Biologica

0:00Liz Zwillinger:Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42Liz Zwillinger:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI-powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions. winning brands thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. If you listened to my recap about Expo West, I called out how much innovation is happening around women's health, and I am here for it.

1:37Liz Zwillinger:Last week, I turned 41, and I know that I have to step up my game with health and wellness and hormones and supplements as we move to the next chapter in life. And the brand that I'm bringing on today is so cool and innovative. They are making it so easy to identify what chapter in life you're in and what supplements can best support you. So today I have Liz Zillinger. She is the co-founder of Biologica. And Liz, I'm so happy to have you on the show. Oh, thank you. I'm happy to be here. And I was telling Liz before I hit record that I was posting about Biologica, tasting it before the show. And I had many of my cool tastemaker friends reach out to me saying that they're already big fans.

2:28Liz Zwillinger:I know that you just recently launched, but genuinely I was getting feedback that people are already hooked on your products and we're really excited that you were coming on the show.

2:39Joey Zwillinger:That's great. And as a CPG person, I am asking my first question to you was, well, why do they like it? I'm always learning, right?

2:45Liz Zwillinger:I need to know.

2:46Joey Zwillinger:You are my market research. which I'm always asking people when they say they love it, why? Tell me why so that we can, you know, orient our messaging around that or, you know, think about new products in the future. Always asking questions about why people love and are attracted to the brand.

3:01Liz Zwillinger:So that's a good piece of advice also, which we will get to later on. But I think asking those questions is so important. So I wanted to start off with you asking, what was the white space that you saw, as I said, women's health is definitely moving forward. A lot more science backed research is coming. There is a lot happening, but at the same time, there is so much opportunity that is still has not been created yet for women's health. So what was the niche within women's health that you saw that you're like, Ooh, we could do something way better here.

3:39Joey Zwillinger:It honestly came out of my lived experience. So I'm 43. I know you're 41. I felt like one day I was standing in my pantry and I was mixing seven different pills and four different powders. And I said, this is impossible. Health should not be this hard. I can't possibly keep up with this routine. I would like somebody smarter than me to figure out what I need to take for this particular life stage and put a very complex formulation in a really simple delivery system so that I actually take it every day. I look forward to taking it every day. It's doable. And then I can move on with my life. You know, prior to doing biologic, I was a divorce lawyer.

4:17Joey Zwillinger:I have three kids. I have two senior lawyers. I mean, sorry, two senior dogs. And I, um, I'm so busy. I had this really busy, rich life and I could not keep up with a 12 step supplement routine. And the truth is we don't need to do that. So we spent two years of R and D talking with naturopathic doctors, OBGYNs, formulators to figure out what are the nutritional gaps that are unique to women? How do they differ across life stages? And we, through that process, we came up with this really interesting insight, which is that women's nutritional needs change dramatically based on their hormonal life stage.

4:56Joey Zwillinger:So as women, we go through five hormonal life stages, infancy, puberty, reproductive, perimenopausal, postmenopausal. And what your body needs in puberty is very different than what your body needs when you're perimenopausal. And the same thing for reproductive versus postmenopausal. And it's when I looked at what was out there on the market, it was either for man, woman, child, right? Like a greens juice or gummy bear, or it's for women, but it's for all women. Where the third category is it's for women. We'll look at it based and your hormonal life stage, but we're going to give you a pill pack that has seven different pills in it.

5:32Joey Zwillinger:And so many people we talked to said, I'm so sick of this. I don't want to take seven pills in the morning. It's not exciting. I forget about it. It's hard to keep up with.

5:41Liz Zwillinger:Totally.

5:42Joey Zwillinger:And so that was the white space.

5:44Liz Zwillinger:So cool. Okay. I'm so in because again, I resonate with the pinpoint, sorry, the pain point that you identified. So what made you start taking the steps to figure this out? You said that you're by trade an attorney, divorce attorney, that's the word. Thank you. Three kids, what made you want to actually take the steps to become a CPG founder, which sounds totally different from what you were doing in your day?

6:15Joey Zwillinger:I felt so passionately that this was a product I wanted to see in existence is really why I decided to pivot. But I, you know, there's women carry so much burden as caretakers, as just like keeping communities together. Right. There's a lot of health anxiety that women face. And I just, if I can relieve some of that burden, I feel like my life has done really good work. And so with Biologica, it really felt like there was, as you were saying, a pain point of there's too much information out there that is disaggregated. It's conflicting often and people aren't getting their health information from their doctors.

