Steven Rofrano
Appearances
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Frito-Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, etc. People buy $30 billion worth of that a year. So when we say massive problem, food in general is big.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
The biggest problem is that all of these things, or many of these things might be processed by the same biological pathways overloading them. So when you do the test on, oh, I'm gonna feed the mice this one toxin and it takes this much to kill them or this much to cause them harm.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Well, what about, like you said, all the toxins going through the same pathways, it decreases the amount you can be exposed to any one of them because if you add all of them up together, the total quantity of toxins, whatever they are, will overwhelm the liver, the kidneys, or whatever the detox pathways we're talking about.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I mean, we mentioned this before, the same enzymes that process ethanol in the liver, it's called aldehyde dehydrogenase, that processes polyunsaturated fats, which come from seed oils. So it's quite likely that your total dose of both alcohol and seed oils should be lower if you have both than it would be one or the other. And so I think there's a pet theory I have.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I've not confirmed this, but I'd be interested to hear your take.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Um, there's a common thing on the internet about how the founding fathers, after they signed the declaration of independence, like rented out some bar in Philadelphia and just like drink obscene quantities of alcohol, even for like the most, you know, alcoholic of modern, you know, say frat bros or whoever, just like handles of whiskey per person, like this kind of thing.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Um, and I, I can't help but wonder, and I know people used to drink a lot more in the past, actually. Like you, if you go to the cafes and bars in Europe, you have these big giant shelves of liquors and stuff. No one's drinking that anymore. And people talk about how Gen Z doesn't drink that much, yada, yada, yada.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that we literally can't process alcohol in the way that our ancestors did because our livers are so... tied up with, I'm sure, you know, seed oils, but I'm sure other things too, but predominantly seed oils.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
you know, on the grocery store shelf, you know, very likely it's basically... Corn and soy are basically in everything, even things that aren't food, right? There's corn in your gasoline. I don't know how many people know that. A lot of plastic, especially the non-degradable plastics made of corn. Soy protein is pretty much everywhere. Cliff bars, even. People, like...
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Normal people think that's like a healthy protein thing. Cliff bars, it's like soy protein. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's- It's everywhere.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Absolutely. I have zero experience.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Just a point about the massive problem, just for some context. Frito-Lay North America, which sells Doritos, Tostitos, Lays, etc. People buy in North America, people buy $30 billion worth of that a year. Wow. Yeah. So when we say massive problem, this particular, like food in general is big. Snack foods is huge. Food is even bigger.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
But like just this one tiny little industry, tortilla and potato chips, basically. Wow. And that's just Frito-Lay.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Right, exactly.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And that's one of the things we had to navigate. So to your question before about how we turned turkey fryer chips, so the first thing we realized was that it tastes good and it's healthy, so it satisfies these – to competing, often competing interests in a way that's helpful to everyone. The second thing we did was like, okay, how are we going to go make it, right?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I can't be turkey frying on my backyard and sell that on the internet, right? So we hired a food startup consultant. These are characters that basically come in and say, you don't know anything about, you know, the food industry, but you have grandma's recipe or your recipe. How do we turn into a business?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
The first thing he told us after thinking about it for two weeks, he comes back and says, yeah, this isn't going to happen. You can't make this. I'm like, well, what do you mean? Why not? And he said, there are no factories that exist that will make your products in grass fed beef tallow for you. And I'm like, okay, interesting. So what are we going to have to do?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ancient Crunch. We make Masa chips, which are tallow-fried tortilla chips, and also Vandy crisps, which are tallow-fried potato chips. And I started this with a friend about... Almost three years ago at this point, two and a half years ago, one of my friends was eating a bunch of Tostitos one morning. I think this is after. This is college? This is after college.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And he said, well, you could use coconut oil or avocado oil if you want to avoid seed oils. But that's pretty much it. If you want to get a factory to make it for you, you have to do one of those two things. And I said no to that pretty quickly because – I don't think coconut, well, first of all, I don't like the fact that you have to import coconut oil from across the Pacific Ocean.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
It's just like a wasteful thing. It's like costly, burns a lot of energy. You have to deforest rainforest. It's just, it doesn't seem right to me to like sell a product in the US that's heavily dependent upon some ingredient from very far away. Possible, but not ideal to me. Avocado oil also is fraught with issues, that whole industry.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
