Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough

Guy Raz

Support for today's episode comes from Square, the easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff and keep everything running in your business without running yourself into the ground. In my neighborhood, there's a shop that sells incredible locally made food, fresh breads, prepared meals, sauces, jams, all from producers within an hour's drive. And they use Square. And as a customer, I love the seamless payment, quick checkout and easy receipts. Square's intuitive software and hardware simplifies everything you can sell anywhere in store, online or mobile, while managing inventory and tracking sales in real time. With Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts or complexity. And why wait? Right now you can get up to $200 off square hardware at square.com go built that's s q U-A-R-E.com g o run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Do you want clear, transparent information about the ingredients in your favorite beverages? I do too. That's why today's sponsor, American Beverage, launched Good to Know, a website with tons of information about your favorite beverages. No spin or judgment, just the facts so you can decide juices, sodas, even seltzers. Sometimes I look at the ingredients and say, what? What is that? I can't even pronounce it. And that's when I go to goodtokonofacts.org@goodtonofacts.org you can check out more than 140 common beverage ingredients. You can find out what they're called, how they're used, and how they're reviewed for safety. Now you can get the facts about what's in your drinks without the chaos of random Google searches. All of this puts you in control because you know what's best for you and your family. So if you want information about the ingredients in your favorite drink without any spin, goodtonowfacts.org is a great place to start. Visit goodtonowfacts.org for more information. Success is a journey, especially when it comes to your finances. One of the most common obstacles in our financial journey is dealing with high interest debt. It can often leave people feeling trapped, but it doesn't have to. If you're dealing with high interest debt, there is a way forward. A SOFI personal loan could consolidate all your high interest debt into one low interest monthly payment, helping you craft a roadmap to paying down your debt. It even comes with no fees required, getting you a financial win right away. Keep pushing on your journey to financial success. You could even get as soon as the same day. Funding View your rate for a SOFI personal loan@sofi.com Guyraz loans originated by SoFi Bank NA member FDIC terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891 fast funds term apply@sofi.com Guy Raz.

Krishna Kalyanan

I happened to meet a friend in Central park and I had told him that I'd been trying out the cereal I was making and he could try some if he wanted. And then he venmoed me for it. And I think he venmoed me like 7.99 or 8.99, what looks like a grocery store price. And that's when it kind of struck me. Oh, you could actually make food and sell it to people.

Guy Raz

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Ross and on the show today, how Krishna Kalyanan created a high protein, low carb breakfast cereal in his New York City apartment and grew it into a 100 million dollar brand, Catalina Crunch. A few years ago, I tried the ketogenic diet and for about a year I ate no bread, no pasta, almost no sugar at all. And I will tell you, it is brutally hard because once you start paying attention, you realize that carbs and sugar are in nearly everything. A bagel with cream cheese can blow the whole day. So can a plate of pasta, or for that matter, a bowl of cereal. Americans spend somewhere around $20 billion a year on cereal alone. There's 60ft of it in almost any grocery store. Dozens and dozens of brands. But for decades, it was basically the same stuff. Corn or rice, a lot of sugar, a little bit of color and a different name on the box. Today's guest, Krishna Kalyanan, wanted to make something different. A high protein, low sugar, low carb breakfast cereal that actually tasted good. And to do that, he had to work with ingredients that were barely known or were just starting to enter the CPG marketplace at the time. Things like pea protein and monk fruit. Those early experiments eventually became Catalina Crunch, a keto friendly brand of cereals and snacks that's now doing around $200 million in annual sales. Now, one of the reasons Krishna became an early adopter of the keto diet was because he had to. He had type 1 diabetes and epilepsy and he needed to cut sugar and carbs from his diet. Krishna grew up in Orange County, California in the 90s and 2000s. As a kid, he played tennis and also became a competitive chess player. His dad, who's an immigrant from rural India, was a veterinarian, and his mom was a nurse.

Krishna Kalyanan

My parents were big on education, but they were also big on you deciding what you want to do with your life as opposed to us telling you what you should do with your life. So my mom, I think, hoped for a while that I'd become a veterinarian because it'd be easy to take over my dad's practice and then run that practice myself. But both of them were very, were very hands off and didn't really say, oh, become a doctor, become a lawyer or anything like that.

Guy Raz

I mean, you know, your dad was an entrepreneur. He ran his own business. But I wonder if you ever thought of it that way. I mean, did you ever. You know, some kids are selling candy bars at school and running lemonade stands and car wash businesses and like, did you do any of that stuff growing up?

Krishna Kalyanan

I did not know I did not do any of that stuff. I don't think I really contemplated starting a business, nor do I think I thought of my dad as an entrepreneur, to your point, even though he is.

Guy Raz

Yeah. Okay. A very sort of life changing thing happens to you in the senior year of high school. And I think it happens during a visit to Penn. Tell me the story. You're a senior in high school, it's 2009, and you are, you're in Philadelphia visiting Penn. Why are you there? You're visiting because you're. Presumably because you want to go there. Tell me the story.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, so I was actually to step back. Right. So a couple months before visiting Penn, I was starting to feel thirsty a lot. And so I got to the point where I couldn't go through a whole hour long class without having to leave, go get some water from the water fountain and come back. And then it got to the point that I couldn't drive from school back home without stopping at a convenience store to buy a gallon of water and drink it on the way back. And so I'm getting more and more thirsty. I don't know why I'm getting thirsty. And to me, drinking water is a good thing. So I wasn't too concerned about it. And then I got accepted into Penn and so I went to Penn for this kind of new student day. And I got there with my family. We're staying in a hotel. The night before this whole thing scheduled to start, we walk around campus and I pass out as we're, as we're walking around campus.

Guy Raz

You just pass out on campus?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes. Yep. Go to the emergency room and one of the first things they do is test my blood sugar, find that it's over 1,000, and that's when they diagnose me with type 1 diabetes.

Guy Raz

So you were 17?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, probably 17 at the time. Yep. They don't have, or we don't have a full, complete understanding of type 1 diabetes, but what we know is that something happens in the body. It triggers your white blood cells to attack the insulin producing cells in your pancreas, leaving you without the ability to produce insulin.

Guy Raz

That's wild. And so now you are diagnosed with this condition that you have to manage and you're about to start college and your parents are going to go back to California. Man, that's a lot. That's heavy. It's like you are now going to have to completely change your diet and do all these. And you're on your own.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. I mean, luckily, you know, UPenn's got a great health system, so I got an endocrinologist there. You get a dietitian that specializes in diabetes care as well. But yeah, it was a lot. My parents were always calling and checking in. What's your blood Sugar, what's your A1C, how you feeling? That sort of thing.

