Interview with Breaters Founder & CEO Stefano Iorino

My name is Dustin Betts. I'm the content editor at the Founder Institute, and I'm here today with Stefano Iorino. He's the founder and CEO of Breedrs. They're an FI Rome and Founder Institute Select portfolio company that's offering a personalized program with daily mindfulness-based assistance to help emotional eaters to lose weight by establishing a healthy and lasting relationship with food and with their body. Stefano Iorino, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you too. Hi everyone.

So before we kind of dive into your startup Breedrs, can you tell us, you know, a little bit more about yourself or your personal story? You know, what were the experiences, whether, you know, professional or personal, that led you to founding this company to provide mindfulness-based assistance to emotional eaters?

Yes, so first of all, I'm Italian. I'm 35. 34 years old yet. And basically, I am a former mechanical engineer, actually, and with a personal experience in terms to help people to create startups into the hardware field. And I work in that field since 2 years ago, once when I founded Breeders. And it could be, I mean, the question could be, how do you found this kind of company as a mechanical engineer? That's because I was already I've always been strongly obese in my life, and since 27 years old, I was 135 kilograms, and so I had a lot of weight more than now. And at the time, when I was 25, 26, I was helped from some friend of mine and to face my emotional relationship with food. And thanks to this help coming from outside, I was able to understand how I eat, why I eat and why I eat so much actually. And thanks to that kind of intervention, an offline intervention, I was actually able to lose more than 50 kilograms in 2 or 3 years. Okay. And I was, and I am pretty, in terms of how to say, I have very easy access to the food because my family has a bakery and some restaurants. So for me, access to the food was 24/7, always free and very good. And that's like the Italian kitchen for free forever. And that was not so easy to manage the way I related with food. And since this experience, after I was working with a lot of company creating hardware startup, I decided to create something that could be more helpful for someone else than only me. So I created this project. I involved this Giorgio that is the co-founder and that helped me and the company to create the program. And so we went live 2 years ago. And we start to have some people enjoying the program and so people liked and then we decided to create the company.

Awesome. Yeah, really, really interesting.

Yeah.

How it connects to your personal story. So yeah, we're gonna kind of dive into this more. I mean, so I know because I'm somewhat familiar with your company already, Breeders is the Founder Institute portfolio company that you're, you know, helping obese and overweight people to improve their lives through like digital mindfulness. In daily support. But yeah, please, you know, we're gonna hear it straight from you, the founder. Give us your short pitch. What is Breedrs?

So Breedrs, we develop an online daily coaching program based on microlearnings and mindfulness to help people overcome emotional and binge eating. That's in a very, very short way. Basically what we believe is that we dropping with microlearning content every day, this content based on mindfulness for a long period. It could be something that it doesn't exist right now as a personal support that's coming from typical professionals like psychiatrists, psychologists, or a gym, or a nutritionist, or a dietitian that don't have this kind of daily support, very, very focused. Our goal was to create what was missing for me and my co-founder because he has a losing weight history too. And that we were missing about a space where we can feel not judged about our feelings related with food and where we can share with other people our difficulties and receive from someone else from a daily hug, something like that, and create a warm house. Okay, that's why we feel that it's pretty different, our approach, and it's something that we are building in, I think, in a right way because people are loving we are doing right now.

Yeah, that's— and I want to kind of talk about, you know, for those who are fortunate enough that their lives haven't been, you know, negatively affected by emotional eating, can you explain a little bit more about the full context of the problem? You know, how many people are emotional eaters, and how does this habit affect their lives and their overall health?

So for the people that are so lucky, and so the main problem is that who are affected by emotional eating have not acquired or learned in a balanced and organic way, the ability to self-regulate it with respect to food and pleasure to food. So actually we don't know because I'm still into that kind of problem. We don't know how to renounce the chemical, physical effect that the food has on our body. So the pleasure of food is interpreted as a cure of emotional suffering. For example, if I feel sad, so I eat a slice of pizza, I will feel better. Okay, this is something that is every time in mind. And so who does not have this kind of conflict with food is because he has acquired the ability to regulate himself into their life. Typically what happens is that, I mean, if you are good to regulate with food or not, it happens when you are child. So at the beginning of your life, so it's very, very influenced by the family environment. So what happens sometimes that, I don't know, like for example, a mother is obsessed by a diet and/or obsessed with sport and maybe forbids you chocolate or something like that. So the food becomes ambivalent for you and is an ambivalent object for you, and it's something you desire it a lot, but it's also considering that it's very wrong. Okay, so there is this kind of restriction and dysregulation, or both, like in my case, because I I had a mother that was always worried about the diet from herself. And so I was obsessed too about my body, but actually I have food everywhere in my house. And when I was to my father's jobs into the bakery, so I had the access to the food I can eat everywhere, every time. But the message coming from my family was, okay, it's wrong. And this given, created into my experience as a child, not a wrong message, but it is not a clear message. Okay? So when there is not this clear message, you are going to choose and you choose which maybe is not right for you. And our approach challenge this kind of, at this core, the typical diet mentality. And unlike other approach available, we are focused on to the innate ability of each person to self-regulate emotion. Food intake and to eat mindfully. So this is the biggest difference between some people that has or not have a problem actually and a weight problem with food.

