Ex-4 Loko Founder, Now Drinks THIS Daily?! 🤯 | Chris Hunter DSH #697

Just this morning, I was in, I went to one of the smoothie shops around and I got a green juice and I saw they had wheatgrass.

And I was talking to my wife after it, and I'm like, oh, my stomach feels a little weird.

And I was like, it was crazy in my mind.

I'm like, is that organic wheatgrass or was it sprayed with something?

And then they just put it in my, you know, and isn't that crazy?

Like, you can do better by having a wheatgrass rot and you still don't know if it's like crazy.

Yeah.

All right, guys, we got Chris Hunter, founder of Koya, and also Forloco, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Both of them.

What a transition.

It was a wild one.

You didn't want to stay in the alcohol space?

You know, the deeper stories, I was forced out of my own company.

Oh, wow.

My partners and I had a...

essentially just different view of the world over years.

And I woke up one day and I was fired from it.

Oh, yeah.

As a founder?

As a founder.

Yeah.

We hear stories of that.

Yeah.

I mean, look, we were 25 when we started the company.

So we did legal Zoom docs.

It was majority rules.

I brought the guys together.

I thought I'd always be in the majority.

And I suddenly wasn't.

And it kind of worked out, though, because I was transitioning in life.

I was married.

I had two kids.

You know, health and wellness was more important to me.

And so Koya made a lot of sense.

Yeah.

Now you're pushing a great product that you can stand behind.

People are drinking it and you could feel good about it.

Absolutely.

And from a lifestyle perspective, like I always think of how do I incorporate, I have three young kids.

How do I incorporate?

life and work together.

You know, we get to go to like Spartan races that we're sampling the product at and the kids get to go and run versus, you know, spring break for four locusts.

I love it.

Yeah.

So talking about Koya, what's in it that makes it it healthy, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So it's a blend of plant proteins.

So pea, rice, and chickpea protein, which makes it a complete amino acid profile.

That's usually the knock on plant-based products.

And it's in almond milk or coconut milk, usually almond milk.

And it tastes, I mean, you've tried it, right?

It tastes really good, but it only has four grams of sugar.

So most people are shocked because I believe with beverages and with food in general, you can have the healthiest thing, but if people don't like it, if it doesn't taste good, they're just not going to sacrifice.

So, So we started with taste, we made it taste really good, really easy, and then it's kind of like, oh, this is healthy up.

I'll keep drinking it.

Yeah.

What's your thoughts on guys like Dave Asprey going after these almond milks, these oat milks, saying they're not good?

Look, I mean, I get it.

I mean, um, I, the glycemic impact of, of oat milk, I get, um, you know, I think there's different ways to attack everything.

And so, there's the, there's the environmental impact.

Are they more environmentally friendly or not?

Like, are they more bioavailable?

You know, there's all kinds of different ways to go after it.

I'm not about exclusiveness.

So, like, we don't, it is vegan.

Koya is vegan, but we don't pitch it as that.

We don't pitch a vegan lifestyle.

Like, I have a steak one night, grass-fed, you know,

high-quality, and then I have a Koya for breakfast the next morning.

So, I think you can have both.

Nice.

You could use it as like a meal?

Yeah, we use it.

I mean, technically, it's not a real meal replacement, but it's really high in fiber.

It's an excellent source of fiber.

And so it fills you up.

And so it can act as a meal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I had a doctor on.

He said there's a major fiber issue right now.

People don't eat enough fiber.

Exactly.

I mean, I think I'm going to mess up the percent a little bit, but I think it's about 30% of your daily intake of fiber is available in one Koya.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's impressive.

Yeah.

How many do you drink a day?

I'll drink two, maybe three.

Dang.

Okay.

So, so I'll drink one in the morning with mixed in with coffee.

Yeah.

And so like we're now in Starbucks.

And so one of the drinks that people make is they take a Venti cup, fill it with ice, put a shot of espresso in it, and then pour Koy in it.

You get protein and coffee.

It's like satiating.

So I'll have one then, maybe one before or after a workout.

You know, some of our flavors are pretty decadent.

So you can even have it as a late night snack.

That's cool.

So what's the process for making a drink?

Do you just come up with stuff on paper and then you sample it?

Like, how does that work?

Yeah.

So

most people start with co-manufacturers.

I mean, it's really, we now own our own manufacturing facility, but it's really expensive to do that.

