Happy Caapi: The First Non-Hallucinogenic Ayahuasca Vine Supplement

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1:16Right now, if you tell people you have something that is a mood boost and it's not going to cause them to see things that aren't there, there's an openness that wasn't there before. People came up and they had samples and we'd say, come back in 20 minutes. Tell us what you experienced, if anything. Every single person who came back said, I feel this. And they liked what they felt. The more we realize people trying the product, the more I am inspired by just keeping up with this very difficult, but very rewarding journey of launching a product that actually works. With HappyCappy, it works whether you believe in it or not.

1:55Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG Podcast. We are back with another founder feature, and this time it's a special two-guest episode. Today, I'm sitting down with Gonzalo Biscara, founder of Happy Copy and Chris Killam, Medicine Hunter. Happy Copy is the first non-hallucinogenic supplement made from the ayahuasca vine, also known as banisteriopsis copy, for focus and mood enhancement. Gonzalo spent years in pharmaceuticals before an ayahuasca ceremony changed his life. He's not alone in that. Well, the ayahuasca ceremony part. Chris is a botanical expert and medicine hunter who has traveled the world and studied medicinal plants for over 30 years and has very casually attended 135 ayahuasca ceremonies.

2:40We're diving into the distinction between psychoactive and psychedelic, why the vine alone offers benefits without the hallucinations, sustainability and sourcing of ayahuasca, and how this product opens the door to plant medicine for people who might not be ready for a full ceremony just yet. We hear from founders on this podcast every week. If you're a brand and want to get new opportunities right in your inbox, text CPG to 833-605-7002. That's 833-605-7002. And we'll get you hooked up. As always, enjoy. boy. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin, and today I'm here with Gonzalo Biscara, founder of Happy Cappy and Chris Killam Medicine Hunter.

3:28This is a first for me. Usually I only have founders, but today we have a special guest with us. Hi, guys. How you doing? Good, Caitlin. It's great to see you. It's been quite a while, actually. I'm happy to see you. It's always good to see you. Gonzalo, what's going on with you? I'm so happy we met and then finding out that we have a very good mutual friend here, Chris, serendipitously. It really is. I met Gonzalo in New York very shortly after seeing your post on LinkedIn, Chris, and I recognized him. And of course, I saw the Happy Cappy shirt and I had to go up and introduce myself. And I'm sure we'll get into how we know each other.

4:07But before we do that, Gonzalo, can you tell us what Happy Cappy is? Great question. Happy Cappy is the first non-hallucinogenic supplement from the ayahuasca vine. It comes in a very nice bottle and it's a natural supplement for focus and mood enhancement, something that doesn't exist in the market. And we are very fortunate to be a communicator of such a beautiful plant from the Amazonian medicine tradition. We are blessed to be creating a path for people to connect with natural alternatives for focus and mood, which are such an important part of our lives, isn't it? Yes, they are. And some of us have a very hard time with both of those things, focus and mentally.

4:49I know you brought a special guest with you today. I also brought a special little guest with me, and it is a piece of ayahuasca vine from my trip to Peru with Chris and his wife Zoe from 2018. I have held on to this. Ayahuasca trip, no less. Yes. Right. Some pretty good context to add right there. Yes. Yeah. That's sweet to see. That's sweet to see. I keep it in a very special high up place where my daughter cannot mess around with it, although she's always very curious. But you know what? Not now. Later in life. So I have to ask the obvious question, Gonzalo, why happy Cappy and why now? Well, I first experimented with the mother vine four years ago.

5:37And after that beautiful experience, my whole life has changed since then, all for the best, no doubt. Not the easiest, but definitely for the better. I knew I had to bring this experience to many more people. And I met two friends who were developing a prototype of a non-hallucinogenic ayahuasca product. And it had a cute capybara logo in a very, not so pretty, but still pretty bottle. And I got hooked and they asked if I could help them. create and launch a product that people like their parents and their siblings who won't likely go to a full ayahuasca ceremony and still like to have benefits from the plant.