85% or 86% of avocado oil in the market was tested to either be fake or rancid by some people in UC, I think... EWG, I think. UCSD? Environmental Working Group? I know this is a university of California. Okay.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah. Um, anyway, avocado oil is the whole issue. And then drug cartels own avocado farms in Mexico. So whatever I was like, I maintain that tallow is the best frying fat, not only because it's high in saturated fat, it's not seed oils. It's also nutrient dense on like plant fats. So it does have vitamins. It has fats, a lot of vitamins in tallow. And the last thing is it doesn't make stuff greasy.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I've, I've fried some coconut before it comes out greasy, shiny, you know, it gets on your fingers. Like, I don't know. I don't like that. So tallow is the ideal frying fat. We couldn't get someone to make it for us. Then we were like, okay, crap. So we're going to have to go make it ourselves. That was the next fundamental realization. And so we thought about like, how are we going to do this?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
We're going to rent a commercial kitchen because you have to have, you know, a food safe place to make your products. Um, we ended up finding one not too far from, um, As I said, my parents' house, which is where the prototype was made. So this is where I grew up. So I know the area well. We found a kitchen. We had to go buy a fryer. We had to get people.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
If we understand that fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think we need to be focusing more on this area.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
We had to buy a machine to get the pouches. We had to do all that stuff. And we were like, as we were planning this out, we quickly realized... this is going to cost a lot of money. This is going to cost a lot of money.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
No.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
No, still not. Okay.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So we realized it was going to cost a lot of money. And so we were trying to like figure out how this is going to work. I looked at the price on the shelf of like Doritos and I'm like, This doesn't even make sense. Not even about the ingredient quality, because, of course, tal is way more expensive than seed oils. Organic corn is way more expensive. The salt is way more expensive.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Even ignoring all of the cost of the ingredients, the math still wasn't adding up. We could use Frito-Lay quality ingredients, and still it was going to be too expensive. So we figured that we learned more about this. We realized that the reason why Frito-Lay is cheap is not merely because they use bottom barrel ingredients.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
That's about one factory for every two states. They have a giant factory with robotic equipment and giant fryers and assembly lines and all that stuff. 30 factories. They have 200, 250 distribution centers. Wow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
This is like a New Year's trip. Actually in Fort Lauderdale. Okay. Not too far from here. Yeah. I was just in Fort Lauderdale this morning. Basically New Year's two years ago plus a month. My friend eating Tostitos and this is after the whole seed oil summer. I like to call it 2021 when seed oils really became mainstream.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Around the countries that's like five on average per state for facilities They have I don't know tens of thousands of employees all all this stuff They also have negotiated special deals with grocery stores that allow their products to appear on shelves that with a lower markup than other people's products and
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So like, for example, if I'm on the shelf at Publix or a similar, I'm not naming Publix specifically, but that kind of store, if I'm on a shelf, Publix might take 35 to 45% of the sticker price for their margin. For Frito-Lay, they might take 25%. Because Frito-Lay has this massive volume, they negotiate this better deal, yada, yada, yada.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So, so many structural reasons why, oh, and the last thing, and Frito-Lay's bottom barrel ingredients are not only cheap inherently, they're even cheaper because the government subsidized them. Right, yeah. A.K.A. your tax dollars. Yeah, yeah. A.K.A. the listeners' tax dollars subsidized this. Right. So there's a lot of reasons why it's cheap.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so thinking about this, it's like, obviously, we're going to have to make this more expensive in order to survive, in particular, to survive without accepting a ton of outside investor money, which we didn't really want to do because we intend to control and own the business for a long time.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So we realized that the products are going to have to be expensive, which I think all things considered, for me personally, if I'm not eating monster chips, I'm just not going to eat them. They're more filling. I would probably, people- They are actually more filling.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Right, right, right.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
The term seed oil is like people started talking about it then. Yeah. Yeah. And so I was just kind of going on a rant to my friend about why are you putting this in your body? Seed oils are poisonous. This is toxic. What are you doing? And he's like, I'm just trying to eat. Like, I'm hungover. I'm just trying to eat my breakfast.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
There's an interesting layer on this, in addition to the vitamin content, because vitamin A, we talked about the nutrient density, but the saturated fat versus seed oil thing is interesting. There's a guy, Dr. Michael Eads, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he talks about, there's a very, very cool study where they took a bunch of kids And they said, hey, like it was lunchtime, whatever.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I think it was a school lunch related study. They said, hey, we're going to feed you. Kids are going to split them into groups and feed you as many calories of a particular meal that you want until you stop eating. And, you know, eat as much as you want. We're going to measure how much you ate. And when you're done, we're going to we're going to figure out the calories you consumed.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