Yeah, and well, I want to kind of ask you about this. So you mentioned, yeah, that I guess the micro-learning, but you know, tell us a little bit more, I guess, about mindfulness or applied psychology, you know, in this space of emotional eating. You kind of mentioned about like a lot of this can be rooted and sort of ingrained and, you know, the way you were raised raised in your family, but, um, you know, these kind of micro-interventions, your micro-learnings, like how does that work, um, as far as, you know, disrupting, I guess, um, you know, what would otherwise be like an unhealthy habit? Tell us a little bit more about the micro-interventions, I guess what I'm trying to drive at.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, nowadays obese and overweight people are used to try to solve this kind of problem, um, with a typical approach like dietitian, nutritionist, surgery, gyms, or, uh, calorie counting apps. But, um, This most conventional approach had very little success in disabling compulsive behavior. So the problem is how we relate with our behaviors in a compulsive or not way. So they focus on the symptom rather than the cause of the symptom itself. And they rely into the motivation, but motivation sometimes is not sustainable for highly sensitive people. Just to Give you some numbers. 30% of the population are considered as high-sensitive people. So, and 90% of them has the risk to develop a dysfunctional relationship with food. We are talking about 2 billion people in the world right now. Okay, so this kind of project are right now into the market. They are not working for that kind of reason. And Because they are based on motivation, sometimes they generate also frustration. So people maybe are motivated to do something, they have a strong call to action, but they don't know how to engage into this specific behavior. And these are present, the specific majority of our clients. So people that are trying to lose weight or deal with their emotional eating, but they don't know actually how to really change. And That's why, I mean, what we are doing through, thanks to this, our microlearning and mindfulness approach is to create a comprehensive training in emotional resilience and behavioral self-regulation, especially applied to food and the eating. With the microlearnings, what we are trying to achieve is that there is not someone that is teaching to you what to do once a week with a 1-hour lesson or a professionalist that is coming outside your world. We are trying to give to you any, I don't know, coping strategies or some tools that you will be able to bring into your own life. So I'm not saying to you what to eat, how to eat, when to eat. I'm just to say to you, okay, stay in contact with your body, feel your emotion, and make the right choice for you in that moment, okay? And that's totally different because no one do that. Everyone try to teach you how to live your life actually, or how to live your relationship. So they don't give you the trust that you can make it Okay, they are always— but it's something that is good for a certain kind of a professionist, I don't know, like some dietitian or nutritionist, because when you fail, actually they are generating recurring revenue. I mean, it's bad to say, but sometimes it is this. So I mean, there are some— we are working with a lot of dietitian nutritionists that share our vision, so to make able people to change actually their life and The approach with the microlearnings, it helps us to keep every day a support. So we are delivering 2-3 minutes video, almost 80% of our content are video-based, so with small video and the other are text or audio. It means that every day you can have something, okay? We are taking care of you every day. And the mindfulness is something that it makes them the overall approach in terms of how to generate kindness, self-compassion to your body, how to treat gentle yourself, try to not judge you and your choice. And thanks to Vipassana meditation and other techniques, we are even able to decrease the stress related with this kind of feelings and because of the inner nature of the meditation and decreasing the stress. People that are high sensitive are high stressful, and decreasing the stressful, we can go into the heart of the problem. And so we can even decrease the intake of food because we are decreasing all this, the overall stress. And again, the approach of the mindfulness, something that comes from Sorry, help us to— a bit of flu, standard old flu, not the new one. And I mean, our goal in using this kind of approach, and I mean, it's to put the person, the people into the center of the self-development program.

