The foods we eat impact our health. We try to eat for better health, but as we age, our relationship with food seems to get more toxic, and we often find ourselves unhappy with our weight and waking up with less energy to face the day. Imagine getting your life back and learning to love eating again.

Bobbi Giudicelli, the author and cofounder of Read The Ingredients, shares her inspiring battle against our most basic need – food. Today, Bobbi tells us her story of overcoming food addiction, anorexia, bulimia, chronic fatigue, and hormonal imbalance, to pioneering a clean, healthy, and complete meal option that you can take on the go. As they say, we are the food we eat but it’s never too late to change for the better. Tune in and learn how you can also gain Freedom From A Toxic Relationship With Food.

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Listen to the podcast here

Read The Ingredients: Eating For Health With Bobbi Giudicelli

I am excited about this conversation. First of all, Bobbi, who I will let introduce herself, is a friend, part of our community, and is a kindred spirit in a lot of ways. There is a lot of wisdom that is about to be bestowed upon all of you, readers. Not to put any pressure on her but this conversation will explore a lot, both personal and professional and hopefully, leave you all with inspiration and actionable advice. Before I turn it over to Bobbi to give her intro of herself, I wanted to call out again our newest initiative, which is based on two things.

One is trying to inspire and help entrepreneurs get more from their advisors and boards and become more effective in the use of that wisdom and intelligence. The second is to ensure that our boardrooms represent the communities that our industries serve and that we have more women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ representatives on our boards.

We started what we call The TIG Collective. It gives the opportunity for entrepreneurs on an opt-in basis to sign an advisory agreement with the collective and issue the collective profit interest. In response, the collective is a mast around 40 or more great advisors who also execute an advisory agreement between themselves on the collective and the collective issues, then profit interests.

In a way, it is a big pot of upside for advisors and a great gain share. It creates a community where there are advisors learning to hone their craft and prepare to be part of the future boardrooms of our industry. The entrepreneurs get sage advice from people who are out there and fighting the fight alongside them. There will be a lot more information to come on that.

We will do a whole episode on it shortly. Let me turn it over to Bobbi to introduce herself. She has a fascinating background. She is the Cofounder of Read The Ingredients. Her Cofounder in that business is her son, which is a whole other thing we can explore. Bobbi, great to have you. Tell everybody about you.

I so much appreciate you having me on. About me, and I will keep it little, is I consider myself if you have to put a label on it, a serial entrepreneur. I started, founded, and built 5 different businesses in 5 different industries and 5 different products and services. That is my background. My venture is in the food CPG space with Michael, my oldest son of three.

I always dreamed that I would be able to do that with one of my kids but it does not look likely since two of them are school teachers, and one of them is a soon-to-be lawyer. I am out of luck. What we wanted to talk about, though, is your personal journey that brought you to Read The Ingredients, which was a journey through a toxic relationship with food. The interesting thing about that is that you find yourself in the food business. I know it from a very personal standpoint. I have always struggled with that conundrum. I have been in the food and CPG space for many years yet have had a lonesome struggle with it my whole life.

Let’s start with the journey. You have written a book. When Bobbi first wrote this book, and I got my copy, one of the things that she said to me was that her concern was that it was written by her. “Is it too female-oriented? Will it not land with me?” I will tell you, personally, as a dude, that I felt like the book was almost a mirror. It was reflecting right back on so many of my own experiences, and it was speaking to me. What I said to Bobbi is that somehow in some way, she was able to balance that teach but not preach standpoint. Why do you not tell us about the journey, the book, and how you wound up here?

There is a huge irony that has not been noticed and thought about several times with my history of my relationship with food ending up in the food business. Even more, ironically, I was in the food sector once before. The first one that Michael and I partnered together on was frozen yogurt. The irony was that it was prior to me starting the journey to understand and proceed to the way I live. I have recognized it. I always felt when I was younger that I was much safer in the business world, which is where a lot of my other non-food businesses were.

The journey for all of us starts when we are born but the journey, and I do have to mention it and in the book, was a pretty dysfunctional upbringing. In one way, that was an advantage for where I am. That advantage was that the aspect of food that we struggle with is it has a lot of sentimental value. We are emotional eaters. The emotion very often is comfort, warmth, and something that reminds us of a happy childhood or a happy moment in our childhood. That is a huge advantage for me. I did not have that.