There were a few different groups. They were all variations of a carbohydrate plus a fat. Seed oil versus saturated fat. And I think most of the carbs are potato. So basically we had a baked potato with butter versus like seed oil fried French fries, this kind of combination. And the seed oil plus carb group ate on average 250 to 300 more calories in their meal. Wow. In a meal? In a meal.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
In a single meal? Wow. And their kids and their children in one meal. Wow. Eating several hundred more calories until they were full. And like you said before, who knows? I'm sure they're getting more hungry faster than the kids that ate the saturated fat. And so there's an added layer. And Michael Eads talks about the whole metabolic reason for this. There's FADH and NADH ratios involved.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
It's all very complex. I think you'd really like it. I'll send this to you afterward.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I would really love it. Yeah, it's a very interesting framework of our cells telling us when to stop eating based on caloric density. Yeah, satiation, nutrient density, caloric density. Totally agree. That's it. You will eat more calories when you're eating seed oils. And obviously people count calories. I'm not a big calorie counting fan myself. But I think it's somewhat helpful for some people.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
But yeah, people eat more calories when they're eating seed oils as their fat instead of tallow. So there's, yeah. And then the other thing about cost, which I think is very interesting, is something about expectations, right? So in the 1950s, 30% of our household budget went to food. Yeah, that's... Yeah, like a third of people's income. That's a sizable amount of money.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Sizable amount of money, right? Nowadays, it's 11%. Wow, so it's a third. A third of what it was in the 50s. And 100 years before that, it was like your entire life was a farmer because 97% of people are farmers. So you worked to eat. Yeah, you worked to eat. So it was like 100% of your income, basically, or your time or whatever, equivalent.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, and it's like the liver thing too, right? Because alcohol and seed oils are processed with the same liver enzymes. And so it's like, this is- Yeah, already a horrible situation. Anyway, so I'm not helping it by lecturing him about why he's making poor dietary choices.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So over the past 200 years, we've progressively gone from our entire lives were dedicated to food to now 10% of our income is due to food and we complain about it. Obviously, financial circumstances are what they are. However, people's diets, like the quality of the food that your dollar purchases has suffered because of this.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so if we're thinking, if you're of the mindset, we're like, okay, food actually affects health. If you understand, oh, I'm going to be, I'm going to save money on food now and I'm going to be sick later and that's going to cost even more money. In addition to the suffering, like what about suffering?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Like money is one thing, but like being physically healthy and vibrant is worth more than money in my opinion. Um, so if you add up all these factors, we, we actually are spending, I think way too little money on food collectively.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Um, And I'm not just saying that because I sell expensive snacks. Don't even buy my snacks. Go to the farmer's market and buy grass-fed beef instead of going to Costco and getting whatever the heck they're importing from God knows where.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
If you're an average American and you spend 11% of your budget on food, if you were to increase your food budget by 50%, that would only have a hit to your overall budget of 5%. Oh, yeah. Right, because 11% turns into 15. Yeah. But that's 50% growth. It's like a relative risk. Yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So it's like if we understand that food is the – fixing food is the way to fixing our health, then I think that's certainly like we need to be focusing more on this area.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
But ultimately, we get to talking about how there could be, you know, he's like, tortilla chips, well, they're junk food, right? I'm like, no, you could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well. And I start describing ingredients that could be made to put into tortilla chips that would actually be healthy for you. And he starts listening. He's like, okay, intrigued.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Going back to that Frito-Lay discussion, so one of their factories is like a massive automated machine. In contrast, because we didn't have a factory, we couldn't, going back to that story, we couldn't find a factory. We had to do it ourselves. These factories that make everyone's, these are factories that make everyone's food for them. And so they have, I don't know, they're 400,000 square feet.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
They have huge amounts of equipment. 400,000 square feet. Yeah, we know of one. Some people, the guys that are making our potato chip equipment for an upcoming factory that we're building, they have an installation in Pennsylvania, 400,000 square feet. It's like casual.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, massive, massive operations. And so there's like, I don't know, a dozen, a hundred, maybe, maybe, whatever, a thousand, a very small amount of actual food factories in the country. Yeah. that make the vast majority of packaged foods. Your protein bars, all of them made at the same factory or same handful of factories. Candies, same handful of factories.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Your chips, snacks, cookies, crackers, all of it's same handful of factories. And so when you go to the grocery store and you look at this apparent diversity of options, And you think, oh, wow, we really got all the bases covered. I have 20 different cookies that I can choose from. They're probably coming from like three different factories.