Whole30: Melissa Urban

26:37And, of course, we modulated our workouts. But even with modulating his workouts and resting and doing all of the PT things that he knew he needed to do, he still struggled to find relief with the shoulder tendonitis. So what did he decide to try and do? So he had been doing some research into the impact of dietary choices on inflammation in the body. And at this time, paleo was all the rage. Dr. Lauren Cordain was kind of the godfather of paleo. And he had written several papers on the impact of legumes and their potentially inflammatory impact on folks who are sensitive. And if you are sensitive, it could be provoking an immune response, an inflammatory response that can manifest in a number of different ways throughout the body.

27:27And I should mention Loren Cordain. He's the guy who came up with what – and I think called it the paleo diet back in the early 2000s or maybe even the late 90s. And really, you know, around this time, much more attention was being paid to the efficacy of this diet. It's very controversial, I should say. I mean, and, you know, like all nutrition-based things, they are controversial. But his basic point is that if you eat more like humans ate before they adopted an agrarian-based grain diet, it may actually be better for us. That was his basic argument. Yes. And yes, it was highly controversial.

28:08I'm not sure was particularly science-backed in terms of the health benefits of eating more like our Paleolithic ancestors. But some of the information he presented in his findings, like the idea that there may be compounds in certain foods to which you are sensitive but not aware that you're sensitive, were very interesting. All right. So you guys decide to try this basically for a month to see if there's any impact. And what did you get rid of? What did you stop eating? You know, I was already eating a pretty whole foods based diet in that I was doing, you know, a lot of turkey and a lot of chicken and a lot of vegetables and salads.

28:51But what it entailed me getting rid of were the breads and maybe some rice, definitely oatmeal. I was eating a lot of oatmeal. So I ditched all of those grains and started eating more veggies and fruit. I got rid of most added sugar in this first go around. So I wasn't particularly pedantic about it. I switched to my iced coffees black, which I did not enjoy, but I suffered through. So dairy, you got rid of dairy. Yes, all dairy. And then legumes. So beans, peas, soy, peanuts, which I wasn't really eating a lot of anyway. Yeah. And then no alcohol for 30 days, of course. Okay. So you do all this.

29:30And what happened to you guys when you started to, I mean, presumably it took a couple days or weeks for you to start to feel any difference. So we started this experiment. I thought I was really interested particularly in performance results. Could I get improved performance in the gym and maybe improved recovery? That was kind of all I was thinking about or all I was focused on. I would say by two weeks in, I was in Energizer bunny mode. I woke up at 5 a.m. without my alarm with so much energy. I no longer had the 2 p.m. head-on-desk slump. My sleep was so much better. Even my mood was happier.

30:05People at work were saying, what have you been doing? Because I was so much more talkative and so much more just happier. It was like someone flipped a switch. When we come back in just a moment, Melissa discovers that she has a knack for teaching others about the 30-day diet. And not only that, people will pay her to do it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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33:49Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2009, and Melissa is in the midst of a 30-day experiment where she cuts out grains, legumes, dairy, and most sugar. And she's seeing huge benefits. And when her partner Dallas tries it as well? His shoulder pain disappeared, which was really, again, unexpected, but confirmed for him. that there were some properties in, and I don't remember when he reintroduced if he discovered that it was beans or gluten grains that were sort of the primary culprit. And I know that he can eat those foods now without shoulder pain. So what the experiment helped him do was just eliminate some inflammatory factors to give him the opportunity for his shoulder to heal.

34:34And yeah, he was equally, I think, surprised. And just to play, like kind of just to push back here for a moment, because I have to do that because I'm with you. Like I do eat this diet. And so I'm a believer, but I'm also like a believer in science and I still trust like public health guidance. And so I would say that maybe some of that was psychological, like because of the choices you made with the food, you start to believe that it was actually having that impact. Yes. When you're talking about an elimination diet, the research definitely does show a placebo effect in that when participants eliminate food, they expect to feel better.

35:17And that is a very real phenomenon. And that's why many healthcare professionals recommend that you repeat an elimination diet at least one additional time to kind of confirm findings. What I will say, though, is like, does it matter? Does it matter if it's placebo, if I feel better and I have more energy? And, you know, all of these things cascade into one another. I'm sleeping better. So, of course, I have more energy. And, of course, my mood is happier. And I'm feeling more well-rested. And I'm feeling more patient. And that gives me a little bit more energy for the gym. This is 2009. Now we're talking 2024 when inflammation is like really front and center in the conversation on nutrition.

