Kareem Cook and Claude Tellis acquired
Naturade in 2012. Soon after, they paired up with John Lewis to create
VeganSmart, a plant-based protein powder. They always knew what they would become: A protein shake on a mission to help spread wellness amongst African Americans across the country. With Kareem a self-proclaimed devotee of the mysterious ways of destiny, it seemed appropriate to begin this behind-the-brand interview on that note.
The Upside: One of things that interested me about your story was the
kismet (fate) involved in the way your life unfolded. I read about the way your local stepping fame led you to meet Michael Jackson, which is amazing. But then you also said that you knew you were going to be on a game show. How did you get on Wheel of Fortune?
Kareem: Since I was a kid, I knew I was going to meet Michael Jackson, and I was going to be on that show. Here's a funny story. They had something called the Wheel O’ Wagon. It's not really a wagon but a traveling audition that Wheel of Fortune does. In 2014, I got a random email one day, like a spam email, that they were having an audition out in Palm Springs. So I decided to do it. I get there and there were like 1,000 people. I was like, oh my God, this was the biggest mistake of my life. It was a two-hour drive and a long line. They eventually let us all into this conference room, about 150 people at a time. They selected five people out of 150 to go up there and play a game. I wasn't one of those people. However, they had each person fill out a questionnaire and they asked for interesting tidbits about yourself. I told them that my name was Kareem Abdul Jabbar, because people loved to joke about that, and I think I may have mentioned something about choreographing a song for Michael Jackson.
A month and a half later I got a call. They said they were doing a little testing session here in Culver City, LA. Are you available to come? And I was like, yeah, I can come. This time, all the people were called on the stage. They did a round where they went around the room with one continuous game—you got to either say a vowel or spin. The second part was they gave us a piece of paper with 20 partially filled out words. They gave us 15 minutes to, to see how many of the words we could guess. I looked at the paper and I was a little nervous. I closed my eyes and said a little prayer. I open my eyes again and all the sudden, I knew the answers to all 20 words. Then there's a break and they're tallying up the sheets and I'm hearing people in the hallway say,
I got 10 of them, or
I got 12 of them. In my mind, I'm like,
man, I got all 20.
So then they called about 12 of us back in the room and we play a real game. About a month later they asked me to come on the show. I was on the show, but I didn't win. I came in second place and won $4,800, which was pretty good, especially for back then.
The Upside: Because you somehow knew, even as a kid, that you would meet Michael Jackson and be on Wheel of Fortune, when those two things actually came to pass they gave you the confidence to trust you were being guided?
Kareem: My favorite word in the world is
Providence. I was introduced to the word while watching the movie
The Matrix Revolution. There's a scene in it where Morpheus, the leader of the rebellion, is trying to calm everyone down amidst a stark, dangerous situation. He says,
Tonight is not an accident. I do not believe in accidents. I do not believe in chance. We are not here by chance. What I see are three objectives, three captains, and three ships. I see providence. I see purpose.
I remember thinking to myself, man, that was deep. But what does providence mean? The word sounds so powerful. I went home, looked it up and it said divine path—path set before you by God. That word was so impactful to me that I printed out the definition, framed it and put it on the wall. I think sometimes you're guided by a voice or force, I call it God. When you're on your path, things work out. They don't always work out the way you want them to work out, but they just ultimately work out. That is what guides me in in moments of uncertainty. When it's time to take a risk, I don't, generally, have any fear. If you've seen some of the moves I've made in life, you would see that's a consistent theme in my life.
The Upside: How did the role of providence inform the path of Naturade?
Kareem: My college friend from Duke, Claude Tellis and I are general partners of
Naturade, we mainly sell plant-based protein powders. Our whole vision and mission is to reverse the trajectory of diet-related illnesses, trends we saw first in our own families, but also have a devastating impact on the global level. Our scope has gotten well beyond the underserved communities who we initially sought out to address. Nationwide it’s an issue. There was no greater canvas in which you could see this picture than when COVID occurred. The majority of people who passed away were people who either had pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease as well as people who were suffering from obesity. I lost four family members—all of them had diabetes.
