Greg Horn - Why the Future of Wellness Belongs to Brands That Can Prove Results

Rose (00:01.996)
Welcome to the story of a brand. I'm your host, Rose Hamilton, and today's guest is someone whose influence on the health and wellness industry cannot be overstated. Long before functional nutrition was a category, before science-backed supplements became mainstream, before wearables and health analytics were part of our daily lives, Greg Horn was helping shape the world we now live in.

Greg is a pioneer, an operator, an investor, and a community builder who has been at the forefront of every major inflection point in this industry. He's been in the room for pivotal regulatory milestones. He's helped build the intelligence networks that fuel today's category growth. He continues to guide founders and brands as they navigate what's coming next. And in today's very special conversation, we explore how we got here.

What's really driving today's innovation? The realities of commercialization beyond the hype and what 2026 and beyond might look like for one of the fastest moving consumer categories on the planet. So whether you're a founder, an operator, or simply someone fascinated by the future of wellness, you're going to walk away with clarity, insight, and direction. Let's dive into the story behind the category, the trends shaping tomorrow, and the man who helped build the foundation. Welcome, Greg Horn. I am so excited to have you here.

Greg Horn (01:20.075)
Thank you, Rose. Happy to be here.

Rose (01:22.786)
So Greg, one of the things I admire most about your career is that you were focused on science-based nutrition.

before the industry, before it even had a name, before it was even alive. And so before we zoom into where we are today, I'd really love to start with your vantage point. What were the pivotal moments that shaped the natural products and science-based industry into really what it is today? And help us understand your career trajectory and what drew you down this path.

Greg Horn (01:53.25)
Great, well thank you Rose. you know, I've been fascinated with this category since I was a teenager. So I was about 15 and a half, 16 years old and I read a book that was already a dusty old health food store book at the time up on my mom's shelf that was called Sugar Blues. And it talked about the dangers of sugar. I don't even know if it's still in print, but it made a huge pivotal impact on me because I...

right out on sugar. was typical drinking sodas and eating candy and all that stuff and you know lucky charms for breakfast and you know I stopped and cut dramatically back and after you know a couple of weeks of adjustment period I guess I could not believe how much better I felt and with the conviction that only a teenager can probably have I just decided I wanted to learn everything I could in life about

about the link between what you put in your body and how you perform and look and feel. That just became a lifelong to this day passion for me at 15 or so. And that led me to a fabulous career just kind of seeking that curiosity. I was always interested in the business side of things. So I got to GNC after business school and...

You know, it was still pretty much a discount commodity category. The challenge we had at GNC was to grow without using any of our own capital, which we started the franchising division. I was a big advocate of that and the first employee for that. And then, you know, how do we actually move past commodities into specialty stores? And that was my project, GNC, and we started that with brands.

and had this idea to hire scientific talent in what was at the time a discount retailer with 99 cent vitamin E and C and fig bars at the front of the store. If you can remember that far back, this would have been the late 80s and early 90s. And so it was a sort of controversial idea at the time. Did we really want to, those people that thought, do we really even want to know that vitamin C and E like do anything or can you actually create formulas that can have a functional benefit?

Greg Horn (04:10.901)
that people can measure in a clinical trial. So that's been kind of a personal mission, Rose. I think that the first thing we had to really solve as an industry in terms of pivot points to get to the point where we actually had the ability to do all this stuff was we didn't have a legal framework that was clear for this category. So it wasn't clear what claims you could make. It was very unclear what type of...

This was the early 90s. What types of ingredients you could sell. You couldn't really say much about them. so the category was never gonna really mainstream and become something fabulous if we didn't even have a legal framework to operate in. So one of my projects as a mid-20s person was to help a new law be passed that clarified all that. And we spent a lot of 1990,

and a lot of 1994 on that and kind of led the effort on behalf of the industry mostly just because GNC at the time was organized and had a big infrastructure, a big footprint and no one else really did. Drugstores didn't really carry anything other than maybe if some letter vitamins, there was no whole food yet. We were the only nucleus that could have done it. So we had to fund the whole thing. We funded.

a huge portion of it. don't know, not the whole thing, others contributed some, but enough of it that those laws don't get passed by themselves, that all the effort in organizing and letter writing campaigns and lobbyists and lawyers that were required to get a law passed, we were funding a giant amount of that. So that gave me a kind of a cappered seat to be able to help shape it and be involved in it. And it was lots of fun, especially when it was successful.

So from 1994 onward, we had this framework that we could actually operate on where you could make a structure function claim and you knew what was allowed to be included and there was a way to actually get new ingredients included. if you did some scientific research on your product, you could actually find a way to make a specialized claim for it. There was a way to get new things approved for safety. So none of that, those manufacturing standards.