35:57I mean, you can listen to, you know, Peter Atiyah's podcast or, you know, Mark Hyman's written a bunch of books. So there's a lot of these, you know, well-respected people of science have shown and pointed out that inflammation in the body is connected to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, et cetera. And if you can reduce inflammation in the body, you're going to have overall health benefits, basically. That's the argument. Yes, and we're specifically talking about chronic systemic inflammation because some inflammation, of course, is incredibly helpful if you sprain your ankle and you've got this acute inflammation that's localized.

36:36It's immune cells that are rushing to the source of the injury to help you heal. Working out, lifting weights. Correct, yeah. Is a form of inflammation. You need that to build muscle. Exactly. But what we're talking about here is this low-grade chronic systemic inflammation where your immune system is just generally fired up all throughout the body where it doesn't need to be. All right. So you do this. You and Dallas do this. And I have to assume on your blog you're writing about this. Yeah. I decided to write about it in July of 2009 on Urban Gets Diesel. And I called the article Change Your Life in 30 Days.

37:12And I shared a very rudimentary set of rules that we had followed. And I said, you know, if anyone wants to give it a go, I'd be happy to lead people through it. And at the end of the 30 days, I gathered testimonials from people. What happened? How did it work for you? And what did people say? You know, when two people do an experiment and get really remarkable results, you're like, that's interesting. when 100 people do an experiment and get remarkably consistent, equally stunning results. That was the point where I said, oh, this is something. We have something here. People reported the same energy boost, sleep improvements, mood improvements, focus improvements, digestive improvements, reduction in cravings.

37:59And then people started talking about how they haven't had a migraine in 30 days, or they haven't had an asthma attack, or their seasonal allergies are gone. And that was really exciting, I think, for me. And you weren't calling it Whole30 at the time. No. You didn't have a name for it. No name. It was Change Your Life in 30 Days. That was what we were calling it. It was a mouthful. But that was the point where I thought, maybe this could be something. And that was the first moment that I thought, like, am I going to jump and leave my job and see if I can focus on this full time? I wasn't ready yet by any means.

38:33But that was the first inkling that maybe I could. And how did you start to imagine what that could be? I don't know that I had a vision for it or a plan, but I do know that after I shared that blog result in July 2009, CrossFit Gyms started emailing us saying, would you come to Arlington, Virginia? Would you come to New York City? Would you come to, you know, Hartford, Connecticut to talk to our CrossFit gym. Wow. To do like a seminar. Yep. To do a seminar. And we, so the first group to reach out was an Arlington, Virginia based gym. It was a guy in CrossFit who we had known. And he was like, well, you come down and talk to our members.

39:17And we were like, sure. So we jumped in the car on a Friday, drove down to Virginia, sat people in a cold CrossFit gym on metal folding chairs for eight hours and talked about the whole 30. And they loved it. I don't even think we charged for this first one. We just drove down, talked about the Whole30 and came back home. And more and more gyms started reaching out. I was working my full-time job and three weekends out of every month, we were driving somewhere in New England to go talk to CrossFit gyms about the Whole30. And did you call it Whole30 at that point? Yeah, we named it, might've been August or September.

39:55I kind of crowdsourced with my community. And someone mentioned, well, this kind of changed my whole life. And I thought, okay, we'll call it Whole30. So you're going to these gyms talking about this thing that you did, this elimination diet, and still blogging about it and continuing to do it, right? I mean, continuing to eat this way. So it was mainly at that point, would you say like more of a paleo diet? After my first Whole30, I discovered some foods that I thought worked well for me did not. And, you know, I really need to emphasize here that we don't eliminate foods on the Whole30 because they're bad.

40:35There are no good or bad foods universally. What we're doing here is just providing you with a template to experiment with these foods, pull them out of your diet, reintroduce them and decide for yourself how they work for you. Right. Dairy at that point in my life was not my friend. It left me super bloated. I felt like I had an alien in my belly. So I gave up my beloved cottage cheese. I didn't go back to eating a lot of gluten-containing grains either because they also left me bloated and they made me break out. So I was really used to at that point eating a lot of veggies. But there were other foods like corn and popcorn and some added sugar and hummus that I found worked great for me.

