Episode 91 | Aug 2, 2024

Lessons for Wellness Entrepreneurs, With Trish Thomas

Navigating the world of healthy eating can be challenging, especially for those with dietary restrictions. In this episode of Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi connects with Trish Thomas, the co-founder of Every Body Eat, to discuss what she’s learned making delicious, allergen-free snacks more accessible.

“The key to entrepreneurship is fearless asking. Never be afraid to ask for help. The worst thing that can happen is somebody says no.”

Trish Thomas

Trish’s journey with Every Body Eat started during the COVID-19 pandemic when the company pivoted from food service to retail, and she found herself with 900 cases of product into her living room. It was a move born out of necessity, and the road to success and stability hasn’t been easy. Trish discusses the unique challenges of introducing allergen-free snacks to stores in the middle of the pandemic, their success in becoming a top seller at Whole Foods and Sprouts, and their continuous effort to scale up manufacturing. She also highlights their emphasis on high-quality ingredients, rigorous scrutiny for dietary certifications, and the importance of transparent ingredient labeling.

It wasn’t hard for Trish to recognize the gap in the market for allergen-free foods. As a person with multiple dietary restrictions, she is deeply familiar with the relative lack of grocery store options for people like her. Her dedication to creating delicious, allergen-free products stems from a desire to make it easier for everyone to find safe, tasty options. This commitment is evident in Every Body Eat’s rigorous ingredient standards and their innovative approach to packaging and marketing, ensuring that their products are not only safe but also appealing to a wide audience.

This conversation underscores the importance of perseverance and the power of relationships in entrepreneurship, two lessons that resonate deeply with health coaches. Just as Trish and her co-founder Nichole identified and addressed a unique consumer pain point, health coaches also strive to understand and meet the specific needs of each individual client. Every Body Eat’s story illustrates how tackling a niche problem can lead to broader success and benefit a wider audience. Their products, though designed with dietary restrictions in mind, offer healthful options for everyone. This episode reinforces the idea that thoughtful innovation and a commitment to solving real issues can create impactful solutions that serve diverse needs, a concept health coaches can draw inspiration from in their own practices.

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Episode Transcript

Dr. Sandi: On this episode of “Health Coach Talk,” we are discussing something that’s a little different. We’re talking about starting a company. How does somebody start a company from scratch, have an idea to create, in this case, a cracker than can check all the boxes that is free of all of the common allergens? And then how do they go on and get it into major grocery stores like Whole Foods? We’re talking with Trish Thomas. She is somebody who is local to my community and I felt that she had a fascinating story.

Let me tell you about Trish Thomas. She is a serial entrepreneur. She’s a problem solver. She’s a four-time founder and a lifetime mountain climber, the proverbial kind. She sold her first company four years out of college, built the first safe online community for kids, scaled a media company to distribution in 100 countries and 65 languages, consulted some of the biggest companies in the world on content, digital strategy, and she currently teaches entrepreneurship at Northwestern University, my alma mater. On top of all that, she’s been raising two sons, four step sons, multiple dogs, and a husband, but she actually thinks that they have been raising her. She cofounded Body Eat. And I think you are going to enjoy this episode. So, without further ado, here is “Health Coach Talk.”

Welcome, Trish.

Trish: I first need to clarify that I cofounded the company with Nichole Wilson who’s amazing. So, I’m a serial entrepreneur. This is my fourth company, but I never expected to do it again. And the only reason why I jumped back in feet first was because I met Nichole Wilson at the book fair for our kids’ school, and Nichole had this background in food. She grew up at PepsiCo and Frito-Lay. And she really recognized a lack of clean, healthy food, and we put our heads together. So, everything we’re going to talk about, we have done together.

Dr. Sandi: Okay. Well, thank you for the clarification. And I hope everybody heard what you just said, because I think it is really those connections that we have that are… We’re meeting people through our kids’ schools, through our neighborhoods, and forming those connections. So, I’d love for you to tell that story, how this really came about, and then, you know, what you decided and how did you decide particular ingredients to go in, and I think, first, backtrack and explain what this product is so that everybody is aware of it.

Trish: Sure. Yeah, I also teach entrepreneurship at Northwestern. So, I would tell you that those connections are key to everything, and so successful entrepreneurs really start with a problem worth solving and how do you know what that is, is that it has to be…the only way to do this is it has to be something that you care more about solving than anyone else in the world, and you have to be unreasonably committed to solving it. So, in our case, I have multiple autoimmune diseases, and with the help of a doctor, Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark, in Evanston and health coach, I figured out that if I remove certain foods from my diet, my body changed. My inflammation went down. And I’ve been off medicine for about 10 years now just from simply taking gluten, dairy, soy, corn, and egg out of my own diet. But I have six sons, so two teenage boys, four step sons, and two and a half grandsons also, and I went from somebody who, like, really loved food and loved entertaining to I became just the opposite of joy for me because I could no longer share the same food as the rest of my family.