Greg Horn (06:33.406)
That was a huge pivot point for the industry, call it 94. And the combination of that and ushering in an era of professional branding that was now enabled by this, professional marketing and packaging, in 1995, I was the industry spokesman for the media and I was unveiling the new law and talking about how great it was, was gonna usher in this new era and how it was gonna attract.

Rose (06:45.058)
Yes.

Greg Horn (07:01.344)
professional marketing, professional packaging, and professional science. And I'm walking backwards into Expo West in Anaheim, which is the industry's biggest trade show. And I stopped and I'm finishing this practiced speech in front of the cameras that are rolling. And I look behind me and there's a handwritten sign with magic marker and a giant blown up picture that says, 99 % of all disease starts in the colon. That was in magic marker. And then,

There was a giant picture that was probably, you know, four feet by five feet blown up of a tapeworm that had come out of someone's colon. And that's where I was giving the speech about this new era in the industry. That was the last year they allowed handwritten signs at Expo West. So it's really gone from like a cottage industry. That was a pivot point. So he asked about pivot points. You know, by the time I was in charge of GNC, we had gone through all the borrowed science.

We had a scientific team by then, fabulous collaborators that I had and worked with some of the smartest people in the industry, certainly in the scientific front at the time. We had grown $100 million a year every single year, organic growth for 11 years in a row. And I was really tired of borrowing science. We were running out of what was available. So we had to create our own. So I went around to the...

the big functional, functional medical foods, infant formula, clinical and enteral nutrition. So two feeding hospitals, medical foods for diseases, infant formula where it's their total nutrition, the very vulnerable populations, and really got an education on where the real science was in this category at the time. This would have been end of the nineties. And the partners that we were pursuing to get access to their science liked the strategy so much that they actually, one of them bought the company.

So in the 2000, 2001, 2002, I was elevated then. I was a COGNC, but I was also the chairman of this consolidated supplements business that we had the largest FDM distributed brands in the US. We had a great network marketing company in the US. We had a $2.5 billion consolidated brand with great manufacturing capabilities. had 150 scientists.

Greg Horn (09:21.052)
on the team working in four facilities around the world, all nutrition topics, infant formula, clinical nutrition, internal nutrition. I was in charge of the consumer nutrition part of that business and it was fantastic. It was really, really great. And so that really cemented my love for the science of it. So I think another pivot point is this idea, and that was for the first one that others had followed, is professional, big companies that have scientific resources already themselves.

deciding that nutrition was serious enough to actually influence health so that met their standards to come in in the first place. So that would be kind of like pivot point number two, what would be serious capital, serious scientific resources, serious staff coming in and saying, no, this is serious. Nutrition can influence health. We can prove it. We can make claims about it. And I got a chance to kind of lead that or be a portion of leading that.

movement. After three years there, the Dutch company that had bought us sent a Dutch guy to run it. I left and I had a non-compete for a couple years. And during that time period, I decided to apply the model that we had had at GNC successfully for pills, which was create a formulation, prove it works, use that clinical data to fuel claims that no one else has.

available in the marketplace and just have products that work better. It's a super simple strategy, but nobody had done that in food and beverage. So this whole idea of functional beverages, none of them had any functional, like Arizona diet iced tea was no proof that would give you any kind of diet benefits. So I started an incubator that had a bunch of concepts that ran through, you know, kind of

Rose (11:08.012)
Right.

Greg Horn (11:16.362)
mini stage gates, self-created stage gate process. And they all had clinical proof behind them and efficacious amounts of things, but in food. And lots of fun things emerged from that. think the Attune Foods, which is the first probiotic chocolate bar with five times the probiotics of a yogurt, is now the platform that Post Holdings has, Post Foods has for their functional food and beverage. That was an outcome of that.

The most well-known is of course Celsius, which was we had five clinical trials when we launched that And that's now a multi-billion dollar, you know value company that's public still with the same formula still at the same science I love those guys. They've really taken it to the next level but the simple idea of proving that a function that a functional food or beverage works Was another I'd say pivot point that weaves into my personal history

And then we've seen in that was early 2000s, you've seen kind of an avalanche of talent and of resources and of new science, new ingredients. The whole ecosystem is really flourished. One of the other pivot points I can point out in that time period talking about kind of the mid 2000s is, or maybe a little later is, you know, the gap in...

interested capital, finding the right companies, venture capital, Oregon private equity, that was new. There was no real ecosystem for that. And so with three partners who were already in Nutrition Business Journal, we started Grant and Tom and me and Steve Allen and Mike Dover started Nutrition Capital Network. And the idea was there to connect sources of capital to companies that were innovative and

needed it and I was the chairman of that selection committee for many, many, many, years, maybe 10 years. If you'd put just a dart, thrown a dart at every single company that came through our selection committee and invested in all of them without doing too much extra work, you would have had a company that did more than a hundred million dollars in revenue a year every single year for the first 10 years. That's a better track record than any venture capital firm has.