Guy Raz

All right. From what I understand, not that long after you were diagnosed with diabetes, you had another diagnosis. Something else happened. What? Tell me the story.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, I was diagnosed with epilepsy as well. I had woken up in the morning, I was taking a shower, and then I had a seizure. My mom heard me and then she called the ambulance and I went to the hospital and was diagnosed.

Guy Raz

Wow. I mean, there's a lot, a lot of obstacles you're dealing with, like from a young age. That's tough. But I think that that diagnosis of epilepsy actually was a hidden blessing for you, right? In many ways.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's different types of epilepsy, but to your point, the ketogenic diet was first invented, quote unquote, in the early 1900s. And it was for the purpose of treating epileptic patients.

Guy Raz

And it's basically, it's low sugar, high fat, high protein, fiber, low carbohydrates.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. The idea is that your brain is using sugar or glucose to power itself. And so the idea is, can you starve the brain of sugar and kind of reduce the, I'd say, the electrical signaling inside the brain so that you don't have a seizure or reduce the chances of having a seizure?

Guy Raz

It basically, you're trying to change your body from burning carbs as an energy source to Burning fat.

Krishna Kalyanan

That's right. Yep.

Guy Raz

It's an amazing. I've done it. I did it for about a year, and it's amazing. It's really hard because you have to really be careful about keeping your carbohydrates to under, like, 30 grams a day or 40 grams a day. And this diet, as you say, was, like, introduced in the 20s to help people treat epilepsy and was found to be really successful. You were not. I mean, even though you were diagnosed with diabetes, you were still eating a lot of carbohydrates, which no one told you was not a good idea.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah. At first, I was still eating a lot of Philly cheesesteaks and things like that and all the bread that comes along with it. One of the reasons I actually went to Penn was when I was visiting a friend there, I noticed all the great food trucks in Philadelphia, and so I was very excited about all the different options for eating on campus. But, yeah, with diabetes, it's challenging, right? And then you start to learn. As a diabetic, type one diabetic, you're taught to take insulin in ratio to how many carbs you eat. And so if you eat more carbs, you take more insulin. If you eat fewer carbs, you take less insulin. The challenge, or I think the opportunity is, is if you eat more carbs and therefore have to take more insulin, if you get it wrong in terms of the number of amount of insulin you're supposed to take, you can end up easily taking too much or too little. And then obviously, insulin is or was relatively expensive. So less insulin is less money, which was also very, very helpful for me as a college student.

Guy Raz

So how are you eating? I mean, were you focused on meat and healthy fats and fiber? I mean, how were you just using the dining hall at college?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, so once I learned kind of how my body responded to different types of foods, I started eating, basically eggs every day for breakfast and snacking on nothing but nuts. And so I started eating a lot of that, and it reduced how much insulin I had to take by a lot.

Guy Raz

All right, so you completely transformed your diet in, like, around 2009, and keto was still very weird. That, like, it was not like, I'm sure your friends are like, wait, you're doing what? What kind of diet is this? Like, it was weird, right? People probably thought that your diet was strange.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, definitely. Yep, it was strange. And it could be a bit expensive as well, but it worked for me, and so I stuck with it.

Guy Raz

All right, so you graduate from Penn in 2013. And I know you worked for, like, a hedge fund in New York for a little while.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yep.

Guy Raz

But I guess you stayed there for, you know, roughly a year. And from what I read, you really wanted to become an entrepreneur. You wanted to start your own thing. And you tried. You had, I guess, sort of an online recruiting tool that you tried to launch and then an online car insurance company. And I guess ne those worked out. But it sounds like you really wanted to do your own thing. You didn't want to work for somebody else.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. Yep. You know, I think there's just kind of this night and day difference in my mind, at least, as it relates to owning your own destiny. And so I was. I was all in on making something happen. So I spent some time, you know, I was working on a number of different projects. I can't tell you or even remember, 20 plus different apps, websites, services, products that I'd probably launched in the course of this. And I had. I had tried certain things that I was very familiar with and I felt more strongly about, and I'd found other things where it's like, huh, it seems like there's a group of people that have this challenge. Let me just go try to solve it. And so I quickly realized, if you're gonna have the motivation to succeed, you're gonna have to really believe deeply in what it is that you're doing. I think that was a good lesson that I learned early on, because otherwise, when the going gets tough, you just want to throw in the towel and move on to the next idea rather than double down and really figure out how to overcome the challenge.

Guy Raz

Yeah. And you had, I mean, you had two businesses basically, tech startups. Right. You know, one was recruiting platform, one was an insurance platform, but they were tech startups. And so naturally you would think that you would try another one, another sort of tech startup.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, I mean, I knew how to write software and build fully functioning apps and websites, and you can do that without spending any money other than your time. And so I was very interested in that path. I actually, to be frank, probably didn't spend as much time as I should have or could have thinking about, hey, well, what industry might I want to go into, what I might want to do? I just knew I wanted to help people, and I thought that if I could come forward with a product or service that helped people and made their lives better, that they would pay me for it and I could worry the rest of it would fall into line after that.

Guy Raz

So what were some ideas that you Were mulling over.

Krishna Kalyanan

Well, so one of the more successful projects that I worked on was Trump had been elected president in 2016. And one of the things that came out of it was this kind of increasing polarization in the country and the idea that in social media, you were being fed information that confirmed your pre existing beliefs.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

And so I had started and built this chrome extension. It was called Escape My Bubble. Very straightforward. And it would insert into your Facebook news feed articles that challenged your beliefs, that got widely covered in the media. At the time, I think it was written about or mentioned in the New York Times. And that drove close to 100,000 signups for the.

Guy Raz

And it was free. I mean, how are you going to make money from this?

Krishna Kalyanan

It was free. Yeah, Yep. I didn't know how I was going to make money.

Guy Raz

You were just getting signups.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah, I was just trying to. I was. I was trying to get a lot of people using it and then think about that afterwards. Right. So it got a lot of press and a lot of people signed up for it. Then the news media moves on and there's no more. There's not as much talk around the bubble and the social media algorithm problem. And I kind of went into this valley where the number of new people that were signing up every day had dropped way down. And I was trying to figure out kind of, what's the future of this thing?

Guy Raz

Yeah. It turns out people really don't want to read news about the other side.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's challenging. I got the increasing sense that I was fighting an innate psychological bias or psychological kind of hardwired into our brains. And it's so much easier to read things that confirm our existing views than to challenge them.