And so Nichole and I met at the book fair at our kids’ school. She was coaching a tech company at the time, and I was just coaching entrepreneurs for fun. It was in the beginning of my journey where I started teaching entrepreneurship. And I started working with her with this founder she was working with, and I would serve her snacks sometimes when we sat down to work. And she’d say, “You eat this stuff? This is disgusting.” I said, “It tastes good.” So, we put our heads together, and we really recognized a couple things, that, one, there was a lack of free-from food, meaning free from the top allergens or certain ingredients that tasted so good, that people without food issues would eat them, and that for the people with special diets like me, the number one pain point was actually sharing food with other people. And most people suffer in silence because they don’t want to be difficult. So, like, if we’re going to a social engagement, my options are eat before I go, don’t eat, bring my own food, risk eating what’s there and getting really sick, or God forbid be a bother and be one of those people that says, “Sorry, I can’t eat that,” in advance.

So, we recognized that the real white space wasn’t just cleaner, healthier food. Our definition is wholefood ingredients, healthy fats. And most of our products don’t have any sugar, but we are launching cookies at Whole Foods soon. And we are using real sugar in our cookies, because we looked at the other alternatives and everything else, and really what we decided is to use lower amounts of sugar but use real sugar versus a chemical substitute or something funky. That was a big decision for us, because we were trying to keep the whole portfolio sugar-free.

But anyhow that’s where we started was the problem we’re solving is actually eating with other people and understanding what that problem is changes everything. So, when we started and we spent 2018 developing food, we wanted to see just how much food we could develop without those ingredients that could be enjoyed by all people. So, we actually have a portfolio of about 25 products. Then we spent 2019 trying to figure out how to get it made because most food companies start by using a contract manufacturer, but most of those contract manufacturers have allergens in their facility. That’s why you might buy something that is essentially nut-free in the ingredient level, but you turn it over and it says made in a facility that contains nuts or milk or whatever. And right now, the latest data we have is that 80% of people read food labels, 65% of you as families have some kind of special diet in the family, either a medically mandated dietary restriction or dietary preference, and with the people that have issues around food, usually 30% have issues with more than one food. So, if you just want to be dairy-free and gluten-free, everybody still can eat it, right? So, we took the strictest ingredient profiles we could from the beginning and started working from there.

But in 2019, we were trying to get it made, and what we found is that we couldn’t. So, we started with crackers and dip because crackers are the number two most shared food behind popcorn. And what we’re trying to do is literally create food that people can share. So, that was how our crackers were the first product launched. And so we made the very difficult decision that we wouldn’t even sample our products until we could make them in a facility that posed no risk with cross-contact with the ingredients we really wanted out. And we did this so that the people with the strictest diet, people with life-threatening food allergies could partake as well.

So, we couldn’t find anybody so we spent 2009 building, sort of, an innovation kitchen and we launched on March 1st, 2020. And on March of…

Dr. Sandi: [crosstalk 00:08:37].

Trish: …2020 right in the middle of COVID, we shut everything down, moved 900 cases in my living room and said, “Oh, my gosh, what have we done?” So, we ran around… We weren’t even going to start a retail. We were going to go to food service because food service, like restaurants, cafeterias, hospitals, any social travel, that’s where the pain point is the hardest for people like me. Cooking at home is… Your community solves for that. But that changed everything. So, we ran around during COVID with face masks on, walking into stores. They did not want to talk to us saying, “Hey, hi, we have this ultra clean new cracker.” So, that was really something.

But by that August of 2020, we started selling every single thing that we could make. And we’ve been doing that ever since. So, our challenge was actually manufacturing capacity. So, our Every Body Eat thins, our Cheese-Less flavor is the number one vegan cheese cracker at Whole Foods and Sprouts. Our Fiery Chile Lime and other flavors, they always say, “Well, I can’t believe I ate the whole bag,” but the whole bag is 450 calories and 13 to 16 grams of protein. Well, that’s multiple servings. They don’t feel sick from it. And then we’ve just recently launched grain-free Crispbread Crackers at the Whole Foods in the Midwest. Those are my personal favorite. So, like if you’re on the autoimmune protocol diet, you need a completely grain-free cracker. So, those crackers actually serve the need of being a base. Like, I eat them for breakfast with avocado or something like that, or you can put them on a charcuterie board. But they really become a carrier for people on the AIP diet versus our thins because they have rice flour, potato flour, really for the modified AIP diet. And the Crispbread Crackers are paleo too. They’re grain-free and paleo. And then our cookies, we focused on, like, high-quality ingredients, again, responsibly sourced palm oil, minimal sugar, and actually just great taste, because a lot of free-from cookies just don’t taste good.

