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Some of the best companies are started by people that create a product to solve their own problems. That’s exactly what happened with Serenity and Joe Carr, founders of Serenity Kids. When it was time to start a family, they looked around at baby food options and found the choices lacking. They knew convenience would be important, but it seemed like their nutritional values would have to be compromised to get the convenience they needed. Instead of settling, they started Serenity Kids, a company that makes baby and toddler food as nature intended. Now, the Carrs, along with many other parents who need convenience but want nutrient-dense food for their kids, can have both!
Listen in as Serenity and Joe tell me all about:
- Serenity’s childhood and how she found the paleo way of eating
- Product research and development
- Packaging and why pouches are so popular
- Joe’s story and how he went from a dumpster-diving vegan to entrepreneur
- The importance of taking advice
- Growing the business as their daughter grows
My kids are long past the baby food stage, but I wish a product like this was around when they were little. For those of you that do have kids in this age group, check out Serenity Kids and use code DIANA15 for 15% off your order.
Resources:
The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson
The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
Taylor Collins and Katie Forrest of Epic Provisions
Dr. Sarah Ballentyne – The Paleo Mom
Connect with Serenity Kids:
Website: Serenity Kids (Use code DIANA15 for 15% off your order!)
Instagram: @myserenitykids
Facebook: Serenity Kids Baby Food
Twitter: @myserenitykids
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.
Thanks to our episode sponsor, Annmarie Skin Care, a company committed to creating the best natural skin care possible and doing it sustainably. While I’ve always been picky about what goes on my skin, this product goes beyond that, feeding the skin with high-performance seed oils, antioxidant-rich botanicals, and synergistic plant stem cells that deliver skin-supporting nutrients. My skin feels fantastic, and these products smell so good.
For a limited time, you can receive 30% off your order at sustainabledish.com/skin with code DIANA30.
Quotes:
“So even if I want to change the world for cows, the way I’m going to do that is with other people, not with the cows. Not by just not eating the cows doesn’t change a damn thing. I need to actually be connected with other people.” – Joe Carr
“We have a noble mission. I mean, who can argue with better food for babies, like it’s a hard thing to argue against.” – Serenity Carr
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
(Patreon Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
Ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level? Join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon and have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community, plus so much more. Go to sustainable dish.com/join to support my work, and thank you.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Today I have with me, Joe and Serenity Carr. They are the founders of Serenity Kids, which is an awesome baby food company that I love because it includes wonderful animal source foods, which is everything I advocate for, especially for kids. So welcome to the podcast, everyone.
Serenity Carr
Thanks. Glad to be here. Yeah,
Diana Rodgers, RD
Well, welcome you two to the podcast. I don’t know why I said everyone, I guess everyone listening as well. So you guys have a really interesting background or story into how you got started. So can you share that with us?
Serenity Carr
Yeah, sure. My story actually starts very, very, very early in utero, my mom in the 70s the healthiest thing she knew was vegetarianism. So she decided when she got pregnant with me she was going to try being a vegetarian. And she was the whole pregnancy and probably most of the breastfeeding time, which, for me, I don’t tolerate wheat or dairy very well. So it was a tough road. I was born a little bit early, I was really small. I had my first ear infection at two weeks old and first round of antibiotics with, you know, rinse and repeat throughout my childhood. Multiple times a year, I would do rounds of antibiotics, which when I was maybe, I don’t know, six or seven it really started affecting my gut and my digestion. And I remember seeing all these commercials on TV for like Pepto Bismol and Maalox and Mylanta – all this crazy, like antacids and digestive things, and I was like, “Mom, I think I need some of this stuff.” You know, my stomach really hurts. And she said, “Oh, honey, that stuff doesn’t work.” And I remember thinking at the age of nine curled up in a ball on my waterbed with terrible pain, thinking, Oh, I guess stomachs are supposed to hurt. And it’s just a really sad thing. And then I started taking sort of taking those antacids when I was a teenager, took them pretty much every day for the next 20 years. And it really messed up my digestion. And it wasn’t until I had another ear infection in graduate school that I got put on another antibiotic. They gave me Cipro for an ear infection, which I don’t understand. But it just destroyed my stomach. I couldn’t eat food, or even drink water without serious pain. So I went back to the doctor, I’m like, Look, I’ve got this stomach pain. My normal antacid procedure is not working. And so she gave me I don’t even remember what it was – the purple pill to take every day for the rest of my life. And I was like, Oh, that’s not what I want to do. I don’t know what I’m gonna do because I can’t eat food. But it’s not that. So I called my dad and I’m like, Dad – he’s a shrink. He calms me down. I’m like, “Dad, this doctor just gave me this prescription everyday forever. I’m only 33. Like, what do I do?” And he said, “Well, you should maybe read the book I gave you last year for Christmas, you know, the one on the Paleo diet.” And I was like, what? He gives me dumb dad books all the time. I don’t read them. And but I found that it was Mark Sissons Primal Blueprint. And I started reading that. And then he also mailed me, Robb Wolf’s, The Paleo Solution. I read the intro to The Paleo Solution and was sold because I had studied anthropology in undergrad. So I understood a little bit about genetics and evolution and hunter-gatherers versus agriculture. And it just the light bulb went off. And that was 12 years ago. And I have been able to switch my diet, I don’t have to take all those medicines anymore. And it was something as simple as changing my diet that fixed everything. And so diet’s always been a really important thing to me. And we were at Paleo FX, a paleo conference here in Austin, in 2016, me and Joe, and started talking about someday maybe having a family. I started getting fuzzy and maternal, and I’m like, Joe, let’s go find the baby stuff. Where’s the baby stuff? So we looked into every single booth, and there was nothing for kids. And so I went up to the CEO of the conference and was like, “Hey, Michelle, where’s the baby stuff?” And she said, “You know, I’ve wondered that question. Every year. I always wonder, and I was like, Man, I guess we’ll just have to make my own baby food.” But in the meantime, Joe had just read Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week and was looking for a way to stop trading hours for money, right. How to make a product, have a bigger impact, and be able to take vacations and things. And so he was trying to come up with a product to start, and then, you know that a couple months later he said we gotta start this baby food company and meets all these criteria, and this is what we need to do.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow, that’s amazing because Tim Ferriss is such a huge influence in the Paleo space. So it’s just so funny that you just read, like, two of the books I have on my bookshelf and, like, combined it with, you know, things that I can also relate to as well because I was really sick kid and thought that stomach pain was just what you dealt with every time after you eat. So, you started this company, like in your kitchen? How did that all come about?