I never had to overcome, “This is the way my mother cooked or my grandmother cooked.” I have none of that in my background. As a point that I did go out on my own, I was sixteen when I was completely financially separated from my family. The food ended up being a drug for me. It was my numbing agent. It was my comfort because it numbed me. It was no different than how an alcoholic or a drug addict uses.

Dopamine is released with the consumption of food. It is no different. Dopamine is an addictive response to food and brings that dopamine response. It is interesting when you mentioned the advantage of dysfunction. My upbringing was not necessarily dysfunctional but I certainly have no relationship with my mother’s cooking because the only thing she could make was reservations. She never cooked. Still does not cook.

It became that drug. When I was 17 or 18, then the conflict became if the drug of choice was food. I have this other pressure of self-image. To sum it up, how much you weigh and how thin you are. That is the aspect that resonates more with women because we have had the pressure on us, much more than men, I believe, to be thin. Thin is everything. Thin also, for many years, equaled healthy. However you got there, it was thin equals healthy. I got there by becoming anorexic. I was anorexic for 2 or 2 and a half years.

My weight plummeted to something about 40 pounds less than I weigh now. If you know what I look like, minus 40 pounds, it was a serious situation. For whatever reason, the anorexia progressed to be full-blown bulimia, and everything about everything I did had to do with how many calories I was consuming. I lived my life in a critical way for about 15 or 16 years.

After that, I became more normalized. I was a mom. I kept having that battle of, “How do I raise my kids to be healthy and yet set an example?” That went over to disordered eating. Fortunately, I married a man who loves to cook and go to the grocery store. I never had to deal with either of those because food freaking scared me. I had no control over food. I was starving or I was binging.

Let’s talk about the difference between an eating disorder, anorexia, bulimia, and disordered eating.

Disordered eating is what more of us struggle with. From age 34 to 35, that is when I managed to convert it to, which was healthier but still left me less obsessed. Disordered eating is still emotional eating but it does not come with the actual defined psychological disorders of eating disorders. You are not purging and binging regularly. You are not starving yourself. You are not that behavior. You eat on a regular basis. Some days you will eat less than others. You are constantly trying to manage it or you are not trying to manage it. You just gain weight, are unhealthy, and accept it and go, “I want to eat chocolate now. I am going to eat chocolate now.”

For me, that experience was very noisy. It was an obsession. It was a constant battle of, “If I am going to eat chocolate now, should I? How much more will I have to run tomorrow? What clothes am I going to wear for whatever event is coming up? Will my clothes fit me?” The noise in my head made it so I could not even enjoy chocolate, eating or the food. The big thing that I point out in the book that is such an important message for people that struggle with this is it is not our fault. We are raised to believe, “If you had the willpower, you would be able to do this.” I smile sarcastically when I hear people talk about intuitive eating.

My intuition is, “Eat a pound of chocolate today and starve myself tomorrow.” That is what intuitive eating would have been for me back then. Given the pressures to be thin, count calories, and control ourselves, none of these things blend themselves into intuitive eating. The reason is, and the reason why we are not solely responsible for making these choices is much of the food that comes out of our large food companies and supply chain is highly processed and addictive. People understand more and more. There is more and more research done that is identifying how the addiction happens. It is important to understand.

I was convinced that my addiction was emotional back in the day when I was struggling. It is all emotional. It is all because I am going for that next drink. I often would have wished that I was an alcoholic because you can take alcohol out of your life and still survive and be healthy. You cannot take food out of your life. You cannot eliminate what you perceive the problem is.

That is such a difficult delineation to understand. It is a true addiction. There are a lot of hyper-palatable foods out there like fast food. There is also an incredible amount of advertising and suggestions around it. That emotional component, propensity to eat to get that dopamine release, to escape and do all those kinds of things, is the gun but the trigger is these hyper-palatable foods. With other substance abuse issues, you can completely eliminate them. With food addiction, your only choice is to figure out some way to come to peace or balance with it. That is a life’s work for many. For those who do not struggle with it, it is hard to understand.