Greg Horn (13:35.327)
everywhere we really have and still around it still does great, great job of screening companies for, you know, to create that ecosystem. You know, the wave of big talent and big money coming into the category continues. Now it's much more sophisticated than ever. There's a lot more functional beverages. I think all the final pivot point before we ask the next question that I'll give you is this whole democratization that, you know, not just the internet,

maybe AI gives you, but the whole idea that you don't need to be necessarily trained expert to find out stuff that can benefit you, scientific studies, products that might help you, the marketing efficiency is much higher. You don't need to get listed in the store before you can start marketing anymore. You can just do that directly. So that's easy to take for granted. I know you're a world expert yourself, Rose, in that because when we first met, you were doing that for Vitamin Shop and bringing them into the digital age.

many over many years ago that was and I know you specialize in that and you're the best but you it's you can't take it for granted because it was a pivot point that all of a sudden now I can hear about something from you know a doctor or from an inventor or from somebody who has had a good experience with it and try it myself without the friction of having to try to find it or or you know find it on you can find it online now so that was another really big pivot point

We can talk more about the future and kind of where these trends are going, but I think that I'll leave it at that in terms of like a few milestones in the road so far in the nutrition industry.

Rose (15:11.308)
That is so helpful to shape and really give the history and the heritage of how we got here. And I think the piece that I, it's really like a special spot for me that you're touching on.

is something in the industry, I think today just takes for granted. mean, those regulatory frameworks without them, this would have been a very different journey. The ingredient pathways, I mean, even cultural acceptance wouldn't have happened because it's the trust with the consumer that is so important. And these didn't exist until very recently they were built. And I think it's really great and amazing that you weren't just like watching, you're in the room shaping all of these things and all of these trends.

It's incredible. And when I think about something I hear a lot from founders, it's that this category feels crowded. And I know you even noted it earlier too. But to me, what I think we're actually seeing is this sophistication now.

And it could be called professionalization too, as you did. But it's not really saturation, I don't think. I think it's more the sophistication. And from your perspective, Greg, what part of today's landscape really excites you the most with what you're seeing coming and what part concerns you?

Greg Horn (16:25.577)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's both. I think it's both crowded and there's tons of opportunity left. It's crowded with people doing the same thing. It's a wide open playing field for something that actually is a breakthrough innovation. Like 20 years ago, I created Celsius with my partners and you know.

Nobody's replicated that strategy yet with the clinical proof for functional beverage. It's not that hard. Just nobody's done it. So it's not even that sophisticated really. There's potential for sophistication. The marketing is much more sophisticated. But at the fundamental innovation level, the science behind some of ingredients is more sophisticated, but the actual where the rubber meets the road, there's a ton of clutter in the choices. So that wasn't your main question.

You know what concerns me and what excites me I worry about the clutter and I worry about the the plethora of Ineffective products out there that are just you know marketing with sprinkles in it that doesn't help anybody and that you know people solve for a cost or they don't know the difference and you know You want to make sure you're eating the right part of the potato right the top is poisonous. So

I worry about that. The lack of effectiveness in the vast array of products that are out there worries me. What excites me is that there's great tools in the toolbox. Now, that ingredient toolbox has never been better. The expertise that exists in the industry ecosystem to actually put it together in formulations or protocols or stacks that help people.

actually benefit from this and it's the largest molecular input in your body every day, Rose. It's way more than if you take any kind of prescription drugs. This is what is fueling your performance, your life, your health, and it's powerful. And there's a lot of great tools now to even take things that we know work, but we haven't actually.

Greg Horn (18:42.238)
tap the potential of getting it to like enough in your bloodstream or enough in your tissues to have it be effective. There's bioavailability enhancing technologies now that enrobe the particles so that they get absorbed right or at a certain time or a certain place. There is breakthrough potential in those still. There's tons of room left to run where you're getting from a non-effective to an effective, call it dose of a bioactive substance. And that's just getting started. I mean, I'd say the category from a

perspective of somebody who really wants to formulate and market products that are going to help people in a way that they can feel or you can measure in a clinical trial, like it's just good.