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so that's just like the reason for this is that food production lends itself to scale. And so for costs to come down, it's like you really want to be making large quantities at once. And so this was our problem from day one, and it's still our problem today. Vanny is a good example. So the potato chips sitting over there. We make that eight hours a day on our second shift.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And we have about 24 people in that crew. Wow. And we make 2,000 bags in that shift. Wow. So it's like, what is that? Why can't I do math? That's like 100 bags per person.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, exactly. And the reason for this is we have a row of deep fryers, and we have baskets, and we have a few glorified salad spinners and pots where we spray filtered water to rinse the potatoes. We have this little potato slicer device. But we have 24 people basically manually frying, like dipping a tray in. And if we're not watching a video, it's like making the frying process.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
motion, and then you're pulling them out, you're quality control, you're putting salt in them by hand with a salt shaker, sticking them in bags by hand, sealing them with a machine by hand. And so that is a very labor-intensive process, and that greatly contributes to the expense of the products. Right. So in contrast, we're looking at some equipment right now.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I just got back from visiting the equipment vendor. It's a whole production line for potato chips. This set of machinery does the same process with our same ingredients. And we have to modify some things for tallow compatibility and whatever, but same ingredients. And it will make, I think... What did I say? It's about 10,000 bags of those chips in an hour. Wow. And eight people are on the line.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So 24 down to 8. Yeah. 2,000 down to 2,008 hours to 10,000 in one hour. Yeah, that's incredible.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
All right, well, where can I go buy these? And I said, well, that's the thing. You can't. They don't exist.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So that's the type of thing that you get when you're big in the snack industry. And part of the issue is that most startups have some amount of access to that type of scaled manufacturing capacity because they go to one of the 1,000, they're called co-manufacturers, these companies that make food for a lot of different brands.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
If you can go to one of them, you can benefit from their machinery, and you can benefit from their economies of scale. But if you're us, and you're over in a commercial kitchen with a bunch of manual fryers doing this by hand, you don't get the benefit from any of that. But again, the reason why we do this is because the big factories, they're seed oil factories.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
They don't like working with new, fangled machines. which is ironic because the entire industry of food production 100 years ago was frying everything in tallow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
This is in my mind. Literally in my mind. Right. Yes. I just come up with a recipe on the spot. And then so he basically challenges me like, hey, why don't you go make them, you know? Right. If I can't buy them, go ahead. And so I'm like, all right, challenge accepted. And then a few months later, I got a turkey fryer, a box of tallow and some corn tortillas and fried up the first prototype.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah. Well, that's a great question. And it often goes under looked. And I think CETOLs are easy to talk about because it's so obvious. They're 24% of calories. I think it's a very high impact thing to look at. But if we're optimizing, which of course you do, we're looking at everything, right? We want to look at every single thing on that label needs to justify itself.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And the short answer, how we do this is it's a lot of freaking work. That's how.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And that's why no one else does it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So I'll tell you a story. So our lime chips, which were our second flavor that we ever came out with. And the reason why is because, you know, everyone knows Tostitos lime, hint of lime or whatever. Like that's a very common tortilla chip flavor. So if we're going to make flavors, we're going to branch out, obviously we should go with lime. I thought, okay, that seems easy.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
It's just one thing, right? It can't be that hard. So I started looking around for lime powders on the internet to try to find a supplier. And I couldn't really find anything. Everything was not organic. If it was organic, it had maltodextrin or some other filler or whatever. I'm like, huh, that's weird. how do these other people do it?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So then I went to a grocery store and I went through all, I went to the chip section to look at all the lime chips and we're trying to find out like on the ingredient label what they used.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Maybe I could copy that. So I forget the exact full list, but basically there's two camps. You get lime juice powder, which has maltodextrin in it and lime juice. Yeah. And I think that's probably what Testudos uses. And then there's, this one shocked me actually. This is, and then the health, some health brands, which I don't want to name. Yeah. They're lime chips. were lime oil and citric acid.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Citric acid, as I'm sure we know, comes from like these giant bioreactor farms in China. It's like black mold basically produces citric acid. So citric acid was there for the sourness and the lime oil was there for that like fragrance of lime, but there was no lime in any of these chips. And I was just like sitting there like thinking like the healthy chips and the junk chips
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
