Helping Businesses Provide Personalized Nutrition Experience with Andrew Brandeis of OK Capsule
Transcript of a Tacos and Tech podcast episode (host Neil Bloom) interviewing Dr. Andrew Brandeis, founder & CEO of OK Capsule. The conversation covers Brandeis’s background (naturopathic physician, entrepreneur), OK Capsule's business model (private-label personalized supplement packets; backend fulfillment and white-label front-end tech), fundraising and go-to-market (seed round, ~10 active clients, hiring head of biz-dev, preparing Series A), manufacturing and quality tradeoffs, sustainability efforts (compostable packets; ~200 grams plastic saved per order), retail 'solution packs' and future plans to integrate wearables/data and recommendation engines to make personalized supplementation effortless.
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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am thrilled to have you here on the Tacos and Tech Podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview, and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Andrew Brandeis, founder and CEO of Okcapsule. Hey, Dr. Andrew, thanks for being on the pod.
Thanks for having me, Neal.
Yeah, real pleasure. We got connected through Ellie Carlson, which, you know, a friend of me and friend of the podcast. And I'm excited to get to know a little bit about your story of OkCapsule. You want to give us a quick one minute overview of what OkCapsule is?
Yeah, we are the only private labeler for supplements in packets. And so, like, really what I mean by that is like, vitamins are good, but the bottles they come in suck. So we make vitamins available to people in packets for the brands that want to sell them. So, like, you know, if, say, gnc, for example, wanted to sell vitamins and packets, like, they would use our infrastructure because To. To sell them in packets requires just a bit of technology. It's different than selling, you know, everybody the same bottle. We customize every single order that goes out so everyone can have their own personalized vitamins experience.
Oh, super cool. I'm sure there's a little bit of a sustainability angle here as well, too.
Which maybe we'll touch on 100%. Every order we ship saves 200 grams of plastic.
Okay, so we're. There's a few angles we'll touch on here, but we got to get to know, you know, how this started, because I'm guessing you weren't born ready to go work on custom white label packets. Where'd you. Where are you from, and how'd you end up here?
Born in Brooklyn, grew up in Jersey, Hated it. Got out as soon as I could, which was when I went, like, college. I went to Seattle, and I've always been into health. When I was 16, I was the manager of a health food store in New Jersey and was. I thought I knew a lot about using supplements. It turns out I was practicing medicine without a license or an education at 16, and at some point I realized I should actually learn this stuff. And so that's kind of how I ended up getting a degree in nutrition and then going on to med school after.
Got it. Okay, take it back real quick. We're in Brooklyn because I. Families all from there.
Born in Canarsie, but I left when I was like, four, so.
Oh, oh, okay. Got it, got it. My family's in Park Slope area, but.
Okay.
It doesn't matter now, but you ended up on the opposite side of the coast, so, you know, obviously you wanted to get far away, which, understandable. Here I am mostly and obviously in San Diego, so. Same thing. How'd you know you want to do medicine and what specific, you know, areas you want? Do you already know what you wanted to focus when you picked that as a route?
Yeah, when I was younger, like early teens and whatnot, I had some health issues and just the doctors that I was seeing just weren't really even looking in the right direction, so I kind of had to figure out my own stuff. And it wasn't even that I had big problems. It just, like, nobody was helping, so I had to figure it out on my own. And at some point, I realized I just really valued health and didn't ever want to have to rely on someone else for my own health because I valued it so much. So I started studying nutrition medicine. And it's one of those things like I, I kind of can't remember people's names or places I've been or conversations I've had, but I can absolutely remember anything. Medical. It just sticks in my head forever. I don't know why, but it works. So that's what I did for a profession.
Interesting. Okay, so obviously you had to do undergrad first and then go to, to med school. And some people, you know, never actually make it the med school path. They plan, right. They pre med a lot. How'd you kind of push through and know that, hey, this is the path and I got to get there?