So you can find facilities that produce whatever you want.

So a lot of times people will make whatever they want in their own kitchen or hire a formulator and come up with something that they that kind of like fits what they want and then you take it to a co-manufacturer and you can produce it at scale got it so look the reality is right now it's easier than ever to make a food or beverage product there are so many um support companies out there that can formulate it for you produce it for you all these things um but you still got to know where to start right and you see a lot of celebrities trying to enter the beverage space right now right a lot a lot i don't think that's totally new i look the ones that are really doing well are the ones that are really living the brand right so what the old model of like have a a celebrity talk about the brand or throw them on a billboard or in more modern times, post about it, like it's transparent.

Everybody knows that's not authentic.

But the ones that are really like aligned with it, as an example, Chris Paul is an investor in our company.

He's nice.

He's a plant-based consumer.

He was organically drinking COIA before he ended up investing his own money.

We don't have him as the face of the brand, but he is a celebrity and an athlete that is aligned with the brand.

You have others like, I think like Logan Paul and KSI, like they live prime.

Yeah, that's why it's working, right?

They live it.

They live 1.2 billion.

It's crazy.

For fastest ever.

And it's, I mean, The Rock with Terramana, right?

He lived it.

It's not like you were asking him to make a post.

He was doing stuff.

McGregor, too.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

With prop, what with Proper 12?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then the Nelk Boys with Happy Dodd.

Yeah, exactly.

All those guys.

Yeah, you really got to be in alignment with it.

You can't just throw it up on your Instagram post.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And if you don't build a good foundational business, what I think some of these celebrities had to learn is like they may have thought or the person bringing them the deal may have thought, like I have the celebrity, it's done.

Beverage is a very complex industry.

I mean, you have to have distributors on board for the most part, right?

Because D2C doesn't usually work that well for beverages because they're heavy.

And if you take products like Koya, they're also refrigerated.

So you have that double whammy of shipping.

So retail is really the

channel to play.

And if you don't have the infrastructure with distributors, with know-how at retailer, all of that stuff, it's, I don't care how many people know about it, they're not going to buy it if it's not available.

So retail is super important for this type of project.

I believe retail is really important.

Now, look, we, we've been 100% retail focused.

We've gone in and out D2C, never profitably.

But I'll say that as we talk to our customers, our number one request is, how do we buy it in bulk?

Because right now we sell over 2 million bottles a month.

It's one bottle at a time.

Wow.

Yes.

No six pack or something.

No, nothing, right?

One bottle at a time.

So that's a ton of trials.

A nice place to start.

But our customers are saying, well, how do I buy it in bulk?

Right?

It's it's clumsy to carry up four or six bottles to the checkout.

And then the second request request is, how do I get it delivered?

And so what we did, we took that feedback and we developed a shelf-stable version of COIA.

It's got 20 grams of protein, it's got vitamins and minerals in it.

And we're launching that on Amazon this week.

Oh, nice.

It's like a powder?

This month?

No, no, it's a ready-to-drink.

It's like in a Tetra pack.

You know what a Tetra pack is?

Is that the plastic thing with the

almost like the cardboard boxes?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You know, like box water would be in it or whatever.

Other protein drinks coming in.

So, so we're launching that and then we'll continue to expand categories.

But

that'll be our first entry into like a delivery D2C multi-pack.

Yeah.

And you got a lot of flavors now, right?

Whenever I go to sprouts, I see.

14.

Yeah, 14.

Yeah.

So flavors have really been important.

Look, there's always like your core flavors.

Our core are vanilla bean, cacao bean, and chocolate banana.

Yeah.

But then we have like a tail.

Some perform better than others.

Like, I'll give you an example.

We, we created a cold brew coffee flavor of Koya seven years ago.

We immediately thought it would be number one.

It sat at probably like number eight, like our worst-selling product for five years.

All of a sudden, this protein coffee thing hit and it wasn't something we started, it's just a trend, and it became our number four product.

Okay.

So, having like a lot of lines in the water from a flavor perspective, I think are important.

And then, two, sometimes we do flavors that are just, they create a lot of buzz.

They're cool and unique.

Will they be here in two years?

Like, we launched a cereal flavor line, like

almost like fruit loops and that kind of stuff.

I don't know if it'll be here in two years, but there's a buzz about it right now.

Right.

So, yeah, I could see that.

I was at Target the other day and Native, the brand that does body washing stuff.

