The Hobbyist #12: An Interview with Spoonful Founder Bradley Gifford

The entrepreneur and athlete discusses Nipsey Hussle, existing between beef jerky and Erewhon shakes, and learning how to build a business

Graphic design courtesy of Thomas Euyang

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not always locked in. But when I am, my day begins with a cup of Spoonful Overnight Oats (I’d be good at writing ads, eh?). The cinnamon apple pie is my favorite (if you know me at all you know I go crazy for a good apple), but the mixed berry crumble is all muscle, too. I, personally, am not a chocolate guy so I ignore chocolate peanut butter cup, but I bet it’s absolutely delicious, too. It’s an ideal breakfast for me (or a very special late night dessert) because it’s filling but doesn’t make me feel like crap after. It’s the rare satisfying breakfast that doesn’t demand a nap afterwards. Spoonful is made by entrepreneur and athlete Bradley Gifford, one of the coolest dudes I know and this week’s guest on The Hobbyist. Admit it: This intro would have been way funnier if my subject had no relationship to Spoonful or overnight oats or even food.

Gifford has a pretty remarkable story. He grew up in Fort Greene, played sports in high school, went to college, and found himself depressed and unsatisfied. After years of ignoring warnings of hypertension from his doctor, he decided to cut out booze, processed foods, and work out like a maniac. He lost 70 pounds in three months. The number itself doesn’t matter, but what does is the changes Gifford began incorporating into his daily life, habits that have stuck with him into his 30s. “I found a way to have fun with food and keep the enjoyment in the eating. I'll have a cookie. I enjoy a glass of red wine every now and then, but I don't drink a lot,” he explains. Whereas diets are restrictive and turn food into some sort of enemy, Gifford has recalibrated his viewpoint. “I eat more to restore myself, replenish myself, and make sure that my mind's in a good place when I'm waking up early in the morning.” Food is helpful, not harmful—especially when it’s good for you.

I could spend 10 or more paragraphs rambling about all the wisdom Gifford offered up during this conversation, but maybe you should just read it instead. I thought this would be a fun chat about what Brad likes doing when he’s not turning Spoonful into a healthy and joyful food behemoth, but it ended up becoming something different. Here, Gifford offers a roadmap of what it takes to build a business, insightfully breaking down the decisions that went into the formation and growth of Spoonful. For anyone looking to turn a passion into a full time job, getting to know Bradley Gifford is an easy and essential step.

Let’s talk about the morning routine.

Bradley Gifford: I wake up, mix up ginger, lemon juice, some ground cayenne with a little bit of black seed oil and some apple cider vinegar. That's a hot shot and it just wakes you up, especially if you’re a coffee person. I drink that as I turn on my coffee machine, just to awaken my senses before I feel like I need that caffeine kick. I'll have a couple of teaspoons of sea moss, some greens powder, and I'm good to go. I have a quick bite to coat my stomach, take my supplements, and then I hit the gym.

What are the supplements?

BG: Bovine colostrum and beef liver, and then glucosamine choros. Those are supposed to help with a lot of joint repair and muscle recovery stuff—combating any just muscle fiber breakdown. I take some maca root, Omega-3, some vitamin C, some COQ 10, some zinc, and a multivitamin.

Damn, you are locked in.

BG: No creatine though. I’m not in that world.

I felt like that might have been your vibe. I’m a creatine guy, don’t tell anyone though. Was your high school a sports-intense place?

BG: No, but I did play sports. My high school had a big football team, so I feel like I got exposed to a lot of just the crazy shit young kids do to try and get an edge in sports. I remember creatine being something that the guys on the lacrosse and football team would fuck around with to try and get big or shredded. Depending on your body chemistry and the supplements you're taking, you can bloat or you can drop a lot of weight fairly quickly, but it's almost luck of the draw.