Rose (19:21.102)
Yeah. And you know, from my seat working with founders and, you know, listening to brands and their stories, I really see two sides. I see the explosion of innovation.

but also an ecosystem that now demands true credibility. Certainly the science that you talked about, the data, the transparency, and now supply chain rigor. And it seems to me like the brands that win today behave almost more like a biotech company than a supplements company. And it's fascinating the things that you touch on there because it really is shaping even how businesses are maturing and growing in this category because you have to. It's more complicated and that's the upside.

Opportunity but that biotech mentality is is a very different space than where it would have been 20 years ago. So I Hope so sure fun watching them grow and mature and

Greg Horn (20:10.046)
The best ones certainly do and that's probably your clan base, right? Let's go. Yeah. Certainly mine, yeah.

Rose (20:18.702)
Yes, yes, yes. You spent a lot of time tracking trends and helping companies look around that corner and figuring out how to navigate. When you think about 2026, what do you think are the trends that are poised to really grow faster and accelerate? And what might move slower than most people might think based on your vantage point?

Greg Horn (20:39.966)
Good question. You know, I think the accelerating trends, like I'm seeing more proof, more access to proof, a better toolbox of ingredients, that's accelerating. There's just better stuff to work with that has better dossiers behind it. So from botanicals to fungus, we never had a fungus toolbox before. Seaweed! I mean, you're seeing all kinds of things that, you know, weren't really in your formulator's toolbox before. You know, acid nutrition, all these...

potential to signal both peptides and things is just remarkable. I spend a very significant portion of my time to this day, like studying that stuff to stay current on it. And there's just more and more. can promise you there's more and more. You know, I think accelerating also is biometric. So if you think about clinical trials driving the industry where you needed a clinical trial to be conducted on humans and then a placebo and then some response, some don't, but on average you get a statistically significant, you know, response.

That's a conceptual framework for proving something works that's accepted. It's not the only one. There's other ways to prove something works. And one of them, ask any Celsius user, which we do have clinical proof on, but you can feel it. You can tell it's working. And that's an instinctive feeling. Your gut feels better, you have more energy, or have more mental clarity, you slept better. But guess what, Rose?

You know, you can, like I'm wearing two of them at the same time right now, you probably are too. Like, you're getting your own data right now. Yeah, there you go, twins. So, you know, I know how I slept last night. You know, I know what my heart rate variability is right now as a marker of stress. You know, I know what my heart rate is.

I know a lot more about my body right this second than you would get from a doctor's visit 20 years ago probably. I mean, without the blood draw obviously, but that's even coming. I know my blood oxidation right now. It's really good, C level. So that's an N of one. So to the extent you're getting more and more data, it's on yourself. You don't really, really need to wait for a clinical trial. I imagine your podcast audience is more of the pseudo biohacker set. I'm certainly in that group.

Greg Horn (22:57.278)
I'm not waiting for a clinical trial to find out if the thing I took last night helped me sleep better because I know that. My O-Ring just told me that. So that is accelerating and the dashboards are getting better. The things that you used to have to go to a doctor to get, you can now order as a blood test every quarter or every once a year, whatever. Find out if your levels are right. Is your C-reactive protein going up or not? You don't even need a doctor for that stuff anymore.

So it's just remarkable. That's another kind of my theme of democratization of information. It also has to do with what's going on in your own body, my own body. And then the third one I think is accelerating is this, the toolbox of things that actually improve bioavailability, which is a marker of bioefficacy. So making things more effective. You're not gonna have a chance at having CoQ10, you know.

counter your statin side effects or give you more mitochondrial energy if you're not absorbing any of it or a tiny amount of it. So there's technologies. One of my favorites is Nulixir, which is a next generation liposome. It's not a liposome. Liposomes are soft and soggy and are held together by the pressure of the water around them basically. And these are more solid state. And it's a breakthrough. Like they have a 10 times more bioavailable, they call them Nuzomes because it's Nulixir.

Rose (23:55.043)
That's right.

Greg Horn (24:18.557)
That's a step towards bioefficacy and bioefficacy is where you actually know that it's working. And so that does require even clinical trials. those things are going more quickly. What's going more slowly, there's a more slow than we like it to, guess, is there's certain areas where technology and availability help and save time.

The structures around those once you have that signal or that input or that discovery have not changed. So let's say that the time to search, discover, validate, and then get through a regulatory process for the US and Europe is seven years. And let's say three of those years is the painstaking process of discovery and figuring out what you really want to test.

AI and the tools we have available now for non-AI assisted in silico tests and computer algorithms that can replicate cell communication and all the things that we have as tools now are fantastic. They can save you a chunk of those three years. They can save a chunk of that, especially the subscription models that are mostly AI driven now. That could be a whole separate podcast about how that's evolving, but it's fascinating.