They have a collab with Girl Scout cookies right now.

There you go.

Crazy.

It's probably not going to be there next year, but whatever.

Got some buzz.

Yeah.

That's cool.

How much research goes into new flavors?

Like, is there a whole team that's doing the taste tests and like research and all that?

So we have an amazing woman on our team that has developed like over 2,000 beverages.

Wow.

So she can do the science behind it, like figuring out the flavors.

Cause, you know, there's a lot of stuff, the raw ingredients, the flavors, all that that goes into it.

It's not that scientific of an approach from us as a company.

We will either look at stuff that's working at retail.

So as an example, we saw cereal kind of having a comeback.

We knew cereal was unhealthy.

This was a good way to get a

play on nostalgia.

So we came up with that idea.

And then she makes it happen.

But somebody might be out, one of our team might be out in stores and have an idea and share it.

Or we may have some investors or even a retailer bring us an idea and say, hey, we think you should launch, as an example, a matcha flavor.

Right.

We can easily do that.

Because of your success with Forloco, were you able to raise capital pretty easily for this?

Yeah, so we didn't really raise money at Fusion at Forloco.

Um, and it was one of the things I wanted to do at Koya just to have the experience.

And to be quite honest, it came from a point of like, I felt a little bit insecure about not having done it.

And so I did it.

And now we've raised more money than I wanted to raise.

And so I'm good.

I don't want to raise any more money.

It did help.

There were a couple of things that helped.

One, the success, you know, the track record I had with Forloco.

And we created another brand called Not Your Father's Root Beer that we sold to Paps.

Oh, nice.

Both of those helped.

The second was we had investment very early from a guy named Bill Moses who started Cavita, which is a

essentially like a kombucha that sold Pepsi.

I think I've seen that one.

Yeah, it's out everywhere.

It sold to Pepsi six years ago or so.

Got it.

And so he helped validate me and our product in a new category, which was non-Alk as well.

So both of those helped.

And you were able to scale into retail.

I feel like that's super hard.

Yeah, it's super hard and it's slow.

Like by comparison to digital products and companies, like you know, people that do that can scale overnight, right?

For us, there's a review cycle, maybe to every year.

Let's say right now, uh, there's a review, it might take four months before that retailer puts it on their shelf.

Wow.

So, even when we have, which we did, like great sell-through data and the products working, it just it takes time.

It's a slower process, and you have to front the money, right?

Cause they're on net terms.

That's right, they are.

Yeah, so you have to produce it.

We sit on the inventory.

Then they have, you know, some of them have net 10, but they get a discount at that.

Usually they're around 30 days.

Got it.

I've heard of net 90 on some source.

Yeah, some ask for that.

That's crazy.

And some actually go as far.

They haven't done this to us, but some actually go as far as consignment.

Oh, so only per sale.

They want you to give it to them and whatever sells off the shelf, they'll pay you for it.

Ooh, that's risky.

Yeah.

I mean, we're a perishable product.

It just doesn't work that way.

Yeah.

So how long does it last on shelf?

120 days.

Oh, that's pretty long, actually, for a drink.

Yes, it's not too bad, but it has to stay refrigerated the entire time.

Got it.

So it costs money for them.

It costs money for us to make sure it stays refrigerated like shipping we can't just throw it in any truck there's and there's always risk right so when they unload the truck it could sit outside there's uh but anyways that's how it is any new products or flavors planned this year yeah so so our most exciting launch like i was mentioning is that is that um shelf stable version on amazon so we'll have a presence on it we get 5 000 searches a month for koya and we sell zero of them wow we don't have a product wow so this we think this should be really really big just organically to offer the the customers what they're asking for.

We'll continue to expand categories.

So we're looking at things that make sense.

What we know about Koya is it's about delicious plant-based protein.

So where can you go from there?

Right.

So we can go into Shelf Stable.

We're looking at, I have three kids.

Yeah.

They all drink Koya, of course.

It's in our house at all times.

I just find half drinking bottles around my house all the time, right?

Because it's a lot of protein for little kids.

So we're going to do a kids line and then we'll expand into different categories as well.

You ever think about doing subscription?

Cause I sign up for Magic Mind.

So they send 30 a month, check 100 bucks a month.

Well, again, so with us not shipping them, then we haven't been able to do that, but on Amazon, we will now.