41:16So I kept on eating those. you know, the goal is not to eat Whole30 forever. It's about to figure out what works for you and then incorporate that in whatever way you like into your long-term diet. And that's what I did. Okay. In the meantime, right, the Whole30 is taking up more and more of your time. And I think around 2010, you start thinking about quitting your day job, the one that you had at the insurance company, right? Yes. At this point in the company, they had done a round of layoffs, but offered several employees retention bonuses if they agreed to stay for the next three years. And so I signed on for that retention bonus, which was great.

41:58My job was secure. And I knew that at the end of three years, I'd have this like little lump sum of cash coming in. And my retention bonus was coming up in April, 2010. That was the three-year period where whether I stayed or left, I would get that $50 ,000 bonus in my bank account. And there really wasn't a hard decision to make. I knew I wanted to pursue this. So they gave you a$50 ,000 retention bonus because you stayed when they had layoffs three years earlier. So you knew that money was coming in, but you still had debt, right? You still had some significant debt, student loans, I think, credit card debt.

42:30Yeah, I had like 30K in student loans. I had$10 ,000 in credit card debt. I had a terrible credit score because of my drug days. But I don't know. I just I had faith that we were going to be able to make this work. And also, if we couldn't, I could just get another job. Yeah. So let's talk about how you were going to turn this into a business, because it was you blogging about your experience, you going to CrossFit gyms, initially speaking for free. And I guess at a certain point in 2010, you came up with a like a fee structure for your lectures? Yeah, we started charging for them actually pretty early.

43:09Like the first one we did for free, but I think the next one we might have charged people$35 or$50. And eventually the ticket price was$100. And we were in CrossFit Philly talking to a crowd of 150 people who paid $100 a piece. It felt like pretty good money at that point. We were also doing some one-on-one consulting. So we were charging, you know, a hundred bucks an hour or$150 an hour to work one-on-one with people. I wasn't sure how we were going to make it a business, but I knew that the seminar requests were so voluminous. We could not keep up with them. And we could travel for a weekend and do one or two seminars in a location and make a pretty good chunk of change.

43:50And this is really what you start to do. I think like in the summer of 2010, you were in San Diego doing a seminar. And I guess your parents or one of your parents was in 10, maybe your mom was there and she's kind of shocked to see all these people turn out. Yeah. We had in 2010, after I quit my job, Dallas and I at this point were together. We were dating, not yet married though. And we did this big road trip that lasted about six weeks through the entire U.S. And we probably did, I don't know, 20 or 30 seminars that summer driving from place to place. When we were in San Diego for the seminar, because my sister lived there, my mom and her husband flew out for it.

44:26And during a break, my mom came up and she was like, people paid you to be here. And I said, yes, mom, this is what we've been doing. People are paying us to talk about this. And, you know, she was so worried about the fact that I didn't have health insurance and that I had given up the best paying job I'd ever had. But that was the moment where she said, I think this is like a thing that you have. And I'm like, well, I sure hope so, because I just quit my job. When we come back in just a moment, Whole30 grows into a business, a book and a brand. But Melissa has to rethink all of that when she and Dallas split up.

45:03Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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47:50Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2010, and Melissa and Dallas have moved to Salt Lake City to be more centrally located. They're building a business around the Whole30 diet and holding seminars across the country. And those seminars are starting to take off. There was a seminar we did at a CrossFit gym in Philadelphia one year. And I said to Dallas, there are a lot of people our parents age here. and that was unusual almost always. CrossFit gyms were populated by young, fit people. And so we started at a break walking around talking to people and oh, so happy to have you here, what brings you here?

48:29And people would say, my daughter told me about you. She lives in Albuquerque and she said I should come or my niece did a Whole30 and she loved it so much she shared it with me and now I'm here to learn more about it. So people have such an incredible experience with the program and then they tell everyone they know. And so largely in the early days, we grew via word of mouth. It was your sister, your friend, your hairdresser who told you about the program. So as you were talking about Whole30 and it was gaining more traction, it was changing, right? It wasn't like this fixed thing. I mean, over the life of Whole30, what was sort of restricted and what's not has changed.

49:09Very much so. In the earliest iteration, we essentially took a paleo framework and put it into an elimination diet format. But very quickly, in 2010, in 2011, we started recruiting the help of scientists and medical doctors and psychiatrists and PhDs to really help us dive into the research behind it so that we weren't being dogmatic. The earliest iteration of the Whole30 said no white potatoes because Lauren Cordain said no white potatoes. And then we do some research and we do some digging and we're like, well, that's dumb. Potatoes are whole, real, nutrient-dense food. Of course, you can have potatoes on the Whole30.