all of the lime flavors, there's no limes. Where are the fricking limes? And we actually ran a few ads after like a while back just where the headline was, where is the lime? And we showed like our ingredient label and other ones. And so in order to make this work, I had to, I was like, okay, we have to go get some limes.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
We got some limes, sliced them up with a deli slicer by hand after washing them, organic limes, of course. And then we stuck them in a dehydrator, like in rows of like little lime discs. Like you see in like a, sometimes you go to a bar, you'll see these dehydrated lime discs and we ground them up into a powder. And that was, that was our lime chip for like six months. Wow.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
In your house? In my parents' backyard, actually. Really? Yeah.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Was some guy's full-time job slicing and dehydrating and grinding limes. Yeah.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And then ultimately we, um, we, we found a guy who has a dehydrated, uh, freeze drying factory. And I learned about freeze drying. it's better than dehydrating because it preserves the vitamin content. It doesn't, like, lead to oxidation. Because dehydrating, it's not high temperature, but it's high enough that it causes oxidation.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So, like, the dehydrated limes, the slices would be a little brown. But then when we freeze-dried them, they remained, like, pale green. And so vitamin C content is preserved and all that stuff. So then we started freeze-drying. And then we kind of outsourced that. But still, the lime powder today remains our single most expensive spice ingredient. Really? Yeah, it's, like, $40 a pound.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Because you're buying actual... Yeah, because we're buying pounds of organic limes and then grinding them up into a slurry and freeze-drying, and freeze-drying itself is expensive. Right. So, yeah, our lime powder is $40 a pound, which, like, that's just a lot of money for spices.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah. I mean, you get, you get a, you buy your own freeze dryers and to be fair, the seasonings themselves, like, of course they contribute, but like the seasonings are relatively, a relatively small percentage of our overall, uh, like. Yeah.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
MSG, that's an easy one. Vegan companies use that to mimic the flavor of cheese. Because cheese naturally has MSG. It's like the umami flavor or whatever they call it.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Um, and so you'll have, uh, again, don't want to name names, but you can easily find this if, if, you know, you go to a healthy grocery store, a lot of the vegan cheese or vegan queso, this and that, whatever, like it'll have either MSG right on the label or they use the term yeast extract. Because yeast produce MSG. And so if you take an extract of yeast, it's MSG. It doesn't sound as sinister.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I think I got it online. I forget which brand it was, but I think it was Amazon. I just found some like grass-fed beef tallow, bought it online. And yeah. The turkey fryer I think was Costco. Thanksgiving turkey fryers, I think RFK's video.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Tortilla chips, they're junk food, right? Could have good tortilla chips that you like to eat, but could be made well. We make moss chips, which are tallow fried tortilla chips. So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak, and also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all. But where is the brand going?
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
But it doesn't sound sinister. Like, oh, yeast, that's in bread. Or that's natural.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, so a lot of vegan foods will use... Like, for example, I actually don't think Doritos, their nacho cheese flavor has MSG. I'm pretty like they actually have cheese in it. I'm pretty sure one of one of them. I'm sure one of them does kind of be Cheetos or can we look that up? Yeah. But but but yeah, you'll see yeast extract. And so I think that's a big one.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
The food colorings, I think there's just no excuse for that.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Like, I think our Cobanero chip is... It's spicy. It's like, I don't know, tomato. Yeah, you've got Redmond salt. Yeah. Yeah, there's tomato powder. There's beet powder for a little bit of sweetness. And, like, that creates a pretty nice color, honestly.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, there should be natural variation.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
We have this with our potatoes, for example. We have two harvests. There's two different suppliers. One's in Idaho. The other's, I think, Florida. I forget. So we have potatoes for six months. They're stored well, but because we don't use toxic storage methods, so there's this thing called CIPC. I actually forget what it stands for. 85% of potatoes in the U.S.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, exactly. Turkeys are much harder to fry than tortilla chips, I'll say that.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
are sprayed with CIPC, and it prevents the spores or the eyes from sprouting because, obviously, there's only two potato harvests. If you want potatoes all year round, you've got to store them somewhere. And so we have to prevent them from sputting. And so if you just like gas them with this toxic crap, like, yeah, you can prevent them from creating eyes, but we can't, we won't use that stuff.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So yeah, you can do things with temperature and humidity and keep them dark, right? Potatoes actually are sensitive to light, like literally, they will wake up. So you have to trick them into thinking they're underground, all these things. But even still, they will change. And over time, some of the starch is turned into sugar in potatoes.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so that creates like there's about a six-month cycle of variation of potatoes where you'll see brown spots and whatever stuff. But it's like you want a potato chip that's not made with crap. That's what you're going to get. It's actual potatoes. It's like french fries in a bag. I think someone said that earlier today. Like that's what it tastes like. That's what it is. Yeah, yeah. You know?