Joe Carr
Yeah, we started – Yes, we started the kitchen. We went to make… we started with research, you know, Serenity’s a big nutrition nerd. She healed herself with food and was coaching other people how to like heal themselves with paleo, basically, which is how I got her and I got gotten into paleo. And so she did a bunch of research. Serenity, tell them about your summer of nerddom.
Serenity Carr
Yeah. So right after that Paleo FX conference, when Joe said we gotta start this baby food company, I was like, Okay, let me think about it. So I’m a big researcher. And I launched into my summer of nerddom, and I read conveniently, most of my kind of health mentors are like paleo health gods or whatever you need to call them. They had had kids fairly recently, within a few years before that. So they had – most of them had written blogs about what they were feeding their kids because they – like people ask us all the time what we feed our kids. And every single one of them at some point or another was making sacrifices for nutrition for convenience, right? Nutritional sacrifices for convenience because being a parent in this day, and age is very hard, especially like little babies and toddlers. So I was like, well, if my like “put on a pedestal” health mentors are making the sacrifice, then there’s a need for a product in this space. So we started doing a lot of research. I read… I even read the USDA’s infant guide to Feeding Infants that they give for WIC. And it was way more – way more friendly to my dietary ideas than I expected to be. They were very pro-meat; they were anti-sugars. They cautioned against a vegetarian diet for children, which I was surprised and pleasantly surprised to find. And then at the end of that summer – well, it didn’t take me very long to realize, oh, wait, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. Mother Nature has done that for us. The perfect baby food is breast milk. So if we can look take a look at the composition of that and figure out what a natural transition macro-wise to some other kinds of food might be. So I dragged Joe to the milk bank here in Austin, which is the largest milk bank in the country. Donate your extra milk, moms – just that’s a tiny plug. And I started learning a lot about breast milk, and it was a lot of fat and a lot of carbs, and then and protein in there too. And so what we started looking at…
Joe Carr
And is an animal product and a free-range animal product.
Serenity Carr
We did a study on what – I don’t know for over 400 organic baby food pouches that were on the aisle. And the results of that were really disappointing.
Joe Carr
Yeah, we put them all into a spreadsheet, mapped the macros of the baby food, and all we looked… you know, the first study was organic baby food pouches.
Serenity Carr
That’s right,
Joe Carr
Right. 246 organic baby food pouches sold somewhere in the country, whether online or in stores or whatever. And then an average of nine grams of sugar per pouch, which doesn’t maybe sound like a whole lot, but for a 15-pound baby versus 150-pound adult, you literally add a zero that’s like 90 grams of sugar in one pouch. And because they’re all fruit, and they’re all carbs, then two or three of these a day that’s like 30 grams of sugar. It’s there’s… babies are eating Snickers bars worth of sugar, and it’s fruit sugar, but you know, it’s processed, highly processed fruit, which just as basically jam, you know, it’s essentially very sugary. But even more concerning to me than the sugar was the lack of meat and fat. Less than 4% had meat at all. None of that meat disclosed sourcing – so feedlot meats, organic feed lots, and those were very poorly distributed. Most grocery stores didn’t actually carry any of those products. And because they all tasted really awful, they all had grain, they all had corn, they all had been some of them mixed fruit in with the meat. They were awful. And then less than 2% – sorry less than 1% had two grams or more fat. So almost no fat on the aisle. Breast milk is half fat. Even USDA says baby need 30 grams of fat a day. You know, half a kid’s calories should be from fat for the first two years and that you know and yet there was nothing on the aisle. It was all carbs.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Did you actually try all these?
Serenity Carr
We tried them all.
