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Gitit Lahav is Co-founder and CEO of Sweet Victory Gum. She is a serial entrepreneur with experience founding multiple companies and maintains a specific focus on the relationship between nutrition and psychology. Her health challenges, including a battle with cancer, ignited her passion for developing products that positively impact people’s dietary habits. Gitit was also Co-founder and CEO of ShrinkMeApp.

Shimrit LevShimrit Lev is Co-founder and COO of Sweet Victory Gum, a company that produces functional chewing gum designed to help people overcome sugar cravings. With a background in nutrition based on Chinese medicine, her struggles with an eating disorder inspired her to develop tools to help others gain control over their sugar intake. Shimrit was also Co-founder and Marketing Executive of ShrinkMeApp, a comprehensive and supportive platform for individuals looking to improve their overall health and well-being.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [03:55] Gitit Lahav and Shimrit Lev discuss Sweet Victory Gum and its functional properties that help reduce sugar cravings
  • [08:30] How a serious health diagnosis can lead to a transformative business idea
  • [14:41] The product development journey of Sweet Victory Gum 
  • [17:03] The value of having mentors in business and key advice that helped shape Sweet Victory Gum
  • [22:15] Gitit and Shimrit’s consumer research
  • [28:26] Key traits to look for in a distribution partner
  • [31:33] Sweet Victory Gum’s unique approach to launching their product in the international market
  • [34:29] The financial dynamics of bootstrapping versus raising capital
  • [37:51] How Shimrit and Gitit determined the price point for their product

In this episode…

Have you ever wished you could stop your sugar cravings with a quick, easy solution? Imagine chewing gum that removes the sweet taste from sugary foods and significantly reduces your desire for them. Could such a functional product exist?

Serial entrepreneurs Shimrit Lev and Gitit Lahav dive into the birth of Sweet Victory Gum and their journey to create a unique product that blocks sweet receptors on the tongue. They discuss the health struggles that sparked their determination to help others gain control over sugar consumption, underscoring the power of using personal adversities to fuel innovative solutions. Shimrit and Gitit also share key decisions they’ve made for product development, distribution strategies, and how mentorship has played a significant role in their business growth.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Shimrit Lev and Gitit Lahav, Co-founders of Sweet Victory Gum, about creating a functional gum to combat sugar cravings. They discuss Sweet Victory Gum and its functional properties that help reduce sugar cravings, how a serious health diagnosis can lead to a transformative business idea, the product development journey of Sweet Victory Gum, and their unique approach to launching their product in the international market.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related episode(s):

Quotable Moments:

  • “Our goal is to empower people to regain control over their sugar consumption in an easy and fun way.” 
  • “You need to have a strong gut to handle the rollercoaster of startup life.” 
  • “Even in a life-threatening situation of battling cancer, reducing sugar intake was not easy.” 
  • “We are not just creating a gimmick; we’re providing a sustainable solution for better food choices.” 
  • “It’s fascinating to see the instant change in taste perception and the empowerment the gum provides users.”

Action Steps:

  1. Consider experimenting with Gymnema sylvestre to combat sugar cravings: It’s a natural herb that helps reduce the attractiveness of sweet tastes.
  2. Seek out creative solutions that address personal health challenges as inspiration for innovation: Gitit Lahav and Shimrit Lev found motivation from their health struggles to develop Sweet Victory Gum.
  3. Explore partnerships with clinics and healthcare professionals for product marketing: This targeted approach can position a health-focused product more effectively.
  4. Utilize consumer research to understand the impact and value of your health product: Sweet Victory Gum’s research demonstrated significant benefits, guiding their marketing strategy.
  5. Embrace mentorship and advice from seasoned professionals to navigate start-up challenges: Mentorship can provide critical insights on product development, branding, and market strategy.

Sponsor for this episode

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Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90xAtariEinstein BagelsMattelRx BarsYPOEOLending TreeFreshdesk, and many more.

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.

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Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:15 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Shimrit Lev and Gitit Lahav and they are with Sweet Victory gum. Before I formally introduce them, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. I love functional food products and functional products that help our bodies and maybe our cravings in this case. So there’s a couple in this realm. I had the founder of RXBars on the podcast, and that was a very interesting journey and lessons that he shared.

Also had Tara Bosch of SmartSweets and how she grew the company from such a young age as well. I also had Eitan Chitayat, the art of building brands across continents. That’s actually how I met Sweet Victory. Eitan was raving about Sweet Victory, and so I have to have them on to tell their story. Also, Mois Navon of Mobileye. I had him on; he was one of the founding engineers at Mobileye. Mobileye was acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion but what struck me about that interview is he talked about all of the hard times and the sacrifices along the journey, because it wasn’t always easy. Most of it wasn’t easy, actually. So check that interview out and much more on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25.