6:18So that's why it exists. I definitely was hooked in and then the three of us got into labs, lawyer rooms, and cons rooms, and in rooms where we met Chris, actually, we realized we had something really special, which was a way for everybody that wants to experience vanisteriopsis scape to grab a bottle from a shelf, a legal path to repair or consume this wonderful plant, which does have non-hallucinogenic benefits, as I said, for focus and mood. So that's why the why now, it's been four years, it's not easy to launch a brand. I have worked for decades for large CPG companies, and it's much easier when you are on the inside of a large FMCG company with tens of thousands of people.

7:05It's much more difficult when you're launching something on your own. So it took us a while to find the regulatory path. Of course, we want to make sure that we do things the right way, that we have sustainability at the core of everything we do, from a packaging to how we live our lives. And also we found that in 2026, the world is shifting the openness to trying natural alternatives, especially psychedelics. And we are getting a lot of traction from a lot of people that would otherwise, maybe two years ago, wouldn't even want to entertain a conversation. Even though we're a non-psychedelic, extra completely legal, there's still an association with the hallucinogenic experience, which we honor, we revert.

7:46And at the time, I think it's perfect now. I have to agree with you. I am seeing other products pop up on the market that are non-psychoactive, non-hallucinogenic versions of mushrooms like Amanita. And I also just recently saw a Mad Honey CPG product as well. So there's definitely a resurgence happening right now. There's certainly a trend that's going on. And there's definitely a lot of interest. So, Chris, now you. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got connected to Gonzalo and Happy Cappy? Well, the Gonzala part is easy. He called me up a while ago and we started to talk.

8:25That's the entirety of it. I've been researching medicinal plants in the field actually for longer than I want to admit it. This might, it's been, gosh, more than 30 years. And that's not counting my many years of working with food crops in the Great Plains prior to that. So I travel all over the world investigating plants and helping companies, you know, very often to find the next big thing, whether it's a cosmetic ingredient or something else. And it's funny how our industry, the natural products industry, has gone. Over time, we've become more accepting of certain uses of supplements. For example, 25 years ago, you couldn't sell supplements for the heart.

9:11You really couldn't. People go, no, no, no, no. If I have a need for my heart, I'm going to go to a cardiologist. Now, of course, there are loads of supplements that we know to be beneficial for the heart. And what we saw maybe starting about 15 years ago was an openness to supplements, especially botanicals that have brain enhancing properties, whether you're talking rhodiola, ole basil, panax, ginseng, schizandra, ashwagandha. And so in terms of timing, we have these periods of time when certain applications become accepted. Right now, if you tell people you have something that is a mood boost and it's not going to cause them to see things that aren't there, there's an openness that wasn't there before.

10:01And one of the things that I appreciate about Happy Copy, we were at the Biohackers Conference in New York. people came up and they had samples and we'd say, come back in 20 minutes. Tell us what you experience. If anything, every single person who came back said, I feel this. And they liked what they felt. Nobody came back saying, oh, it makes me grouchy or irritable. So in my work with ayahuasca, I'm very aware that a certain Colombian tribes in the turn of the last century were known for engaging in ceremonies only using the bind, not using the leaf, which contains DMT, which gives you the lavish visions with which we're so familiar.

10:44And now granted, they were doing it in extreme concentration and larger amounts. But we know this to be both psychoactive in good positive ways, helping to maintain a higher level of serotonin and dopamine, which are two primary feel-good neurochemicals and also safe. The safety of this goes back certainly a couple thousand years that we know of. So that's how I come to be a friend of Happy Copy and think it's a good product for sure. And it's something that at least what I've seen with people who've sampled it gets a very enthusiastic response. It's interesting because when I first saw Happy Cappy come through on the startup CPG Slack, I raised an eyebrow a little bit.

11:33I'm not going to lie, Gonzalo. And I thought, what is this? Because I've always had the assumption that it's only ayahuasca if you have the vine and leaves together. So of course, I was wondering about that. Why would this be beneficial to me if it's just the vine? And also, how are you harvesting? What's your sourcing method? And then I saw Chris was associated with your brand. And And to me, I thought, OK, this has a stamp of approval. This is legitimate because Chris has been working with plants for decades. And ayahuasca vine is something, Chris, correct me if I'm wrong. I believe you did two years worth of studies with the ayahuasca vine and sustainability.