Joe Carr
Oh yeah. We even tried the Gerber mystery meats. I mean we tried like the nasty conventional stuff. We tried all the organic meats, they were awful.
Serenity Carr
I wouldn’t say we actually tried the Gerber meat.
Joe Carr
Well, I tried to.
Serenity Carr
We opened the lid, it stunk up our kitchen.
Joe Carr
Those little sausages. I couldn’t eat those little sausages. So we tried the meats, but the little sausages were…
Diana Rodgers, RD
And explained to me the pouch idea because that was not something that was on the market. My kids are 16 and 18 now, and there were no pouchy options. So I’m just guessing it’s… is it more environmentally friendly? It’s less expensive to ship because it’s not glass. Is that it?
Joe Carr
One of reasons. The pouch craze started about 10 years before we came into it before we discovered this. And yeah, the others, you know, there’s a lot of initially it was the environmental argument. It was a lower footprint because you’re shipping flat plastic rather than heavy jars. They’ll break there. They’re not recyclable, but only a quarter of glass jars are recycled anyway. So most of those glass jars are ending up in landfills. And so if you’re gonna end up in landfill, better to have this flat little pouch than it is to have the big jar. So that was the original argument. But then the moms discovered how convenient it was. I mean, that it’s not breakable. So when the kid throws it across the room, it doesn’t break, you can put the lid back on it. They can feed themselves at a certain age, they start to be able to feed themselves, which some nutritionists have come some concerns about. If you do that too much, then there’s mouth development issues. But here and there, it’s you know, no big deal, just like drinking from a straw. And so the convenience issue and then you know, there’s a little more, you can get a little more variety of stuff in there so that you can use them at like an older and older age. You know, you only want to spoon feed, minimum amount of time, as soon as they can include your off a purees. But if they’re feeding themselves, they can eat that, you know, a couple years in, you know, it extends the life of the puree format, which particularly for nutrients as product like ours, it’s really great for parents because they can now have a format that’s convenient, easy that the kid likes, but it’s full of nutrition. But all the others were just full of sugar, they were just off all carbs. And so they would kind of get their kids off as fast as possible because they don’t want to just give them these fruit pouches all the time.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Interesting. Interesting. So did you with your own children? Is that how you develop the flavors of what you’re offering? Or how did you come up with…
Joe Carr
Initially, we had to use friends’ children and their friends because we didn’t have a baby yet. We were just planning to get pregnant when we discovered the opportunity and actually put our baby on hold for a minute to start the company. So we made them in our kitchen, we actually were living in a co-op of like 12 or like 12 other people. We reserved the kitchen to make baby food purees all day. Fight… we had lots of fights about…
Serenity Carr
Measuring tiny amounts sharing tiny amounts of peas…
Joe Carr
Making puree, I mean, it was a disaster. And then driving them. They had to refrigerate them of course, because we couldn’t make them feel stable. So refrigerated, drove around town, trying to get babies to fill out surveys. You know, so that was… they were all developed on our friends kids. But then, in the process of developing, we actually launched our first products the same day our baby was born.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Oh my gosh!
Serenity Carr
Not exactly the plan
Joe Carr
Not planned at all, but was a fortuitous day. It was like these are always meant to be linked. So she’s always eating the product. She loves the products. She’s four now. And still will eat as many pouches a day as we let her. Like she we have to… if you ask her favorite food, she’ll say olives and pouches, like those are her favorite foods.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wonderful. So explain some of the combinations you have in there. And just how different that is from like the current landscape. And have you seen, I mean, I see that, um, who’s that celebrity that has the…
Serenity Carr
Jennifer Garner
Diana Rodgers, RD
Jennifer Garner. So she’s got that line out, and there’s no animal source foods in…
Joe Carr
Correct. They’re exclusively plant-based. So Once Upon a Farm is the name of that company, right? Wasn’t started by Jennifer Garner. She sort of bought it, called herself a founder. Okay, you know, but they’ve expanded it a lot, Jennifer Garner and John Foraker, the former founder of Annie’s organics, have expanded that brand really big. And their proposition is refrigerated is higher vitamin content because it’s not shelf stable. Like it’s not pretty good at shelf stability.
Serenity Carr
It’s fresher.
Joe Carr
It’s fresher, it’s cold pressed, but it’s all fruit and veggies and their processing modality also requires it be high acid, which means fruit or citric acid or lemon juice. So, you know, our processing modality allows us to, and most, actually, most of the baby foods rely on a high acid shelf stability model which is easier and cheaper. We use a different one that’s more similar to canning. So it doesn’t have to have any pH. We can have meat. We can have vegetables, it doesn’t have to be acidic. So we have a lot more flexibility in the ingredients were able to use, and because it’s pressure canned, it still maintains a lot of the nutrients. We’ve not done a lot of side-by-side comparison, but you know in general meat and vegetables have more nutrition to begin with the other than fruit. And the only thing that’s damaged is the vitamin content, the fat, the protein, the fiber, the carbohydrates, all that is identical with the process mode doesn’t hurt it at all. So vitamin content is probably reduced some in our products versus a fresh product. But when you look at the nutrient density overall, I think you’ll see that we win.
