Matthew Kelly (speaker/founder) addresses a common misconception that mushroom-based functional drinks taste bad, calling many existing products “dog shit” and saying he deliberately reformulated his product to taste like regular coffee and better than competitors. He criticizes the wellness category’s conservative visual branding (black/brown/green) and emphasizes ongoing flavor improvements.
I still think there's a misconception that anything mushroomy tastes like dog shit and anything functional, but especially mushroom, because it sounds like it's in the ground and dirty. Obviously their product does taste like shit. I'm not just saying that. So I made a point of making it taste better and this one just tastes like a coffee. We're trying to improve the flavors even more to make it taste better than a non functional drink. And making it taste good was easy because everything else on the market tastes like dog shit, in my opinion. We're obviously improving them to make them fucking amazing. And every other brand in the space at the time I thought was black, brown, green, as they are, as a lot of brands are in the wellness space. To be fair, very safe, very boring.