So we'll have subscribe and save and we'll have a subscription model, which I think will be really valuable because here's the reality.

We learned this over COVID.

Like if you have a bottle or two in your fridge, you'll drink a bottle or two.

If you have 12 or 20, you'll drink 12 or 20.

So we're forcing people to go to the store every day to drink a Koya, where now they can just load up their fridge or pantry and drink it multiple times a day.

Absolutely.

Do you have an end goal for this?

I mean, look, I've ultimately wanted to have a strategic sale at some point on one of the companies.

We still own Fusion and Forloco.

We still own this as well, or I still own this as well with the investors.

But we pivoted, I'll say two years ago, two and a half years ago, from a high growth, high burn company to a self-sustaining, profitable company.

It was absolutely necessary for us to do.

And the nice thing that that gave us is time and optionality.

So we're not in a rush.

Someday, you know, whenever that is, when we build the best company and have the right, you know, opportunity, I'm sure we'll sell it.

We have investors who want to return, right?

Nice.

But I didn't know that was a common thing where drinks were operating at a loss like that.

It's very common in drinks.

I mean, some of the biggest brands that you've ever heard of may have never made money.

Wow.

Yeah.

Really?

Never made money.

Like Gatorade?

Maybe, but that's really a really long time ago.

Like maybe like a body armor or like a vitamin water.

And these guys probably could have, but they consciously chose to keep reinvesting.

Now, I don't know the specifics.

They may have made some money along the way, but Suja is an example.

Oh, I love Sujo, yeah.

Yeah, so they never made money until they sold.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, they sold?

They ended up selling.

Yeah.

Oh, was that recent?

There were a couple different situations, but I would say a couple years ago.

Oh, got it.

Yeah.

They were the first drink sponsor I've ever had.

Oh, really?

Five years ago, they sent me those.

They're really good.

Yeah, they're good.

Yeah.

Wow.

I didn't know they sold.

Good for her, man.

Yeah.

She was running that stuff alone.

I forgot her name, but super impressed with that story.

Yeah.

I knew some of their other, some of their other team, but uh, because I was in San Diego for a while.

That's cool.

So is it common?

Because there's, there's a big few drink players, right?

Like all the, like maybe five companies are, is it common for them to just buy out people?

Yeah, it's pretty common.

I mean, there's been a lot.

So we're in a niche of the beverage space where we're refrigerated.

So that takes different capabilities.

And so we're now in a place where there are more people interested in refrigerated products because it speaks to fresh.

You don't have to add all these things into into it.

But traditionally, that was like kind of a question.

Did people want to get into refrigerated?

If you're just a general beverage that doesn't have to be refrigerated, it's Pepsi.

It's the big players you would think of.

Now,

I will say that other people are taking kind of a different strategy right now with like a roll-up and building their own platform strategy.

And a couple of companies like VitaCoco have gone public on their own.

And, you know, so there are other options now.

I didn't know Vita Coco was public.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

I love coconut water.

There's one upcoming brand called Once Upon a Coconut.

Yeah, I've seen a lot about it.

Why is it different?

They've done well with the celebrity aspect where the celebrities are actually behind it.

So they got Damon John, they got Charlie Rocket, they just got Gary Brecca.

Okay.

So they got major faces and just marketing, social media marketing, they've crushed it.

Yeah, that's that's a huge thing.

I tell you, I like the brand Harmless Harvest.

They actually recently sold to Danone.

Oh, they sold?

They did.

But they have been involved in that brand for a long time.

So I don't think anything will change.

Got Got it.

But

that's a great story.

That's a great brand.

It's the pinkest coconut water I've seen in stores.

Yeah, exactly.

And I remember when it came out, it was like eight bucks a bottle.

And that's like eight years ago, right?

So it was, it was crazy, but people paid it.

It tastes great.

They just dropped a sparkling water.

Did you see that?

No.

Sparkling coconut water.

Really?

Yeah.

I just tried it.

Yeah, I just tried it.

It was decent.

Yeah.

I like sparkling water.

But yeah, my fear with these brands, because I'm very health conscious, a lot of them, when they sell the bigger companies, they start making more profit.

So they remove certain ingredients.

Yeah.

I remember back in Chicago, my early days of the beverage industry, I had a friend who worked at Kraft Heinz and he was telling me that like every year they had to hit certain metrics and they had to increase their margin or at least maintain it regardless of input costs.