At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. We call ourselves kind of the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the company and the host, so they can create amazing content and create amazing relationships. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people in companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce Shimrit and Gitit. They’re superwomen and inventors of the magical chewing gum. Okay, this chewing gum is called Sweet Victory Gum, and it helps you overcome sugar cravings. And if you watch any of the videos online, it’s kind of magic. They’ve done this, I think, on live television too. People eating the gum or trying some sweets, then eating the gum and trying sweets, and you’ll see the reactions there. But a little background. Shimrit Lev is the co-founder and COO Sweet Victory Gum, and she has a nutrition background with years of experience specialized as a nutrition based on Chinese medicine. Gitit Lahav is the co-founder and CEO, and she’s a serial entrepreneur and CEO of several past companies that she founded, and she spent the last decade researching the relationship between nutrition and psychology. Thank you both for being here.

Gitit Lahav 3:30 

Thank you for having us.

Jeremy Weisz 3:34 

I’d love for you to start off and just talk about Sweet Victory Gum and what you do as a company? I’m gonna, as you’re talking, there is a video version, I’m going to share my screen, and we’ll poke around the website. So talk about Sweet Victory Gum.

Gitit Lahav 3:55 

Cool. Where should we start? Shimrit do you want to start?

Shimrit Lev 4:00 

I can give you briefly a background about our product, or maybe about ourselves before Gitit and I established the company a few years ago, three years ago, maybe like four years ago, at the beginning of the covid but we both in our background, best friends and entrepreneur for the last decade in the field of nutrition and health in our background, we both faced with health challenges in the past, and we both had so in early stage of our adult life, we decided to dedicate our time and efforts to design a tool in order to help people with similar difficulties to overcome their sugar cravings in an easy and fun way. And this is how a Sweet Victory was born.

Sweet Victory is a functional, tasty chewing gum. It contains herbs, a Gymnema sylvestre. It originated in India and very known in Ayurvedic medicine for the last 3000 years as a natural treatment for sugar related issues. And actually, two three minutes of chewing that gum just blocks the sweet receptors on the tongue in a weighted sweet food loses their sweet taste immediately, but at the same time, it reduced sugar craving overall. We wanted to help people to have a tool easy and fun tool to help them to gain back control over their sugar consumption in an easy and fun way. So this is the product, and this is our background.

Gitit Lahav 6:05 

I think Shimrit covered it all well I can just maybe add about our background, and you know that a lot of people struggle with craving for sweets, and sometimes it’s not so bad, and you can take a chocolate afternoon or at night in front of Netflix, but sometimes it can really damage your health. And both of us, we had medical challenges that really we needed to change our diet and nutrition. Me for example, around a decade ago, I was diagnosed with cancer stage four, and so it was pretty severe when we discovered it. And when you have this kind of cancer, you really need to change your diet. And I don’t know if you know, but sugar helps the cancer cells to grow faster. So it’s something that I needed to take into account, that I need really to reduce my sugar intake.

And I think it was then when I realized that reducing my sugar intake is not an easy task, even in life threatening situation like I had. So I think this was really, really the beginning of thinking about having and finding a tool to help people struggling with the same issue with cravings. It took us a while. I mean, it’s not the first company that we are establishing together. We have previous companies always in the field of nutrition, and always we try to find a solution for sweets and for the cravings. So it’s a lot of time and experience and mistakes on the way, until you find there are tools that really can help a lot of people. But I think we did it pretty well. I mean, still, we are very at the beginning, but we are very happy with what we created.

Jeremy Weisz 7:01 

When you were going through that and you found out about the cancer, where were you at in your life? What was going on with company and family?

Gitit Lahav 8:30 

I was there just after delivery of my second child. He was like one month old baby, and his bigger sister, she was three years old. So in family life, it was a pretty stressing situation, not being sure if you will be able to see your children getting older. I’m healthy now, yes, I don’t want this conversation to be such a bummer. I’m not a party pooper normally, I’m healthy. It’s okay. This is my real hair, I’m fine. But they say that what doesn’t kill you make you stronger. And I think I gained a lot from this period perspective, a new ideas and stronger so no complaints.

Jeremy Weisz 9:33 

That’s a strong driving force. And “why” for the company.

Gitit Lahav 9:39 

Sure, yeah.

Jeremy Weisz 9:41 

And your previous company together was an app that helped people with health?

Gitit Lahav 9:48 

Yep, exactly. We recreated an application. It was for the Israeli audience only. It was in ibru. But the idea of the application was to provide a dietitian nutritionist that is available in your pocket from 9am or till 9pm helping you throughout the day.