When you're young, you don't really read labels or do a lot of research about ingredients and integrity. You don't know what the fuck you're really taking. I was like, if I ever take creatine, I'm going to do a pretty extensive dive on all the ones that are out there before I just throw some stuff into my body randomly. I maybe take a couple gummies after a long run when I'm feeling super beat down. I know it'll help, but I'm not heavy on the creatine team.

Where did you grow up?

BG: Fort Greene.

I imagine it is not the same as it was when you were growing up.

BG: Yeah, very, very different dude. Very different. Ironically, I started building the base for Spoonful in Fort Greene and a lot of the shops that sell Spoonful weren't in existence when I was growing up. There were no high-end bakeries or organic delis; maybe my health would've been a little different as a kid. I had high blood pressure when I was a kid. My pediatrician told me when I was 12 years old that I was going to have hypertension before I was 30 if I didn't overhaul my lifestyle. I didn't really change much to be honest with you. I thought, I'm young, I can just play sports and it would correct itself over time. Sadly, that wasn't the case.

I was super depressed by the end of my sophomore year in college. I wasn't playing that well on the court. My grades weren't great. I was in a relationship at the time. I wasn't happy there, so I felt like I really needed to kind of look inward and make some changes. So I stopped drinking, stopped eating processed shit, stopped drinking sugary sodas and Gatorades and things like that, and started running and started boxing. Did that six days a week, and after three months I lost 70 pounds.

That is crazy. Do you still maintain many of those same practices now? Not drinking, not eating processed foods, that sort of stuff?

BG: I don't want to say I'm intuitive or loose, but I definitely am a bit more free with the way that I eat. When you're trying to make those changes so aggressively, you call them a diet. I was definitely in that mindset when I was first starting to make those changes. But I'm 32 now, so after over a decade of living like this, it's just my lifestyle and what I do. I found a way to have fun with food and keep the enjoyment in the eating. I'll have a cookie. I enjoy a glass of red wine every now and then, but I don't drink a lot. I don't drink soda. I don't drink or eat a lot of the things that dysregulates me.

I was having a conversation with somebody the other day where we were talking about food and the context that “better for you” companies talk about food. Sweetgreen or Pura Vida or even the fast casual places that are very health centric. They create perceptions of food in terms of categorizing certain things as healthy or unhealthy. In terms of appealing to the average consumer or making something more attainable in terms of changes to your health and achieving your goals, it would probably be more helpful to talk about food as regulating versus dysregulating. I more so look at food now in the ways it helps me. I eat for performance now, and not necessarily to lose weight.

I'm doing 200 minutes of cardio a week. I'm lifting four to five times a week. I'm in the sauna four to five times a week. With the wear and tear that I put through my body in the gym, and then obviously the stress as a founder and working in a warehouse and packing and shipping boxes—I demand a lot of myself physically. I eat more to restore myself, replenish myself, and make sure that my mind's in a good place when I'm waking up early in the morning.

Are you generally an early riser?

BG: I try to be, but sometimes I’m up late. You have a long day, you take a break, you have dinner, and then just do a bunch of stuff for the business before the night's really considered done.

It’s the stuff that you don’t see…

BG: It's always something, dude. I mean, it's great. It's great and I love it, but it's definitely a nonstop kind of thing. I feel like founders I've spoken to or operators that work at bigger CPG brands, they're always like, the problems don't stop when you get more money, you just become better at dealing with them. The fuckups are actually happening at a lot bigger scale, so you just roll with it. You grow thicker skin. You become a bit antifragile in a way, and you're not necessarily getting too low when something doesn't go according to plan. You take it on the chin, you learn from it. You really try to peel back the layers to figure out what insights you can take from each failure, and then move on to the next situation. The to-do list is very long.

I know you received funding from Pharrell and the Black Ambition Prize. How did you decide on this way of raising capital versus traditional seed investments and things like that?