12:16And it was even published in American Botanical Council's Herbal Gram. Yeah, there was a lot of conversation going around in the ayahuasca community that the vine was being ripped out of the forest and it was being depleted at a rapid rate and it was almost gone and we needed to panic and, oh my God, what are we going to do? And I was quite suspicious of that. So my Peruvian team and I, we did four different missions to different parts of Loretto and Ucayali provinces in Peru, the main ayahuasca areas. And what we found was a very different story, that while there were areas where it had been harvested out, there were a lot of people cultivating, which is the inevitable future.

13:01Cultivation is where it's at. And in the ayahuasca breadbasket, which is an area that most people will never, ever go to because it's way too far away and extremely dangerous, we went there. And, I mean, there was ayahuasca every 10 feet. So I came away with the understanding that this happens a lot with botanicals. You have a botanical that is harvested in the wild. It becomes popular. And then people say, we should cultivate this stuff. And that's exactly what's going on with Banisteriopsis, with the vine that is really the half of the ayahuasca brew as we know it. Very good to know. And I feel like that is definitely comforting to know, too, because this plant and this brew has had such an impact on so many people's lives.

13:51And to now be able to say, OK, it's not in danger. There's more to go around. There are more people that can have this experience and now experience it without these psychoactive effects is, again, it's very comforting. Gonzalo, I have to know from you, if you're comfortable sharing, can you give us a little bit of insight into your experience with ayahuasca and what inspired you to then create HappyCopy and make this a non-psychoactive product available for consumers? Of course, Caitlin, it's open kimono session. So I was going through, as probably most people, a difficult time in my life, and ayahuasca tends to be the last thing people try.

14:31Well, for me, it was the first thing I tried. I haven't done any assisted psychedelic therapy before. So I went straight for what's presented to me or he called me, however you want to say. And it's a beautiful experience in Panama with lovely music and people that were creating different things, businesses, art, music, products. So when that product was presented to me, literally that first weekend when I had the ceremony, I knew that all of the years of me working for P &Gs of the world had to be put to a better use. And I think that's what got me to it with the connections that I have made over time and the knowledge about how supply chain works, how regulatory protocols, quality protocols, GMP certification, branding, FDC, all the acronyms that we can think of.

15:25I was now able to put it into bringing an experience that I know people need. And the first inspiration is my brother. He's actually the capybara. If you've ever seen our ads, an inflatable capybara, that's him. Give it away. He used to drink energy drinks, three a day. And after he started taking happy capy, he cannot pass the first one. And then I understood the science behind it. So the alkaloids in capy are very powerful. The most known benefit is that it inhibits MAOs on amino oxidized enzymes. And as a result of that, then you get either the DMT to access your nervous system or other alkaloids like caffeine.

16:04And so by removing MAO, he didn't need to take more energy drinks. That to me paid off the four years of investment. Just getting my brother off energy drinks and then seeing how other people are getting of bad habits or athletes taking happy cappy before they go and perform a martial art, a baseball game. And the more we realize, as Chris was saying, people trying the product, the more I am inspired by just keeping up with this very difficult, but very rewarding journey of launching a product that actually works. So supplements is, my boss used to say, it's a faith-based category. You either believe in them or you don't.

16:44If you do, they might work. With happy-cappy, it works whether you believe in it or not. And that is very refreshing in the supplements market to put trust in a bottle or a product or a sachet that you know is going to do what it's intended to do. It's going to make you feel more present, more focused. And then as a consequence over time, there will be benefits like producing new neurons. Like I thought neurogenesis was a myth and that once you drink too much in college or whatever those neurons never grow well it's not true with this plant not happy copy but the plants the vine you can generate your neurons and then it has so many benefits that it's just when moments when i'm down and everything is going uphill and i try to remember the people that have called me and literally thanked me for just bringing it into a bottle because you can always get copy if you go to outside of the U.S., but it's not easy to find Cappy down the street in this market.