And if you have a little bit of training, you can really do almost remarkable things. The work of a PhD, a new PhD level scientist in a long weekend with these tools if you know what to ask him. But once you've discovered it, you still gotta go through EFSA for Europe. And that's gonna be the same three years that it is now. And you still gotta go through the FDA approvals for a new dietary ingredient or for a grass.

Like none of that changed at all. And so if we really want to be more innovative, that's those regulatory approval are not going to have to be revised, but that's not happening. So you can save a chunk of the time, but it's not going to advance breakthroughs in like this year. Pause. have to cough. Sorry. I was building up.

Rose (26:42.338)
it.

Greg Horn (26:47.025)
All right, unpause.

Rose (26:51.33)
You know, I'm just fascinated by how fast discovery is moving. You know, as you're talking about AI driven ingredient innovation, personalization in the consumer experience. And you also touched on the democratization of health data. And when we think about the Apple about our Oura Ring, the Garmin, but what you're saying here is there's still the reality commercialization, safety, scaling, regulatory steps. These timelines don't magically shrink. And I now think.

innovation and patience have to coexist in a way that founders don't always expect, especially if they're new into the industry of trying to create a brand new product from scratch. And I think you and I touched on this in the pre-interview that AI will accelerate discovery, but not commercialization. So when a founder asks, how fast can we get something new into market? What's the real honest answer behind the scenes today?

Greg Horn (27:48.766)
Well, most founders aren't necessarily nutrition experts in this category. You know, they might be fashion models or they might be actress, actors. Yeah, they might be somebody who's made their living as a great circus acrobat. Now they have an acrobat following and they want to do sports nutrition products, but they're not sports nutrition scientists. So what I do when I formulate things is actually get scientists around me to...

Rose (27:59.182)
celebrities.

Greg Horn (28:16.603)
make sure, make darn sure that it works. And I think that's a step that's a little bit skipped by some of these companies. So, you know, they'll say, hey, we have an audience that, you know, has trouble sleeping. So they'll go to a contract manufacturer and they'll have them put together, you know, a formula for sleep. But it's gonna be probably the same thing as everybody else's formula for sleep. So, you know, what is innovation? There's marketing innovation, you know? There's innovation like,

Rose (28:25.39)
I see it.

Greg Horn (28:46.439)
the innovation of the acrobat who has a following selling sports nutrition protein powder because he also or she also takes the protein powder and you know if they're getting more protein and they didn't get enough before maybe they'll have better athletic performance fantastic that's not really innovation that's expansion of market of a personal following it's marketing innovation you know what i think about is innovation is like okay well how can we make that protein powder actually work better and that's a deeper dive that you're not always going to get that from your

manufacturer, although some contract manufacturers are very in touch with this. And so if the innovation is, on the other hand, the scientists that try to commercialize innovations often don't have any following at all. They don't know how to market. And they end up with, you know, four point type on the label and you can't read it. So it's, you know, the magic, I think, Rose, in terms of what I would tell founders is

Fill in the gaps in what you're, where you're an expert. You're an expert at getting acrobats to do circus tricks. Fantastic. I'm a big fan of acrobats in case you couldn't tell. We have some in the family. And I really respect what they do, but they're not going to nutrition school. So get a group around you that knows how to formulate and think through how it's gonna be better than the 10 million protein products that are already out there.

And you will find a way to do that if you try hard enough at the front end. But don't take that as a shortcut, would be my advice. Like have something that's actually innovative and make sure it works. Super simple advice. It's not just about making a claim, it's making sure it really works. But that depth, if you do that upfront, you will not regret it later.

Rose (30:34.348)
Yeah. this, mean, it really points to the fact that this is a moment where founders need...

almost more clarity over hype. Because innovation can be lightning fast, as we were talking about, but safety, regulatory, ingredients, qualification, manufacturing, there's still physical world processes. And I think we've reached an inflection point in the world where we can dream in digital pace, but we still have to execute in the real world. And I think some pieces from what you're saying are going to need to catch up in terms of timing.

And it's moving, it's progressing, but it's still the real world. And as you start to think about when you started in the industry at a time when none of the support systems existed, no ecosystems, no playbooks, no network of capital, if you were starting that journey today, what would be better, easier, or even harder, any topics that we have not addressed that would be different in today's world?

Greg Horn (31:36.06)
So there's a great ecosystem right now for nutrition innovators and entrepreneurs. So assuming that's your audience, tap into that ecosystem, right? Nutrition Capital Network exists now. There's a whole society of...

investors that would like to help you. There's a whole society of consultants that can help you find the right clinical research organization to do your clinical trial if you're doing that. Find the right contract manufacturer if you don't have one. Find the right set of scientists to help you formulate. the right... I that all exists. Use the democratization of information to go find that. And you can test your concept much more efficiently nowadays.

with electronic tools. So tap into that and use that would be, it's a lot easier now. Conversely, it's a lot more cluttered and it's a lot more cluttered with products that aren't all that impressive if you take them apart and put all the parts on the floor like a motorcycle engine. You're like, this is just a motorcycle engine. It's not a special motorcycle engine. So if...

