All Episodes
Previous Next
March 23, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
20:56
Keith Wahrer from Rhythm Superfoods talks raw vegan superfoods, kale chips and more Feb, 2012
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello and welcome everyone.
This is Mike Adams, the health ranger for naturalnews.com and here today in studio, yes, in our studio, we got him the co-founder of this company, Rhythm Superfoods, a company I've been raving about in videos and articles just because I love what they do.
I don't have any financial ties with this company.
I just love their products and you're about to learn why.
So here to join us and to explain all that, the history of Rhythm Superfoods, where it comes from and why it's healthier for you than other snacks, is none other than co-founder Keith Warr.
Thank you, Keith, for joining me today.
Thanks for having me.
Glad to be here.
It's awesome to have you here.
You're based here in Austin.
That's why we're able to get together.
Yeah.
Your company is just a rising star in Austin.
First, before we get into the back story, tell us about the, you know, the acceptance, the notoriety of your company in Austin now with both Rhythm Superfoods and Daily Juice.
Well, I mean, it's been an awesome ride.
Austin is such a great place to launch an entrepreneurial adventure.
I think especially in the health realm, there's just a lot of people that are into it.
Yeah.
And just a great community.
I mean, we were definitely born of that community.
Yeah.
How we started was in 2003, a friend and I opened up Daily Juice down on Barton Springs Road, which is, for those that don't know Austin, there's an awesome natural springs pool down there that's kind of the, I think of it as sort of the heart of health consciousness in Austin, and sort of a spiritual place, too.
Historically, Native Americans would go there and that was a very special place for them.
And it really is spring water that flows in and fills the pool and it still flows.
It's a miracle in this area to have a spring that produces like that.
It's a huge blessing.
We opened a juice bar just down the road from that.
It kind of carried that energy.
So I was able to bring my interest in vegan foods and what was then becoming raw foods and super foods to this great venue which was a juice bar.
Perfect place to try out new products and to experiment.
So what kind of products, you mentioned maca and goji, what kinds of things were you blending in your juices at that time?
Well, at that time is when we just started introducing fresh coconut water.
No one was really doing that.
We reached out to some of the Asian markets and started buying coconuts and started making awesome smoothies with the fresh coconut, sometimes serving them in the coconut water.
I started finding cool things on the internet, superfoods and some other.
There's kind of a cool underground raw food scene in Austin and so I was learning things from friends in Austin as well.
But goji berries, maca, noni.
This is my superfood smoothie right here.
I always have this on camera.
People make fun of me sometimes because it's usually green.
Today is my fruit smoothie.
Dude, I don't even...
When I go on Alex Jones' show, I bring three quarts to power me through the show.
I have my cooler with me.
They make fun of me.
Well, you're doing it right.
I'm sure you're having an influence on them.
Well, hey, I made juice for the entire staff there when they had their fundraiser.
I saw a video of you doing that.
I saw that video.
They loved it.
They were totally into juicing.
Anyway, sorry to get off track, but continue.
Well, so we, you know, it just became a great place to experiment, and that's something I really like to do.
I'm kind of a foodie as well.
I'm really into food and making it taste good, and sort of started playing with that genre of raw, vegan, gluten-free food.
I started making an energy bar called the Baraka Bar.
Oh, I didn't even know that.
Yeah, we were selling those regionally.
It was a raw, vegan, gluten-free energy bar.
Superfood bars.
Baraka Baraka.
Today would it be called the Obama Baraka Bar?
That got complicated right about then.
But that bar doesn't exist anymore?
So we had to pull back the reins on that because Kale chips came on the scene for us and kind of blew up and took over all of our very limited capacity at times.
These guys, right here.
Those guys, we realized we were onto something that nobody really, at the time when we started, no one in Texas was doing it.
And so it kind of, there was just so much momentum behind that that we had to kind of jump on that.
And put all of our resources into that.
But we do plan on bringing the bars back as rhythm bars.
Oh, that's a great idea.
We have a long string of products we like to sort of slowly be unleashing to the public.
Well, I have so many questions for you about this, but I want to ask you, for those who aren't familiar with this snack yet, give us the basics.
What is this?