That makes a lot of sense. I think the contrast between, you know, an overly pedagogical or somebody just kind of telling you how to do it versus this mindfulness approach that's very like deliberate and always kind of following up and checking in and making sure that it's like, you know, it like you said, it helps to keep the motivation up, etc. So really, really interesting. So from the user perspective, if I'm somebody, you know, signing up for Breeders, I go to the website just starting out, sort of how does it work? And then if you could talk a little bit more, I know there's also a kind of the personalized support and coaching or access to a community is also part of it. If you can tell us a little bit about why it's so important to have that kind of community or personalized support and how that works through Readwise as well.

Yeah, so basically to start the program, you have just to go into the website and start the free trial. We are giving the free trial for everyone with no credit card because I mean We strongly believe that what we are trying to achieve is something that could be helpful for you or for who has this kind of problem. And because we were obese, strongly obese, emotional eater, sometimes we are very, very diffident in terms of people that asking to us money. And that's why we decided to don't ask any kind of card at the beginning of the process, just to create trust, more trust on our approach. So our goal and our— we strongly believe in our approach and what we are saying, okay, test it. If it works for you, we are happy. And otherwise, Otherwise we will see if there is something else maybe that it could be helpful for you. So first of all, you have to subscribe into the 14-day free trials. And yeah, it's a full feature free trial, so you can get access to all the features we give you. And you can start to get into the members area where you can consume, look all the content. We have some intro content to explain very well which is our approach, how it works, and how it could to help you. And the first step to be done for us, that is very important, is to join the community. It's a program highly and strongly based as a community. So we have a strong community. We have a lot of people after 2 years that help each other, that can give advice. And that's because from the first second, you can even join the live activities that we are doing into the community. We are used to do from 2 to 4 live activities per week that are divided into webinars, live guided meditation from our teacher, and we are running every week a sharing group. So when you join the guided meditation or the webinar, you are just a listener, but when you join the sharing group, you can even talk to someone else. You can talk with our mentor, and you will talk with other people that are taking part of the program. And again, All the community, all the sharing groups, everything is set up to create a non-judgmental space. And it's something that since now it's recognized by our customers that they feel very safe into this environment. It's very important for us. And so we're talking about the content. You can get access to the content and from day one we will send to you the daily notification So you unlock content and we can send you a notification by email or Facebook Messenger. Now we are starting with SMS and/or WhatsApp. So it means that I can notify you every day about what's going on for you. And then you can get access to them, to the platform that is a website right now and look at a video or read the text. In terms of the coaching part, so actually we give to you the ability to chat, to write with your coach. So we assign to you a coach at the beginning of the program when you when you sign up and you can start to write to him or her, depends, as soon as you join the program and we give the opportunity to schedule a first introduction call at day 1. So actually there is the onboarding day, is the day 0 when you can understand what's going on and where are you landed in and from day 1 you can start to work maybe with a coach and taking contact with them, with with him. We decided to go with this kind of support with coaching and community because normally the relationship with the impulse to eat emotionally is strengthened in loneliness and in self-closure. So it's very, very typical that people that are highly sensitive are loneliness people, that they don't want to— they feel more and more closing themselves and they are very difficult to stay with the other and to be into a group. So, but one of the main feelings when the people join for the first day to the program is the shame because they don't know how to regulate with food. And when they get into the community and they see that there is a bunch of people that like them, has the same problem, this change everything because you are not alone anymore. So we are talking, we are a lot actually, because there's a lot of people that maybe don't talk but has this kind of disease. And so you start to communicate with other people and you feel from that more relaxed and again, more relaxed, less stress, maybe you are not going to eat so much. So it's a starting point to feel welcome first of all, and to see that you are not alone in this issue. There is other people like you and you can just share with them.

Yeah, that's really, really great. So thank you so much for offering the 14-day free trial. We put the link so anybody who's watching live or watching this replay video, you can see the link there and try it out for free. And yeah, and like you just mentioned, you know, there's the access right from day one of the community support as well as, you know, the personalized coaching. So awesome. Thank you so much for including that for our audience. We really, really appreciate that. I want to ask you, so I understand you've recently expanded to the UK market. Congratulations. Tell us a little bit about your traction and growth and how things are going at Breeders and what the reaction, I guess, has been as you expand the service out in the United Kingdom.