That part is, it's more cluttered, so you need better marketing and more sophisticated marketing tools. But what a lot of the companies that get started are missing is just actually the fundamental question of does it work or not? You couldn't skip that before, and you can't skip that now. And so, I guess if you're asking me for give my advice to people I haven't met, it would be.

Make sure that what you're doing actually matters. Make sure you actually care about it and make sure it's actually gonna work. And then figure out the marketing and figure out, like the making it work part, it's not just a gimmick. Like this is people's health and this is people's, like the benefits they're trusting you to provide. You have to provide and it can't be fake. So that would be my advice. Make sure there's something behind it.

Rose (33:48.856)
Well, and today's founders clearly have the advantages, the data, the community, the capital access. But to your point, it's also more.

there's more competition, there's more noise, and I think really a consumer who just expects proof. mean, that's really what you're talking about here. And when you build credibility, you create that ecosystem. And today founders must really learn to operate within one and to really build that around them on the front end. And I oftentimes meet those who have waited to do that. They've focused on the marketing and the messaging. And as we look at costs to acquire a customer and we look at lifetime value,

and the relationship between the two, where they'll struggle the most, will be the retention aspect, because the product doesn't work. And so I think it's so important to look at that upfront before you ever do anything. And I think the importance of testing, testing, and more testing, there's never been more avenues to do it. So now it's about building it in and really thinking that way as founders and brands are getting started and as they're trying to scale and grow. One other topic you mentioned is NBJ. You helped start several.

key consortiums, communities, call it intelligence networks within this industry, and NBJ and others, and they really had an influence on this industry growth. Can you share what motivated you to create those networks? You talked a little bit about it earlier, but where was the moment where you said, got to do this? And what impact do you think they've had on where we've come to be and where we're going?

Greg Horn (35:23.11)
Great. Well, I want to comment on the last topic and then I want to come back to MBJ and Nutrition Capital Network. one thing that I would, another piece of advice I give to founders is to get people who can help you have experience in the industry right away. I mean, somebody like you, Rose, could really help people, for example, because there's some fundamental thinking around what you really want to do that the very beginning matters a lot.

Rose (35:40.023)
Yes.

Rose (35:51.987)
no, the now.

Greg Horn (35:53.9)
One example, so I just gave a talk earlier this week on functional beverages because that's a category that I'm still working on and I'm near and dear to my heart. And one of the themes there was benefits are a much bigger idea than attributes. And a lot of founders who want to get into a business confuse the two.

Benefits are what it actually does gives you energy helps you sleep makes your joints less creaky You know gives you more mental focus the things that people want as a benefit That is a big idea if you can have something that really delivers there and whatever form you're putting it in and the talk was on beverages Attributes are no alcohol

Organic, no artificial colors, zero sugar. Those are attributes. Anybody can do attributes. And most things that pass for innovation, especially in the beverage industry, are attributes. New flavor, so what? So, different forms, a smaller can, so what? Like this works better, this will help you focus, whatever it is. So anyway, I just wanna make that point that getting help up front,

to think through issues like that, which seem obvious to somebody like you or me, is not always obvious to somebody who wants to get into business because they have a following amongst acrobats. Okay, back to building community. I care about this community. I mean, that's my lifetime achievement award is in the back corner there. Like I really have always tried to make the community like better. It's also very selfish because I've really benefited from it. So it's not like.

Rose (37:17.922)
That's important.

Greg Horn (37:35.526)
totally public service or anything, but there wasn't a journal record for the nutrition industry. And when Tom Arts was starting that, he called me and I had the only data set, because GNC had scanners and stores and nobody else did, to create a journal that had data in it about what the sales were. Now you can buy Spins or IRI or Nielsen or Excercana, whatever.