Well, I actually started in art school. My grades in high school were bad that the only college I was able to get into was, was an art school based on my portfolio. I was, I was an oil painter in high school. And so I started that and hated art school and eventually like kind of got kicked out because I wasn't really meant for it, but transferred to science, nutrition. And at that point I was like, all right, I'm ready to kind of get my, my act together. And just turns out I needed glasses. That was very helpful for me to be able to read and study. But yeah, so started visual arts, then nutrition and then just. It was obvious to me that I want go on to med school. And the kind of medicine I chose was called naturopathic medicine. So my degree is ND Naturopathic doctor, which means I'm licensed primary care provider. I worked in urgent care for a while, but I really am an expert in like nutritional science and using dietary supplements as one of my main modalities in practice.
Got it. Okay. So obviously supplements and vitamins have been around a long time, thousands of years, right. In some nature form. But it feels like every 10 years, maybe every generation, there's a new way of taking, taking hold of that even, you know, trusting who gives you advice on it. What was that like from a doctor's perspective of seeing. I'm not saying like fads or anything, just like what's the style of where a doctor comes in and gives advice on that kind of wellness?
That's a really good question. I've seen supplements really work when used appropriately and when they're high quality. Right. If you're using a low quality supplement for the wrong thing, it's just, it's not going to work. And I think supplements have this like unfair, maybe like snake oil thing going on. You know, there's bad actors out there that sell low quality stuff. It's a differently regulated industry than pharmaceuticals, you know, so there's good and bad supplements out there. But I think it's very hard for the average consumer to know what is right for them to take and when to take it. You know, you might, you probably don't even want to take the same thing every day for the next 10 years. You probably want to change it up every couple months or so. Like I do. When I was practicing medicine, I was using alongside pharmaceuticals. Like I said, I worked in urgent care. So I'd have like, you know, people come in with their third UTI of the month or their fourth migraine of the month. And you know, I would treat the acute problem with pharmaceuticals and then the ask the patient, maybe you should come back and we should talk about why you get four migraines a month or whatever. And general. And what I kind of learned is that pharmaceuticals tend, and I'm generalizing here, but pharmaceuticals tend to work really well for acute illness and supplements tend to work really well for chronic illness because they tend to correct the underlying problem. And whereas pharmaceuticals just try to like augment the symptom, you know. And I'm, again, I'm totally overgeneralizing. But that's sort of, you know, how I came to really value and appreciate supplements. But again, it's really hard for most people to know what to take. If you go into a Whole Foods. I mean, I did, I did this a couple weeks ago. I stood in a Whole Foods in the supplement aisle because I needed to get something. We didn't have it. I was traveling and I noticed like all the people in the aisle. There was like six people. They were all just standing there with their mouths agape, just staring at the shelves, overwhelmed. And I was one of them. I also was confused. There's like 16 different sleep type pills on the shelf. I'm like, why? What's the difference? Which one do I need? Like, why isn't this simple? Why isn't it simple? And that's like, you know, that's for whatever reason, that's like my life mission is to just kind of make it simple for people to get the low hanging fruit. Like some of this stuff can be so helpful if you just take the right stuff at the right time. So that's, you know, that's what I'm doing here. I'm trying to scale what I was able to do as a physician. You know, as a physician, I'm a personalization engine. You know, you come to a doctor to get a personalized treatment for you and I wanted to scale that. So now I have A technology company that allows anybody who already sells vitamins to personalize what they sell to their customers.
Kind of. I mean, scratch it in a certain itch to your own regard, right, of seeing your own issues. But also, like you mentioned, kind of the convergence of two fields of study coming together and saying, you know, we could build a product around this, but this isn't your first entrepreneurial venture, right? You've dipped your toes in the water a few times. Like, what's that like when you're, like, you said you're in an emergency room. Other things. When do you have the time to go and play around in the startup space?