49:51So that was the first rule change we made. But high in carbs. Yeah, they're high in carbs. But for some people, that might be really appropriate for their context. And for others, we're not saying you have to eat potatoes. But we began having a lot more conversation about the nuance and the context that is always necessary when you're talking about diet. But the basic principles are at this point, you know, it's still no sugar, right? During the 30-day elimination, yes. No added sugar, no alcohol, no grains, no legumes, no dairy. Those are sort of the basics of the rules. Right. And then you reintroduce things that your body, you know, is okay with.

50:28But is the idea to, you know, initially it was about reducing inflammation in Dallas's shoulder and yours too. Is it today about reducing inflammation or is it about just feeling better or both? Historically, we talk about kind of looking at the Whole30 impacting the body in four areas. Your cravings and your emotional relationship with food. There's a lot of habit research and behavior change science woven into the Whole30. So that's one area. We look at blood sugar regulation and metabolic health. We look at digestion and gut health and then inflammation or the status of your immune system. And dietary changes can have an impact on all four of those areas.

51:12We're not here to tell you what to eat or how to eat when your Whole30 is over. We're here to give you the tools to help you evaluate that for yourself. So how did you, I mean, when you and Dallas were kind of coming up with what this would be, was it going to be a business around seminars and content? Or did you think, well, we've got to figure out bigger ways of, you know, building this out? In 2010, we were doing these seminars all across the country, making good money every weekend. And then when we got to British Columbia as part of our road trip to visit Dallas's family, we took two weeks off.

51:56And we realized that we did not make any money when we took time off. And we realized that that was deeply problematic. And that was the moment where the term passive income was introduced to my lexicon. I was like, we need a way to make money even when we are not working. We can only take on so many consulting clients a day. There are only so many weekends in the year to do a seminar. and we can't survive on that. We have to take time off. We have to take weekends off. And that was the first moment where we thought we have to create something that we can just create once and then sell. And then that's going to earn us revenue in between.

52:32And what did you start to think about? We put together a 40-page PDF on how to do the whole 30. It was essentially our seminar packaged down into PDF format. All of the stuff that we talked about, the science behind it, the big picture recommendations, the rules of the program, how to do it, tips for grocery shopping and meal planning. And we put that all into a PDF and we sold it through our website for$39.99. So it was a digital book. It was a digital book, but it wasn't even an ebook. It was literally just a PDF that you downloaded. And we sold thousands, thousands of this PDF. People were so hungry for how to do the whole 30.

53:17And this was an accessible, easy way to lead hundreds of thousands of people through the program. So you knew that basically you had to write a book. Yeah, that was the point when we started thinking about, okay, well, maybe we could turn this into a book. Yeah. And one small independent publisher, Victory Belt, which was operating out of Las Vegas at the time, reached out and said, maybe we could do a book about the Whole30 together. And they had just published a book, another paleo book in our community that had done pretty well. And I think they decided that they were going to be like the paleo book publisher.

53:53So they reached out to us. I didn't know anything about publishing. I didn't know to ask about an advance. I didn't know anything about agents. I didn't know anything, but we wanted to write a book. And so we were like, yes, great. Sounds good. Signed a contract and started writing. So this was going to be the first book. It starts with food. And that was going to kind of lay out the science behind the Whole30 idea. And this came out, I think, in 2012, right? Yeah. And it did pretty well. I mean, it got quite a bit of traction. It did. It didn't hit the New York Times bestseller list right away.

54:32It was published in June. But I got the call from my publisher in September that it had gained enough traction and it made the list, which was huge. I never expected that. So, yeah, it did really well. Okay. So at this point, you have the seminars and the one-on-one coaching and the book. And then another big part of your business would become like a kind of partnership program, right? Like where food brands could pay to become Whole30 approved and then put that logo on their packaging, right? Yes. In 2011, we came across this company called Primal Packs. They were making this jerky, not dried fruit kind of snack mix.

55:18And the cool thing is that their jerky didn't include any added sugar. And so they reached out to us and they were like, hey, we're a really small company, like making these things out of my garage, but we don't have any added sugar. And I thought, that is so cool. What if we said you were poll 30 approved and we introduced you to our community and we could make an affiliate commission if people bought it through our link. And he was all on board because we were now introducing his product to a whole new community. And there was no agreement. There was no contract. There was no payment other than our affiliate link.