One of the best ways I can convey it is my wife bumps into food. It is not in her consciousness. She will, all of a sudden, go from not thinking about it at all to going, “I am hungry. I am going to eat something.” She has always found it so bizarre that I get up out of bed with, “Here is what we should have for dinner tonight.” We plan trips and plan days around those things. It is different wiring. You cannot just say, “I will just stop eating.” That is not easy. I do not want to underestimate that. Any type of addiction is hugely difficult but you do not ever have to make peace with the substance that you are addicted to because you can eliminate that substance with the exception of food.

We have the component where the food companies are putting addictive substances in the food to create that. We have not just the social pressure to look good and be thin but the social pressure of food is a part of so many social activities. You do not go to a get-together that is around an activity without food there. You get together with friends at a restaurant, and you do all of these things. There is that social pressure to be part of that social group. Fortunately, I consider myself lucky in that aspect too, because I am not a real social person. As an introvert, I do not feel that pressure. I am perfectly happy to meet with a friend. I have no problem saying, “We are going to go here if you want to eat dinner,” but I do not go out with groups of people. It is not in my nature.

We, as a society, have all of these pressures on us. The opportunity to figure it out for most of us does not come. It came, for me, when my health and my family suffered. I watched their struggle in the case of my sister passing away from a very ugly struggle with ovarian cancer. My father, his last ten years of life, the dementia was ridiculous. This is a man who skied until he was 80. He rode bikes down the ski mountain until he was 80. He lived to be 92. The last ten years of his life were zero quality of life. He was immobile. He had dementia, and he ate the standard American diet.

I am convinced that it has a lot to do with how he ate. In any case, those two things were happening, and then my health was failing. I was challenged with all kinds of problems, chronic fatigue, huge inflammation, and a hormone imbalance that had me a mess. I have always been active. I have always been into sports. I have always been doing stuff. I was so fatigued. I could not walk across my property. We say “fatigue” and people go, “You are tired. Go take a nap.” No. This is the kind my body was giving out. It was saying no. I said, “Something has got to give.” I had always thought I was eating healthy except for the diet soda and the Equal in my coffee.

I did not look at a whole lot of anything else. I felt like I was controlling the rest of what I would eat and choose to eat. Another thing that we will talk about is how the healthcare system does not support us in having these unidentifiable illnesses or physical or health challenges. In any case, I took it upon myself to start learning, “What is it to be healthy? How can I get my energy back?” I felt like I was 95 years old.

I started to learn about nutrition and food and processed food. All the light bulbs went on. My journey started, and I started making changes. I started eliminating things. Sugar was a big deal. Eliminating my artificial sweeteners was a big deal. Here is where I ended up. I am whole food, plant-based but I say, in the book, I do not think everybody has to give up all animal products. I know for a fact that I did need meat.

Let me back up. How did you wind up there? Talk about the exploration and what you did to do it. I want to explore further because I agree with you. I look at it like many fingers pointing at the moon. As long as you are pointing at the moon, there are plenty of paths to get there but you, specifically, how did you go from disordered eating and this complete imbalance, fear, and hatred towards it to figuring out at least what steps to take, how to evolve it and fix it?

I thought a lot about that, and I did not remember this story until after I wrote the book. This is not in the book. I had a woman that I knew who worked for Coca-Cola. She knew and realized that I had this diet soda addiction. It was a huge addiction. Two six-packs a day was not unusual for me. I was one of those who was raised, “If you are eating zero-calorie sweetened drinks, you can get all the sweets you want, and it is not hurting you.” She was in business up here in Grass Valley. I knew her through my company. She would always say to me, “Do you know how bad that is for you?” I go, “Yes.” The truth is I did know how bad it was for me but it was the one thing I would say, “Everybody needs one vice. This is mine.”

Fast forward a couple of years after that, with all the health issues, I ended up in the hospital. It was a flu thing but it ended up making me sick for about three months like critically ill. It was a flu thing just so nobody freaks out. I had a knee replacement. The knee replacement resulted in a pulmonary embolism. The pulmonary embolism ended up in the beginnings of the worst hormone imbalance you could ever imagine. All of my major organs were shutting down. I spent 3 or 4 months not eating. I could not eat. I could not hold food down. I was very sick. When I started to get better, I said, “This is my chance to give up artificial sweeteners.”

I gave that up and realized that some things were changing. My palette was changing, and then all these other things came up. I started reading about, “What do I want to start eating? What is it really to be healthy?” That is when I started. I do not know what would have started changing things. Six months later, if I tasted a diet soda then or now, it is awful. I cannot drink it.