Well, I guess you're an entrepreneur and your listeners are as well, so you understand that it's a disease. So, you know, we can't help ourselves from solving the problem if it's persistent enough. When I was practicing medicine, the. The first sort of tech company I started was called Share Practice, and it was a collaborative medical reference for doctors. And there I'm going somewhere with this. So as doctors, we have reference tools. I could look up urinary tract infection and see the drugs, the pharmaceuticals that are recommended to treat it. But there's no integrative treatments in there. There's no, you know, cranberry or the other stuff that you might use, like D Mannose is something you might use to treat it. So I wanted to create a reference tool that was as helpful as the pharmaceutical ones, but that included the integrative treatments as well. So that was my first sort of Silicon Valley. I was in San. My urgent care was in San Francisco, so I was in Silicon Valley. I was. I've always been an entrepreneur, but now I had patients who are entrepreneurs and VCs. And I'm so embarrassed. But I. I pitched all of my patients. Like, they would come into me with a real problem, and I was like, sitting there pitching them, like, this horrible deck that I had. But I just, like, I didn't know what to do. I really wanted to raise money. I. I did, you know, I mean, it finally worked out, but it was just a little embarrassing. You've probably seen Silicon Valley. There's like that scene where he's like, he's the main character. I forget Richard goes to, like, the doctor. The doctor's like, well, how would you like it if there was a. Like, that was. I was that doctor. It was so bad.
No, but that's great. I mean, you want to actually get out of the. Get some pitches that maybe don't matter nearly as much, you know, Some dry runs maybe before you get in front of the Sequoias and whatever else is. So no, I mean, what you're doing is customer development really. Right. You're asking your patients, is this a real problem? Would you pay for it? That's the best part that an entrepreneur really should be doing. Right. Is there a business case for the.
Idea that I have? Yeah, for sure.
So where did that take you? Where did you, where did your practice end up?
It was. I raised money at a time where all my investors were saying, don't worry about revenue model, just worry about eyeballs. And I was naive enough to sort of take that advice. So we didn't really build in a revenue model. And when it comes to Dr. Eyeballs, there's only like 600,000 of them out there anyway. So like, wasn't to be judged by the same metrics that a regular consumer product would. So it didn't really go very far. But, you know, we created some valuable assets and I was able to exit from that. But I got, you know, an incredible education. But I could not have gotten anywhere else, which dovetailed nicely into consulting for various health tech companies. Because I'm one of a few doctors who really understands how to speak tech and speak like Clint. Like, there's doctors out there who consult for tech companies, but they never practiced clinically. And I had like a very successful cash based clinical practice in San Francisco. So I'm there and I'm sure there's plenty more doctors like me now. But at the time, you know, it was one of a handful. So that's sort of where I cut my teeth. And then when I sort of saw the opportunity for Capsule, I was able to like recognize it, workshop it, get feedback from relevant people. And I kind of knew it was a good idea, it was worth pursuing. And I think, you know, we were talking earlier about what was like, the moment that I knew to do it. I can go into that now. It's. It's a very clear moment. It was a Wednesday afternoon and I was like just kind of workshopping my deck for okcapsule. Just like really, like, like my process for figuring out the model is like working a deck and like pitching it and pitching it just to keep getting feedback and keep refining the deck until I have like, really, what I know is, makes sense. And it was a Wednesday afternoon and in the span of about 4 hours, 3 different people called me back to back and all said, hey, we should start a company together. And I'm not kidding you, it was Like, I was working on it and the universe was just delivering these people to me. And one of them was my co, founder and cto. I was quite literally looking at my deck, at the page where it had like the founder listed and it was me, the CEO and it had the CTO spot empty. And my friend calls and he's like, hey, I quit my job. I just gave six weeks notice. We should start a business together. And I was like, interesting. Let me tell you what I'm working on. And it turns out that he had a similar idea like six years earlier and had already researched the machines that we needed to use. It was a no brainer. The conversation lasted five minutes. Let's start a company together. This is what I'm working on. He's like, great, let's do it. And that was it. It was Wednesday. We were like, great, I think we're doing it. You know, when the universe sort of presents it to you like that serves it up, it's. You're kind of an idiot to, to turn it down. So I totally, I had to go with it.