Serenity Carr
And compared to HPP, or compared to hot-fill all the other pouches…
Joe Carr
Just the other ones. So Once Upon a Farm uses HPP, which is probably the best of the of the fruit pouches, like if you’re going to use a fruit, or fruit and veggie pouch, Once Upon a Farm probably have the most nutrition because they’re the freshest and they are very, they’re also the commitment to sustainability. So we have a lot in common with each other. You know, we’re both run by gorgeous celebrity women.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Well, and let’s talk about the vitamins too, because it’s not all vitamins that would go downhill. It’s just that like vitamin C is the one I can think of the most because that I know, like it’s present in liver in high doses. But as soon as you cook it, it goes away. But kids are known to consume a lot of fresh fruit on the side. And it’s not like they’re only eating your pouches. But to try to get…
Joe Carr
Yeah, I mean even better than one of our pouches, right. I mean, you’ve got no processing modality like that, if you’re going to eat fruit, you get the fiber, you get the skin, you get higher vitamin content.
Serenity Carr
Basically, we designed the nutritional profile to be to approximate breast milk was a little bit of extra protein because there was none on the aisle. So we make sure to have a certain amount of protein and a certain amount of fat in every single pouch,
Joe Carr
Fat and carbs
Serenity Carr
And carbs. Right, and the whole macros so we have it’s a balanced type of approach. And for our meat baseline, which is our core. We have our grass-fed beef, we have our bison, we have wild-caught salmon, pasture-raised chicken.
Joe Carr
This is a good example. This is 100% grass-fed beef with organic sweet potato and kale. That’s it. There’s some water to make it turn into puree. There’s four ingredients in this one. The other bestsellers are free range chicken with organic peas and carrots. And this also has some avocado oil, the chicken wasn’t quite fatty enough.
Serenity Carr
Even though we buy thighs.
Joe Carr
We use the fattiest cuts of the meat. But in order to get to our five gram of fat target, we add avocado or olive oil depending on the flavor that we’re going for. This one has avocado. And so it’s a meat, veggie, fat combinations that like she said, mimic breast milk and are really very simple. That tastes great.
Diana Rodgers, RD
It’s like grandma’s stew in a pouch.
Serenity Carr
Or it’s kind of like what I would get when I went out to a nice restaurant. I get a steak, a sweet potato, and some kale as a side, like are you kidding me? That’s like a nice meal.
Joe Carr
Yeah, I just want to do an ad of like, one kid served the steak with the kale, the sweet potato, and other the kid’s served an apple and three blueberries and a mango. It’s like, who’s getting [garbled]
Diana Rodgers, RD
And how much extra citric acid on the side?
Joe Carr
Yeah with a side of citric acid, right? Yeah, would you really need it if you have all that fruit, but we focused on most nutrient-dense foods, which also happened to taste really great. And also are more in line with what people have at least health-conscious parents are eating themselves. And so I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful is the people buying our products were already buying grass-fed beef, were already looking at, you know, wild-caught salmon, healthy raised chickens. And were already looking at low-sugar vegetables and have that consciousness and just weren’t finding it on the aisle. So they were holding their nose and letting them eat fruit pouches because that’s all there was. And so now they don’t have to do that.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. And so are most of your sales just in retail stores or do people go onto your website and get like subscriptions to…
Joe Carr
We have a huge… we’re very omni channel we have a lot of channels you can buy us on. So about half our business is on Amazon or our website. So huge online sales both obviously we’re in 12,000 stores, nationally, retail, so big retail business continuing to grow. We’re in basically every natural food store in the country. And now we’re that quickly expanding in conventional. We’re in nationally with Kroger, we’re about to be in 2800 Walmart’s. We’re about… we’re going to be at about 1500 Targets. So we’re one of their top-selling brands like every store we go into. We become one of the top sellers even with only a couple of products on the aisle because people are just so ready. We’re the only meat brand. Nobody in this four years we’ve been selling has come out with meat on the baby aisle, like they’re just people are just still so scared to touch it. They probably couldn’t do it any cheaper than us. So when they look at competing with us, they’re like, we can’t undercut them then what’s the point? Serenity’s gonna win every time. But especially with our sourcing story and you know, with all the other tenants of our brand around heavy metal testing and trustworthiness, and that were run by a mom who’s feeding this to her baby, I mean, really no other baby food company is actually run day to day by a mom feeding her kids.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. And can you talk a little bit about how you went from where you started, and this co-op and driving things around and testing all this stuff to where you are today so quickly? And I don’t want this, you know, I don’t want my listeners to think that this is an ad because definitely, you know, I know this is just focused on one company. But I am sincerely just curious. And that’s why I wanted to have you on and your story, but also in how someone comes up with their dream. I mean, I bet a lot of our listeners have ideas and don’t know how to actually make them happen. So how did this like, how did you make it happen?
Joe Carr
Yeah, well, let me tell my story
Serenity Carr
Yeah. You tell your story.
Joe Carr
Because I think a lot of that comes from my story.
Serenity Carr
That’s what I gonna say this is Joe. Joe made the whole thing happen.