This does not stick to your specific question but I can tell you that milk chocolate was one of my absolute favorite foods go-to comfort foods. I cannot eat milk chocolate. I cannot eat anything that has a lot of sugar added to it. It does not taste good. It does not feel good. It does not look appetizing anymore. The power of changing both your taste buds, your mindset, and how you react when you look at food is mind-blowing to me.

In a million years, I would never have predicted that this is where I would be. It is not a problem for me. I do not wake up in the morning anymore and go, “It is important to know what I am going to have for dinner.” My husband still does. I do not. When he asks me, I am like, “I do not know. I do not care.” He eats the standard American diet. I do not care, yet I get excited about what I am eating because it tastes good.

When did you get to the point from the title of your book, Freedom From A Toxic Relationship With Food? When did you have the recognition that, “I am free of this. The shackles are off. It is no longer controlling me?”

I do not know that I can identify a point because I am always involved in too many things. I get that. I overfill my plate. Some people say that it is another drug. The problem for me with food was always, “I am doing all these other things, and I am doing them well. I am feeling accomplished and gratified. Why am I obsessed with this thing that I cannot get control of?”

At some point, I realized a year or two into the journey when all processed food was out of my system or when I first realized I could drink black coffee. This is somebody who used to put four packs of Equal in their coffee. I am drinking black coffee. Maybe it was when I got on the scale, I went, “When did I start weighing that?” It was less than what I used to weigh, and not trying to and not worrying about it.

Maybe it was when I realized I was going nowhere without water by my side. I do not know the time but I know that I have been 100% vegan for years. I know it was before that. That was a conscious choice of one last step to get the final animal products, which for me, were eggs and fish. To get those out of my diet was no big deal.

To me, it is iterative. It takes time. I do not know that it is a light switch. I still wake up in the morning and think about dinner but not in the way like, “I got to plan this all out to make sure I do not blow it.” I do not think of it that way. I get up and think about the love aspect of it, “What can I create tonight? What can I put together? What sounds fun to make?” It is still a fixation. There is not complete freedom but it is a different type of fixation. It is a fixation of joy. I still self-analyze as I put my clothes on in the morning, “Does it feel a little tighter?” It is nature.

What compelled you to take these two steps further? You have got control back. You feel this freedom from your toxic relationship but you do not stop there. You do two more things. You start a business because you had a challenge in trying to figure out how to start your day as a busy on-the-go human being to start your day with the nutrient density and the clean eating that you want. You wanted to solve that problem, and then you wanted to tell and share this story. You felt compelled to do that, which is wonderful. Why did both those things need to be seen through by you? What made them both come to fruition?

They are mutually exclusive. The book was a fantasy for me. It was a dream because I had spent a lot of time in the difficult early years in my worst throws of eating disorders, and I would always put “cured” because I did not believe that was even a possibility. I thought, at best, I would manage it. Saying, “If I am ever cured, I am going to do something to pay it forward.” It is such a hell part of my life that I was living in. it is very lonely. It is isolating. It is secretive because we think it is a weakness in us. I did not think it was right that other people should struggle with that. I wanted to make some contribution to bringing it out of the closet or supporting them to find a journey that worked for them.

The book was always a dream for me. In my life, I look at things as another advantage of having such a miserable upbringing and say, “Things always got better.” If I put my life on a graph, it is a constant up but I also did not plan out my life. Things just happen. The book was always a dream but it was a back-burner dream. The products for Read The Ingredients came about because I needed to find something that was convenient that I could take with me. I was traveling. You cannot eat when you are traveling if you are super clean, gluten-free or vegan. If you want to eat super clean, it is virtually impossible to travel and be in airports all day, eat that way, and have it be satisfying.

I created the products for Read The Ingredients for my own personal need. Michael and I had another business that it was getting close to time to sell anyway. A couple of years after I developed the recipe and we shared it with other people who had the same reaction, and it is like, “This does not exist.” I had no idea what, “It does not exist,” would mean as far as the challenge of bringing it to market. This is an industry I had never seen, been involved in, and wanted to be a part of in the past. That was my new dream because, A) It does not exist and, B) Like the book, there must be people out there that can benefit from this because it does not exist.