What's not in it?
Because that's crucial.
That's why I eat these and I recommend these.
I won't eat most stuff out there that's processed food.
But this, even though it's in a package, it's not really a processed food as we traditionally would use that term.
What's in the bag here?
Well, I think of this product as sort of the evolution of natural foods.
I think it's the raw foods movement where you're minimally processing.
It's just another way of even more minimally processing your food.
You're only drying it.
We're drying it at low heat.
Low heat.
And the theory behind that is it retains more of the enzymes.
And more of the vital nutrients that are in the food.
Because when you cook food, you can denature it.
You can even chemically alter it as it cooks.
Well, what?
Heat destroys about half the proteins in plants.
That's something Gabriel Cousins talks about all the time.
So this kale has more protein than dead cooked kale.
Yeah, I think that the nutrients in this are more available for digestion and assimilation.
Sure.
The other thing is most Americans don't get enough greens, right?
They're not juicing enough kale.
They're not growing their kale.
I've got dinosaur kale growing in my garden right now.
I always love to grow that.
But this is a great way for people and even kids to actually get greens into their diet thinking they're eating Like delicious snack foods.
Exactly.
And I mean, they are eating delicious snack foods.
They don't think that they're eating something healthy all the time.
So that's the beauty of it.
It's kind of a foot in the door for people, is to make something that's a ready-made product like this, where they can buy it, open a bag.
It's a convenience food, but it's a convenient way to get greens.
It's like a salad in a bag that has a shelf life.
That's a good way to think about it, yeah.
You're getting a healthy dose of greens and kale is just chock full of all kinds of amazing things.
No kidding.
Kale is a miracle plant.
I mean, just the phytomedicines in it, plant-based medicines, are super powerful for helping to prevent numerous diseases.
I know you don't make any disease claims and I'm not asking you to, but just in terms of the research, we know that kale and cauliflower and all these things You know, they have, for example, a cancer preventative effect.
That's just well known in the literature.
But getting to this, what I really appreciate is what you don't put in it.
As you may know, I'm extremely allergic to MSG. And a lot of companies out there, even the so-called natural snack foods, they'll put yeast extract in it.
Right.
And it drives me nuts, man.
It drives me nuts.
Because yeast extract gives me a massive eight-hour headache.
Yeah.
I don't get any headache when I eat your food.
I can just eat bags, which I've been known to do on airplanes.
I ate one in the car on the way over here.
Myself.
Well, I'm sure you have quite a supply.
Yeah.
And you brought quite a supply here, too.
Talk about what are the different flavors and things that are available.
We have five flavors of the kale chips available.
We have a zesty nacho, which kind of mimics a cheese flavor, but it's a vegan product.
We have the Texas barbecue.
Which utilizes things like a beet powder to get that color of the barbecue.
Yeah.
Flavors like onion and garlic and tomato.
And then we have this fairly unusual one, the mango habanero.
Oh yeah, that's interesting, I've tried that.
And that's one of my personal favorites.
I think it's kind of a very unique to Texas kind of flavor combination.
Yeah, true.
The Bombay Curry for the curry lovers.
It's got turmeric in it, which is well known as another medicinal spice.
Yep.
Lots you can read about that.
The curcumin.
Curcumin is the active...
We have the...
The Cool Ranch, which is kind of our attempt at meeting mainstream folks halfway with a flavor profile that is familiar to them.
Of course, our ranch doesn't contain any dairy or any of the other things like MSG, which is typically found in a ranch dressing.
You're exactly right.
I wanted to mention that.
If you go into the grocery store, folks, anything you buy that is ranch, whether it's ranch salad dressing or ranch dips or ranch chips, they 100% of the time that I've seen contain MSG or other hidden forms of free glutamate, which is definitely an excitotoxin, as Dr.
Russell Blaylock talks about.
But it must be very challenging for you.
How do you get the taste, the exciting taste, without resorting to those chemical ingredients that other companies use?
Yeah, it is a challenge.
And the way I do it is I spend massive, massive amounts of time in the kitchen.
And I think it can be done.
It's a matter of flavor balancing.
You have to have a touch of sweet, a touch of the salt, a touch of the sour, you know, and the savory.