And he's like, so sometimes you just have to take a little more ketchup out and put a little or a little more tomato out and put a little more high fructose corn syrup in.

And it's like, that's scary that that's what happens.

It is scary.

It's the game they play though.

They're all margin and money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, I actually just this morning, I was in, I went to one of the smoothie shops around and I got a green juice and I saw they had wheatgrass and I got a wheatgrass shot.

I was talking to my wife after and I'm like, God, my stomach feels a little weird.

And I was like, it was crazy in my mind.

I'm like, is that organic wheatgrass or was it sprayed with something?

And then they just put it, you know, and she said, isn't that crazy?

Like you can do better by having a wheatgrass shot and you still don't know if it's like crazy for you in some way.

So your body's that sensitive where you can tell if it's not the highest quality stuff.

You know, who knows?

It could have been a bunch of things, but something was definitely a little bit off.

Yeah, there was a big wheatgrass phase.

I don't know what happened to it.

Yeah, it's, it's not the easiest right i mean you you kind of have to have the shop to to make it i don't think you can i don't think it stays the point is i don't think you you can bottle it and sell it absolutely and there's a lot of health fats you're probably tempted to launch new flavors all the time

Always.

And so we've done some of that and we've gone a little too far away from our core consumer.

So as an example, we launched a functional coffee line that had MCT oil in it and like ashwagandha and these other popular ingredients.

And I love all those.

But as an entrepreneur, I think you have to know what the brand is about and what the consumers of that brand want and expect.

And so we launched it.

It did okay.

It didn't do great.

It didn't do horrible, but it was not selling like our protein was.

And so we ended up sunsetting that and focusing on our protein.

So I think you have to be a little bit careful.

We've learned some lessons.

The biggest one, I think, was we launched a...

This was consumer driven.

We launched a low-sugar smoothie line.

So to compete with like Naked and Bold House, if you know those brands.

Well, Naked has a lot of sugar, though, right?

57 grand, like as much as the Coca-Cola.

Now, granted, there's this from fruit and coca-cola's is from high fructose corn syrup but the point is it's a lot of sugar and so we were looking at the insights consumers were asking us for fruit flavors so we launched this like low sugar smoothie line lower in protein yeah and it did okay ultimately i realized we had some self-inflicted wounds because if that was how you became familiar with the brand you may not have crossed over and become a longtime consumer of it we took our own shelf space as an example to get that out there we thought it had a huge opportunity right and then sometimes it didn't work and we had to pull it out and then we had to rebuild So, so you have to be careful with, I mean, there's a ton of opportunities, a million flavors you can come out with, a million line extensions, but like what, what really makes sense?

Yeah, because there's that balance you play of what percentage of people actually care this much about that health aspect, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And I think, you know, some brands have tried, some have done it successfully, but some brands have tried to expand into every category out there.

And it's like, I don't know, how many brands do you think of that you're like, I buy this as my coconut water?

I buy this as my protein bar.

I buy this as my, right?

I would say none.

None, right?

There's very, there are a few, but there's very few.

And so I think there has to be a red thread

between them all.

And between, for our brand, that red thread is plant-based protein.

So plant protein, low sugar, and that has to taste good.

And so that gave us permission to go into shelf-stable drinks, which is still a drink.

So it's only like one degree away.

We have some other innovation that'll take us out of categories, but it'll still be true to that.

That makes sense.

Do you have any data on what percentage of your customers or return repeat customers?

I don't know specifically.

It's a little bit harder to tell at retail, right?

But we know it's a pretty high repeat rate.

So we'll do a lot of like in-store demos to get people to try it.

And we'll see, of course, you always see a spike during times like that.

Okay.

But we'll see like kind of a new base level set after that.

And so we believe we have a pretty high retention rate, 60, 70% of consumers that try it.

So really, it's an awareness and trial game right now, which is why launching Starbucks was so important.

I mean, I think they said they have 100 million people walk through a Starbucks store or at least go through the drive-through every week.

What?

Every week.

And you're in all of them?

And we're, well, we're in 9,000 in the U.S.

There are 16,000.

The other 7,000 are what they call licensed stores.

So like inside of a Target or inside of an airport.

Okay.

And we're not in all those.

Got it.

So those are separate from the main locations.

That's right.

They're just managed a little bit differently.

Okay.

Interesting.

Wow.

Yeah.

I didn't realize that.