Yep. So as mentioned, we started here in Italy almost 2 years ago, and since now more than 1,000 people tested the program and we convert them in more than 3 than 300 clients. And since now, actually the first step of the program, it takes 6 months, okay, is a day by day, sorry, month by month subscription, a renewal membership. And for the one that they take it for 6 months, 50% of them, they lose weight actually. Even if we are not strongly selling the losing weight feature, okay, we are more onto the relationship. The losing weight is something that are very good consequences. And as mentioned, 50% of them lose weight with the 50% average of their body masses. And the other 50%, I mean, they didn't lose weight. First of all, maybe they don't know, they didn't want to lose weight actually. So because being emotionally literate doesn't mean that you are overweight or obese. Okay, there are a lot of our clients are actually normal weight, so they are not clinically in that target, like, let's say, overweight, but they are suffering with their emotional relation with food. So they have a huge change. And the most important things, something that we have something like 40 pages of positive comments that they sent to us privately. So we are collecting, we are sharing all the feedback because once they start with this program, okay, they are starting from the food, but once they understand what's going on, they are able to apply all the tools and the principles to their life. So they are not— they are changing their relation with food, they're feeling better, but they're even feeling better with the other people around them, okay? And it's very important. So we tested even with a net promoter score to understand how they like it. We collect them, we have an average and 80 point for the net promoter score, that it's good, an average of 9, 9.5 people that share what we are doing. And a lot of people are bringing other friends or colleagues into the platform. And we are starting, we started here in Italy some partnership with 3 hospitals to test the program with I don't know how to say the— here in Italy there is a public health actually, and so people that has this kind of problem, maybe they are obese or overweight, they go to the hospital to get some feedback or some cure. And so we are testing, we are going to test our program in collaboration with other approach, okay, like a dietitian, nutritionist from the public system. And we are starting a partnership to help people as a follow-up after bariatric surgery. So the idea is that when you have this kind of surgery, you are going to really change your body, but maybe you don't have the structure to understand how you feel about your new body, or you haven't changed the way you feel, do you, really with food. So you are having a surgery, your body are maybe decreasing the weight, but the risk that you are going to take again, regain the weight is high. So we are doing this kind of test, scientific test. And since we have seen that we have this kind of result here in Italy and that the mindful eating and the mindful approach, it's very, I mean, it's increasing outside Italy actually. We are still into the beginning of this approach. It's not so usual. So we decided to go into English market, English-speaking market, and to understand, I mean, The customer base, it becomes huge because there are many people that are talking in English instead of Italian. We are only 60 million. And we started from England because we have some partnership with some advisor that come from some hospital in London and that are used to deliver this kind of approach, maybe privately or with small classes with mindful eating. And we started 2 weeks ago actually, we went live with the English-based program. And I mean, we are live and we are starting to run some operation to get some people on board and we already some clients, that it's good without doing almost anything. And step by step, we are going to make what are we doing right now here in Italy. So some webinars to inform people, to collect some lead, to make them to try the free trial and then to see what happens.

Yeah, awesome. Well, we're conducting this interview in English, so if you're not an Italian speaker and you're listening, again, like, you know, the platform is open now and the 14-day trial is there, so you can go and check out the English language version. Kind of something you were leading at a minute ago, you kind of led into my next question. I want to— because just basically about, you know, how these microinterventions and mindfulness are sort of still kind of just coming onto the scene, especially in this context, right, of helping emotional eaters to, like, address this problem. And so I want to kind of ask you to make a prediction. What do you envision for the future of mindfulness within the context of food or how this applied psychology can help change impulsive eating habits? How much do you think this is going to change over the next 5 years as people start to adopt it?

Well, looking at the trend, basically US and again English-speaking market since last 10, 15 days is something that is growing a lot because people demand of their program to, to live better. It's something that is going to be a common goal for everyone. So we are starting to think that we can live better with ourselves and with the people around us. And I think that mindfulness and applied psychology can help a lot to deliver this kind of message this kind of vision to live all together a better present, first of all, and for the consequence, a better future. And I'm pretty sure, I mean, we want that. We are one of these kind of actors in this field to try to have an impact to grow this approach because we strongly believe in the vertical of the relation with food. There is a lot of work to do. I'm talking Right now we are working with people that have an average age of 30-55 years. So it's someone that has already some problems and it's difficult to change something at this age. Like everything, if you want to learn some sport at 40, it's more difficult than once you have 10 or 11 years. And we have a huge problem as a humanity right now that the the average of the obesity for infant, childhood, and people that are, I don't know, from 6 to 15 years, they are growing like 8 to 10% every year. And we are, we strongly believe that we need to bring this approach as a prevention as soon as possible. And this is one of the goal of the scientific research we are we are doing with some hospitals. So to help parents to help their child to grow with a more conscious and awareness about their body as first, and then their relationship with them, with food. Because basically once you have some parent that has this kind of emotional eating problem, it's pretty sure that the child or the son or daughter, they're going to have this these problems. So I strongly believe that for the next 5 years, we will be in the middle of the growth curve again, because more and more people, like thanks to other apps like Calm or Headspace or what else, that they are living in this kind of approach. And more people and young people, that is something that is great, are understanding that that could be a life-changing approach. We can live better and we can live better together with thanks to these techniques or approaches.