BG: It's funny. It's great to hear your perspective on my approach there because when I first went down this rabbit hole of applying to programs looking for accelerator opportunities or funding resources, it was for three main reasons. One, wanting to learn the fundamentals from the industry, from institutions in a formal curriculum since that's the easiest way to just take in new concepts. Two was to de-risk myself. Speaking with a lot of friends that worked in venture or worked in finance, one of the things that they told me was that being an early stage company was risky, especially at a time when investing in CPG is actually turning down and a lot of companies have been overvalued and failed. People aren't really looking to invest in a CPG company right now, so you may have to go the extra mile to de-risk yourself.

I felt like aligning myself with experts and showing that we've gone through the rigor of program after program to really tighten our business plan, our cashflow model, our go-to market strategy, our marketing plan, our customer research to really understand what we're doing, where we sell, and how we sell it, was key. I thought that was super valuable as well. The residual effect of that, which would be number three, is it allows us to talk about ourselves in a different way. We’re small and don’t have a huge budget for PR or a lot of outbound communication. These alternative avenues bring a lot of eyes to you and give people a chance to root for us.

It’s a way to be able to tell our story and give people a peek behind the curtain into not just the way we make our product, but how we're actually building the business. It ended up just being a cool way to change our narrative on Instagram and make it more about, ‘Hey, here's what we're doing to maybe provide some insight and inspiration into how you can build your business,’ as opposed to, ‘I'm Brad, I got this oatmeal company. We do cool things and that's why you should care.’

As soon as someone else's money comes into the situation, it gets tricky and slippery really quickly.

BG: To get back to those smaller checks and that non-dilutive capital, we have to really go through the grant writing process, talk to boards and really explain our value prop and our concept. Being able to get those checks and still maintain control of the company is huge. It's almost a nod of, ‘Hey, I see where you're doing, I believe in where you're going. We are basically just giving you a boost forward and there are no strings attached to it.’ That's a much different dynamic than taking money from an investor where you immediately get on their timeline, you are on their exit horizon schedule.

You are having to make certain operational decisions that might not be what your vision was for the company or what might be in the best interest for the long-term growth of the company. But in the next three, five, or seven years, this is what you have to do because you took the check from that person. You always want to make sure when you get a grant or get into an accelerator or a program where you're aligning with an external partner, that the value alignment is still there. It can't just be about, well, they're giving away $10,000, because even they have criteria for companies that they're looking for and the growth potential of companies they're bringing into the fold.

You were in digital marketing and brand strategy before starting Spoonful. How did that give you a leg up?

BG: I knew that I wasn't a great operator. I knew I couldn't read a P&l and a balance sheet frontwards and backwards with this level of fluidity that would allow me to know that I had a product that was going to give me this margin right away. I had to grow into that and learn by trial and error. The marketing and the brand strat and the positioning and the community building, I knew that those were things that we could have dialed in from day one, and people would get that when they interacted with us or when they saw us out. Then, we would just nail a lot of the business fundamentals over time. Thankfully, we didn't have to pay for a lot of things that I feel like a lot of CPG companies do out the gate, which is marketing, because the thing that allows you to stand out is your brand. That’s what people care about at the end of the day, and that's going to pull them in. To be able to own that and make that something that is almost like our IP in a way, definitely helps us stand apart.

How do you get to the point where you're doing that and then Spoonful comes into your head? What is that risk proposition where you're like, I am going to quit and start this company?

BG: I was actually working at this gym called DOGPOUND. At the time I was managing their marketing. It was me, their COO, and their CEO. They were this new cool, popular gym, and we were working with a bunch of different brands and products. It was around the early days of Sakara Life, things like that. Being the point of contact for all of these relationships and seeing how new, “better for you,” next gen, consumer facing companies were coming to market and using us as a gateway to tap a certain audience, was interesting. I was seeing what certain brands were trying to do, but I was also observing some of the shortcomings in the product, what they were offering or the way that they were trying to communicate to our customers.