Joe Carr
The technical side was a lot of her, but this piece you’re talking about, like making dreams reality came from my journey, which also starts in childhood, you know, I’m autistic. I was not diagnosed autistic as a child. They didn’t understand autism and Asperger’s when I was a kid in the early 80s. And so I had this very big energy, I was very expressive, I was very creative. I was very loud. I was very social, charismatic. And that’s not the stereotype of what you think of with Asperger’s or even autism. And so they just didn’t know what was wrong with me. They called me ADHD, but those drugs didn’t help at all because it wasn’t accurate. And eventually, my official diagnosis I think, was obnoxious. And so I you know, I had a lot of social challenges. My big energy took over a classroom, it took over friend groups, like kids really didn’t like me, I didn’t know how to modulate my energy for them. Teachers hated me because I would just disrupt, constantly take over the room. And then my mom discovered theatre, that I was a performer. I was a natural performer, that my autistic gift was performing arts. And so I started doing professional theater and got into commercials and television and, you know, really spent a lot of my childhood and teenage years on stage, which is where that big energy really worked. But in middle school, I was annoying this popular girl and instead of being mean to me, she turned to me and said, hey, you know what, my friends and I were going to teach you how to be cool. And I was like, I’ll do whatever you say, I’m so ready to be cool, tell me what to do. And it worked. They told me what to do. And I did it. And then I became part of their cool group. And you know, I’ve been cool ever since. And I learned the most important lesson of my life which is that I could take feedback and become better. That there was a way I can improve myself. So I started this social personal growth path at about age 12. That continues to this day. A lot of adults I know have not figured this out yet. So I’m so grateful that I was able to figure that out, I got diagnosed with autism in college. So that was more information that was what they call it Asperger’s at the time. Since then, Asperger’s has been found to be the same as autism, but it’s all one thing.
(Annmarie Skin Care Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
I’ve recently switched my skincare routine to Annmarie Skin Care. While I’ve always been picky about what goes on my skin, this product goes beyond that, feeding the skin with high-performance seed oils, antioxidant-rich botanicals, and synergistic plant stem cells that deliver skin-supporting nutrients. I am loving the results of these products, which smell so good and are as close to nature as possible. For a limited time, you can receive 30% off your order at sustainabledish.com/skin with code DIANA30. That’s DIANA30. My skin feels so great, and again, these products smell so good. I would love for you to give them a try. Go over to sustainabledish.com/skin and use code DIANA30. That’s DIANA30.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Can I just interrupt really quickly? Because it does… that isn’t the profile that I think of when I think about autism? So what are exactly if you don’t mind sharing your challenges?
Joe Carr
Yeah, so autism is characterized by high sensitivity to stimulation, so easily, easily overwhelmed by sound, sights, touch, emotions, feelings, energies, even. So that’s a big piece of it. There’s a social piece of it, where it’s hard to know what other people are, you know, social – reading social cues is challenging. There’s a strong filter, social filter – mental filtering is tough, like we just sort of say what we think, just kind of comes out. And so we’re very honest, the benefit of that is we have a very hard time lying because it’s just whatever we’re thinking we’re saying. We just we’re really loud. So difficulty with lying. There’s we’re so also sensitive at the molecular level, I think so like sensitive to toxins, so a lot of issues with food allergies, or heavy metal toxicity. So I had all those impulse control sessions.
Serenity Carr
And I would say obession too.
Joe Carr
Thank you. So like obsession getting obsessed with a certain thing, like being really into one special interest, they call it like autistic
Serenity Carr
Marvel
Joe Carr
Marvel, superheroes, or whatever is one of mine. But like every, you know, different autistic people have different special interests where they’re really really into that one thing to the point of tuning out the rest of the world. So it’s like a hype- focus, but also very hard to focus at the same time, like we can hyper-focus but then if you do me something that’s boring, like, you know, I’m super fidgety, you know, can’t handle it. There’s a spatial awareness issues. I’m not going to stop. I’m focused, you know, spill things. My clothes are always dirty. I’m always bumping into people and not noticing it. As you know, there’s sort of a different relationship with the physical world. But my special interest was performing arts for a long time. In high school that actually switched to social justice activism, I realized that I could, in addition to changing myself, I can also change the world and I became very obsessed with social change and making a better world, environmentalism was one of the easiest things to get into. And animal rights as well was really big in that scene. So got really focused on the environment and became a vegetarian kind of thinking that that was what was best for the environment. And then went to college and discovered the vegetarian wasn’t enough I had to be vegan. And so you know, and became vegan in college. And I’m very sensitive to lots of foods. I’m an O negative blood type, which means like meat all day long, and I just craved it constant for that four years. It was just a constant meat craving and feeling guilty about like wanting meat, feeling guilty about it. So I found the best way that I could still eat meat was to eat out of trash cans. I was like hey, it doesn’t create economic demand for this unethical product, so I thought, so I can eat it out of trash cans. And so I like literally like spent years…
Serenity Carr
Dumpster diving behind restaurants
Joe Carr