Dr. Sandi: Well, I have to say this is just such an incredible story, and I’ve tried these products, and they are good because often and it really bothers me that these are called health foods. You go into a grocery store and other than, like, a Whole Foods or Sprouts, they have the health food section and that hasn’t really… I mean, every food should be a health food. And I remember many years ago, this was way before Whole Foods, and you mentioned Evanston and Northwestern, I would go to Evanston. It was a half hour from where I live at the time and they had one little health food store called the Green Earth, but things were…didn’t taste that good. They did not have that many products, and they didn’t taste that good.

But now you log into a Whole Foods, and there are thousands of products. I wonder if you could comment on some of those like greenwashing. They’re in Whole Foods and people think, “Oh, they must be good because they’re in Whole Foods.” But if you read the label, they’re not like your products. They really have some ingredients that may be not so good.

Trish: Well, I would just, in talking about the ingredients or marketing, how we got around that was that we knew that people with special diet spend a year of their life reading the food label. So, we just put the ingredients right on the front in the order that they are right on the back. And what’s interesting is, when you’re sampling food, you still see people read them on the front and still flip it over on the back. But we didn’t write gluten and corn-free and vegan and all those things really big because we did the research and what we found out is for people that don’t necessarily have a food allergy or a special diet, when they see too much, no, they think it has no taste and they won’t eat it.

So, I have a very different experience with Whole Foods. I mean, you have never met a group of people that care more about the ingredients and food in your life. And I can say that not only knowing the category buyers, but there was recently their annual meeting here in Chicago and they had, like, 600 store managers there. And we were 1 in 10 food companies that was invited. And the store managers, the people that work in the store, they really want to talk about the ingredients. So, I would say that the scrutiny that we have to go through for ingredients, both in terms of certifications and non-GMO certifications is really intense. And it’s amplifying. It’s starting to amplify at other mass retailers too. It’s not just Whole Foods, but I don’t think that they… You’re the expert, but from what I’ve seen and experienced, they don’t greenwash anything. If you’re not using the best quality ingredients, they will ask you to change them.

Dr. Sandi: That is so great to hear. And what I was referring to would be those products and often health coaches will go through the store or they’ll tell people like, “You have to be discerning.” And I love what you do in putting those ingredients on the front because sometimes they might take, let’s just say, a cereal, and they’ll use… We’ve seen this. It started out with the factory movement and everything was fat-free, but you turn it around and look at how many grams of sugar, and it was just loaded with the SnackWell’s. So, it started there, and now it’s like the gluten-free and things that…you know, like on potato chips, there’s so many products that they’re putting these labels. It’s gluten-free, it’s paleo, but really is you want to look and see, “Well, what are they actually using in this product?” and helping people to really be discerning and look for products like yours that are actually talking about those ingredients

Trish: And I know from other major retailers, too, that we now get one of the biggest grocers in the world. They send you a list of three pages of ingredients you can no longer use. So, the message is getting out there. I mean, it’s a little bit easier for us but… I apologize. My mom is in the hospital so that is her caretaker. She’s in the ER. So, I think it’s going to get better. It’s going to get better. So, just in the next, like, two weeks, Kroger, which is one of the larger grocery stores, they’re having a nourishing change conference in Cincinnati. It is all about food is medicine for all of their executives, right? Next week, I’m going to South Dakota to meet with Hy-Vee. We’re presenting at their nutrition conference.

So, a lot of the larger grocers are trying to figure it out. It’s tough though, because when you look at… If you follow, the money is still going to the brands that can make really cheap food, or there’s not a lot of food in the food. And so the challenge is really how to take the cost down for mid-scale… I mean, we’re still tiny, right? We’re tiny, but I would say smaller to mid-sized food companies don’t have the purchasing power of the behemoths, right? So, the first question is how to shrink the distance and the cost between the farm and our mixing bowl when you’re tiny. And we were talking to somebody about ingredients a couple of weeks ago, and he said, “Now, do you receive your grain in a rail car and does it go in a silo?” And I was like, “No, it actually comes off a truck in a pallet in a 20-pound bag.” And he’s like, “Okay.” So, you can’t compete with that.

So, I think that it’s really about shortening the distance from the farm to the company, learning how to buy at scale, but it’s really going to take the consumer’s demanding it before there’s change. Because if somebody can eat a cookie that’s made with all kinds of stuff that you don’t understand what it is and they keep buying those, even though there’s other alternatives. The retailers and the grocers are always going to sell that cookie first, because they can make more money with. It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to sell, but that’s where you see. But, like, what we’re seeing with our Cheese-Less skew is out of, like, cheese crackers, right, or just gluten-free cheese crackers. We haven’t had any money to do marketing, but we’re the number one vegan and gluten-free, like, vegan cheese cracker brand, right? And that wasn’t marketing, that wasn’t anything else. That was just people trying our product and buying it again and again.