I got the idea for Spoonful by just seeing what was missing, but also seeing that there was a real disparity in terms of cool pop culture and cool people in the space. Black culture is sometimes used to promote processed foods, alcohol, sugary sodas and drinks. That was where I saw an opportunity to use my knowledge of the culture, use the fact that I'm from the city, and I have a deep understanding of the way that things work in this consumer landscape in a way that most people pay a lot of money for. I felt like there was something that could be put in the middle between the high luxury, Erewhon type product and the super shelf stable, long shelf life, beef jerky, hard boiled egg, Muscle Milk offering. There's a sweet spot here that a busy professional would really appreciate and so would the high performer.

That's really where Spoonful came from. I didn't know everything I needed to just put a product out there. I actually spent about two and a half years getting certain brand strategy certifications. I did a Professor Scott Galloway course three different times In the couple of years that I was working at Matte Projects. I decided to stop doing my freelance consultancy and started taking up contracts at agencies to work on bigger brands. I kind of took myself to school, or felt like I did, to level up what my larger brand knowledge was. It was so I could properly put this thing out there; architect and position the thing.

Whenever I've had an existential crisis about my career, I’ve been tempted by the Galloway courses.

BG: They're so packed. I took the brand strategy sprint. I took the brand building or the consumer persona building, and then the brand strategy course. Those are great. Some late nights for sure. That information was so dense and so tight and so insightful. I feel like it was the best way to learn so much, so quickly. I still use a lot of it when I think about tweaks to make the brand better.

Fitness is obviously so integrally tied into your brand and Spoonful’s brand. Do you view that as a hobby or is it now a part of the career?

BG: Before I get into it, there’s a tie that those two subjects have to each other because in order to really unlock the true potential of the brand, we're going to have to be more than a fitness product or seen as more than a fitness product. It needs to be seen as something that people can use every day, no matter their lifestyle. It's great to be loved and appreciated by such quality driven, performance minded people. We're going to continue to make things that cater to that customer and invest heavily in showing up in those communities to serve that person.

But to really go to the next level, we have to be something that is appealing to all households and we have to go beyond the highly active performance minded person that lives in cities like myself and take that hat off. It's really more about thinking outside of my own needs and the needs of people that I see and meet every day and thinking about the needs of the person that might live in upstate New York or might live in central New Jersey or central Ohio. I really need to start to think about how to make this a brand for everybody in this country and not just in larger cities in certain regions.

You're getting a company off the ground, it's thriving. You're balancing all of this stuff with trying to raise more money. There are late nights and early mornings. What do you do to decompress that is totally unrelated to your work? Is there such a thing?

BG: Being an entrepreneur, there have to be goals or hobbies or activities that you do that have no monetary or tangible outcome attached to them whatsoever. You have to do things for the sake of enjoyment. I consider myself to be a pretty mindful person.

I try to kind of work on my spirituality when I can. Daily meditation, ice baths, getting in the sauna. I get body work done. Deep tissue massages twice a week, just to make sure my posture and my hips and all those things are where they need to be from all the sitting and all the physical activity. Then I'll take days where I just get off my phone and go see some art. I love art and architecture, love nature, love being outside. Now that it's getting warm, I'll definitely go on more hikes. I just try to find moments to be in silence and stimulate my senses in a different way that have nothing to do with my phone or a screen or anything that has to do with Spoonful.

Are there any figures who have been spiritual leaders for you?

BG: My first constant reminder is Nipsey Hussle. He was a huge inspiration to me as an independent artist focused on quality, not chasing the affirmation or the validation from a big label too soon. He was about market segmentation. There are so many things you can learn, especially just how you show up in the community, but still reach commercial success. There's a lot just to learn from his path and his spiritual journey. I definitely look at people outside of the CPG industry for inspiration. I look at Virgil, obviously, he's a great one. Fashion icons and designers, Rick Owens, Thom Brown, Raf Simmons, artists like Wes Anderson. I love Philip Johnson. I love Frank Lloyd Wright. I look at people from different mediums, to take in how these people orient their lives, find inspiration, because obviously it's not operating in a nine to five, eight hour schedule. It’s okay to be different and not be that robot every day, but you still have to have a process getting things done.