And there was nothing like that before. was all guesswork. And I couldn't give it to him because it was proprietary. He said, OK, well, once a month, monthly issue, once a month, I'll just call you and then I'll say, we think it's this big. Well, that's too big. We think it's too small. No, small. So I played 20 questions with Tom Harts for the first, you know, whatever, three or four editions. And when he had enough content and he started publishing them, I found my name on the editorial supervisory board masthead.

where it remains to this day. So that's how I got involved in Nutrition Business Journal. And they do a great job. It's been now part of Informa. They do a fantastic job of like, it's the data intel opinion leader service for that. They have an annual conference called the MBJ Summit. I usually speak at that and always attend. And it's great. It's the CEOs and it's the movers and shakers in the industry and it's the best event of the year. Nutrition Capital Network was kind of an outgrowth of that. I was very frustrated.

raising money for my startups one at a time. I started 12 companies and you know, each one was super painful to raise money for and not always a really good experience later either because there was no professional ecosystem around that. It was like Greg knocking on your door. Luckily, I knew which doors to knock on but it took forever and it was inefficient and it was, you know, was painful. So, Nutrition Capital Network was born out of that, partially out of that frustration.

Although I was not the only founder, was also me and Tom and Grant and Steve. So, and Mike Dovish does a great job of running that to this day. He was there at the very beginning. you know, that is a true ecosystem. If you go to one those events or join that ecosystem, you're going to have access to the people who have self-identified as investors in the space. And they'll give you feedback for free. Maybe they'll invest in your business too.

Greg Horn (39:57.907)
that the NCN staff is a network of committee members for the selection committee that's volunteers, but they're industry experts themselves. And you can get kind of free consulting on your pitch from them too. It's just a really, I wish that were around when I was raising money.

Rose (40:14.414)
Yeah, know, this is something I talk a lot about with founders who are looking for funding because we get calls like that all the time. I like to say, don't just build the product, like build your whole ecosystem around it. And the brands who move industries forward, I think, are the ones who create the combination of discussion, community. They are not afraid to reach out. They're building intelligence around the category or the topic that they're working on.

You're a perfect example of that, because I'm hearing you talk about all of them. Community, dialogue, intelligence, all three of those are a big part of what shaped what you were thinking about. And to that point, here's an important question for you on the where is it going? Where do you see within the topic of democratized health data, where do you see the future of health data going? Is it hurtful? Is it helpful? Is it both? I mean, that's a big juicy topic, and I'm sure you have an opinion on it.

Greg Horn (41:10.619)
It's both. mean, having more data about yourself can be very scary, right? Depending on what you find out, right? But the data is just the data. What I've seen in the last couple years, a really big breakthrough is the interpretation of that data has gotten a lot more user-friendly. Whether it's your Garmin watch or a interface or if you subscribe to Function Health or...

any of those services that give you your kind of like scorecard on what your blood work is. Like it's all, the interface has all gotten better and you know, less medical training required to understand if you're like, it's green, yellow, red, right? So see a doctor if it's in red. So there's just, that is I think a positive. It's probably, I mean it's expensive. So it's probably, there's some.

probably bifurcation of people who can afford to wear two devices like you and I are, Rose, and who can't, they're not getting that data at all, and probably to their detriment. So that's a downside is that all this great stuff is available, but a lot of people don't have access to it and aren't benefiting from it. It can also be, so it's super valuable and it changes, like at some point you're gonna have.

blood nutrient levels be able to read through the little lights on your finger, right? Like there's gonna be all kinds, like if you look at Apple's app meter, they have a marker for blood alcohol content. Like I don't know that there's a sensor for that yet, but they obviously think the one's coming or they wouldn't have it in their app. the way that you can shine light through a blood vessel and find stuff out is increasingly like non-invasive way is really amazing. The downside.

You can get overwhelmed with the health data that you get. You can not know what to do with it. mean, monitoring your sleep too much can actually interfere with your sleep. I've experienced that. If you're waking up and thinking, wonder what my sleep score was. I know lots of people that can't wear this stuff because they think about it too much.

Greg Horn (43:29.051)
So there's a downside to it as well. It's very distracting if you're paying attention to it too much. I I have hacks around that where I turn off the Bluetooth in all of them, so I can't actually find out if my heart rate variability is going up during this interview or down. But it's fascinating when you do, because sometimes it goes down. If you have something stressful to do and you look at your stress level, your heart rate variability level, you know.

often it's much higher anticipating it than actually doing it. Like twice as high. So you do learn some pretty cool stuff. But the big picture is you get this N of one where you know what's working for yourself. You take that sleep supplement that you think works and you find out it doesn't do anything and you take another one and you find out it works great and then it stops working. You can tell that because you can associate what you did. You do a workout and then you sleep better. You can associate all those things really, really.

easily now. And so I think it's way more positive than negative.

Rose (44:28.908)
Yeah, and as consumers, we're really on the brink of the biggest behavioral shift in modern health. mean, our bodies are becoming that data stream, but companies have to earn the right to that data. And transparency, think, is going to become the new currency, really, of trust. And one area that, another topic that I love to talk about is supply chain.