Well worse than that. Like, you know fast food trash cans like half-eaten burgers and stuff. Like it was… my mom thought I was mentally ill. She’s like, I think something’s wrong with you. Like you seem obsessed with this and like in hindsight and I was just starving, malnourished. Yeah, I was like, really hungry for meat. And so, but I felt this real conflict because the environmental movement I mean, I was like sitting in trees, chaining myself to bulldozers. You know, I led the Food Not Bombs group in Olympia Washington for a few years when we were cooking vegan food for homeless people, malnourishing homeless people in hindsight, but we believe that was the healthiest thing. Also made from dumpster stuff, we would dumpster dive, cook it, feed it to homeless people for free. And so it was… very into that and got bored with that. I was like even that wasn’t crazy enough for me because I have to seek, seek thrill. I’m such a thrill seeker. So I went to Palestine. 911 happened my freshman year of college and a lot of stuff was heating up in the Middle East and especially in Palestine and found out about these activists that would go and join with Palestinians to take part in nonviolent resistance to the US funded Israeli occupation and that seemed like more up my alley. So I went to Palestine. And there was a lot of vegan activists, veganism was really common in the social justice activist scene because of this perception that it was better for the planet, or better for animals or whatever. A lot of strong reaction to factory farming, some of it true, some of it, mythology. And we were in Palestine. And they… it’s a giving culture. Palestinians are all about, you’re judged on how much you give away. And so we were their guests, even though they’re super poor, if they had meat, they would want to share it with us because they didn’t have a lot of meat. And if they did it because they raised it themselves, it’s like right there. So it’s the best meat you can eat, and they’re wanting to share it with us. And these vegans would be like, eww [garbled]
Joe Carr
And it was like such a huge insult. And I’m already craving meat, so I’m going to eat it. And me I’m like, I could just feel what an insult it would be like there’s no way I’m going to let my whatever this weird ideology impact my connection with these people. So I started eating it and when served in that I just started really examining how this lifestyle activism, this idea of I change myself to change the world interferes with our actual ability to change the world, that if I… if my diet choices interfere with my connection with another person, particularly oppressed people, then that is what we call counter-revolutionary. You know, we’re counter and we’re actually fundamentally fixing. So even if I want to change the world for cows, the way I’m going to do that is with other people, not with the cows, not by just not eating the cows doesn’t change a damn thing. I need to actually be connected with other people. So I got to get over that lifestyle activism and start eating meat and just recognizing that the way I live isn’t the be all end all. Like how… my most important thing is how do I build community? How do I connect with others to create change in the world? So fast forward that to we discover that I want to make some kind of product. Tim Ferriss told me to.
Joe Carr
You know, I’ve been working 90-hour weeks and jobs that were great, you know, nonprofits. I started my own youth program. And that was great for the handful of people I was able to serve, but it was so limited. You know, I could maybe have 30 kids in my youth program. Maybe that was big. So it’s like 30 kids at a time like I’m more than that I want to serve more and so read Tim Ferriss. Like you could create a product that either makes you financially independent so you can do your service all day long and not need money for it or possibly changes the world because the nature of the product. And so that’s where when we discovered the lack of baby food, how important a big an opportunity that was, and how important it was for the world, how it really combined with my mission to make the world better for kids, which was really my fundamental commitment, after all the Palestine stuff, I realized, it’s kids I want to focus on. I had a hard childhood, you know, kids are some of the most oppressed people in the world, ultimately. And so that’s where I was committed to, and that feeding them is a really big piece of that. What they eat, and how and being able to get access to parents, to teach them about everything else besides food was it was a big draw for me. Plus, we could be able to build a sustainable business that could also be to help us help us financially. So that was like, the vision ,was her vision, her mission for health, and wellness, my mission for children. And then the environmentalism we didn’t even know could be a part of it like that. It was like, oh, we should have the best environmental practices possible, just because that’s my mentality, and because that’s what our consumer would want. And we knew that pasture-raised and grass-fed meat, were better nutritionally. Also better taste and, and ethically, in general. And then when I discovered the regenerative agriculture movement. I discovered that we could actually reverse climate change, like, Man, I don’t have to be vegan sitting in a tree, right, anymore. I can actually make meat products that feed babies that, you know, make us decent money, and also reverse climate change and change the world was like, really powerful. So having all that combined together, you know, really had us clear that we were going to do it, there’s nothing that was gonna stop us. I think that’s one of the biggest things between oh, we had this idea. We’re making in the kitchen to today, where it’s like, Oh, if it works, we’ll do it. I’m going to work another job and kind of do this in my spare time. And if it takes off, maybe I’ll do something with it. Like, No, we were like this, we’re gonna do hell or high water. This is where we maxed out all our credit cards. We borrowed money from family, like we were all in. Cashed out all her 401k. I mean, like, everything we had was put into the initial stages of the company before we raised money. And we had to raise money to even launch because they were making shelf stable meat and the pouches such complicated technology that we had to have a lot of capital to a huge order minimums, because we had huge order minimums, then we needed bigger distribution. So we couldn’t just sell online, we needed to sell retail. Taylor and Katie from Epic bar were very essential to this process for us, like we met them really early on. We’d like had a couple of products that had tested well. We had a general brand idea, but we met them and they were like, you know, you’ve got to be in retail, this is a really huge idea. And you need to raise money. And they, you know, they taught us about regenerative agriculture. And so they were really… they became our initial advisors. And they had just sold Epic to General Mills. So they had a