Guy Raz

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like such a great idea. I mean. Right. And now in 2026, I mean, it just. That concept just seems so unlikely. People are so much farther away from wanting to exchange ideas in a rational way.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yep. Yep.

Guy Raz

I should mention that from what I understand in the sort of as in the background or as a part of your life, you got. Were getting into cooking and baking. Right. Because of your diet and what you had to eat. And you would experiment in the kitchen just for you, I guess.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. So you know me, I think along with a lot of other type 1 diabetics, start eating the same thing every day because it's very predictable. And so it kind of takes the mental load off of managing diabetes. So I think I had mentioned that I had started eating eggs every day for breakfast, snacking on nothing but nuts, and then eat chicken breast every day for lunch, and then I get some spinach and some other things like that as well. But it was largely the same food over and over and over again. Living in New York, you know, New York's like the food capital of the world, maybe, or one of the food capitals of the world. All the new, fun, exciting stuff tends to come to New York first. And it's very exciting, right? So I'm looking at all this stuff and, you know, I can't eat any of it. So to your point, I got really interested in the opposite, which was just meal prepping, and it was just the same thing every day. But along with the grilling of chicken breast, I actually got interested in baking as well. And so, you know, the whole concept here is if you have a typical cookie recipe for. As an example, the idea is take that recipe, go out to GNC and buy some protein powder and put that in place of the wheat flour, Go out to Amazon and get some alternative sweetener, use that instead of sugar, add some cocoa powder, and try to make cookies that taste halfway decent.

Guy Raz

Right?

Krishna Kalyanan

It's difficult. There's actually a whole science behind baking. And so how the protein powder hydrates when you mix it with water. If you're trying to make a dough, you need something that's sticky. So when you add water to protein powder, it doesn't necessarily get sticky. Now you need to replace that with something else which is going to get sticky so you can form a dough in the first place. So it was very intellectually challenging to try to figure that out and try to make these things taste from awful to decent to pretty good to really good.

Guy Raz

And I guess at a certain point you decide that you want to try to make, like, breakfast cereal, like a ketogenic, like something that you could eat, which, I mean, I don't even know where you would start. Tell me what. What you were thinking. Like, how did that even. That idea even come to you?

Krishna Kalyanan

So I had eaten a lot of cereals growing up. Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, you know, Golden Grahams. It was one of the high. You know, it's one of the classic American staples, so to speak, that I think a lot of kids in the 90s ate a lot of. I also had really fond memories of going to the grocery store with my mom when I was a kid and kind of picking out the new stuff. Right. I mean, it's like 60ft worth of cereal in the grocery store. So you can eat and try a lot of different Things. And so I had craved that variety in my life, and I had just gotten sick of eating eggs for breakfast. I had been eating it for such a long time. I'd eaten it with over 100 different hot sauces and other sorts of sauces to try to make it taste different every morning. But ultimately, it's that same eggy taste with that same eggy texture. Right. It's not crispy, it's not crunchy. And I've just gotten really, really bored of it.

Guy Raz

So you decide that you want to see if you could, in your kitchen, recreate breakfast cereal.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes. Yeah. I was thinking in particular about Cocoa Puffs. That was my favorite cereal growing up. And I realized that the chocolatiness from Cocoa Puffs is coming from a combination of cocoa powder and sugar. And if you can take the sugar and replace it with something like monk fruit, keep the cocoa powder. You now have this zero sugar or low sugar chocolate taste.

Guy Raz

And monk fruit is an extract that doesn't spike blood sugar. It's like. It's a sweet. It's like a miracle sweetener. It's super sweet, but it doesn't have the same impact on your. On your glucose levels.

Krishna Kalyanan

Exactly.

Guy Raz

Sugar or honey or maple syrup.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. Everything that you just mentioned is all, you know, if you break it down scientifically, it's all glucose, fructose, sucrose, which are three of the most common sugars in food. So a lot of people, I think, think that sugar and sweetness are the same thing, but they're actually not. And there are actually other things beyond sugar, which give your brain the sweet sensation. Right. I mean, what we perceive as sweetness is really kind of neurochemical changes in the brain. And so, yeah, Monk fruit has seeds. The seeds are extremely sweet, but they are not sugar. And so they do not spike your. Your blood sugar.

Guy Raz

It's the same with stevia, which comes from a leaf.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes.

Guy Raz

Right.

Krishna Kalyanan

And I just became enthralled with the. The whole subject. You know, it's kind of like opening a door to a whole new world. When you think of cooking is just follow the recipe and you get your food, and then all of a sudden, you open this door to this whole new world of, oh, wait a minute. There are all these ingredients that I would even go so far as to say humanity itself has not spent a lot of time thinking about or trying out. And so it almost felt like exploring something totally new.

Guy Raz

Okay. I mean, Cocoa Puffs are puffed corn, basically. I think rice and corn. Maybe some wheat in there. But what were you gonna use to make your keto version of that?

Krishna Kalyanan

So I was trying to make something. First of all, I was rolling the ingredients into a dough. I was cutting the dough into squares.

Guy Raz

And again, this is what, pea protein powder.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes.

Guy Raz

Cocoa powder and stevia or monk fruit.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah. At the simplest form. Exactly. It was those three ingredients. But. But if you mix these three things together with water, you're not going to get a dough that sticks together very well. And it's also going to be very hard and very flat and it's not going to have a lot of crispiness to it. So you're also adding, or I was also adding at the time, baking powder. Baking powder, as you know, helps things rise. Right. And then when they rise. And so there's kind of air pockets inside and then set with the air pockets inside them, that's where you then have that structure that enables the crispiness or the crunchiness. Right?

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

And then, yeah, you take those ingredients, you mix them together, you form it into a dough just like you're making crackers. Right. Roll the dough out into a thin sheet on a baking pan, cut it into squares, and then bake it in the oven.

Guy Raz

Okay. And how was it

Krishna Kalyanan

again? It was an evolution. It went from really bad to better over time. I think the first one I made was as hard as a rock. You could not eat it. And that's when I started to realize the importance of baking powder to get it to rise a little bit. I also started to realize that cocoa powder is extremely bitter. It only tastes like chocolate when you add the sweetness to it and those two things come together. So I think the first iterations I made were hard rocks that tasted like soil.