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
It's not like Frito-Lay's where everything is the same shape and color and texture and size and consistency. It's like, that's not how food works.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Ancient Crunch.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And it's not like any compromises, like it's actually good.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah. So, so we started out with masa that, or that was, and back when we started, I was like, this is literally, we're only doing original one flavor. I, I didn't even have ambition for other flavors. I'm like, what, what other flavors do you need?
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
But then I'm like, Oh wait, that's it. People buy like a billion dollars of Doritos or God knows what, $2 billion of Doritos a year. So I'm like, Hmm. Obviously, people want the spices. And the fun thing about the spices is that there are no artificial flavors in the sense that, like, there are artificial substances that create flavors. But the flavors are all real.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And they do it fast. I mean, if you put ice cubes into a deep fryer, that's not fun. Yeah. Because the act of frying is basically rapidly boiling the water. And so if you have the ice, I don't know, it's denser or something because it doesn't spread out. Whatever. Yeah, it's not a good time. So don't do that. It's not a good time.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
There's vanillin, which creates a vanilla flavor. There's lime oil and citric acid, which creates a lime flavor. But none of the flavors, it's like, is there a fake color? All the colors exist. Like, they're just real colors. Yeah, yeah. So the fun thing about spices is that any flavor that exists in the junk food world we can just make with real stuff. In most cases, it'll taste even better.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Because we're not using, the reason why they do their fake stuff is not because they want a fake flavor, they just want to save money. And so if we're not beholden to this idea of like, we have to get the cheapest thing possible in every single way, because we don't, we want the realest thing possible, not the cheapest thing, we can make better flavors, right?
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Like the cheese that is going to go into the one day Masa Nacho cheese flavor is going to be better cheese than the cheese that goes into Doritos. And it's still going to taste like cheese. It'll just taste better. So we realized we could do the flavors.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So then we got to thinking with this whole, the whole long-term idea here is that there's a certain, like American snacking is like a big part of American culture. You go to the center of the grocery store. There's like four aisles dedicated to these things. It comes in bags and boxes that people snack on. And it makes up a lot of our calories, for better or for worse.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so our goal is to- For worse. Yeah. I mean, not necessarily- Not with you guys. The snacking is also an activity. I mean, I actually don't really snack on these things. I eat them as part of my meals. It sounds like you do too. We had lunch earlier today. Yeah. But regardless, Americans buy this stuff. They want this stuff. And so my job is to go in and say, all right, that's next.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
We're going to do that, but make it real. If it's bread, it's going to be sourdough. You get the idea. So our whole goal with Ancient Crunch is to have a portfolio of these many companies, brands of a classic American snack product that people really enjoy that's not going anywhere anytime soon.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
We're just making it, like turning up all the dials on the real food level and making it as best as it possibly can be.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Right. Yeah. Why is that an issue? So I think the main issue from my perspective and understanding with GMOs is that it's not to say, because a lot of people are like, you don't believe in science. Like, GMOs, it's like, what's wrong with that? And it's like, and then some people say, you're playing God. And it's like, that's not the strongest argument.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
In my opinion, the problem with GMOs is not that they're modified. It's that, what are they modified for? And the vast, vast majority of cases, GMO crops are modified to be more resistant to pesticides.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And that's pretty much it. Roundup ready. Yeah. So more resistant to pesticides means that the farmers can put more poison on it, and that means you can eat more poison and the crop doesn't die.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So it's not like if someone were to GMO something and make it more nutrient-dense, I'd say maybe, but also food, when properly grown, is as nutrient-dense as it needs to be. It's already there for us. Nature put it there. Right. You don't need to make it better. We're not going to put more vitamin A in beef liver, right? Right, right. There's enough...