Jeremy Weisz 10:12 

Talk about the original conversations about Sweet Victory Gum, and why you decided to do it? Because it is a big undertaking, of course, and with both your background, you could have started a lot of different types of companies in the nutritional space and in technology. So what was that original conversation like when you were kind of ideating around creating this company?

Shimrit Lev 10:44 

No, go ahead. I will jump in if I want something to add.

Gitit Lahav 10:48 

Junk, junk. So I think that, unlike a lot of other Israelis, it was not our mission a target to go to be entrepreneurs, and to do an exit. It was not. It was like two moms trying to find a solution for eating healthier. And then we expand a little bit the circle, and we try to help people in our area, which is the north of Israel. And then we try to expand a little bit more, and we say, okay, we want to reach not only the north of Israel, we want to reach all the Israelis. So an application was something that was easy for us to apply all what we wanted to give people through the application, because before it was face to face.

And after that, because we always see that people can maintain very good diet until 5 p.m. and then everything is destroyed by the sweets after work, we try to find a solution, a tool to help people to overcome the craving. And this is how we came up with the idea. Again, it took a few years. It’s not something that we thought about one day. It took time, and it took development time. But eventually, if I’m looking in circles, it starts with us, and then in our area, in the north of Israel, then all Israel and eventually, right now, actually, our current product is sold mainly right now in Europe. It’s not even in Israel yet. It’s going to be launched next month in Israel. But you really try to find a solution that everybody in the world can benefit from.

Shimrit Lev 12:41 

For me, it was really the sweets. For me, it was to help people to gain back control over their sugar, over their nutrition overall, and because sugar is addictive, it was the main goal. When I was a teenager, I suffered from an eating disorder, and to be in control over the food wasn’t control on me, and it’s and it should be otherwise. When you are dealing with food all day long, it’s really hard to maintain a normal life. So the product, this specific product, the chewing gum, it helps people to be in control, to make their choices very well, to choose when to eat instead of otherwise, instead of the sugar rear control over them.

Jeremy Weisz 13:50 

Yeah, I love it. And I just love the mission and the product and the functionality of what you do. I remember when I was talking to one of the co-founders of RXBar, any you know, I love to hear about the development of the product. I remember him experimenting in his kitchen with different things. And he wanted something that was just cleaner, simpler ingredients. And that’s really why they came up with RXBar. And if you look at RXBars, the ingredients are listed on the front of the package, right? And so you have a similar kind of this functional aspect. Talk about the development. Because I know you have background in nutrition, but the first versions of the product, or thought on what the product is, I don’t know if it was gum. Maybe it was something else. Talk about the development.

Gitit Lahav 14:41 

It was gone, but it didn’t look like a gum. It was really, really homemade. After we explored a few herbs that can help, we stumbled into this amazing herb called Gymnema sylvestre, which Ingrid mentioned earlier. And it’s amazing that it’s existing in nature. It’s really a gift. It’s an amazing herb. The only issue is that this herb is disgusting.

Jeremy Weisz 15:18 

Yeah, most of the ones that are healthy for us, tastes terrible.

Gitit Lahav 15:23 

It is and it’s really, really bitter. And when you want to eat something sweet a chocolate, the likelihood that you will take something bitter is very, very low. So we needed to create something that will taste and feel like a treat and funny and sweet and easy and tasteful to use, and this took a while. At the beginning of the first chewing gum, there were very, very look like homemade with plants everywhere and herbs popping out. My parents, they came from Yemen, and my mother told me that it looked like a Yemeni chewing gum, because it really looked like very, very authentic. But they were functional. They worked well. So for us, it was the first step to see that we can embedded the herb into a chewing gum, and after that, we had a long way to improve the formulation and the bitter masking effect, etc.

Jeremy Weisz 16:26 

You can see here on the page, if you’re looking at the video we have right now in time, there may be other flavors in the future, but right now, there’s tutti frutti, peppermint, watermelon and spearmint, right? You mentioned the original look of it was like, kind of, a lot of herbs popping out. Talk about Eitan and his advice to you, because we did talk about on the interview your company, and what was some of the things that he was working with you on.

Shimrit Lev 17:03 

Eitan actually helped us with the branding of the company. He helped us to find the name, Sweet Victory. Actually, this is a work that we did with Eitan. We came with another different name. The original, original name was Ginny. We thought it like Ginny in a batter, like a magic but we wrote it like a shot of junema with different letters, but worldwide when we talked with partners around the world, they told us that the name actually reminds them of something else, like women products. So Eitan helps us to find the way that actually will empower people like we wanted it to be when we first started to develop this product. We wanted to help people to feel empowerment. So Sweet Victory, it’s definitely, definitely.

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