55:55But that was the first time that we thought maybe we could connect partner products with our community and have it be a three-way win for everybody. Okay. So you were experimenting with like Whole30 approved, but it was still kind of early days. And meantime, did you have brands or small companies who made certain products start to approach you and say, hey, can we do this too? We did. Yeah. Epic Bar was another very early adopter now owned by General Mills and an Yeah, massive. Absolutely huge company. Yeah. But at the time, they were just like two, you know, two young adults who were making these meat sticks that happened to, again, meet Whole30 compatibility, you know, guidelines.

56:42And so we did a deal with them. I think there was a contract for Epic Bar, like a really simple one-pager, and they may have paid us like$500 to use the logo, and they put it on their products. Sea Snacks was another really early adopter, those seaweed snacks that are still so popular now. But they were an early believer in the brand. But it was it's like an if you build it, they will come phenomenon where we needed brands in the approval program to lend legitimacy to the program. Like this is the thing that you want for your brand. Did you have I mean, you know, any product? I mean, not any. But really, you don't need permission to say paleo friendly or keto friendly on a brand.

57:18That's not a trademark. Right. But were there, you know, did you start to see sometimes people describing their food as like Whole30 friendly without asking permission? So you can still describe your food as Whole30 friendly. But if you want to use the Whole30 logo and now Whole30 approved is also a legally registered trademark. Yeah, you have to have a license for it. So in the early days, we didn't see a lot of overstep. But when we did, I had a good trademark attorney who would go in and, you know, very politely request that they take it down. So we were pretty persistent in protecting the trademark early on, knowing how important that was going to be for future contracts.

58:01How did you decide? I mean, initially charging 500 bucks for the use of your logo is not – you're not going to build a business around that. But how did you start to think about the value of that logo on a brand? You know, I always had a hard time. I still, to this day, sometimes have a hard time thinking of Whole30 as anything other than this scrappy, word of mouth, little do-it-yourself brand. And so I really undercharged for so many years for some of these licenses. In 20, I think 2018, we hired an in-house attorney, somebody to run our licensing program. And she was the one to take a look at all of our contracts and all of our deals and say, y 'all are undercharging like massively.

58:47And she was the one who created our new contracts and set our new pricing structure. And so from that point on, licensing became a much bigger part of our revenue stream. And we really did start charging what we were worth. But we spent a lot of years just getting brands on board because adoption was really important. So I guess a lot of people after your first book came out wanted a more sort of step-by-step guide on how to do this, And so that was going to be your next book, which was The Whole30, because people wanted to know, look, I get it. I've read it, but I just need like a paint-by-numbers thing here.

59:21Just make it really easy for me. Exactly. I still felt like I had so much to say about The Whole30 and so many different pieces of advice and tips and resources I could offer down to just the most granular, oh, I'm doing The Whole30 alone. My husband's not doing it with me. Like, how should I go about this or what tips do you have? I had so much to offer that the idea for the second book came up almost immediately after the first one was published. So that book was written. You guys wrote that book, but you also – your partnership, your marriage was kind of coming apart. And I, again, you know, don't always talk about this on the show unless it's connected to the business.

1:00:05And this was inextricably linked because the two of you had a business together. But your personal life was coming apart. Yeah. You, in this book, The Whole30 came out while you were in the process of divorcing. Yes. In Dallas. Yes. And you had to go on book tour and you had to show a happy face. And how did you guys manage that? That was so hard. It was so challenging. We knew the marriage was over and we were in the process of quietly divorcing, but we had already signed this book contract. We had an obligation to our publisher to write and promote this book to the best of our abilities. And so we are on tour for this book in April 2015, and our publisher is booking our hotel rooms, and we are quietly booking a second hotel room paid for with our own money so that we could maintain our own individual spaces.

1:01:03And then during the media and during the tour events, we came together and we did a really good job. We were a good team. I'm really proud of how we behaved. We could have made it difficult, and we didn't. We promoted the book. We did a great job. And then when the tour was over, we made a very simple announcement, told our publishers, told our agent, and moved on with the divorce and the business split. Now, here's another sort of challenge, which is you had changed your name. You had taken on Dallas's last name, and that was your professional name because the book came out. You were Melissa Hartwig.