You know, that's not only, that's what I call revenue generating marketing.

Like they buy the product, they sell the product, we make a margin, they make a margin, but it's exposure like beyond what we could generate otherwise.

I'm surprised how effective the demos are.

I didn't know those were increasing numbers like that.

Yeah, and they're not necessarily efficient.

So, you know, you won't get a return on those right away.

You need labor cost and right.

It's almost like understanding your lifetime value on digital, right?

We don't necessarily have the ability to completely understand that at the store, but that's the only way that demos make sense is if you look at the lifetime of a new customer.

Yeah.

Did you have a mentor?

Where did you learn all this?

Because this is super impressive to me.

Trial and error.

I mean, I started in the beverage industry.

It's the only thing I've ever done.

So when I was 23, I got my first job working for some guys with the startup vodka company and they came from Seagram.

So they had a lot of experience.

I kind of got a bit of a mentor.

There was a guy who ran a company called White Rock, which created two vodka brands that sold.

One was called Three Olives and one was called Pinnacle.

Oh, I've heard of Pinnacle.

Yeah.

So this guy had done what I wanted to do.

He sold over a billion dollars of alcohol brands.

And so he put me in touch with a business coach early on who did some behavioral assessments and kind of helped me understand myself better.

So that was really helpful.

And then really just asking a lot of questions as I was growing different companies.

Nice.

Kind of learn, right?

Yeah.

Like one of the ones I shared recently is, you know, there can be a false sense of success in beverage when you think about just your sales.

Because I usually sell to a distributor.

The distributor then sells to a retailer.

The retailer then sells to the end customer, right?

Wow.

So it goes through three levels.

Multiple layers.

And in alcohol, it's called a three-tier system.

You have to have that.

I can sell directly to, let's say, a Kroger in Nanok.

But the point is, if I'm just measuring my sales to them, that's a false sense of security.

Because if it's not selling off of the shelf at a specific rate per day per slot,

you know, it's going to, you're going to run into a dead end.

So the metric is called dollars per TDP or dollars per total point of distribution.

And so I was talking to

early beverage entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs explaining like that is the metric.

It tells you everything.

If it's high, you can expand because people want things that are very productive on their shelves.

If it's low, you need to get, you need to focus on awareness and trial because people aren't buying enough of it.

If you expand distribution, that metric will usually go down for a little bit and then it should come back up as people try it.

If it doesn't, maybe you expand it to the wrong area.

So without experience, you wouldn't know that's the one to pay attention to.

That makes sense because you could expand too quick, right?

For sure.

And you can expand into the wrong channels that are very cost, costly, but also don't return that well.

Right.

So like

a channel that I'll talk about, you know, like the drug channel, like Walgreens and CVSs, there are a lot of those stores.

Yeah.

People aren't usually buying the most beverages at those stores.

They might buy some and by category, maybe they buy energy drinks more than they buy something else.

The point is,

it depends, right?

It depends on if you want to expand there if you're looking just for more doors or if you're looking for highly productive doors.

So you have to ask yourself that question because it's not cheap.

Yeah, from a consumer point of view, me in a pharmacy, I'm not buying a healthy drink at a pharmacy, right?

Most likely.

You're probably picking up your prescription or band-aids or, you know, whatever.

I don't know.

I'd rather buy that at Whole Foods or Sprouts.

Yeah.

Just mentally, it makes more sense to me.

Yeah, I think that's probably pretty common.

Yeah, but that's a good point because people could get excited by like a huge purchase order from like a Walgreens, see this many stores.

Yeah, there's thousands of them, right?

And that's great.

But if you're turning one bottle per store per week, I mean, is it really, you know, in a product like ours that's perishable, like it may spoil there.

Right.

So has that ever happened to you?

Occasionally, not very often.

When our product moves pretty quickly, when it has spoiled, it's usually been from abuse.

And what I mean by that is like, you know, if it gets left out, if it comes off the truck and it sits out for a couple of hours, it gets warm.

Like it can't, it's like milk.

It can't sit out.

Yeah.

So it's usually spoiled out that way, not because it hasn't sold through.

That makes sense.

There are occasions.

I was watching you on another interview.

You got your frack got kicked off campus when you were in college.

Yeah, it did.

It did.

Yeah.

We were, our fraternity was called Kappa Sigma at Ohio State.

And

we had this legendary party on campus before I was there.