And the universe seems to just like put it right in your face or right in your lap like that. So you did, I'm guessing you, what were some first steps? I mean, around that you had your deck, did you have to go raise money? Or this time around, did you go say, let's, let's build a revenue model or in a little bit more than we did the first time?
Definitely, definitely built a revenue model in right there from the beginning. But no, I had to raise money. And I was surprised that some of my previous investors were willing to invest in me again, you know, because I was, you know, embarrassed and thought that I kind of screwed up the last time. But no, a handful of them were like, hey, no, actually this is a good idea. This makes sense. You have a track record. I know you, I trust you. And so I was able to raise seed capital. And I think my last company, I must have had like 30 investors or something. It was ridiculous. And this time around, just a small handful because, you know, I understood what a minimum check size was and like, who makes for a good investor? So, you know, I had learned a lot too. And I have to say, like, I, you know, I know and love everyone that's on my cap table.
Yeah, it's a really big deal in the beginning for both sides to be experienced in that regard, right to one, for them to know how to take the money that, you know, can be more helpful than the money itself. Right? Actually, you know, open doors for you and vice versa. It's helpful for them to know, all right, he's not going to make that same mistake again. He's already learned it previously. It doesn't have to learn on our dime this time. So, you know, if you're betting on someone who's brand new versus someone who's doing it for the second or third time, like it's already a little bit of a sure bet. So yeah, that's super smart from that angle. And at this point, people are betting, betting on the people more than anything. Right. They know this idea is going to change. It's going to pivot, you're going to learn some things. So it's got to be a total at least. My style of betting this early is a jockey bet as opposed to like the betting on the horse.
Yeah. And I did one thing that now in retrospect was really smart, but I didn't realize it at the time was I got some Lois letters of intent from potential customers said, hey, here's the idea, here's the business I want to build. If I built it, would you be a customer? And it was kind of a no brainer because it was a like easy business model for these guys. So I think I had like six Lois, so it was a lot easier to go raise real money saying like, look, I've got, there's, I've got customers waiting for this and they're like, here's a business. So in retrospect, I think that was very helpful.
Yeah, I know that there's been some pivots a little bit maybe take us through what we were, what were you pitching when you got those first, Lois?
I was pitching something that's fairly similar to what we have today, which is backend infrastructure for say like a DNA test company or a blood test company. So, so here's what I, here's what I learned when I was talking to the CEOs of these companies. So take the DNA test company, for example. Their model was they would sell you a DNA test or if you already did 23andMe, you can upload your results and then they would tell you, you're like, they can sell you an exercise report or a nutrition report or a supplement report, whatever. But those were one time sales. So with this one DNA test company, for example, they would tell you, hey, you need to take vitamin. Based on your DNA, it's likely that you need to take vitamins A, B, C and, and that's it. Set. Go to Amazon and good luck Right. I was like, wait, but it would make sense for you to be able to sell your brand of supplements, personalized supplements, directly to that customer. And they're like, yeah, of course, that'd be great. But I'm not building an infrastructure. That's not my, that's not my business model. So that's what we, I realized we were able to take off the table for them. And sort of the analogy I liked to use at the time was like, if you want to, if you want to sell sneakers on the Internet, you don't start by building a payment processor, right? That's not your business. Someone else can do that for you so you could focus on your business. And for me, it was similar thing, like, well, hey, why don't we handle the back end, personalized supplement aspect of it? You tell the customer what they should take and then we'll fulfill that order and ship it to them. So it was a really good model and we were relying on that business to handle the entire front end experience. And what I learned, this is coming back to answer your question. What I learned is that that's a good market right there for tech companies that could do the front end experience, but there's a much bigger opportunity for companies that can't. For example, imagine a retail pharmacy. I'm sure you can think of the names of a couple. And we, you know, the conversation that we had then was like, hey, do you guys want to have your house brand? All these guys have their own, like house brand of personalized vitamins in packets and like, yeah, that. Absolutely, we want to do that, but we don't have any of the technology you guys are going to have to provide it, including the front end experience. That might be a quiz or linking to a DNA test, whatever. So what I realized was when I started, I thought we were just going to be that backend infrastructure, but we've been asked by sizable companies to provide the front end experience, white label, the front end experience as well, which turns out is also a better business model for us because now we're building technology. That technology is interacting with customers. We're able to gather more data from more sources. So it turned out to be a good thing, but also it's, you know, more required us to raise a little bit more money and build out some more technology that on day one, I didn't think we'd have to do. But I'm glad we are now.