Dr. Sandi: Well, that certainly was the case with me. I bought it and these are really good. And I was having company, and I was assembling a charcuterie board. And I was like, “Oh, I love these crackers. Where’d you get them?” So, the power of word of mouth and you’re so right, educating the consumer. Trish, where would you like to go? What’s your ultimate goal with Every Body Eat? What would you like to see? You’re already in Whole Foods, which is really such a feat to be in Whole Foods.

Trish: Well, when people say how will you know you made it? For me, it’s when I walk into a Super Bowl party and there’s something I can eat, right?

Dr. Sandi: Oh, yes.

Trish: It’s not complicated. I also travel a lot. And so my dream would be able to create an Every Body Eat menu where people in the hotels or other things could order off the room service menu or off the menu. And I could know that what I’m eating, I can eat. I know where it was produced. I know it doesn’t have any risk of cross-contact and I know it’s going to taste good. So, we have a long way to go, but I think that we’re doing it little by little, right? And so for us, the next stage is trying to go to unexpected places besides the grocery store. So, food service like entertainment menus. We might do a pilot at Wrigley Field next year. Schools, universities, travel, the airport, places where people could discover the brand but also where it’s really hard to eat. Historically at the airport for me, I could get stuff jacked with sugar, sliced dried mangoes, or potato chips, if the potato chips weren’t made in corn oil. So, that’s really where we’re headed next. We’re not just trying to grow for growth’s sake. We’re trying to take the pain points out to make it easier for everybody to eat everywhere.

Dr. Sandi: That is so, so important because you were so right. That is where it is most challenging. I travel with my own food, but sometimes you want to have some options at airports, for example, or Wrigley Field. And we didn’t mention that you are Chicago-based. We talked about you’re in Northwestern, which is in Evanston that’s north of Chicago, but this is where you manufacture.

Trish: Correct. We built our own manufacturing facility, and, well, we’re on our third. And in April, we moved into a 20,000 square foot facility that will allow us to do 10 times what we were doing last year. And it’s actually a funny story because we looked at 55 locations in the Chicago area trying to move, and we are in a former Nissan car dealership. So, I’m talking to you from what used to be the office where they would sell cars. And a food plant needs floor drains and a lot of power, so we creatively chopped it up. And in the back, we made it a bakery. So, we have an allergen-free food facility on a main street in Evanston, Illinois. It’s pretty fun.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, that is just so fantastic. And to think again, this all started because you ran into somebody you connected at a kid’s book fair. And for coaches who are listening, this is how this can happen. And you grow and it sounds like the sky’s the limit. Well, I am so excited for you, Trish. And how can people find you? And how can people find your product?

Trish: Our website is everybodyeating.com. They can find us at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Natural Grocers in Chicago, Mariano’s, and now Jewel. Yeah, so traditional grocers are going there, but I would say for your health coaches and everybody else is that the key to entrepreneurship is fearless asking. Never be afraid to ask for help because the worst thing that can happen is somebody says no. But that isn’t the worst thing that can happen because once somebody says no, they calm down and then they’ll start to talk to you and tell you what they will say yes to. So, it all starts with a conversation and not being afraid to ask people to give you a reference because, as a health coach, you need those personal referrals, right? So, are they asking, like, every client to give them 10 clients, right, or to host an event where they could do a talk or other things? So, it’s all relationships, right? It’s all relationships and getting out of our comfort zone. And I can tell you that I didn’t know a thing about the food industry. I’ve done other things in my life, but I didn’t know anything about the food industry five years ago. And we can all learn. We can learn.

Dr. Sandi: Yes, and I didn’t know anything about business when I was 65. So, I’m 74 now. So, that was a while back, but I had just been in private practice as a health psychologist and started a company and started a school to train health coaches. I had no idea. I didn’t even know what a P&L was. I was so clueless because as a psychologist, those aren’t the things we focus on. But learn as you go. And you are so right, ask for help. I love that.

Well, I’ve loved this conversation. I have loved getting to know you. And as I have said, I love the products, and it is so exciting to go into stores and now a store like Jewel, a national grocery chain, this is our local chain, but it’s part of a larger venture and to see those products there is really exciting.

Trish: Thank you, Sandi. Enjoy. And wait till you try the grain-free crispbread. You’re going to [crosstalk 00:22:57].

Dr. Sandi: Oh, my gosh. I’m excited to try that. Thank you so, so much.

Trish: Thank you. Take care.

Dr. Sandi: Bye now.