I rarely go to the grocery store. I went to Whole Foods, which for me is a little over an hour away, and walked through their bar section. At the time, I was thinking, “Bar,” so it is ironic that we had that problem with our consumers. I went through their Whole bar section and said, “This is disgusting. There is nothing here I can eat, or want to eat or tastes good.” I bought some things. I had tried bars before. I did not like them then. It was not clean. I said, “I got to create something because I need to be traveling and cannot do that.” That is why I created those, and then Michael and I sold half of our previous business. We decided there was a need in the market.

You are seeing on the other end of it how big food in the industry conspires against those who are trying to solve these problems. How has that shaped that view of what we are facing both as consumers and the general populace? How’s that realization or recognition of the big food companies in terms of controlling what we get on shelves?

It is my one and a half in priority, my biggest frustration. My biggest frustration is how our healthcare system deals with illness, people, and wellbeing. There is getting to be more but percentage-wise, very few healthcare practitioners that go to food and nutrition as the way for us to be healthy. Right up there is our supply chain, and the marketing of big food company products is appalling. I could go and do six more podcasts on it.

The exciting thing to me about being a part of this industry is some of that is all about making a profit but I believe when harnessed for good, the business can be the change agent. When I look at facts like $18 billion in market share move from the top 25 CPG brands into emerging brands were making a dent or progress. It is a fight worth fighting. The consumers out there want us to fight for them to bring better products.

I believe all things like this are iterative. We are not going to get everyone to go from eating Pringles to kale chips but if we can help them along the way by bringing solutions that they can begin to work through to improve their habits, it will be good. I want to switch back to the personal side. Your husband eats a standard American diet. You eat a Whole Food, plant-exclusive diet. You are still married. How does that work?

To make it one step more challenging, we raised three boys with him doing all of the cooking and all of the grocery shopping. Not only does he eat and is going to eat the way he always has but his identity was also wrapped up in providing for me, now that the kids are out of the house or for all of us as a family from a food standpoint. He got that from his mom. I loved his mom. She was an amazing woman. That is how she showed her love. She fed everybody. They came over here from France. They are French country people, so there’s bread, meat, and cheese part of every meal.

His identity was as the food provider, and that is how he nurtured and showed love. When I started to change how I ate, it was a big threat to him. It was very uncomfortable for him. Anyone who knows me knows I am strong-willed, and when I decide I am going to do something, I am going to do it. It was hard. His reaction was his normal reaction when something is impacting his ego or his identity. It was tough. He was sarcastic. He was not sabotaging but he was sarcastic. It was a big deal. It was very uncomfortable. We have gotten to the point where if I do not have to justify to him why I am doing it, which to him suggested he should do it, it is not much better.

As a matter of fact, we went from him always cooking when we were having dinner together to now we are both in the kitchen cooking the same meal. Mine is adapted to my diet and is the way it has always been. He loves pasta, and he will not eat pasta without meat or chicken in it or whatever he puts in it. I now love gluten-free pasta. I make it the way I make it. We are sharing the activity of being in the kitchen and cooking. That is a real plus, and I look at that as a real plus. It upsets me that he is on medication to keep his cholesterol controlled. All of that, that I never wanted but it is his choice. You have to let people make their choice.

It is easy to fall into a lifestyle or eat a certain way and then tether too closely to your own identity and think it is the only way and then start proselytizing about it. You and I eat somewhat similarly. I am not gluten-free but I eat a Whole Food, plant-exclusive diet. I love to cook. Fortunately for me, my wife is, has been for years and years, primarily a pescatarian. She is not going to give up cheese and fish but for the most part, she will eat whatever I make. She is fine. When my kids come to visit, they give me a lot of good-natured shit but they are happy to eat whatever is being served. They eat healthily but they eat more of the standard American diet.

They are happy to eat what I make, but then they are also going to snarf down that stuff. I learned that it is not my place to be either judgmental or preachy because it is a personal journey for everybody, and there are trade-offs in all of those decisions. The best way for any of us to leave our mark is to be fully transparent and honest with our relationships, whether it is our relationship with food, people or our spirituality, whatever it is, and not proselytize. I welcome when people ask questions. I welcome when people want to understand why I choose to eat the way I choose but I do not judge them and will not ever preach. There are plenty of fingers pointing to the moon. We are all getting there, and there is a way there.