Yeah, I love that prediction because it totally makes sense. Like you say, these behaviors as you get older in age, they become harder to have that intervention. So I love that prediction, you know, kind of going earlier in life is kind of a more effective way. And that's the trend that, like you see with other mindfulness approaches like meditation in schools and things like that, it's being taught earlier. So that totally makes sense to me. Really, really great prediction. So what advice would you offer for other early-stage entrepreneurs or maybe just an aspiring entrepreneur entrepreneur who's just thinking about getting started, anything you wish you would have heard, you know, 3 years ago when you were just getting started?

That it's hard, but my biggest suggestion is to base your company on your vision and your mission because when the stuff is getting hard, you can always rely on that. So if you are building something that can, could have a good impact for your client or for someone else, you can always rely on that. And so this is my first strong advice. So don't do that just for money because maybe you will never see enough money. I mean, it happens that you can get broke as soon as you can think. And that's my advice. And so this is the first one. And something that I would be, I mean, 3 years ago I would like to understand is to create as soon as possible, to listen my client, to create something that could be adopt it as too much people as— sorry, too many people as possible. Because actually we started with a more tough approach. So going B2C directly in Italy without money. So it's something that it's hard. And maybe it could be better to have some strong partnership that could help you to validate your project or your services or product and it could be helpful even to raise money more easily. Because going B2C, you have to demonstrate to investors that you are good into acquiring customers and to acquire customers, maybe you need money. I mean, you need money at the beginning and it could be difficult. So we started because we had a small traction from day one and that's something that give us the energy to go ahead. We started with 1 or 2 clients now We have more than 300 and it's something that is not a huge traction to run a big, big round, but it's something that could be done. And again, for this kind of project that is in a bit into the healthcare vertical, we start to go B2C because once you want to stay in this field, sometimes you need a lot of money to start. Okay, so if you want to start being validated by an hospital, you need to run a research, you have to pay a lot of people and it takes a lot of time. And so we try to bet everything to say, okay, we go live and we will try to change people's life. If it works good, if not, we will try with something else. So again, just to maybe to close, as a general advice to take some risks, but But be focused on delivering something that could help someone else.

Perfect. That's awesome. Okay, final question here is kind of just, you know, where is Breeders headed next? Is there any other, you know, news or updates to share with the Founder Institute community or kind of any generic asks for the audience who might be watching?

So the ask is pretty simple. So try— more feedback we have, so it would be great for us. So for everyone that wants to understand better, what are we doing? First of all, try to get the free trial to join us. And for the one maybe that they don't feel to have this kind of problem, but they like the vision and approach, try to maybe get in contact to understand if they see where we can use our approach in other field or, I don't know, in other environment and how to help people. And For the next update, I think that, I mean, we will be focused a lot into the growing again the customer base here in Italy and to the English-speaking market. So if it's first in UK, then I think we will move as soon as we have more structure, maybe US. And actually we are growing into different direction. The one is the geographical approach. So starting from UK, then move to another country. And then we are increasing our offer as I mentioned As I mentioned, we are going to release, I think in 2-3 months, a new program for parents to help their child. And because we strongly believe, as I mentioned, that as soon as we get into action for the life in this moment, and it could be very, very helpful to create more healthy people for the future.

That's perfect. We talked about it, and it's in development now. So we'll keep on the lookout for that. This has been really interesting for me, learning about how these kind of mindfulness interventions are being applied in the space of emotional eating. And we're all really looking forward at the Founder Institute to keeping up with Breeders and where you're headed next. As you hint at these kind of future product releases, like we talked about, maybe looking to do these interventions earlier in life. So for parents to teach their children these good habits early on. Yeah, we're just really excited to hear the traction and success and keep up with where you're headed next. Stefano Iorino, thank you so much again for joining us.

Thank you, it's been a pleasure.