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
there's enough where it is yeah so i think that's the main issue with gmos um and corn is an especially nasty crop like parts of the midwest are just like the groundwater is literally polluted with atrazine and like glyphosate is everywhere yeah it's like it's not just the food it's also the like corn farmers have a lot uh get cancer at higher rates than you know other professions it's like absolutely devastating and i think um
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I got tortillas, actually. I found a guy who made organic corn tortillas and, like, ordered a case from him. He's based in Massachusetts or something.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
It's either only 1% or 7% of corn in America is not GMO. And among non-GMO corn, a lot of it's still not organic. And so I think for us, organic corn is like the absolute bare minimum standard. Over the next two, three years, I was mentioning this before, I want all our corn to be regenerative organic, which is possible.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Dropping yeah, I mean across the board and availability increasing because I think the main thing yeah I mean it's it's kind of supply and demand at this point right like we're really tapped.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I think we made We can make I don't know a hundred thousand ish approximate bags a month And you know we can get a little bit more out of that with our manual methods however The real issue is that we like why are we not on shelf at some big grocery stores? I don't have enough product, but there Right. Right.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Um, so I think that's the, the real thing is like the more availability is like the laws of supply and demand just kick in. As of right now, it's like, oh, why is it, uh, you know, why is it, why is this flavor out of stock or whatever? It's like, I can barely keep up. I think so. Today's Friday.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, they're flexible. It's like you go to a Mexican restaurant, the tortillas, they come in that little bowl with the weird little lid with the paper. Yeah. That kind of thing. Okay. I chopped them up on a cutting board into triangles, and I tossed them in the fryer outside, of course, not indoors. Mm-hmm.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Right. Today's Friday. We're making chips that were likely sold, I think, Wednesday. And we're shipping them today. So it's like a two-day kind of backlog. So it's like, I can't keep up. I mean, I'm trying.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I can't, I'd be lying if I said I didn't prepare for this because I... I was listening to some of your episodes in the car, and I'm like, oh, okay, that one. I actually think I've thought about this before, though. In my head, even when I heard the question for the first time, I was like, ah, I know the answer, my answer. It would be potentiality.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So I think organisms are designed to be able to do a certain set of things inherently. And as humans, we can typically stretch the amount of things that we can do. But at the same time, we can also shrink them, right? If you're sick or you have brain fog or you're overweight, that limits, say, your ability to play with your kids or go climb a mountain or go mountain biking or do whatever.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Like if you have brain fog, it limits your ability to like, I don't know, read books or do play chess or any sort of mental physical activities kind of things. And so I think as we're talking, especially in the realm of biohacking, health optimization, all this stuff, the goal, of course, we're always talking about how to make ourselves healthier.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
But for me, it's like, once I'm healthy, then what? I don't just, not just, I want to be healthy just to sit around and be healthy all day. I want to go do stuff. Right, right.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Right. And so I think we want to be maximizing our ability to go do stuff, basically. And that's what I think it's easy to forget in the health space where I was talking about trends and how to optimize this variable, which is all important.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
But then at the end of the day, how can we take our health and mental acuity and all the stuff that we have that we're frankly blessed with relative to the standard state of health in the modern world and do that and do something useful with that?
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And the first thing I noticed about them was that they didn't taste beefy or anything, which kind of surprised me at that point. Yeah, beef tallow. I was expecting, hey, if we use beef tallow, it might taste meaty or greasy or kind of weird. But I was very happily surprised that they were neither greasy nor beefy. And so the ultimate test came. This was actually at Easter.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So that's how I answer that.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I literally invented nothing. Yeah, that's what I mean. You're just going back to the basics. Yeah, it's like I am a time traveler from 1940, and I make tortilla chips and potato chips, and here they are, present-day humans.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
My extended family was over. The ultimate test came. when I brought them inside and started feeding them to my extended family, a lot of whom are not interested in health. So these are the type of people who, as a lot of people are out there, who might say something like, I'd rather enjoy my life than be healthy. I'm sure you've heard this a billion times. Yeah, a billion times.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so, yeah, healthy is nice, but they want to eat what tastes good and other sort of things. So you expect the same people that have made fun of me for eating beef liver.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Not yet. That would come later.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I have my PowerPoint, my business plan.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I didn't even know any of that yet because, again, I had just found out five minutes prior that they didn't taste beefy. So it was like news to me. So yeah, I fed this to my family members who ate them and were like, wait, this is actually pretty good. Because I have a lot of, you know, these are people who if I fed them liver, they would freak out.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
They would not want any part of what would normally be considered health foods. And so the fact that they liked them, that set a light bulb off in my head because most health foods... as at least people think of them, taste bad. It's kale smoothie, it's chia seed pudding, it's like, eh, gross. And on the contrary, most things that taste good are considered unhealthy.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
McDonald's, fast food, chips, candy, whatever. So the fact that you have something here that's healthy enough for me, the health freak at this time, and also delicious enough for the people that don't care about health at all, that's a pretty novel thing. And that was the idea that I was like, wait, this could actually go somewhere. This is actually impactful.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
People buy $2 billion of Doritos a year. So I'm like, hmm, obviously people want...