6:56Joey Zwillinger:They're getting it from Instagram. They're getting it from podcasts. They're getting it from group texts of their friends. And everyone is, you know, from my experience, people were just shouting at me from all these different areas of my life. Oh, take this and take this. And what about this? And it felt like I just kept adding to a supplement stack instead of being able to step back and say, okay, what does my body really need? because there are two things for me, my forties that were going on the same time. The first, I started to feel older, right? Like you feel your age. Um, my, you know, my joints are a little bit creakier.

7:27Joey Zwillinger:You're getting, you get out of shape a little bit faster, right? Like you take two weeks off.

7:31Liz Zwillinger:I feel like it started the day I turned 40 and I was like, wait, wait, wait, hold on. I was not ready for this.

7:37Joey Zwillinger:Yeah. You take two weeks off to go on a vacation and then you come back and all of a sudden the workout you did is way harder. Um, joints are a little bit creakier, I felt like my brain wasn't functioning in the same way it did before, which like for my personal identity was like an affront to like who I am as a person, right? When like I couldn't, I was losing words mid-sentence or my thoughts felt really jumbled. I've talked to women who are in their forties who had this like new sense of anxiety that they'd never felt before. I've sort of always had a low grade anxiety. So that was not something that like I really identified with, but I was like, Oh, what is that like to have your whole life never having anxiety until your 40s.

8:16Joey Zwillinger:So it was sort of like this baseline health that we were missing. I know that I need to protect my bones and my muscles, right? We need to strength train. Women and frail bones have a very bleak future. We know this. So that was happening. So baseline health, vitamin B, make sure vitamin D, calcium, all of that. But then at the same time, I'm having all of these new symptoms, these acute hormonal symptoms because I'm in perimenopause. So the brain fog Like I was talking about other people have anxiety for me, my moodiness around my period. I used to have, you know, two to three days of moodiness and I entered into my forties.

8:52Joey Zwillinger:It started to be four to five days, creeping up to six days and I wasn't feeling like myself. And that's where I felt like it's so hard to be able to satisfy both of those buckets, right?

9:06Liz Zwillinger:Your fundamental baseline health, filling those nutritional gaps and your hormonal health

9:11Joey Zwillinger:and trying to do all of that in one supplement stack where you're doing it all yourself. And sometimes the ingredients actually don't work well together. Sometimes you're not taking even the right dosages, but more than anything, it's hard to keep up with a routine that's complicated. And as we know, supplements only work if you take them.

9:26Liz Zwillinger:Right. And if it's a seven

9:29Joey Zwillinger:pills and four powders making some complicated, messy smoothie, it's just not going to work. So that was the white space we found. And we went out to, we did focus groups with other women to make sure that like, it wasn't just me, you know, we did it with women in their thirties, their forties, their fifties, their sixties. We did a thousand women study also to make sure that this wasn't just me. And that's where we had this really interesting insight emerge, which is that women's health concerns were very, very similar within their hormonal, hormonal age, but very different across their hormonal ages.

10:02Joey Zwillinger:So women in their thirties weren't complaining about brain fog in the same way that women in their 40s were. You know, women in their 50s were complaining much more about joint health, that creakiness that they feel as athletes that they weren't feeling in their 40s, for example. So it was like we started to see these patterns emerge and that's where the insight came to divide our formulations based on hormonal age because our body's needs are really different.

10:27Liz Zwillinger:Right, and I know that your formulas are science-backed. Can you go through a bit of how you started connecting the science with what you are finding in wellness groups? Again, coming from a totally different career background, maybe some helpful pieces of the puzzle that you were able to connect with and start seeing of like, okay, here's how we could get access to this science. because unfortunately there is such a gap still of women's health and science to back it. But understanding that you wanted to have that science back piece to it, so it's not just another supplement of guessing, but this is really putting all those pieces together.

11:17Liz Zwillinger:What did that look like in the early days?

