Working on the microbiome at @eatbeny
New York, NY
Joined July 2016
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I quit my job as a product manager at a $10B crypto company to start a yogurt company. Here’s why 🧵
We’ve gone through more than 200 recipe iterations to create a product that’s not only incredibly good for your gut, but also tastes amazing. Recipe development is one thing; getting that yogurt into your hands is a whole different beast.
Here’s what it actually takes for you to enjoy Sourmilk:
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🐄 Cows are milked at local dairy farms in upstate NY
🚛 The raw milk is delivered to our factory in tankers or totes
🔬 The milk is pasteurized to remove any harmful bacteria
🧫 We inoculate it with our probiotic cultures to start the yogurt fermentation
🏷️ While it ferments, my co-founder and I manually sticker thousands of single-serve containers by hand
🧃 The yogurt is strained (Greek style), filled, and cooled
📦 We hand-pack containers into cases and stack them onto pallets
❄️ A refrigerated truck picks them up and delivers them to our warehouse
🚲 When you place an order on sourmilk.com, we manually update inventory, hop on CitiBikes, and head to the warehouse to fulfill your order
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How do you get Sourmilk? The same way you get drugs ;)
Since we’re not in stores (yet), we’ve been running a little experiment — borrowing a time-tested method traditionally used to distribute… drugs. Except there’s nothing illegal happening here 😅
Here’s how it works:
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3. Then, you meet us — usually on a random street corner in your neighborhood and we hand you a brown paper bag filled with yogurt. No questions asked.
4. You go on your merry way, giving your gut the fuel it needs, and hit us up again when you need to restock 🫶
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Somehow, this yogurt-drug-deal model has led to over 4,000 cups sold in just a few weeks. If you haven’t participated in a Sourmilk drop yet, drop #3 might be one of your last shots before we hit retail shelves:
sourmilk.com/products/sourmi…
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“Did your college major actually help with your career?”
As someone who studied Computer Science at Stanford and now runs a probiotic yogurt company, I get this question a lot.
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I’ve been reviewing nutrition panels of other yogurt companies to get a sense of the landscape for Sourmilk. Did you know that foods are legally allowed to be up to 20% inaccurate on macronutrients?
This means something claiming 80 calories on the label might actually be closer to 100 calories, take the image below for example. Here’s the formula to calculate calories:
Calories ≈ (# grams of fat * 9 cal) + (# grams of carbs * 4 cal) + (# grams of protein * 4 cal)
In this case, the claimed calories is 140cal but the true calories is 165cal, a 25 calorie difference:
(9g fat * 9 cal) + (3g carbs * 4 cal) + (18g protein * 4 cal) = 165cal
It could be that the calories are undercounting or protein/fat is overcounting. Regardless, if you’re ever curious to verify macros, now you know how!
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One of the many benefits of the Sourmilk pickup model is that we get to meet all of our customers in person and learn more about what they do.
Sean just finished his Sophomore year in high school and is starting a Manuka honey lemonade company called Hunni. He loves yogurt and has been following our journey for months.
These connections are what make what we do so special - can’t wait to meet many more people in our next drops!
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💙 Loyalty
There’s a big difference between discovering a new yogurt on the shelf for the first time vs. seeing it after meeting the founders and eating it all summer. Right now, the only way to get Sourmilk is to meet us in person.
Yes, it’s high friction– we’re hauling 50lbs of yogurt on Citi Bikes and running pickups across the city. But it’s helping us build something stronger than distribution: a community.
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So we decided to roll up our sleeves and take an alternative route. We filled our Hydro Flask coolers with 50lbs of sourmilk yogurt and hopped on Citi Bikes to deliver yogurt to people around the city. We set up local pickup points across Manhattan and Brooklyn and had everyone pre-ordered their yogurt and meet us in person to pick it up (we love meeting customers face to face).
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We were blown away by how willing people were to go out of their way to try Sourmilk, despite this being a high-friction experience.
We are so excited to get more gut healthy yogurt into people's hands - stay tuned for drop #3 👀
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