We are a nation of people who are largely sick on some level. We realized that by looking at the American Diabetes Association, when they said that 100 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes. But if you lose 10 percent of your body weight, you have a 65 percent chance of going from pre-diabetic to healthy. We said, look, here's what we need to do. We need to get people to lose a little bit of weight. How can we do that? At first, when we bought the company, we thought that there was maybe some magic blood glucose pill, like green tea, which was popular back then. Then we realized we had two friends who had totally reversed their Type 2 diabetes by going to a
plant-based diet. We knew that the majority of people cannot become vegetarian. However, what they can do is have a better balance.
Our message became about balance. If you going to do the unhealthy dinner in the evening, then why not have a
plant-based smoothie in the morning, perhaps for breakfast. That message has been resonating because it's not judgmental or polarizing—it’s been a message that everyone can receive. That’s how we were able to go from a super small company to a company that was able to garner distribution in some very difficult places. We’re in Costco, Target, Whole Foods and other national and regional stores.
The Upside: You say on your website that the thesis was to bring Whole Foods quality to a Walmart consumer. How do you do have quality ingredients and still keep a low price point?
Kareem: We haven't had the high margins that a lot of companies experience and we realize that on some level, we're talking to a price sensitive consumer. For instance, a jar of
Naturade VeganSmart might cost you $30 but that same quality product with 21 vitamins and minerals, 20 g of protein, dietary fiber, omegas, digestive enzymes, will cost you about $50 or $60 from other brands. Our products are very affordable. We could easily charge $60 for our product and we'd be justified to do it, given how much it costs. But we have partners and we've been able to negotiate our cost of goods down and offer products at a reasonable price that people can afford to pay.
The hard part is people need to be convinced why a plant-based protein shake is a good thing. Part of what we've done that's different from other companies in our spaces is we talk to people about why you might need to adjust your diet or lifestyle. And we talk about
intermittent fasting and being active, but in a way that’s not intrusive to your life. People think it's all or nothing, that you have to go to a gym five days a week and work out for two hours at a time. You just don't have to do that. You could get your exercise goals achieved in your own home. We talk about more than our products; we talk about how you can improve your life.
The Upside: What kind of work culture do you encourage at Naturade?
Kareem: We try to foster a team environment, even though COVID changed the landscape of how most companies do business, whereby everyone doesn't always come into the office. Still, everyone here is bought into why we're doing what we're doing. If you don't have a belief in that, you probably won't last too long. Everyone in the company has a voice, everyone can make suggestions even if we don't always agree with them or execute them. But I like to give everybody the opportunity to say whatever it is they want to say. I don't want you to feel intimidated that you can't, because that's where the great ideas come from. People who understand where you're trying to go and they're looking at it from a different angle. Ultimately that’s why diversity is so important because different perspectives, beginnings and backgrounds lead you to see the same issue differently. You can't see what another person can see and their perspective ends up being the one that was needed.
The Upside: What’s next on the horizon for you?
Kareem: We have a ready to drink a liquid version that's coming out soon. I’m excited for the launch of that. Right now we sell only powders, but we just formulated a liquid ready to drink (RTD), our first one. It took us a year to, to get it formulated and ready. So we're going to be hitting the streets with that within a few months.
The Upside: Do you have any final words of wisdom about how to navigate the challenges of entrepreneurship?
Kareem: We believe in being bold, taking risks and going for it. It borders on an irrational, illogical belief in yourself. That’s the only way we got here, wherever you judge us to be. And by giving back. We got Costco to give back $196,000 to
Prep for Prep, an education-focused organization for minorities in public schools, which I credit with literally taking me off the path I was on in the Bronx. It helped me get into the private school system, which led to Calhoun School in Manhattan and then Duke University. That has made all the difference in my life.
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