Guy Raz

When we come back in just a moment, Krishna finally makes an edible version of the cereal and then names it with a nod to Will Ferrell. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card is designed with your iPhone in mind, making it easy to get started and even easier to use. Apple Card is a no fee credit card you can apply for right from the Wallet app on your iPhone. Apple Card has no annual fee, no late fees, and no foreign transaction fees. No fees, period. Every credit card should be this easy. Get started in the Wallet app today. Subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.49% to 27.74% based on creditworthiness rates. As of January 1, 2026, existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or@card.apple.com Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch Terms and more at Apple Card Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now Vanguard is making it easy to have your voice heard in those decisions. Alexa, Take me to Vanguard Investor Choice. Got it. Texting you a link where you can

Krishna Kalyanan

set your proxy voting preference for your

Guy Raz

Vanguard index funds and be heard by the companies you invest in. Just say, alexa, take me to Vanguard Investor Choice and make your voice heard. Vanguard investors own shares of our index funds, which own shares of the companies they invest in. Available for Vanguard index funds that participate in Investor Choice. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor were supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude When I'm prepping for an interview, there's always that moment where I'm trying to turn a pile of research into an actual conversation. A founder's timeline, early decisions, big inflection points, old interviews, company background. All of it matters. But the real work is figuring out what connects. And that's where Claude has been super helpful. It helps me work through the material, organize what I already know, and find the thread, that thing that turns research into better questions. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter, from research to strategy to the tasks that slow everything down. Claude helps you stay with the work and keep moving for problems worth solving. Get started with Claude at Claude AI hibt. Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy raz. So it's 2017, and Krishna is playing around in his kitchen and he's trying to make something that tastes like Cocoa Puffs but without all the carbs and sugar.

Krishna Kalyanan

I got it to the point, after meticulous trial and error, to where it tasted pretty good. I was eating it with almond milk in the morning for breakfast. It didn't send my blood sugar through the roof like Cocoa Puffs would, but it still tasted good. I happened to meet a friend in Central park, and he was not diabetic, but he had gotten interested in getting more protein for breakfast, and he was sick of eating eggs. And we were just. We just happened to be talking about this. I don't think we had really planned to talk about it, and I had told him that I'd been trying out the cereal I was making, and he could try some if he wanted. So the next time I saw him, I gave him a bag of it, and then he Venmoed me for it. And I hadn't asked him to pay me for it, so I wasn't expecting it. But it was a nice gesture of goodwill on his part. And I think he venmoed me, like, $7.99 or $8.99. But he venmoed me a price that it wasn't like, oh, here's 10 bucks, or here's 5 bucks for this stuff. Here's, like, what looks like a grocery store price. And that's when it kind of struck me, oh, you could actually make food and sell it to people. Now it's obvious to people that there are big companies that do this. I had not really considered that. I had just been thinking about, hey, I know how to make apps. I know how to make websites. I'm going to do something with that. I reflected back and realized, oh, I've been actually working on making a quote product or a serial product, but that was not the intention of it going forward.

Guy Raz

All right, so walk me through how you got to a place where you were like, okay, I'm going to try and make a business out of this. I think I want to put all of my energy into. Into this cereal idea.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. Well, when I saw that my friend was not diabetic yet he was also trying to eat a lot of protein for breakfast, I kind of put two and two together and realized, oh, there's not really many options in the grocery store that are a good fit for people that are trying to achieve this. And so that's when I realized, oh, there's actually a big need here that no one really seems to be meeting. And so I walked through the grocery store cereal aisle, which I hadn't been to in probably a decade, and it was exactly the same as I think I had found it when I was a teenager and had last been there. And it struck me that there's a lot of different cereals in the grocery store, but they're all sort of the same cereal with different branding.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

And so that's when I realized, oh, you know, that could be exciting. And I think finally I had come to realize that the obesity rate in the country and the rate of diabetes in America were both through the roof.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

And when you start to think about all the money we're spending on health care and the negative repercussions that can have for our country, I Got really excited about it is like, hey, there's a big challenge here, but a big opportunity to help a lot of people.

Guy Raz

All right, so you, you decide that you're gonna go pursue this. But what was the first step that you did? I mean, you're making it for friends, right? And in your apartment. But this is a complex product. It's gonna, it's gonna be crispy in milk or almond milk or soy milk. It's gonna stay crispy and it's going to taste good and it has to be healthy and it has to have low carbs and high fiber and high protein. That's a lot. I mean, there's a, you know, you'd been doing some of these experiments in your kitchen, but did you feel like, I've got a. I got to get more training, I get a better understanding of how to do this?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. So it was, it was an evolution. So there were a lot of mistakes I made along the way that, that anyone who was in the food industry wouldn't have made, but they were all learning for me. You know, I think the first one was I didn't do the math right. I looked at my oven in my apartment and it has like five layers on it, racks. You really only ever use one rack. And so I thought to myself, oh man, I could just make a bunch of cereal right in this oven. Once you do the math, you realize that a sheet of dough doesn't really weigh that much. And so you're taking up maybe three racks of your oven just to make one stand up pouch worth of cereal. And then you're baking it for a long time. You do the dough for a long time. You can really only make in an eight hour day out of your oven, maybe five or six pouches of cereal.

Guy Raz

And I guess I should describe your cereal for people who are not familiar with it. It looks like Golden Grahams, for lack of a better description. It's a little square that's sort of curvy. But you were making it in sheets, on baking sheets and scoring it and then sort of breaking it apart. So I imagine the first year or so it wasn't perfect. I'm sure some of the squares were not squares. Maybe they had like a chip on them or something.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah.

Guy Raz

And you had a name for this cereal?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes. Yep. I called it Catalina Crunch from the beginning.

Guy Raz

Okay. Catalina's island off Southern California. I'm assuming that's the Catalina you're talking about.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. I'd grown up in California and so I was aware of Catalina island off the coast. One thing I did realize was that this cereal was going to be priced at a premium to other cereals on the market. And the reason for that was when I started to look at different ingredients. You look at the corn flour and the rice flour and the wheat flour, that's down at like 10 to 20 cents a pound. You go to GNC and you get one of those tubs of protein powder for, like, 30 bucks. You know, that stuff, like, can be way, way, way more expensive.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

And so I realized, hey, I need to come up with a name that it kind of has this premium feel to it. Right. I wanted the name Crunch because I thought, like, my snacks and everything I was eating was. Was more mushy, like eggs. And I was craving the pretzels, chips, crackers, cereal, the crispy, crunchy bite. So I wanted Crunch in the name. And then I was trying to think of something that started with C that would kind of go with Crunch, so it would be like alliteration. Chobani is a good example of, like, you know, it sounds premium, it sounds nice. It starts with a C, but I think that's like, Italian or European of some sort. Cereal is a very American invention. And so I was thinking of something that was American. And I knew the Catalina Wine Mixer from the movie Step Brothers. I really loved the movie Stepbrothers. I think enough people had been introduced to Catalina island through the movie Step Brothers. So I went with Catalina Crunch. It sounded good. It had a ring to it. Easy to say, I liked it.