Jennifer. Well, you obviously knew you needed a cto. You know, I would say so. A lot of people you Know, thinking they're in the packaging and shipping and, you know, more design heavy area, I would think. Sounds like may not go find a CTO as a co founder. So obviously there's tech that you knew you had to invest in. What have you learned now? A few years and a few rounds of funding into it that you didn't know and building out the business about the industry.
That's also a good question. I, I think I, I have a very like, MVP iterate, build, measure, learn kind of mindset and in the, you know, tech people, and I'm going to overly generalize here again, but they tend to want to do it right from the beginning, especially if they're smart and they've already done it before. Like my, my co founder has built large enterprise solutions for big companies. Comcast, Verizon. So he was looking out five years like the platform that we're going to need five years from now. I'm going to start building it now. And I didn't quite realize that was happening in the beginning and I don't think he, he does now. But back then, I don't know that he quite understood that we really needed to like, scale it way back and spend less, test some things more. You know, we're like, hey, we don't want to do any processes that don't scale, okay, but we might not ever need to scale those processes if we don't figure these other things out first. So maybe it's okay to do a few things by hand now and learn. And I think it took us a little while to kind of get into that groove together. And I think the same thing with quality. You know, you really don't want to skimp on quality when it comes to supplements because, I mean, they just don't, they won't work right. We want to make sure that what we're providing is what we say it is, and it's the best and it works and it's efficacious. And so there's challenges, there's challenges that we needed to figure out how to overcome when it came to the cost of what quality, doing things right, costs. And I think one of my, one of my investors when we were building out our facility, said something that was really poignant. It was, do you want to be the best? Do you want to have the best manufacturing facility or do you want to make money? And like, okay, and that doesn't mean, like, we can cut corners. You know, it doesn't mean that we skimp on quality. It just means that maybe we don't need that thing to be beautiful chrome stainless steel because it looks great. You know, it's not cutting corners, but it was just allocating resources appropriately to what we needed to deliver.
Got it. Okay. And so where are you today? Like what, what's the, you know, I don't know how you measure things and number of people or number who are getting your. Getting the branded packages or number of companies. Like take us through where you're at.
Yeah, so we've got, I think we've got about 10 active clients and we're adding maybe like one or two per month that like that we start shipping for. We have not done any marketing. We still haven't really done any marketing and we just hired a head of Biz Dev. So we're now going to finally start going out and like trying to attract more customers. And the reason for that is because we really spent the last two years just dialing in our funnels, making all the mistakes that we were going to make, you know, and dialing it all in. And now we finally have a machine that works. We know if we put something in the top, we know what's going to come out of the bottom. And so now we're ready to scale that. So we just announced our seed round even though we had actually like raised it over the last two years. And we are about to start raising our series A so that we can take what we have and scale it appropriately.
Oh, it's exciting. Super interesting. The scaling time is super fun now. I bet your CTO is also excited about that where you've been testing and trying things right now you've got some repeatability which is, which is awesome. And you got some Playbooks obviously as well too.
Like SOPs, man, we have a lot of those.
Totally. Yeah, I bet. I gotta imagine Covid obviously is, has been mostly good for this industry in that regard. Like people now are expecting way more by mail and maybe never even visiting a pharmacy in person. But I'm guessing you do packets, you know, can be in person or delivered by mail. Like what's the kind of wide range use cases that you're building things for?