That is what I appreciate about your book. Many of the things that are out there paint a picture where it is all an absolute. You have to do everything 100%. You didn’t and said, “This is what I have to do but these are things that you can do to whatever degree you want to do them or that work for you. Every step that you take towards this is going to be an improvement in the way you feel and in your relationship with food.” You have given them a decoder ring, and they can choose to decode how much of the map they want to.

Why did you choose to do that? Was it for that same reason? Philosophically, it is unique out there from a lot of the other things that are being pushed. We live in a very tribal society when it comes to food, “I am a keto eater. I am vegan. I am paleo.” It is tribalized. Being hybridized or open to multiple solutions to somewhat oddly unique.

I have two answers for why I chose to do it that way. One is when I wrote the book. I reflected a lot on my journey. There were so many times in my life that I was sent signals that I should be doing something differently than you are doing. Not just with food, with my first marriage that lasted four months where I should not have married him. You are given these opportunities in life, and it is up to you to listen to them or not. In the case of food, I cite two examples in the book. One is I went to a doctor. I walked in the door and told her, “I am dealing with chronic fatigue.”

She said, “You need to become vegan.” No explanation. No, “Tell me about your lifestyle.” No, nothing. She said that. I was completely shut down to it. I would love to go back to her and say, “You were right but I wish you had delivered the message differently.” I looked at that. The other example I tell in the book is my stepmother died of mad cow disease. It is a very rare disease, and few people get to witness that. Of all the ways you could die, this has to be one of the most horrendous. The progression of the disease, the symptoms, and then what happens to you is a horrendous way to die.

She died around Thanksgiving in 1995. We got together as a family, which in itself was a rarity for Thanksgiving because it was right after she passed. We looked around the table at all the family members and had a discussion about, “Are you going to change the way you are eating? Are you going to change? Are you going to take the meat out of your diet?” We had all witnessed this horrendous thing that happened.

We all collectively said, “No.” I look back on that alone and I go, “What? That is nuts.” I looked at my journey. People cannot tell you what to do. When the time is right, the stars will line up. Something will happen. For some people, you wait until the big, bad event. For other people, it is the right time but you have to be respectful of that.

If I was going to accomplish what I wanted to with the book, which was to be a support system or an idea for somebody or turn a light bulb on, I had to go into it, understanding that everybody does it in their own time. You have to be very respectful of that. That is so important to me in life. The other answer to the question is, and you can ask Michael if this is true and this is the way I raised my kids, I raised my kids not by telling them, “Do not do that.” I raised my kids by empowering them with the information and saying, “If you do that, this could happen. If you do that, that could happen but it is your decision.”

I wanted to empower my kids to make decisions. My end goal was that they would be independent, happy, and successful adults. I have three independent thinking and successful adult sons who all have families, are married and have their own kids. In that way, empowering them, that approach, supporting and guiding them when they need it but just empowering them is the way you get your message across. I would like to think, as a mom, I was a role model for them in different ways. Two of my three sons are, for the most part, vegan. I was the first of them. I would like to think role modeling was a factor there.

I also think across the board, we have done the same with our kids. We are not going to tell them how to think. We are going to give them the information so they can do their own thinking. That has always been my philosophy. It is my philosophy while working with entrepreneurs too. We are not going to give them the yeses. We are going to give them the trade-offs and the questions that they should be asking to let them go solve. When it comes to food, it is one of the most personal things that any of us have in terms of relationships because for all the things you mentioned, a lot has to do with the connections to our childhood.

There are a lot of societal things around it. There are a lot of self-image and self-identity things around it. When you get too preachy about it or proselytizing about it, and for me, candidly, I am vegan but I feel great that my diet is beneficial for animal welfare and better for the climate. That is not the reason I got that led me there.

It is the reason that reinforces me staying there, knowing what I have known and what I have learned but what got me there was that I felt like shit. I was unhappy with my weight. I recognize that moderation, for me, equaled failure and abstinence, success. It was that simple. I want to switch back quickly to the professional side. As we look to build this brand and begin to expand Read The Ingredients, how do the book and Read The Ingredients potentially play together?

I got an email from a guy who I knew years ago. Our paths crossed. He is a huge force and presence in this industry. I reached out to him and said, “I have gone into this business. We met back then when I was doing XYZ. I would like to send you some products and see what you think.” He and I have been in this dialogue. He gave me great feedback.