1:01:44You were blogging under that name. You had written two books with that Melissa and Dallas Hartwig. So, I mean, I'm assuming your publisher who's like, well, it looks kind of a bestseller. Like, that's your name. Yeah. oh my goodness, I just never change your name. Just don't, just keep the same name that you have. That's my advice. I remember going to my publisher after the divorce saying, okay, and as part of the divorce, I'm gonna change my name back to Urban and I'm gonna keep it that forever. And my publisher said, well, you can't. You're already under contract for your next two books. Hartwig is the name that you wrote under.

1:02:20That's the name the media knows. That's the name the public knows. That's the name the booksellers know. You can't change your name. And I went back and I thought about it. And I came back to my publisher and I said, that is absolutely unacceptable. So let's talk about a way to change my name that suits your needs, but also suits my timeline. So for a couple years, we did a hybrid approach where I was Melissa Hartwig Urban on books. And we did that for, I think, two book cycles. And then I was finally able to drop the Hartwig and go straight to Urban. So, but it was a process. Yeah. Yeah. And presumably with the split, you also had to figure out what to do about the business, about the Whole30 business.

1:03:01Yes. There was never any question whatsoever that I was going to buy him out. He agreed with that. I agreed with that. This was my passion. This was my baby. I had a jillion ideas for it and he did not want it. Of course, the issue was, what does it look like? How much money do I give him? It's a price, yeah. What does he get to keep, right? There were seminal articles and pieces of content that he wanted to use going forward. And, you know, what does that look like and how do we share in those things? So it was complex. Any breakup, whether it's a divorce or partnership breakup in a business, is just so complicated.

1:03:36It's so challenging. And there's no playbook for it. I mean, you just have to hope that everybody can work through the challenges. Yes. And, I mean, add to that, we had a one-year-old at the time. So it's figuring out what to do about the business, figuring out how to be a solo parent. You know, I'm lucky in that he's a great co-parent. But it was the hardest year of my life, certainly, especially having to do all of this in such a public fashion. But I also remember it being one of the happiest. So I guess that's paradoxical, but that's how it was. How did you, especially when you guys split in 2015, how did you start to staff the company?

1:04:26I mean, I'm assuming you didn't need too many people to run the business. No, I think we hired our first employee in 2012 and she stayed on for a couple of years. And then we hired another assistant in 2013, a social media manager. And in 2016, we hired a Whole30 approved partner coordinator because the licensing program was blowing up at that point. Right. I mean, on that point, I think around this time you started to do promotions with some pretty big retailers like Whole Foods, right? Yeah. We had, you know, as you mentioned, Whole Foods in the Rocky Mountain region did this big Whole30 approved promotion.

1:05:05So for a period of three months when you went into their store, you saw Whole30 approved logos on everything. These little shelf tags that would call out our Whole30 approved partners. I'll never forget the time that one of our brands was trying to get into Whole Foods. And they had a meeting and Whole Foods said to them, we would love to have you in. Would you put the Whole30 approved logo on the front of your bottle? Move it from the back of the bottle to the front. And that was the point where I thought, okay, it felt like we were a pretty established brand by that point in 2017. With this platform, I mean, I imagine you had people coming to you, consultants, maybe entrepreneurs and other people saying, you know, Melissa, you really can do a million things with this.

1:05:50Like you should have – you should be making food. I mean you're basically saying, look, this is what you should eat. Why don't you make the food and then people could buy that food? Yes, I've had investors approach since very early days, and I've had good conversations and gone even pretty far down the road with a few of them. But we're such a mission driven business. And I'm so focused on impact. I am not a profit driven CEO. I'm not a revenue driven CEO or care if we turn into a billion dollar organization. And so many of the things that these consultants or investors wanted to do to turn us into a$100 million company would have felt gross.

1:06:32And I didn't want to do it. You did do a line of salad dressings and dipping sauces. You launched that in 2020. Tell me about that decision. Why did you feel – I mean, to me, it makes perfect sense. Like, it's the obvious next step. But was that a struggle for you to make that decision, to decide to do that? It was an obvious next step. And also it took us until 2020 to actually do it. But over time, it became obvious that we could fill a niche within our community and offer them something that would solve for pain points, that would add flavor, that would add deliciousness. So in 2018, we started talking about what that product could be and a salad dressing and sauce kind of line was the obvious choice.