Right.
And just a hint of this and that.
And then it has to do with kind of a...
An alchemy, if you will, of the combination of the elements that are there.
Yeah, that's where the artistry really comes in.
Yeah, and that's the challenge, and that's my job, is to try to make these taste as good as I possibly can.
So you're not just some CEO sitting behind a desk in your fat cat suit.
You don't look like a fat cat at all.
You look like a lean, mean machine here.
But, I mean, you're in the kitchen doing the job and playing around with the food.
Yes, all the time.
That's awesome.
That's, you know, constantly, yes.
So you must have some other things coming up that you could share with us.
Ooh, share with you?
We do have some things coming up.
Any secrets you can...
Well, I can say that, you know, that we're definitely wanting to come up with more alternatives to the standard potato chip and the standard salted snacks, which are typically fried.
Right.
Even the normal baked ones have a good amount of oil in them and often use somewhat processed ingredients.
Sure.
And GMOs.
GMOs are everywhere in the snack chips.
Exactly.
So coming up with alternatives, I think Rhythm's mission is really to bring Just bring healthy eating and gluten-free, nutrient-dense foods to a wider audience.
Eventually, we'd love to be able to sell these kale chips for less or come out with products that are more affordable.
Literally, they're so expensive to make.
Well, let's talk about that.
The price is, you know, higher than cheap GMO corn chips fried in the same oil over and over again, obviously.
But I do want the audience to understand, it is more expensive to dry foods at low temperature, to handle live foods, or we should say raw I mean, you can sterilize anything by throwing it in a vat of oil, and that's easy, and it's got automatic shelf life.
But you don't do that, it takes more effort.
It does.
I mean, it's a whole overnight process to make a batch of kale chips.
So that is unheard of in terms of traditional food manufacturing.
They want stuff that they can pop out.
We're committed on that side of it with these kale chips and the sweet potato chips too are made the same way.
Sweet potatoes are well known to be one of the highest mineralized foods in existence.
Even, I think they have more minerals or almost as many as wheatgrass, don't they?
They're very rich in like the beta carotene and the vitamin A and yeah, a whole host of minerals, trace minerals.
Very much like kale in the sense that it's a lot of micronutrients.
And superfoods are Most of them come from South America or they come from foreign lands, but what's cool about kale and sweet potatoes is they can grow right here, even in Texas.
That's a good question.
Your product is USDA organic, it's gluten-free, it's vegan and so on.
You must buy a lot of kale.
Oh, man.
A kale truck?
Oh yeah.
With a forklift?
We do, yes.
We're buying kale by the truckload.
That's awesome.
So you're supporting, you know, farmers.
Organic farms, yeah.
And it's all organic.
It's all organic.
Do you buy your kale in Texas?
We have Texas sources that we use as much as possible, and it's very weather-dependent and seasonal, but in the wintertime, We can get Texas kale and we use as much of that as we can and we're working on building the relationships with specific farmers right now.
Really?
That's awesome!
We can even possibly go year-round in Texas.
So that's our goal to reduce carbon footprint and for us it's cheaper because we don't have to pay for shipping.
Sure.
Right now, you know, our kale is coming from California, from organic farms in California.
Because of the season that we're in.
The season, yeah.
California can grow year-round because they can do Northern California in the summertime, Southern California in the wintertime.
I see.
Kale cycle.
Even that is still not 100% consistent.
It is something that's growing out of the ground and it's depending on the weather.
Is there a variety of kale that you specifically request?
We do.
We like the green curly kale.
Not dinosaur kale.
Just for our purposes, I love dinosaur kale.
I love to juice it and stuff.
It's kind of waxy, too.
It's got that dark emerald color.
So you know it's got a lot of minerals.
But you use like a curly kale?
We use the curly green kale because we like the way that it holds the dressings that we make.
Oh, that makes sense.
Yeah, it just kind of grabs onto it.
It adds to the crunch factor.
I want to wrap this up in a couple minutes with you here, but I was first introduced to this idea of a kale-flavored snack at the Tree of Life, Dr.