You know, we joke about this, but it's true. Everyone wants the supply chain to move at tech speed, but it still moves at biology speed. So what do you think founders might misunderstand most about the operational timelines of today and connecting inventory and supply chain and all the things now as we professionalize within this category?

Greg Horn (45:17.528)
You know, there's this idea amongst entrepreneurs that I've been exposed to lots of entrepreneurs. I've got to be the most pitched to person in the plant and the nutrition industry. It'd almost be impossible to catch up to me because for a dozen years I was pitched to, you know, five, six days a week every day from everybody in the industry at G &C. And then, you know, I was the chairman of the Nutrition Capital Network, know, selection committee. So that's hundreds of pitches a year.

And I've been doing it for a long time. out of all those pitches, like what patterns emerge, one is that founders, the naivety of a founder is actually really a positive to me. Like it's good, because if everybody knew how hard everything was going to be, they probably wouldn't do it, need the innovation. But there's this fairly like last five or 10 years, more so of what can I do without any physical infrastructure at all?

Rose (46:01.421)
Never do it.

Greg Horn (46:15.193)
Like what is the most asset light thing I can do where I'm sitting in my at home, you know, uncomfortable clothes and just working on my computer and making money. And that's pretty elusive concept. And so the reality of what it takes to actually run and build a business gets in the way of that perfect, you know, PowerPoint business plan that they write by themselves. Like you have to have staff to, you know,

If you want to scale a business and get it to let's call it $100 million, it's super unlikely you're going to do that by yourself in your pajamas at home. So like you're going to have to hire people and manage them. Do you have those skills? If you want to have a product that you're selling, somebody's got to make it. It's a physical product. And so who's going to do that? Whose factory are you going to use? And all of sudden now it's not really yours. You don't own the factory. So you're going to need that. there's the physical, like then you have to buy inventory.

I talk to plenty of founders that don't even know that you have to buy inventory and order it advance. So if a minimum run is 10,000 bottles and your cost is $10, you're tying up that inventory. I see business plans where that's not even in their plan. They just have marketing dollars there. yeah, they bump up against, depending on what stage they are, bump up, founders bump up against the physical reality all the time. They never seem to do it twice though.

It seems to be something that once you learn, it's very learnable, right? You can learn how to manage people, can learn how to hire people. A lot of it's from mistakes. You know, can find a contract manufacturer and you have to cough up money to buy your product. And then you have to have a warehouse to put it in. Like they figure that out, but it's often a bucket of cold water over their entrepreneurial dreams. But only the first time. If you talk to a founder, like I ran a seminar at one of the NCN events one year that was

entrepreneurial stories, entrepreneurial successes, and we had a panel of people that had done it once, like had had an entrepreneurial success one time and their stories were very interesting. It was the best rated thing we had that year and it was a lot of like I did this and I saw the smart good opportunity and I saw this and I saw that and then I did this and then I did that. Very interesting stories. The second year as a follow-up I did a panel of people who had done it at least twice, started a business twice. So I've done 12.

Greg Horn (48:40.026)
And so you get somebody who started a business you've probably heard of and then started another business whether you've heard of or not like like double triple entrepreneurial successes That conversation rose was totally different It was we got lucky and we and my partner had this idea and we we we we it's a totally different Mindset and the way you tell a story if you've done it more than once and you recognize the importance of the whole system around you versus just your personal, you know brilliance

And entrepreneurs go through that curve too where you know, they figure out that you need physical surroundings and in somebody's and they also figure out you need other people so That's something that the faster you learn the better off you usually are

Rose (49:27.948)
Yep, it's so true. the other thing with entrepreneurs and founders, they're oftentimes chasing the trends. But the ones that we see that are winning long term are the ones that are really rooted in community building, scientific truth, product fit, brand truth, consumer truth. So there's a lot around that.

That is all about the truth at the cornerstone of how these businesses are getting brought up and built. And if you build from that place, it seems to me like the category will rise with you for sure.

Greg, I know we're coming up on time and I just want to thank you for sharing your journey, your insights, your wisdom that can really only come from decades of building, leading and shaping an entire category. And what I love about conversations like this is that they remind us industries don't evolve by accident. They evolve because people show up with a vision, with curiosity and a willingness to build the ecosystem around the idea, not just the product. And for everyone listening, I hope you're walking away with a deeper understanding

of where we've been, a clear picture of where we're going, and the inspiration to create something meaningful, rooted in truth, rooted within an ecosystem, within this space. And if you've enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves exploring the intersection of innovation, wellness, and category creation. Thank you again, Greg. Greatly appreciate your time today. And I can't wait for an episode number two for us. Thank you.

Greg Horn (50:55.918)
Thanks for this fun being here. Take care.