Guy Raz

I'm curious. I mean, clearly you liked cooking, you liked baking, but this was not how people identified you. Probably people thought of you as a guy who was going to start a tech company. When you started to talk to people who knew you, maybe your family and others, that you were like, I'm going to make a go at this thing. I want to see if I can turn this into a brand. Did you get any pushback from anybody? Was everybody super supportive?

Krishna Kalyanan

I'm very lucky. I have a very supportive family. But it's definitely challenging being an entrepreneur, because an entrepreneur is like a adjacency to being unemployed. When you go from working at a hedge fund, right, where you're making a ton of money and you're kind of in one of the most difficult, demanding, and respected jobs in New York, to all of a sudden, quote, playing around in these various ideas, there's pressure, quote unquote from society. But no, my parents, my girlfriend, who's now my wife, family, they were kind Of, I would say, rocks in my life that helped me pursue these things with confidence.

Guy Raz

And you were initially going to. So you set up a website and you were going to sell bags of this cereal, and the flavor was chocolate.

Krishna Kalyanan

Chocolate, yep.

Guy Raz

And how did you market it? Did you call it a keto cereal? Because still a lot of people don't know what that means. Did you call it a low carb cereal? A high protein cereal?

Krishna Kalyanan

When I started out, I was very focused on low sugar because sugar in particular is what makes your blood sugar spike and go up and down and up and down.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

So I was very focused on the low sugar nature of it. It happened to be high protein and high fiber at the same time. And so people were eating it for a variety of reasons. And that goes back to something very important. When selling something is like you might put something out into the world for a reason, and then people might buy it for a different reason. And you need to go talk to people to understand that. Right. But yeah, I was very focused on the fact that it was low sugar.

Guy Raz

How did you get people to be aware of it? Was it. I can't imagine. You just put the website up and all of a sudden the orders start flooding in. I'm assuming it was just kind of friends and friends of friends.

Krishna Kalyanan

No, actually, it kind of was more put the website up and the orders start coming in. You know, one thing that happened was someone found out about it and then posted it on a, like, diabetes, type 1 diabetes group inside of Facebook. And then like 100 people from that group came and bought the cereal. So we had a lot of what you would call guerrilla marketing. It was a ton of really word of mouth, offline word of mouth, people posting about it on Instagram, Facebook, that sort of thing.

Guy Raz

Okay, so you've got this. And how are you making. I mean, how are you actually fulfilling orders? Let's just say you're getting 10 orders a day. Is that about right?

Krishna Kalyanan

We quickly got up to hundreds of orders a day.

Guy Raz

I'm assuming you had to start hiring people to help you quickly.

Krishna Kalyanan

Well, so I went from the kitchen in my apartment to a commercial kitchen. And in the commercial kitchen, I could make dough in bigger sizes. Right. They have these Hobart mixers. So I think with like an 80 quart Hobart mixer, you can make like, I don't know, 30, 50 pounds of dough at a time.

Guy Raz

And you were doing this?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes, yep.

Guy Raz

And fulfilling orders.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes, yep.

Guy Raz

Okay, so. But you had to hire people to help you, I imagine.

Krishna Kalyanan

I did not. I just had my Trusty wife on the weekends. That was it at the time. And so, yeah, once again, you have these sheeting belts in the commercial kitchen. You got rack ovens now, right. So you can put whole racks of cut crackers, cereal into the ovens.

Guy Raz

It's complicated because imagining you're cooking this at low temperatures for a long time. Right. Because you have to kind of dry it. It's not just like putting it in the oven at 400 degrees because you'll burn it.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't remember exactly, but I think I had it in for like 275 at 18 minutes or, you know, 250, 18 minutes, something like that. Yep.

Guy Raz

And then put them in bags and seal them.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes. So this commercial kitchen was an industry city. It was very busy. So I had the last shift, which I believe was 10pm to 5am or something like that. So I was working overnight in there and making the cereal, packaging it. And so I would go to the post office by my apartment with tons of boxes, drop them all off, and then kind of start that again and

Guy Raz

sleep for what, how many hours a night?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah. I wasn't getting a lot of sleep. It was just a lot of. It was a lot of work.

Guy Raz

Tell me what that felt like. I mean, you're obviously a smart guy. You go to this elite college, you get this sort of elite job out of college on Wall Street, a lot of your friends are probably already, you know, making a lot of cash in these different businesses. You're now four years out of college and I don't know, was any part of you questioning what you were doing?

Krishna Kalyanan

I was intellectually enthralled by the adventure and I was very busy. So there were challenging times when I questioned what I was doing. But at this point, like when you're getting orders coming in and you're seeing the orders come in every day, and then you're getting emails from people and they're loving what you're making. It's like. It's thrilling. It's really exciting. I don't know how else to describe it, but you've just put something new into the world and people are telling you that they love it. And so that was foremost on my mind at this time.

Guy Raz

All right, I want to go back to the ingredients for a sec, because in that first year of making it yourself and going, you know, selling it, I mean, were you were literally going to GNC and buying protein powder and ordering, you know, other ingredients probably through Amazon and just. That was it.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, I Started ordering everything off Amazon. Yep.

Guy Raz

Because the ingredients today are quite complex. I mean, there's still pea protein and. But there are other ingredients that are not so obvious. Right. Like corn fiber or pea fiber or chicory root fiber that, you know, it's. It's a corn, but it's. It's a part of the corn that doesn't have as much carbohydrates. And so to get what you have today, you've mixed all these things. But I imagine in that first year, it wasn't so sophisticated.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things with the ingredients is I had also wanted to have a lot of fiber in the cereal if I could. And I had been using almond flour and then coconut flour to put a lot of fiber into the cereal. And one of the challenges with fiber is if you put too much fiber into a food, it becomes hard to digest. And that's when I started to realize, oh, there's actually different types of fiber. And each of these fibers can act differently in the digestive system. So I've spent many years trying to understand what combinations of fiber. One do I think, do I want to eat and do I want my kids to eat? And I think that are best for my health. And then also so that you can eat a significant amount of it, but without having an upset stomach afterwards.

Guy Raz

And the amazing thing about this to me is you couldn't do this in the year 2000. Even in the year 2010, it would have been hard. But in 2018, you could get pretty much chicory root fiber, and you get powdered spinach. Whatever you need, you could just get online now.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's fascinating, and you're absolutely right. And an interesting kind of side bit, but we talk about whole grains, right? So a whole grain has the bran, the germ, the endosperm, the entire grain.