Yeah, that's another good question that goes back to an earlier question of yours, like what did we learn? So they're, you know, as we're talking to these large retailers about these e commerce solutions that we have, they say that's great. What do you have that we could put on shelf? And it turns out the packaging that we had is really good. We produce on demand and we ship and our product is consumed within, you know, a month or two. And so we never really considered like stability testing on the packets when we first started because they were going to be used right away. So then we wanted to figure out like, oh, if there's an opportunity for retailers. Well, first of all, what does that mean? How do you personalize something that goes on a retail shelf? And second of all, what about stability? How do we like, you know, figure that out? And so the answer was actually a very elegant solution. And so we came up with what we're calling, like solution packs. So it's pretty cool. Like if I was, you know, I said before I was in Whole Foods looking at the shelf, and I'm like, I just want a sleep supplement. And, and so what the solution pack is, it's, it's a beautiful, just box with about 10 packets in it and it's all just beautiful. It just says sleep on it. It really doesn't get more simple than that. And we've got one that says inflammation and joints and migraine and gut and you name allergy, you know, and so these are now solution packs that could just go on the shelf to the customer that's not interested in investing their time, blood, DNA, whatever, in personalizing a solution. They're just not there yet. So now we have solution packs that go on shelf in retail, make it really simple for the customer to just be like, I need headache and just take the headache back.
Right.
And then the idea is then we remarket to that person like, oh, similar to my experience in primary care, it's like, oh, you're taking a migraine pack, you must get migraines. Would you like to answer a couple of questions? And we can figure like further personalize this. And then we, the idea is we'll turn that retail customer into a subscription personalized customer. And so that's the, like, the marketing strategy that we're employing now. And it's, it seems to be panning out, going well.
And that's on behalf of the brand in a sense. Like if they want to roll up that subscription product, you'll run it for them on behalf of them.
Got it? Yeah. We, our house brand is called perfect Packs. So we do have, we do make these packs available, but we don't put effort. It's our house brand. So if that retailer didn't want to launch with their brand, they could launch with our house brand. But we don't market it like a D2C brand would be marketed. And that's mostly because I don't really know how to do that. Well, I'm not a marketing guy. Like I, I get the, I get everything else I was explaining, but like going out and competing, I'd rather leave that to the brands that know how to do that.
Well, sure. And, and you're getting to learn, you know, in a sense with their data for your brain as well too, which is nice as well. Take us to the sustainability piece. Like, what have you learned a lot about waste in this space?
There is a lot of waste in this space. So I mean, I'm kind of appalled at that. Wellness for people has to come at the expense of wellness for the planet. So when I was practicing medicine, I would notice that to really get results, and again, totally generalizing here, but I could really get meaningful results, long term results. But the patient would typically have to open up like four or five plastic bottles two to three times a day for like two to six months, kind of depending on the severity. And that's just a lot. So first of all, no one does that. No one. It's called compliance. And no one complies with that protocol for that long. They just don't. I don't even do it when I need to. But it also produces a ton of waste. And so we worked really hard with the manufacturers of, of the packaging material that we use to get FDA packets that are FDA compliant for dietary supplements, that have the shelf life that retailers want in compostable material. And so that was a big kind of effort, undertaking. And we now have really beautiful compostable material. And if you think about it, we put, you know, on average five pills in a packet on average. And five plastic bottles, equivalent plastic bottles is about 200 grams of plastic. That's a lot of plastic. So every order we ship, we like to think saves 200 grams of plastic from ending up as trash. And I think that consumers want this, especially those that care about their wellness. They probably care about the wellness of the planet and probably don't like getting so many plastic bottles and throwing away so many plastic bottles. I mean, they're not even being recycled anymore. Right. So I think we have a very elegant, simple solution that makes health and wellness easier for the consumer, but also just better for everyone. And it's also cheaper since we put it all together in one packet. It's generally like, you know, 20% less for the end consumer than buying all those things individually.