1:07:20And then it took us about two years to figure out how to get it off the ground. And we launched in 2020. So this product comes out in the middle of COVID, actually. And how did it do? Well, it was obviously not ideal to launch mid-pandemic. So the salad dressings did very, very well when we launched, but we quickly ran into issues. Manufacturing issues, supply chain disruptions, you know, freight and distribution challenges. We just started getting our butts kicked, to be perfectly frank. And we weren't big enough and did not have economies of scale to be able to absorb it. Yeah, because I imagine like somebody like you goes to Whole Foods or, you know, Sprouts and you're like, hey, I want to do a product.

1:08:06They're like, let's go. Immediately, yes. Right. They're like, of course, we want to work with you. You're Melissa Urban. Like, this is Whole30. Let's do it. At the same time, right, I mean, there were brands like Primal Kitchen that were Whole30 approved that, you know, depended on that label to really boost their sales might have caused some tension, potential tension with those folks. That was a huge part of the thought process in launching. And I will tell you this, I personally called our three biggest Whole30 approved partners before we launched. And I had a call with Mark Sisson, head of Primal Kitchen.

1:08:43And I said, hey, I want to let you know that we're thinking about doing this. Here's what we're thinking about launching. Like, what do you think? And he was so immediately supportive. I think this is great, Melissa. A rising tide raises all ships. The more the Whole30 logo gains prominence, the better it is for my brand because people are going to see it on my bottles. And everyone was super supportive of getting the Whole30 mark and the logo out there more. So we did it. And I'm certainly not saying we won't go there again. But at that time, the right move was to shut that down and reallocate those resources and that money to the core business.

1:09:20Okay. One of the things that you've done recently, and you launched this in 2023, was a delivery service, food delivery service, Made by Whole30. So like meals ready to eat that you just heat up in the oven. Yeah, exactly. So Made by Whole30 Meals launched in mid-December 2023, so just a few months ago. And again, a project that we've been working on for the better part of a year. So when you go to meals.whole30.com, you'll enter your zip code. You'll see your local menu because we've got local and regional chefs all throughout the country who are using locally sourced ingredients, seasonal ingredients that they're comfortable and familiar with.

1:09:57So everyone's menu looks a little different, but most meal delivery services, you have to subscribe and you're going to get X number of meals per week. We also have an option where you can just order one box of meals if you want. So if you want to supplement an especially busy week or, you know, you have guests in town and you just want a few easy meals, you can order just one meal at a time. Or you can put meals on a subscription and get them every single week delivered. So, I mean, when you think about now, I mean, you've got this pretty recognized brand around nutrition, you know, that was really started out as an experiment, right, that came about because you got into fitness.

1:10:37It came about because you were trying to save yourself and recover from substance abuse, which was triggered by traumatic experience. I mean, all those things like lead to this moment, right, this point where you are in your life. And I wonder how much of all of the things that happened to you, how much of it do you think happened because of the work you put in and how much just happened because of circumstances and fate or luck? It's always both. It's always both. When I think about the earliest days of Whole30 and how fast we took off in the CrossFit community, it was because there was a hole that we were prepared to step in and fill.

1:11:19Our timing was impeccable. And that was not by design. It was just how it happened. And also, we took advantage of those opportunities. And we hustled and worked as hard as we could and made connections and networked. And so it's always both. I love what I'm doing right now. I love the community that we have, the impact that we have. If all of this blows up for some reason, and I have to lay my whole team off, and Whole30 is no longer a business, and we no longer have Whole30-approved partners or licensing, and I never write another book, the Whole30 will live forever. People will still want to do the program.

1:11:56I think the program itself has now incredible longevity and staying power. And I'm still excited about that 15 years later, which I feel very lucky to be able to say. But I would still like to see where it could go. That's Melissa Urban, co-founder and CEO of Whole30. Melissa has a new book coming out soon. It's called The New Whole30. And among other updates, it includes a plant-based option for vegans and vegetarians. And by the way, if you think doing the Whole30 means you can never eat something that you know is bad for you, well, that's not entirely true. Like, I love a good McDonald's hot fudge sundae.

1:12:38That is my favorite. I'm not an ice cream person, but for some reason, McDonald's hot fudge sundae is with extra hot fudge. That's the one. But I love it. Wow. I mean, you know, it's a solid sundae. There's no question about it. So good. But I've figured out how much I can get away with and still feel amazing. And that's my sweet spot. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I kind of want a McDonald's Sunday. Extra hot fudge. That's the key. That's the key.

1:13:04Hey, 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 of the show. And as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with music composed by Ramtin Erablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez, Gilly Moon, and Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, JC Howard, John Isabella, Carrie Thompson, Malia Agudelo, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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