Gabriel Cousins, where I used to visit a lot and do interviews down there and enjoy their meals there, their raw meals, and then I think there was a raw spirit festival one time where someone was offering some kind of Cheesy, flavored.
Sure.
I think they were using nutritional yeast and a little bit of pine nut.
I don't know.
I don't know what the ingredients were.
But that was a hit.
And I remember they sold out the bags in hours.
And then it was an underground market.
People were paying more for the bags.
Like, you have some of those?
I'll give you $12, you know.
It's crazy.
It was crazy.
I mean, when we started selling...
When we first started selling kale chips, we were charging...
We just did the math on what a typical...
It's a small profit for us, and it made the product have to be $9.99 a bag on the shelf.
Wow!
But we were selling them hand over fist.
I mean, we couldn't keep up even with that, just like people were buying it.
It's changed a little bit now.
There's competition, there's a couple different brands out there, which is great.
Yeah.
And we've been able to bring our price down, because we want to charge As little as possible.
Not just because we're good people and want everyone to have it, but because literally we'll sell more product.
If we can lower our costs, we can move more kale chips and greater net effect on the health of America.
Well, that's exactly right.
I mean, the more volume you do, the more affordable you can make it.
But I've tried some of these other brands, by the way.
I'm not going to mention their names, but there's another prominent brand out there that I tried.
It's just not that tasty.
It's just not.
I don't know why.
I'm not trying to put them down.
I kind of know why, because I know how hard it is to make these on the large scale.
It's a challenge to keep the flavor happening.
Yeah.
So isn't it interesting?
I mean, like Frito-Lay, for example, you know, they make all these snack chips.
You know, their so-called science or mass food production is really kind of easy compared to what you're doing.
What you're doing is like advanced, you know, culinary artistry.
And with a higher nutritional product and so on, I mean, is Frito-Lay, you know, calling you and saying, would you consult with us?
Anything like that?
Not yet.
I bet they will.
Not yet.
I bet they will.
Well, we'll see.
Yeah.
They're going to try to buy you out, Keith.
Yeah.
I don't know about that.
Or they'll come out with their own competing...
Yeah, that may be the other likely scenario.
Or they'll say they're raw, but it's actually spelled differently, like R-A-W-W. Exactly.
It's not really raw.
Well, you know, a lot of times those big companies that go, and they do, they go up and buy these small artisan brands.
Yeah.
They tend to want to keep the quality as much as they can because that's what people are buying.
They're buying the brand because it's valuable, because it has a following.
It's amazing that Walmart now is selling organic produce.
That's true.
Hey, HEB is carrying your product.
Yeah, mainstream grocery stores are now starting to buy kale chips.
I mean, I think that says that there's a change going on, you know, that we from the grassroots are being able to have an effect on giant corporate America just through the market forces, you know, because it's popular demand.
I mean, it's not always that these corporations are just so evil, it's just that they're kind of based on, they're just there to sell products.
They sell what people buy.
Yeah, so if people are going to buy it, then they'll sell it, and that's what's kind of happening.
Well, no, we've seen that in every area.
If people stop buying GMOs, for example, all those companies will reformulate their cereals to be non-GMO. Exactly.
I mean, so people just need to know more.
They'll also try to coerce the terms organic and non-GMO and there will be shenanigans.
Of course.
Always are.
Lastly, where can people buy Rhythm Superfoods?
Rhythm Superfoods are available at a lot of natural food stores around the country, Whole Foods markets, Central Markets in Texas.
On the West Coast, there's more mainstream chains that are carrying them, like Raley's.
Also on the East Coast, in Whole Foods, and we can be also purchased on Amazon.com.
Oh, that's right.
That's right.
Okay.
And through our own website and possibly there's other online sources that I'm not even aware of.
Well, it's ever-expanding, so I'm sure there are some you don't even know of.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Keith, for joining me here in the studio today.
And folks, if you want to check these out, introduce your family to Rhythm Superfoods.
Again, this is an independent review.
We don't sell this product here at Natural News, but I just love this product and I love this company.
And I think you owe it to yourself to try them out and get yourself some healthy snacks for you and even your kids.
They will absolutely love these.
Well, thank you, Keith, for joining me today.
▲
Export Selection