Guy Raz

Right. Like a wheat berry before it's ground up. Is. Is that's what you're talking about?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes, exactly. Yep. And so it has all the protein, all the fiber, and. And all the starch all in one. We started the food industry, started removing the protein and removing the fiber as a way to make products taste better. Yeah. And so that was the first iteration of this was going from whole wheat flour to bleached white flour and going from brown rice to white rice, etc. And so when you start taking out the protein and fiber so that you can get this isolated starch source, a, it's a lot less healthy for you. And there have been a lot of people Writing about the problems with. With that. But B, well, where does the protein and fiber go? It's just being thrown away.

Guy Raz

Thrown away. Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. So to your point, a lot of these new ingredients are actually byproducts of other ingredients. And you know, we talk a lot about food waste. This is a, this is a way to avoid food waste by. By reusing some of the most nutritious parts of the legumes, the lentils, and whatever else.

Guy Raz

Yeah. I mean, it's like whey. For a long time, whey was just thrown away when people would make yogurt. And then somebody was like, wait, why don't. We'll take it and dry it, powderize it and turn it into a protein powder.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yep.

Guy Raz

So, okay, so you're. Let's go back to. So it's 2018. You're working at the commercial kitchen and trying to learn about what's going to make this better. Because I imagine like version 1.0 that you're selling in 2018 is probably okay, but. But I. But probably not really what you wanted it to be yet.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. So what I was making out of the commercial kitchen again, you know, trying to make it quickly. You're making larger batches now and, you know, there's, there's variability in the baking process and I'm basically only able to make so much each day. And so was kind of going through this in stock, out of stock pattern on our website. Right. Where we'd sell and then I'd have more orders than I could ship. So I'd turn it off and say out of stock. Then make all the cereal, ship it, and then turn it back on again. And I realized that it was very physically demanding on me. And even still, we weren't making that much cereal.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

And so that's when I went to Texas A and M. They have a basically like a executive short course on how General Mills and Kellogg's and Post make cereal.

Guy Raz

Wait, Texas A and M? That's amazing. You go to Texas A and M? And how long is the course?

Krishna Kalyanan

I think it was a week.

Guy Raz

That's so interesting because I'm sure you know the story, maybe you don't, but Ben and Jerry's, right, Ben and Jerry, they took a correspondence course in ice cream making at, I think Penn State back in the 70s, and that's how they learned how to make ice cream. So Texas A and M is a cereal making course, which makes sense. Texas A and M, huge ag school. And so you fly there to College Station for a week and take this course?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, I mean, you know, so I think the course, to your point, Texas A and M has an ag school. It's a lot of companies that maybe are thinking about getting into making cereal, and so they want to send someone from their company to understand how to make cereal.

Guy Raz

So you're in a kitchen in this class?

Krishna Kalyanan

No, no. So in this class they have what they call pilot sized versions of the equipment, equipment that the bigger companies use to make syrup. So, like, one of the first things you learn, for example, is in the commercial kitchen or in your own kitchen, you're baking in batches in this like standing oven. Right. But in bigger food manufacturing, they actually have continuous ovens. Right. So you have like a conveyor belt

Guy Raz

and it's just be. It's like a Papa John's pizza. You know, they put in a conveyor belt and it just cooks. The pizza comes out, they put the box.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah, yep. So you learn about that. You learn about equipment to package food products as well. And you know, you go to any modern food facility, they don't have a bunch of people just sitting there scooping cereal and putting it into. Into bags. They have, they have scales and better ways of doing it. Right. So I learned a lot about that. The other thing that happened in this world was bars, you know? Right. So protein bars became more popular and an ingredient into protein bars is protein

Guy Raz

crisps, which is whey puffs, right?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes. Well, they have whey puffs, they have pea protein puffs. They have many different ingredients, but those are also made on cereal making equipment. And you can think of whey puffs if you added cocoa powder to them, you could think of them as miniature cocoa puffs made high protein. And so as the, as the bar market was growing, demand for this same manufacturing process was growing and hence investment in it was growing.

Guy Raz

Interesting. I mean, the people you met in that course were like, you're doing what you're cereal with what? I imagine the people running that program may have been skeptical of what you were doing, because if you are teaching people about cereal, well, cereal is wheat, corn and rice.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. So, hey, so cereal, you know, it stands for cereal grains, right? Which to your point, you know, like corn is a cereal grain. So what I was doing with the protein powders was highly unconventional. And so what was challenging about it was everyone I talked to, no one said I was going to be able to make the cereal, that I was making it in large volumes. You know, they're saying that it wasn't going to work for, for one Reason or another.

Guy Raz

But what you're doing, again, I would think, I mean, if you're at this serial course and they're saying, yeah, what you're trying to do can't be done at scale, I mean, game over. Those guys are the experts.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. I mean, they're the experts. They're not geniuses. And experts every so often find themselves in the expert's dilemma where they have all this knowledge, but that knowledge becomes outdated over time. And so the world's moving forward. There are new ingredients, right. So you talk about it being hard, but you know, a lot of these folks haven't tried some of these new ingredients. We're talking about like chicory root fiber and pee hole fiber and things like that, right?

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

So. So yes and no. On, you know, whenever. When someone tells me something's not possible, my first question is, is why is it not possible? And if I can't get down to the first principles, reason as to why it's not possible, then I, then I walk away believing it's possible and that we just need to do more work.

Guy Raz

When we come back in just a moment, Krishna puts in the work and learns why Indianapolis is a really smart place to make cereal. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talk to on this show. Because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobil supreme plus Premium gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. 3 times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details. They say that every day your business is late to AI, you fall two days behind. But how do you keep up when the competition is only Moving faster? With NetSuite Next, NetSuite Next is the next huge leap in how business gets done. Because AI is built into everything you do. It automatically provides custom insights throughout your day. While AI agents work alongside you to solve problems and handle routine Work. And anytime you have a question about anything, ask, just like you're having a conversation with a colleague. If I needed to manage HR, commerce, inventory, CRM, financials, I would use NetSuite next. Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, it's time for NetSuite Next, where your business meets AI for the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to NetSuite AI built. Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom. NetSuite AI built. Hey, welcome back to How I Built this. I'm Guy raz. So it's 2018, and Krishna's selling Catalina Crunch entirely online and making it in a commercial kitchen in Brooklyn. But after finishing a course in cereal making, he now has connections that can help him make cereal at scale.