11:19Joey Zwillinger:So when we went out to naturopathic doctors and OBGYNs, what we realized is that there are unique needs for women based on their age. And a lot of what the supplement industry was putting out were multivitamins for everybody that didn't have specific ingredients that women are deficient in. And the reason they do that is for ease, right? It's much easier to sell one product to many. And so, for example, a good example of this is iron. Iron doesn't taste great, right? I don't know if you've ever tried to take it. Even an iron in a pill format doesn't taste great. There's an aftertaste to it. So a lot of the green juices that are meant for everybody or the gummy bears don't have any iron in them because it impacts the taste.

12:05Joey Zwillinger:So that's why we spent so long in our formulation stage to make sure that for reproductive age women, women who are getting a regular menstrual cycle, we put sufficient amount of iron in and we were able to mask the taste through a very complicated R &D process and a sophisticated flavor house that we found in Europe that can create these flavors that mask that taste. Because women are deficient in iron when reproductive age. Almost every woman has some iron deficiency. You're shedding blood every single month, but men aren't. So it wouldn't make sense for a green juice to include iron in their ingredients because half of their consumers don't, you know, deplete blood the way that women do every month.

12:45Joey Zwillinger:Another example is vitamin D. So So all women, regardless of where you live, right, are deficient in vitamin D. In order for an ingredient to be included in a biological formulation, it had to be shown that that ingredient, that mineral vitamin was deficient in the average American woman. And that deficiency impacted their overall health outcomes for a healthy individual. So we looked at all of the science for women, right? Not science based on a general person, right? But women's based science to say, what are the ingredients that women are deficient in? What do they need? And what's going to drive better health outcomes for them?

13:25Joey Zwillinger:And so we were really rigorous about what ingredients we included and which ones we left out. So trendy ingredients that don't have the clinical data behind it, we were able to, you know, we left out. An example of that is biotin, right? In terms of biotin is not a B vitamin that women are generally deficient in that impact health outcomes. So we have a full B complex in our formulations and all three of them. But that's, you know, B3, B6, B12. And we leave out other ingredients that just don't move the needle for women so that you can feel good knowing that everything that's in our sachet is what your body actually needs.

14:05Joey Zwillinger:And in our sachets, we have five to six grams of active ingredients. So that's the equivalent of seven to 10 pills. So we're able to pack in a lot into one sachet that you stir with water and make this really delicious effervescent beverage. We're able to pack in a lot and not have to deal with choking down 10 pills in the morning.

14:24Liz Zwillinger:Wow. So I didn't realize the ratio of its equivalent to around seven to 10 pills is in one sachet. That again, it's so easy to pour in water kind of makes like a sparkling lemonade almost. Yeah, exactly. Something along those lines.

14:41Joey Zwillinger:So there's ingredients like, for example, choline, right? Have amazing research of what it does to brain health, right? We know it has amazing impacts on fetal brain health when you're pregnant, but also for women's brains, right? It helps at the neurotransmitter level to make sure that those connections are happening freely without interference. And choline is left out of a lot of multivitamins because it's dense. It takes up a lot of space in a pill. But we're able to include it in all three of our formulations because we have space in that sachet. We have five to six grams of actives. We have space to include kind of bulkier ingredients like choline, which really are amazing for our brain health.

15:20Liz Zwillinger:That is really interesting how the form factor gave you more breath, so to speak, to include more benefits. But again, going back to sounds like you really wanted to make sure that it was something that stood out back by science that was depleted or women by and large were not getting enough of. And that's what came in versus just what's cool and hot. And, you know, we see it being added to everything. And you're like, why am I now having this one random ingredient in all of my food, beverage, you know, the world of CBD? So I like how you made that discernment. So was it partnering with medical professionals that really help unlock that?

16:06Liz Zwillinger:Or was it doing your own research and just networking? It was medical professionals.

16:11Joey Zwillinger:I mean, it was assembling a team of real experts. And that's why it took us two years of R &D was because we wanted to make sure that we were doing it in the right way. And look, our co-manufacturer that we used to actually make the ingredients kept saying, this is going to be so much easier if we just do pills. just do pills. It's going to be so much easier. And I felt so strongly that the form factor was really important because it has to, you have to create an exciting experience, right? I mean, you know, through your CPG work, if you're going to drink something, you know, you're going to buy it at Target or 7-Eleven, like it's got to be something you look forward to.

16:48Liz Zwillinger:Otherwise you're not going to want to do it.