17:44I am curious, since you started talking about the format in which people could find supplements, pills, packets, bottles, what is your vision for Happy Cappy? You probably have a bottle on you, I would assume so. It's in a little squirt bottle. What do you picture for the future of happy cappy and a retail presence? Are you targeting specific retailers? Are you targeting specific channels? What does that look like for you? So the taste of a product is very important, as I'm sure you know. And the taste of ayahuasca is not great. Okay. And finding the right format for a cappy product to taste well has been a challenge.

18:26We found that liquid preserved the way that we extracted is completely non-chemical. There's nothing else other than the plant and glycerin and water. And because we want to honor the plant, it's just a plant in a bottle, but the taste of it through a liquid format, if you get to try it, you will see it's actually enjoyable. So we want to maintain that. So what we will launch though as a second phase is a disposable, recyclable paper-based sachet, like power gels. You take power gel before you go running. This is going to be a power gel for your brain. You have a big podcast, you're interviewing big names like Chris, small names like me, you take a pop, you pop one, and then you're settled for three hours.

19:05The lifespan of the effect is around three to four hours, which is just about, you can get a lot done in three hours of focus versus eight hours of distraction. And in terms of retailers, we haven't targeted retailers yet. We are finding that it takes a lot of education and retailers tend to associate it with a illegal product, which is not. We've got a very solid safety and regulatory support for introducing this product in the market. And so we're targeting first consumers, people that want to experience and creating the education and the journey of introducing a new product into such a large market.

19:43But the vision is for Happy Cappy to just be the first of many brands that will see in Divine, a divine purpose to bring people to the present moment. And so we want to help other people create happy products. We want to help introduce this ingredient to other nootropics that want to add something new that is beautifully crafted by nature. So, yeah, this is definitely the first step. And that's, I think, what Chris and I also have a passion for is how do we, in that process of expansion of the knowledge of the vine, how do we protect the cultivation of it? And we want to create a protocol of how to grow CAPI sustainably and then look for places that are already growing CAPI and outmanned because the demand will surge.

20:27I envision a year from now, there will be a CAPI ingredient. We are developing the ingredient so that other brands can have a standardized access of CAPI. And it's going to be rapidly furious. So we want to be prepared for that. Chris, I'm really curious from your perspective. You have had many ayahuasca experiences. Do you actually know how many you've had off the top of your head? Yeah, because I keep journals, I've sat in 135 ceremonies. Okay. All right. So I've drunk a little bit of ayahuasca over time. Just a few, just a couple. You've also written the Ayahuasca Test Pilots Handbook. You've had these experiences.

21:05You've offered advice to people on how to approach ceremonies. Are you expecting any kind of backlash from people who are very protective about the plant, about ayahuasca in general, who might say, why are you doing this? I expect backlash from people if you tell them that you like to eat peanut butter sandwiches. And I want to make a comment. Whoever said that supplements is a faith-based category is uninformed and cynical. And that really does a disservice to many tens of millions of people. The fact is that as long as people are cultivating, I mean, I met one man in the Amazon when we did our study.

21:50He had 6 ,000 vines. He makes fencing out of them, okay? I mean, he runs a center. He's never going to run out of ayahuasca, ever. He has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of psychotria viridus bushes, too. But the point is that people will object to anything. They'll hear half a sentence, and they'll immediately go on a strident campaign against the thing that they don't even understand. So yeah, I expect backlash. But we live in this amazing time in which information is readily available in ways that it was not decades ago. If you go online and you look, for example, at the alkaloids that exist in Banisteriopsis copy, the ayahuasca bind, and you pay attention to the science, you discover that there's an enormous body of science showing very specific levels of and types of brain activity.

22:49we're talking elevation of serotonin and dopamine, neurogenesis. These things are well documented by people who've never sat in an ayahuasca ceremony. They're scientists doing brain studies. So yeah, I do expect backlash because people backlash to everything on earth. And I don't think that's a reason not to go forward. But what I do think is that that means that the information has to be strong enough that objection among some people doesn't steamroll the product and the category. I think that is totally fair. And I think it's a really good observation to make, especially with how people view very many controversial topics and psychedelics is definitely a controversial topic.