Krishna Kalyanan

I then met a partner, a company that specialized into this sort of thing again. They were already making crisps for the protein bar industry and working on some, like, baby cereals and some other more organic products. And so once I was working with them, I could then make, you know, rather than making 50 pouches a day or whatever it was in the commercial kitchen, you know, they could make 10,000 pouches in a day. Right. Far, far larger quantities of it. But, you know, the thing is, when you have this big equipment, all of a sudden it costs a lot of money to do the work on it because you need to buy bigger quantities of ingredients and the whole nine yards.

Guy Raz

So did you raise money?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, so I had raised over the course of two rounds, first $100,000 and then $800,000 afterwards.

Guy Raz

Okay, and this is in 2018?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yep.

Guy Raz

And who were your investors?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, so first investor was a good friend of mine from college. And yeah, he wrote me the first check that enabled me to, to do a lot of this work that I talked about in making the cereal and this co manufacturer.

Guy Raz

And you're back in New York.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes.

Guy Raz

And so that's it. You're going to work with this co manufacturer on making, on scaling this?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes. I went back and forth. This company's based in the Midwest, I was in New York. There were two things that were going on. One, I wanted to make sure that it tasted great and that everything went according to plan. So every time they would make Catalina Crunch cereal, I'd go there and watch them make it. Number two was they could make the cereal squares, but they could not package the cereal itself. They could only put the cereal into the bag in box model. If I wanted to do that they couldn't put the cereal into stand up

Guy Raz

pouches, which is what you had. You weren't using a box. Cereal box. It was a pouch.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. Yep. And I was, you know, for better or for worse, I was insistent on the stand up pouch from day one. The reason was I had spent a lot of time as a kid trying to get the bag of cereal back in the box after I'd taken it out of the box. And it got grown very frustrated with the bag in box. Also, if you open that bag up, you then have no way to reseal it. So you now need to go find a paper clip or something else before you put it back in the box. I thought the pouch is easier to carry around. It reseals itself because it has its own zipper. You know, to me, it's just better. So they were making the cereal and then I had a second company which was putting it into pouches for me. And then from there I was able to take it and ship it out to customers as they ordered it.

Guy Raz

All right, this is all happening in 2018, your first year in business.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yep.

Guy Raz

So this is a busy year.

Krishna Kalyanan

It was. It was a very busy year. Yes.

Guy Raz

Okay. Late in 2018, you decide to leave New York City and move to the Midwest. What happened? What was the catalyst for that decision?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, so we had this company that was packaging the cereal into the standup pouches. The owner of that company was a type 1 diabetic like I was, and so he was very passionate about kind of helping me with this. The challenge was, is they are a very large company. They do probably tens of millions of packages of food every day, and we are a very small company. So we weren't really a good fit from the go ahead.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

And so eventually they kind of came to me and said, hey, we, we're just not going to do this anymore. You're not, you know, your volume's not big enough. Our equipment's having problems putting the cereal into the pouches. We're done. So that was probably the first time that I was really trying to figure out what to do. And so I basically moved out to Indiana and started doing it myself.

Guy Raz

Wait, you. There was no one else who could do it for you?

Krishna Kalyanan

There was no one else I could find that was a good fit. And just to go into a little bit more detail, there's three steps here, Right. There's the making of the cereal squares. There's then the tossing of them in things like cinnamon or tossing them in cocoa to give a chocolate flavor. Then there's the packaging. And so I needed a company that could toss it in the seasoning and then put it in the packaging. And many of the companies that could do that also had other. Some other sort of manufacturing process before it, which I didn't need and they wanted to use.

Guy Raz

So you had to build your own production facility or was it a turnkey operation? Did you buy a bunch of equipment? And why Indianapolis?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. Yeah. I took a big risk, honestly. At least it seemed like a big risk in my mind, because at this point, when I couldn't find anyone else to coat and package the cereal, that was the first time that I kind of asked myself, man, should I keep doing this or should I shut this thing down? Because I had emailed a million and one food companies. A lot of people are like, you're too small. A lot of other people are like, we don't do that, or we can do this, but we can't do that. And so I was kind of thinking, all right, am I going to sell, stop doing this, or am I going to do it myself? And can I do it myself?

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

And I thought, kind of like, the hell with it, let's give it a try. I chose Indianapolis because it is somewhat close to the center of the country. And so from Indianapolis, you can ship both to California and to New York in one week. So I've gotten a little smarter at this point from back when I was making things in my kitchen. And I started to realize from buying ingredients, if you have your thing located in New York, you're paying a lot more to ship those ingredients, say, from Chicago to New York, right, where a lot of the ingredients come out of the heartland, than to just have your place right where the ingredients are coming from. And then if you're in New York and you're shipping your finished pouches of cereal, say, out to California, you know, that can be two weeks for them to get over there on trucks. So I looked at different places. I ended up renting about a 3,000 square foot space in an office building in Indianapolis, and I basically moved into that building, bought a cot off Amazon, set it up in the office, and then I would do the cereal in the back.

Guy Raz

And what did it. I mean, did you have to buy, like, huge mixing bowls to, like, to mix the cinnamon and cocoa? Was that. It doesn't sound that complicated, but if you're talking about large volumes of cereal, I imagine you need. I don't know, what do you need?

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, yeah. So there's a few different ways of doing it when I started, I was thinking about it and was like, hey, I just need something that's going to turn around and that I can put the cereal into, and it'll kind of spin around, and then I can put the cinnamon into it and then mix it all together. Right. And so I actually started by buying a washing machine and just not turning the machine on and just having it spin and then having the cereal inside of the machine. And so that was the first way that I was getting the cinnamon and the chocolate onto the cereal.

Guy Raz

Okay, so you are in Indianapolis, just grinding away, sleeping in the facility. And give me a sense of, like, what. What your sales were like overall in 2018.

Krishna Kalyanan

It was probably a million dollars or

Guy Raz

something like that in your first full year.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yes. Yep.

Guy Raz

That's a lot.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah. I mean, I think it's crazy to say it, but, you know, social media connects a lot of people together. Also, it hired a marketer, and this guy was also obviously instrumental to helping with running ads on Instagram, running ads on Facebook, basically getting the word out.

Guy Raz

Okay, I imagine that you are. You've got a D2C business. And was that sort of the direction you wanted to head towards? Like, did you think that D2C was the way to go? Or obviously you would eventually get into retail, but was that even on your radar at all?