little bit of time. They were six months pregnant with their first kid. So they were like, we’re really into this, like, we really love this product. And so we set forth to do it, it took us funny that you say fast, because it took two years from that idea stage to the launch date. It took a long time for us to get out. I wanted to do in six months. But the processing in the factory work was very, very hard. We were using the same machinery for high fat meat puree that is usually used for fruit purees. And it did not behave the same. They thought it would it didn’t. There were all these complications. So we had to make modifications to the equipment and all these things that we had to figure out. And then of course, the day they launch was the day our daughter was born. So it was always meant to be that day. But in that two years, we didn’t just sit around waiting. Well, we were three months from launch for about a year of that. Every… we’re going to launch in three months. So I was marketing, we were going to trade shows. I was meeting with retailers. We had a website, we were actually taking preorders, which in hindsight was a terrible idea to take people’s money. But it motivated us to like advertise and to like be building a tribe, you know, really get building a lot of brand presence. So by the time we launched, it was as if we were a little bit further along than we were. And a couple months later Whole Foods called us, called my cell phone to say, well, we want to take you nationally. We hadn’t even met with them yet. And they were… they, usually it takes about a year to get into Whole Foods from the first time you meet usually. And they were like, we have this hole. We need to fill it. We have your products. Can you do it? And we were like, I was like I don’t know how but yeah, we’ll find a way and so we only had two products at the time, they wanted five. So we had… fortunately, we had four more under development or even more than… five more. And so we fast-track development. We raised more money and we launched in Whole Foods in February of 2019. Went from one little baby store in Austin to 450 Whole Food Stores overnight nationally, and then that jump-started us into a retail presence that allowed our sales team to sell into all other stores that share distributors with Whole Foods. And Whole Foods is a big leader. So if you’re selling well there and people like you there then it’s easier to get into more retail. But we’ve continued to grow the online business, mostly through paleo influencers, the Paleo influencer community like you, and Robb, and those folks promoting us was huge because they had these big audiences, a lot of them were having babies, and a lot of non-paleo influencers, but health influencers are influenced by those paleo influencers. So there’s a lot of people who now maybe wouldn’t call themselves paleo, but utilize all the same general values of low sugar and good animal products and high fat and gut health, functional medicine, all that kind of thing. So that really springboarded us to this big online community that we then used to grow the brand. And now we’re a couple 1000 stores with a, you know, fastest selling brand at most grocery stores. We have 25 products of three different product lines, and more to come. And a lot of that’s just sheer passion and dedication, like we’re going to do it. We’re going to find a way, you know, the new products were really hard like the puffs and the formula were both really, really hard products to create. So it took a lot of just sheer willpower and determination.
Serenity Carr
I think the one of the secret sauces to our business and the growth was the mission. We have a noble mission. I mean, who can argue with better food for babies, like it’s a hard thing to argue against. So because of that, we have had all these advisors and helpers, and people have given us discounts. And people have given us free consulting, and people have supported us with nutrition information. And we have really amassed an amazing community and a support network. Because we’ve never done this before, right? We don’t know what we’re doing. But we do have… we have people who do know what we’re doing, and they can talk to us for 20 minutes and give us some advice. And we take it, and we go back two months later, we’re like, okay, we did all that, now what and they’re like, Oh, we did all that.
Joe Carr
We actually took the advice,
Serenity Carr
We’ll take some more advice. So it’s been an effort of many, many people, most of whom, you know, at least a lot of them don’t actually work here. But they have just been really supportive of our cause.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Well, I’m both inspired and exhausted by listening to that story.
Serenity Carr
A lot of self-care. We’ve learned that the hard way.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Wow, it’s so fascinating to me. I had the guy from Alec’s Ice Cream on, who’s kind of in the beginning stages of all this with a wonderful new product to the category of, you know, A2 milk. I mean, that’s a cool story. And I think Katie and Taylor from Epic have really done a lot for this space and have not been given the credit that they deserve for all the work they’ve done to so it’s, it’s nice to hear that they helped you out. So…
Joe Carr
Trailblazers.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah. Awesome. So what’s on the horizon moving forward?
Joe Carr
Yeah, we’ve got more, you know, more and more products coming out. So we didn’t talk much about our other lines, but you know, we have these grain-free puffs, which is a little chewable snack that has bone broth, olive oil, and vegetable powders. So most nutrient-dense crunchy snack, anywhere in the store really like I don’t think there’s anything better anywhere else. And then we’ve got our formula product which was – went real crazy this year during the formula shortage, and is regeneratively farmed, A2, whole milk-based formula. It’s the most like breast milk of any formula ever created. Dr. Sarah Ballantine, the Paleo Mom did enormous amounts of research to help us develop that – like literally read every paper on breast milk, globally, written in English, like 200 or so scientific papers. The woman’s a beast! And mapped the nutritional profile of breast milk globally, and then helped us evaluate hundreds of different ingredients to start from scratch with formula rather than like modifying existing formulas. We’re like, why don’t we just throw out that template and say, What in breast milk? What are ingredients available to us? How do we mimic that and so our grass-fed A2 whole milk formulas the closest to breast milk on the market.