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Because I think one of the reasons, and we were talking about this before the show, one of the reasons why a lot of people don't adopt health is because they perceive it as either unpleasurable or inconvenient.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so people like us will go be healthy either way, but if you want to eat things that taste good and you're prioritizing that enjoyment, which I'm not saying there's anything wrong with, that's 95% of people, if the health foods are unenjoyable, you're not going to eat them.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Yeah, I think a good entry point into this discussion is the history of seed oils. So the first commercially available food seed oil for consumption was Crisco. And Crisco is hydrogenated cotton seed oil. And it was, I think, first sold in 1924 or 1912 or something in the early 1900s. And the issue was that Procter & Gamble had a lot of cotton seed oil left over from something.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
I forget what industry it was that they were in. What were they using the cotton seed oil for? Well, so it was a waste product. So you had the cotton gins, and you would pull the seeds out, because the cotton gin separates the cotton fibers, because that's what you use to make clothing, and you separate the seeds out of it.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so you had all these seeds left over, and it was a waste product they didn't know what to do with. And if you are in industry, you will have mountains of waste of whatever kind. If you can sell that, that's a new revenue line, and you want to do that.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So I think for a long time, they had been trying to sell it for something, but it had never worked, because at that time, Americans did not eat oil. Like, literally, olive oil wasn't a thing. The Italians hadn't brought it over. Mediterranean culture hadn't shown up yet. Coconut oil was certainly not a thing, even though it's solid at room temperature.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Avocados, no one had even heard of an avocado in the U.S. in the early 1900s. And there were no vegetable oils. There was the only fats that Americans, and I think I heard Max Lucuver talk about this on your podcast too, I think 90% of fat consumption was animal-based fats. That's right. Butter, lard, and tallow. So Americans didn't eat oil at all.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so Procter & Gamble was unable to sell a liquid oil product to American consumers. So it kind of sat on the shelf for a few decades until some guy invented a process to turn the liquid oil into a solid fat. This is called hydrogenation. Anyone who lived through the 90s knows about hydrogenated fats. Margarines. Yeah, all that stuff.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so that guy invented this process that allowed them to turn cottonseed oil into a solid. And now all of a sudden, people, because it was consistent with American culture, hey, we can eat this, it looks like lard, it looks like tallow, it's a solid thing, I can scoop it out, that's familiar to me. And so they began selling that, and it was obviously so cheap, right?
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Because you're taking this waste product, it's basically free. Or you'd even pay to get rid of it in some cases. So you have this thing that's basically free, and now you're selling it to compete with something that actually costs money, whether it's lard or tallow or something. So you can undercut everyone else on price.
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165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And a lot of their marketing at the time was touting this whole futurist, modernist idea of developed technology. It's sort of that dirty animal fat with those smelly farmers who have pig poop on their boots. Eat this thing made by science in a lab with guys in white coats. And that sort of idea, which is kind of the opposite today, most people think, if it's made in a lab, I don't want it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Back then, it really resonated with the American culture, who was like this forward-looking, like, scientific, like, we want this kind of technology in our lives. So that's kind of how it got started, and then that was a very, very big success for them, obviously because the inputs are so cheap, and ultimately led to them starting to sell liquid seed oils, starting in the 50s and beyond.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So anyway, all of that's to say that this entire category of products was invented. There was a point in time in history when people did not eat this at all. That's not true about corn. That's not true about wheat.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
Well, at least in recent memory, people have been eating all these things, you know, butter, they've been eating, they've been drinking water, for example, eating sugar for at least hundreds of years, if not thousands. Cedar oils. were not eaten in any form or fashion, like these types of oils, the industrial processed ones, prior to, say, the early 1900s.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So I think understanding that history makes it a lot easier to understand why we shouldn't really be eating them. Because anyone who understands this idea of how we're evolved, right? We talk about we're evolved to get sunlight.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
You talk about how we're not supposed to be wearing sunglasses outside because we want to get the sunlight in our eyes, and that helps us make the melanin that we need to protect our skin. All these things, like live how we're evolved, Same thing with food. No one has evolved to eat seed oils. It's not possible that anyone's evolved to eat seed oils.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
So it's kind of like this shocking, and the last piece I'll say about this that I've been talking for a minute is that it went from zero, literally zero, to 25 to 30% of the average American's calories. a quarter of their calories.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And even worse, extreme suffering would drive you to go sue the person who caused your suffering.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
165. Steven Rofrano: Why Your Chips Are Toxic and How to Snack Smarter With Masa Chip Founder
And so then, like, if seed oils were that acutely toxic, then Procter & Gamble would get sued and then they would stop making them.