It was called Reggae Fest.

And they used to pull up beer trucks in the driveway and sell, you know, keg beer.

And it was just, it was wild, right?

And then it got too wild and it got, it got banned from campus.

Well, we decided to bring it back.

And our fraternity was, was pretty wild anyways.

I guess it's probably no surprise that two of the founders of Forloco Loco were from that fraternity.

But we decided to bring back Reggae Fest, and there were a couple of rules.

And one was we couldn't have alcohol.

And, you know, there were some other things.

We brought in Ziggy Marley.

We had, do you know, OAR?

OAR.

They're a band that played a lot in the Midwest.

And so we had them come.

They've been, they've gotten really famous at the time.

They played, I think, for free.

Wow.

But it was a huge event.

And we weren't supposed to have any alcohol.

And it just so happened that at that time there was a reporter from Rolling Stone on campus and he was reporting on hazing and sororities yeah that was and it was greek week and so he was following all these sororities around he heard about our party he came to the house somebody decided to show him around no one knew who he was and he took him to all the wrong places he took him to the green room where there was alcohol he took him to the house next door that sold all the drugs he got hammered throughout the day and made some really offhanded comments

and that got published in rolling stone oh my god i put i put it i wrote wrote a book and i put it in the book about it um and it was pretty it's pretty wild so that was like the first kind of thing that got us going.

The second thing that essentially really got us kicked off is they entered our house during Hell Week and

they saw some hazy going people from nationals,

Capitol Sig National.

So the way fraternities work is there's a national chapter.

There's like a headquarters somewhere.

And then each campus has a, is like a local chapter.

So the nationals had come in because they saw us in Rolling Stone and then they saw us in Hell Week.

But the Nationals know about the hazing.

I mean, that's...

Yeah, everybody tries to turn a blind eye.

but I think these things go through cycles, right?

So they're like,

look, we got kicked off, and then a couple years later, they brought people back, and it was a very different mentality.

Our fraternity was like the hard partying, a lot of fun, athletic guys.

When they brought the fraternity back later, it was more like a business philanthropic.

Okay.

You know, so it changes over time.

Yeah.

I went to Kappa Sigma parties at Rutgers.

Oh, nice.

I think they got banned for like a year or two.

Exactly.

Right.

And then, you know, it happens.

Somebody else got banned two years after us.

But overall, you think fraternity was a good move for you?

It was.

I mean,

Ohio State's huge, right?

So I thought it was a nice way to get like a core group of people that you got to know really well.

I liked the rituals that you went through of like, of having to know everything about your fraternity brother.

Like, like, I know the guy's first, middle, last name.

I know his family.

I know his brothers and sisters' names.

I know, you know, and you had to do that as part of the initiation.

There's like 100 guys in the fraternity.

Yeah.

And you get tested on it.

That's the only way you go through.

And so

I think it's pretty cool that you get get to know people that way, especially at a young age, because at least for me, it was like, you know, it was very surface level a lot of times.

Right.

So did you make it all the way through college, all four years?

Yeah.

I ended up five years.

I went to Miami of Ohio my freshman year.

And I thought I hated it.

I did really well.

But I thought I hated school.

And I realized what I hated was I was homesick.

It was the first time I was ever away from home.

And so

long story of, you know, kind of a crazy upbringing, but I transferred to Ohio State, quickly found out I couldn't stay at Ohio State because my money was taken by my mom who was struggling with addiction at that time.

So I had no money to pay for college.

So I went back to Youngstown, which is where I'm from, Youngstown, Ohio, lived with my aunt, started working in construction and selling cars and all these things and realized that that wasn't for me.

I needed to go back to school.

I always got good grades.

went back to Youngstown State for a quarter and then transferred to Ohio State permanently and did my four years there, but what ultimately ended up being five years.

Wow, what a story.

And all that's in your book?

Yeah.

Blackout Punch.

Yeah.

So it's very candid.

I share everything about who I am, how I grew up for Loco,

business wins, you know, setbacks, Koya, and kind of how I approach life now.

I love it.

Where can people find the book?

It's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble's.

Awesome.

Anything else you want to promote, man?

No, just check out Amazon.

Check out our new Koya.

Look at drinkkoya.com.

Check out the book.

And And cool.

It's a great drink, guys.

Definitely check it out.

Thanks for coming on.

That was fun.

Thanks for watching.

See you guys tomorrow.