He also happens to be predominantly vegetarian or might be plant-based. In any case, he liked the product. He did not understand the use case. I thought, “Here is one more hurdle to overcome.” To talk about the connection between the book and the product, our brand, the challenge for us is I do not want to go to market as a vegan product.

Like, “If you are vegan, this is for you.” I do not want to go to market and go, “If you are gluten-free, this is for you.” We made it very clear what we are going to market as is a clean, convenient product. It does not have the sugar that 90% of your other convenient grab-and-go breakfast or lunch has. I go, “People are not even understanding it is a full breakfast.” The messaging is so important, just like the messaging in the book was important to me that I did it in a way that people can be receptive to any part of a message, all of the message. We have this challenge even bigger with our brand. It is like, “You do not have to be vegan to appreciate this.”

This makes me chuckle. We got a five-star review from a guy who tried a sample pack within five days after he received our sample pack. He signed up for a substantial-sized subscription. In the comment in the five-star review, he went, “These are great because nothing that healthy exists. I can grab them. I can take them with me. I can thaw them in my car or pop them in the microwave.” He went into this whole description. In the end, he said, “The taste is not great but I choose health over taste.” He gave us five stars. He did not even ding a star off for that. I am thrilled that he likes and serves him. That shocked me.

That is because the taste is by the pallet of those who are over-sugared. It is a challenge when it comes to branding and the fact that you want to be receptive and open to everybody. You want to pitch the biggest tent. The other truth of the matter is that to drive trial and interest, you sometimes have to put a stake in the ground and start narrow to go broad. For example, the fact that calling out and saying, “This is for the Whole Food clean-eating vegan,” does run the risk of alienating or limiting the broader audience but it is the catalyst to motivate those that are suffering from the problem at the biggest.

What we have seen a lot is that brands will start there with firm messaging that is very narrow and tight around that to build their early adopters. You will see a metamorphosis of the messaging as it softens and broadens each time it knocks the tent down and builds a slightly bigger one. Those are all things to explore. I wanted to give you the opportunity to let folks know where to find the book, how to reach out to you, and how to order the Read The Ingredients Superloaf. Go ahead. This is your pitch.

Freedom From A Toxic Relationship With Food is available on Amazon. It is also in a few bookstores. I have made it available wholesale, and I know a couple of stores have bought it. I give an email address in the book. I am available for any discussion about the book because my purpose was to be a place of support for anybody that is exploring a journey for themselves. I am not a doctor. I am not a nutritionist. Michael is a certified nutritionist. I am there as emotional support for that journey.

Read The Ingredients. We are making some headway. We have gotten accepted into one very large coffee shop. We expect to get a positive from a coffee shop in the Bay Area that has got eleven shops. We met with them, and we expect that to happen. We also are going to be in retail up in Southern California, Northern California, and likely, up in Oregon or Washington. We are online at RTIFoods.com. We are on Amazon and ShopVejii.com.

Bobbi, we are going to have to do another one of these because we got a lot left to talk about. I will say this to everyone reading. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. Bobbi is one of the most inspirational people I work with. I love her moxie and willingness to be vulnerable. If you struggle at all with food, even if you have no intent to eat a plant-based diet, it does not matter.

Read the book. I promise you. You will not feel like you are being preached to. You will feel like you are being educated, and more importantly, you will feel supported and like, “This person gets me.” It is very much that way. That is certainly how I did it. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Thanks, everyone, for reading, and we will catch you next time.

Thank you, Elliot. I appreciate it.

Important Links

• The TIG Collective

• Read The Ingredients

• Freedom From A Toxic Relationship With Food

• Read The Ingredients Superloaf

• ShopVejii.com

About Bobbi Giudicelli

Bobbi Giudicelli is a serial entrepreneur. She lives her life following her passions. Today she is the mother of 3 adult sons, and the grandmother of 6 little ones.

In her career she has founded companies in both service and product industries. Today, Bobbi, together with her oldest son, co-founded Read the Ingredients.

Bobbi, who, for moral and health reasons, is a vegan, spends whatever spare time she has with her horses and dogs, or on the Pickleball courts with her husband in the beautiful foothills of Northern California.

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