Krishna Kalyanan

So D2C was the way that I wanted to go. It was another thing that got me interested in starting the business in the first place is I was starting to see lots of stuff was being sold online. There was dollar Shave Club as an example of a company which had kind of gone outside of the usual retail channel and had grown really quickly. I realized after some time that we weren't going to sell to the entire nation online. When you're selling sunglasses as an example, if it's like a $100 pair of sunglasses and it costs like $7 to ship them to the consumer, you know that works. Right. But when you're selling a bag of cereal for $7, and then you're spending $7 to ship it to the consumer, that doesn't work. And so that's when I realized, okay, if we're going to get really big, we got to be in the grocery stores as well. Yeah, we went into Whole Foods first. Whole Foods had actually just moved from region by region buying to what they call global buying, which was basically one person that buys cereal for the whole country and puts it into every store. And so in 2020 and January, I believe we got the cereal on shelf at All Whole Foods across the country.

Guy Raz

Wow. What are some of the things you did to create awareness at Whole Foods?

Krishna Kalyanan

So I think within six months, we became one of the top selling cereals at Whole Foods.

Guy Raz

Wow.

Krishna Kalyanan

If not the top selling cereal at Whole Foods. And the reason that happened is I think a couple fold. In 2019 or so, keto became very popular.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

Great buyer there at Whole Foods. She was very excited about what we were doing. And she said, hey, we want to take your cereal, but we want you to change the packaging so that rather than saying low sugar in big letters, it's going to say Keto Friendly in big letters. So I then made that change. We'd been selling direct to consumer for close to two years or so at that point. And so we had a lot of people that knew us, but again, because of the cost of shipping online, we were selling four packs to people online, and it was relatively expensive. It was like $49 for four pouches or something like that. When it was at Whole Foods, it was like $8.99 for a pouch, which was a really good price.

Guy Raz

So one of the things that is challenging, right, especially with the food business, is the fluctuation of prices like cocoa and different ingredients that are affected by the Ukraine war affected sunflower oil. And the price of cocoa has skyrocketed, I think, in recent years. How do you manage those fluctuations? But you got to sell the cereal for the same price.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yeah, it's been a really big challenge. Not going to lie the prices of these commodities, as they call them. You can go online and look at the price of sunflower oil and see a graph of it over time on Google Images, you'll see that when Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of sunflower oil skyrocketed. Because I believe Ukraine and Russia are two of the largest growers of sunflower seeds. So, yeah, you. You occasionally have these major spikes in prices, which can threaten basically your whole business model.

Guy Raz

Yeah.

Krishna Kalyanan

One thing that, that I feel proud of is we have worked hard to work around those spikes to avoid having to increase the price of our cereal. So, you know, a lot of people complain about shrinkflation, so. So another thing you can do is you can say, all right, the price of this has gone way up. Let's reduce the amount that's in the bag. We have never reduced the amount of cereal that's in our, like, say, pouch of cinnamon Toast cereal is 9 ounces today. It was 9 ounces when we started the company. So one, you try to find new suppliers from new regions Right. Like, yes, the. The dominant supplier of sunflower seeds is Ukraine and Russia, but that doesn't mean that literally 100% of the. The ingredients are from there. And then two, you try to make changes to your recipe when you can. Right. So we had, due to the tariffs on, on China, the price of. Of monk fruit went way, way, way up. And it was like an extra $85,000 a pallet for us to buy monk fruit. It was a crazy increase. And so, yeah, we're now working on, like, okay, how can we make the cereal taste sweet but use a little bit less monk fruit? So there's no one solution. It depends on the situation. But you're trying to pull those levers to keep your costs in check.

Guy Raz

So cereal was, I mean, it was your sort of main product. Right. And. But I think pretty quickly, like, within two years, right. You launch in Whole Foods 2020, roughly. Right. And I think, think the next year you expand out. So snack mixes and cookie bars and cookies. So the idea is, hey, we can be a snack company.

Krishna Kalyanan

So when I started the company, I was taking the cereal I was making, mixing it with almond milk, and then eating it out of a bowl for breakfast.

Guy Raz

Right.

Krishna Kalyanan

Going back to talking to consumers to understand why they love and are buying what you're selling, I realized that a lot of them were actually snacking on our cereal rather than eating. Eating it as breakfast cereal. And then I see people writing into us, writing letters saying, hey, look at what Chex Mix is doing. We'd love for you to make a snack mix. And I realized, okay, we can take our same cereal squares, mix some cashews and almonds in with them, and then we can toss that in a, you know, call it a Parmesan garlic seasoning, and. And that's a snack.

Guy Raz

So the business really starts to grow, and you're in Whole Foods and I think Costco. You guys also got into Costco pretty early on.

Krishna Kalyanan

Yep.

Guy Raz

And in 2024, I think you brought in a CEO Doug Behrens to run the company. And tell me what, I mean, you started this, right? And. And it was scaling. And so tell me what that freed you up to do.

Krishna Kalyanan

So what it's freed up me to do, really, is one, focus on nutrition. Basically nailing protein, fiber, and sugar. That's like the biggest three things you can do, right? I think people should be eating more protein and more fiber. I think very few people eat enough fiber. Fiber and protein actually work synergistically to help you feel full and stay feeling full throughout the day. So if you ask me, like, what do I think's coming next and how can people kind of make a step, change improvement in their eating? It's not just protein, it's protein and fiber.

Guy Raz

When you think about, you know, the journey you took and all the sort of failed businesses that you started, and then this thing, which is a complete left turn, and then it really grows really fast. And I think you guys are doing more than $100 million in sales, maybe even higher than that. How much of where you got to now and the success of this product and brand do you attribute to the work and the grind you put in? How much do you think had to do with luck?

Krishna Kalyanan

Oh, man, I think it's a lot of both. I talk to a lot of other people that have started successful businesses. There's no school or course or training that you can go through to basically prepare yourself to, quote, be an entrepreneur. You just have to do and then learn and do and learn and do and learn. You know, it's funny, I was reflecting the name of your podcast is how I built this, but it's really how we built this. And it's not just me, but it's, it's the retailers that support us, right, that enable us to get our products out to consumers. It's the ingredient vendors, it's the early investors as well as other investors that have given us the money that's enabled us to get the equipment. And now we have a 125,000 square foot facility in Indiana. Much bigger, does, much more volume. Again, have had some great mentors and advisors along the way, you know, and then, and then just having a family, a wife that are kind of like a rock and that have helped me see it through to the end and not, not go crazy, you know, again, it's all, it's all luck. It's all being in the right place at the right time.

Guy Raz

That's Krishna Kalyanan, founder of Catalina Crunch. 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 episode of the show. And as always, it's free. And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter@guyraz.com or on substack. This episode was researched and produced by Chris Messini with music composed by Ramtino Rabloui. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Kwesi Lee. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Karla Estevez, Casey Hearn. Herman J.C. howard, Sam Paulson, Catherine Cipher. Kerry Thompson, John Isabella and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Roz, and you've been listening to How I Built this.