can eat and overeat, but never feel like bloated or kind of like, get that swelling stuff. And I think if we’re not careful about what we’re buying and the grocery stores, you know, we can, we can kind of get a lot of inefficiencies. So I guess to answer your question, it’s just like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:50
Like protein, protein powders that you have tried that you like. I know I have, like a, I don’t know, ten of them on my shelf. So I’m always interested in trying other ones. But I’ve tried Ascent protein, the chocolate and vanilla. I’ve tried the organic protein, I’ve tried, you name it.
I’m curious what you’ve tested out for yourself.
Filip Keuppens: 30:15
I used to be really loyal to Honey Stinger. They’ve got. They’ve got some cool products. They use honey rather than sugar. But again, I’ll only use anything that has sugar or honey towards the end of a long event. It’s kind of like once I start consuming sugar, I kind of feel I need to keep consuming sugar, but I won’t have sugar like more than two hours before the finish of anything. But other than that liquid, I like liquid IV, I like noon. I also like the story of noon. I know a lot of people that were with the company and they’re like pre exit phase and they’re just really cool people. They also have that experiential thing. They’re popping up on the side of the road. And there are also people that do the thing. There’s a company out of Vermont that uses maple syrup as an energy source. They’re really cool to look into. They’re also really good people. Yeah. So I’m kind of a little all over the board between, like, some really well-known brands and some kind of lesser-known brands.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:35
Cool. I have one last question. First of all, thanks for sharing the journey and the mission behind Pickle Juice. I can attest that I like, love the taste, and it helps a lot from an endurance perspective, just maybe some resources that you’ve learned from throughout your journey. It could be from like a business perspective, it could be from a distant mentors, from books or podcasts, or it could be actually personal business mentors that you’ve had in your journey.
Filip Keuppens: 32:10
Yeah. I mean, the book I really love, and it’s on my desk, and I’d like have a lot of people read it. Our leadership team is led by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. It’s called Extreme Ownership. It’s pretty cool. It’s a concept that flips leadership on its head. And I think it’s really relevant in how we manage businesses and people today. Fundamentally, it reinforces the fact that there’s no such thing as bad employees or bad leaders. That’s a great one. And some of the classics, like Who Moved My Cheese? is really cool about adapting to change, and it’s still, still very relevant, even more so now than in days past. I’ll also tell people, and this is kind of more broad, but.
Don’t ignore the things that are inevitable. Learn them and use them. And I think I’m speaking mostly about AI to anybody that’s Gen X or older. And we’re learning we have an AI task force that we meet with. Every couple of weeks, to see how we can become more efficient and incorporate it into human activity, not replacing humans. And what we do is our team’s actually growing, but we’re growing with AI as a tool that our people use. And I think that’s where companies are kind of going wrong a little bit. AI shouldn’t be a tool to replace people. It should be a tool that allows companies to do more. So where you’re where you’re limited. And keeping your scope of offerings the same. Make the scope of your organization bigger, broader, and more relevant rather than like cutting costs.
I don’t understand the concept of cutting costs when there’s, when you can just be more efficient and have more positive growth. So that’s more of a philosophical thing. But gosh, what else do I have here? I got my little library, The 4 Disciplines of Execution. There’s a mental tennis that is really cool. One. Leaders Eat Last. What else is there? The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is kind of fun to read, and these are all pretty quick, easy reads. But yeah, those those are some of the, some of the books that I kind of read and share. I’ve got a little free library kind of deal set up in my office that anybody wants to know what I’m reading or what I’m reading, they can always come in and grab it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:50
I love the Patrick Lencioni books. He’s got a bunch of them, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and a number of others. So those, those are always good, and they’re concise, you know that you can you can probably finish it in a day if you had a little bit of time. So what kind of AI tools are you using or playing around with now?
Filip Keuppens: 35:12
There was a building kind of a our own ecosystem. We use a Microsoft platform. So we’re trying to see how we can build that up and integrate into there. Right now, we’re still pretty rudimentary, as a lot of people are from companies that are kind of in this midsize thing. So we’re using out-of-the-box stuff like ChatGPT we’re using, but we’re starting to evolve.
Like we’ve got a system we use to create work orders and track our maintenance. And that has a predictive AI component to it that we’re starting to implement stuff like that. So we just kind of kicked off our AI task force relatively recently. So we’re still exploring because we don’t want to just like adopt for adoption sake or change for change’s sake.
We want to see, like, where we can really lean in. Where, where can we create competitive advantages for ourselves, where it can create efficiencies for our team members? So it’s very exploratory. We never say no. So if anybody comes to us and says, hey, here’s a tool that we’d like to use, it’s kind of like a whole power of yes thing. We might say yes, but yeah, right now it’s that we’re still growing. I think if you ask me the same question in a month, I’d probably have, hopefully, a much more comprehensive structure and kind of AI org chart, which is what we’re aiming to build out, like where each department can benefit from this stuff.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:51
So first of all, thank you. People can check out PicklePower.com, and you can order there. Are there any other places we should point people to where they can buy Pickle Juice?
Filip Keuppens: 37:02
Yeah, we’re in about 17,000 retailers in the United States. And then your usual suspects, Walmart.com. We’re also on Amazon. But yeah, if you call here, a human actually answers the phone, and we’ll speak with you. So we try to be easy to find.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:21
Yeah. And if you go to PicklePower.com, they, I mean, you obviously you can buy it from there, but you can basically just go to the shop near you. And I’m looking at Walmart Jewel-Osco. There are like a number of places within a couple of miles of where I am personally. So I’m sure that’s the same with you, Filip. Thanks so much, everyone. Check out more episodes of the podcast and Pickle Juice. Thanks so much.
Filip Keuppens: 37:49
Thank you.