23:39But I do think with decriminalization, legalization, etc., it is allowing people to open up to have more of a conversation for these taboo topics that maybe they weren't having years ago. My father-in-law even was very open to talking about CBD when CBD was in its boom back in 2017 because he wasn't going to talk about cannabis with us in general. And now we're able to have discussions about psychedelics, something I never thought would happen in my lifetime and certainly not his. So this is pretty cool. One thing I would like to say, because the term has come up, repeatedly, there is no question that happy copy is psychoactive.

24:22Coffee is psychoactive. Tea is psychoactive. Chocolate is psychoactive. It is not psychedelic. And I think that part of the education process, Rhodiola rosea is psychoactive. I think we need to be very clear that in nature, there are lots of good, safe things that are psychoactive. In other words, they're active in the brain and they work on mood, and they are not psychedelic. So part of the challenge with something like this, given that the term ayahuasca always represents something psychedelic, to clarify, yes, this is definitely psychoactive. There's no question about it. That's why it exists.

25:01If it weren't psychoactive, there'd be no purpose for it. But it is not psychedelic. So you're not going to see things that aren't there. You're not going to lose motor control. You're not going to be disoriented. You're not going to taste music. These things. But I think the language with this is, it's not that it's tricky, but it is an educational process. I think that's a really good distinction. And I probably said non-psychoactive several times already. We have these things available to us, You know, many things. And I think that this product, especially given the very positive results that people got at the Biohackers Conference, I think that this product really has legs.

25:46And the challenges are to clarify messages, make sure that people don't go completely batshit crazy about, oh, it's going to ruin the supply of ayahuasca vine globally. I mean, all of that stuff. I think it's got a great future. I would love to hear from you, Chris. With all of your years of experience, any advice that you want to give to other brands that are using botanicals in their products? I see advice from you all the time on LinkedIn, but if anybody's not connected with you, what advice can you give them about working with botanicals? Well, first of all, companies, if they can afford it, have to have somebody in the field.

26:26Now there's a lot of adulteration of botanicals. There's a lot of misidentification of plant parts. Things get expensive and tightly controlled and people substitute and don't say so. But also, one of the problems that we've seen with some products over time has been a failure to use enough because they want to hit a certain price point. And if you're developing a product for price point, you're developing a product for failure. The idea is to have something truly effective so that when people try it, they go, wow, this is great. I like this. I mean, I think that there are dozens and dozens of factors, but at this point in time, you can't afford not to know the entire chain of trade.

27:14You have to know everything about the source, who's working with it, where it comes from, all the way through to the finished product. If you don't have that, you don't have control of your product. If you do have that, then you do have control of your product. Gonzalo, what green flags would you say there are for people who are looking to work with botanicals and how they approach sourcing? Yeah, so I am a sourcing professional. That's where I spent 20 years. But when it's not your brand, you're not very close to what it is. So if you are launching a botanical brand, you have to really feel it.

27:50So there's an element of purpose when you deal with nature products, I think. And when you really understand where it comes from, what was it really intended for? It was definitely not intended for being in a bottle in Walgreens. It was a different purpose with it. And then really understand how people use it, how people cultivate it, how people revert it. Then you naturally get a different mindset. And that mindset, I'm sorry if I'm going a little bit esoterical here, but I do believe mindset sets up the rest of what happens in the real world. Then you start to worry about the quality, the regulatory path, the communication, all the OTIs and SLAs and any other acronyms that you can think of.

28:29If you don't do that, you're only going to be managing a KPI. And as Chris said, KPIs are easily fooled. You can definitely have potency tests, unless you're doing the right lab, showing off something that it's not. And so for me also, what has helped me is connecting with people in the field like Chris. Like I am blessed that I found him or stalked him to the point that he answered my call because definitely he challenged me to the first time, the first time he did. He's such a nice person. And he challenged me to have you thought of X, Y, and Z? And I hadn't. And so definitely bringing the right lab partner, the right comms partner.