That's awesome. That's got to feel good as well too. So where do you think you're headed? Like where's when you're out from now close the series A scaling up the team. What do you think you're up to?
I think we've done a really good job of our operations and the product that we ship, but now we really need to start focusing on more tech solutions. Like I was kind of saying before, you know, I've got an OURA ring on my finger and it's pretty cool. These wearables are really like, I'm. I was actually surprised at how much I've been learning about myself from my wearable technology. And what I want is my phone to just push to me a notification that says, like, hey, I noticed this change. If you agree, I want to augment your supplement pack and send you X next week. Right. So I think we need to. We're going to be doing more on like, creating recommendation engines for our clients and technology that integrates with the modern technology and makes healthy behavior effortless. That's sort of my goal because people don't. I mean, people invest in their health and wellness, but people are way more likely to do it if it's effortless.
Right.
If we just make it super easy for them. All you have to do is tear open a pack and swallow what's inside and that actually moves the needle on your health and wellness, like, for sure. So that's, I think, how I can really scale what I could do as a doctor.
That's awesome. Well, I mean, the quantified self is such a. It's become not just for the tech nerds who are really like into 1 percenting themselves. It's really you. We're, we're all wearing these devices now. We're okay getting our data tracked. Right. And feeding it to the big engine. Like Apple being like, oh, yeah, I didn't even know. I've enrolled myself in a clinical trial. Right. So, yeah, I agree that the data is there now. You need to get it to talk and be useful to each other company. I need to connect you to what we're invested in called vessel health, which is.
Oh, I know. John Carter.
Oh, well, there you go.
We're talking to them. Yeah, perfect.
So that's a perfect example where we're taking urine samples. Right. And doing meaningful data. I can't wait for it to be just installed on my toilet so that it's automatically getting samples for that when I decide to do it, which is where he's headed and actually where he started. So, yeah, I'm glad you guys are connected because that's a great example of that part.
I think he might have been one of those Lois that I had in the very beginning. And we're only now getting around to like actually trying to do something together.
Good. No, I'm super. I'm glad that's. That those connections are already made. John's a great guy. So lastly, you know, this is the tacos podcast. We haven't really talked about that. The fact that you're in Mexico, which, you know, probably rivals San Diego's taco scene. I'll allow it. But do you have a favorite taco place?
I have two, and it depends on the time of day. So I live in a small town in Mexico and that's actually where I started OkCapeSule from. I was not expecting to start another business, but like I said, it's a disease. Entrepreneurship. And so during the day there's this place that has great like all sorts of different, like veggies that like, like cooked veggies that come tacos. And that's my like daytime one. But I don't get there so often. The place that I do get to go to that has just the best tacos is on a street called Insurgentes and they open around like 7 or 8pm at night. The guy's name is Andy, who runs it, and he kind of looks like Elvis. It's really weird, but it's just street tacos. And the other, they're both street tacos and that's like really like the best. But it's. I don't know, it's like 50 cents a taco or something like that. And they're just so good and I could eat a lot of them, but I certainly try not to.
Okay. I love it. Yeah, for sure. That's going to be a hard one to put on a map in our taco database. And that's okay. We have plenty of those. Like, oh yeah, that food truck that's in the Target parking lot on Saturdays. And that's okay. Those are some of the best for sure. But Andrew, it's so nice getting to meet you and obviously seeing the impact you're having on our wellness and the environment as well too. And helping brands do it in their own way, telling their own story too. So thanks for sharing your story and thanks for doing what you're doing.
Yeah, I'm grateful for the opportunity to talk with you, Neil.
Absolutely. Thanks for being on the pod. Cheers. Thanks for tuning in. Tacos and Tech Podcast. You can find all of our episodes on Fresh Food Tech as well as on Twitter. At Tacos and Tech Pod. Also, follow Fresh Brew tech on all of your social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or Google Play. Thanks again.
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