Serenity Carr
It’s the only one without industrial seed oils.
Joe Carr
No industrial seed oils.
Serenity Carr
It’s the thing we are probably the most proud of.
Joe Carr
One of the only ones without folic acid, synthetic folic acid, which is toxic for people with the MTHR gene, which is like half the population. We’re one of the only ones that’s lactose sweetened and it’s lactose carbs instead of corn syrups. Right and then the A2 protein being a key piece of that is the much more digestible form of dairy protein than the A1 protein found in most cow’s milk. A2 is what’s in breast milk, it’s what’s in goat’s milk, you know…
Serenity Carr
All other mammals
Joe Carr
Really all other mammals but this mutated form. Plus it’s regeneratively farmed from Alexandre Family Farm up in California.
Diana Rodgers, RD
So it’s the same, it’s the same milk that Alec’s Ice Cream is using. Wow that’s really great.
Joe Carr
They’re the standard. So we’ve got all this for those products. We are working, we are going to begin the process of getting our formula infant formula certified. So it’s technically classified as a toddler formula right now. Infant process takes many years and millions of dollars. But after this crisis, we’re like, we got to do it, like we got to be, and several other new formulas came out that we hoped would be as good as ours. And they’re not like, they’re not. They’re still on industrial seed oil. I mean, there’s still not everything we want. So we’re gonna work on that. We’ve got some new pouches coming out, that’ll continue to age up the pouch age a little longer, that can even work possible, hopefully, for maybe even palatable for elementary school kids would be like a really cool expansion. But in the long run, we want to be a children’s food. That’s the goal is we want to keep aging our products up with our daughter, to have nutrient-dense, great tasting, packaged children’s foods that don’t require compromise, that are easy, that the kids like to eat, that are full of nutrition, especially animal nutrition wherever possible. And that are easy for parents, so they don’t have to compromise when they’re…
Serenity Carr
And I don’t say too, the older kid gets and when they start going to school, if they do that, then we want to make it look like their friends’ food.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Yeah, I had that problem with my son who devoured sardines at home and didn’t think anything of it, sent it to camp with him one day, and he came home crying, saying that the kids were teasing him. And he will never eat them again. And I’ve gotten him to eat them again, here, but at home, but you know, kids are really sensitive to that. So I appreciate that you’re thinking of that.
Joe Carr
We’ll find a way. Yeah, well, this, it’s gonna it’s harder than baby because they have so much more social pressure. There’s so much more ability to choose, the packaging. I mean, everything matters more. For an older child, once they’re in school, they’re influenced that way. So it’s going to be a longer journey. No other baby food company has actually ever done it. They’ve not succeeded in crossing over from baby to children. So we’re going to be the first but just like we were the first meat and fat baby food, like I’m very determined, very clear that we’re going to be one of the leading natural children’s food company, that our customers start in baby and just keep buying the products on through, and we’ll just keep aging them up.
Serenity Carr
I mean, I need it for my own kid, like, I can’t not do it. Right, I gotta feed her.
Joe Carr
Otherwise, we compromise. You know, we have to have the convenience. We’re busy. And we give her crap that we don’t like because there isn’t anything else.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Well, I have an idea to share with you offline, around all this stuff of like a product idea. So I will end the podcast now. And thank you so much for your time and let folks know how they can find you on social media and your website and obviously in Whole Foods and many other retailers.
Joe Carr
And for a but first thank you for your work. I mean, day in and day out beating the drum on how important meat is and stripping down these myths that kept me malnourished for four years and made Serenity sick in utero, you know, like this is somebody’s got to do it. And it’s key for kids and children to get to get meat in their diets and to have it all throughout. Regenerative and grass-fed great, but regular meat better than anything plant, so…
Serenity Carr
And you are one of those health heroes of mine for many, many years ago. So just thank you for your contribution to me and my journey and helping to make me a healthier person so that I can do this cool stuff.
Joe Carr
So you can find this we have a website my serenity kids.com We’re also on Amazon just search Serenity Kids, you’ll find all our products there. And then, really any grocery store you go in. Whole Foods has all our products nationwide. Most natural food stores have a pretty good selection but really any…
Joe Carr
Sprouts Natural Grocery, HEB, Harmons, Stop & Shop
Joe Carr
Target, Walmart. Yep, really anywhere you go. Yeah. But Amazon and our website for best deals and have all the products.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Awesome. All right. Well, thank you again and hang on one second, and I’d love to chat with you offline. Okay. Thank you so much.
Serenity Carr
Thank you. It’s been great to be here.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. If you liked the show, please leave a review on iTunes. And if you’d like to support the work I’m doing on Patreon, please visit sustainabledish.com/join. As a Patreon subscriber, you’ll get access to ad-free podcasts, plus exclusive video podcasts, never before seen interviews, and a discussion community. Go to sustainabledish.com/join, and thank you for your support.
