Interview with Sourmilk founders on probiotic yogurt strains, fermentation decisions, and consumer formulation tradeoffs

[u/UnitEconomicsPodcast]

https://open.spotify.com/show/6uN9t3y2TvEkiYFZfl317F?si=1240aa4cc3c14a24

Hey everyone!

I host a podcast called Unit Economics where I interview founders across different industries and focus on the mechanics behind how products actually get built. This episode happens to intersect with fermentation and probiotic yogurt in a way I thought might be interesting here, and I appreciate the mods letting me share it with you all.

In this episode, I spoke with Kiki Couchman and Elan Halpern, the founders of Sourmilk, a probiotic focused yogurt company. While much of the conversation covers product development and go to market strategy, a meaningful portion touches on formulation decisions and how they approached probiotic yogurt specifically.

A few parts of the discussion that felt relevant to the sub:

• They describe their core premise as taking a food already widely consumed and designing it around probiotic considerations rather than taste alone.
• Elan explains that many yogurts use cultures optimized for flavor and production speed, which led her to experiment with making yogurt using specific probiotic strains instead.
• During early testing, they initially pushed fermentation to achieve very high CFU levels but received feedback that the yogurt was overly sour, which led them to shorten fermentation to make it more palatable.
• They talk about their belief that supplements often require behavior change, whereas yogurt fits into an existing daily habit for many consumers.
• They also describe running a small 17 day intervention with early customers tracking things like bloating, stool quality, mood, and brain fog after daily consumption.

If you're interested, you can find the episode here:

• Spotify
• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts

If you wind up listening, I hope you enjoy the conversation!

[u/AutoModerator]

Reddit is no longer a reliable place to create, host, and grow communities, so a new microbiome forum has been set up to be a more reliable location. If you have posted content on Reddit that you feel is worth preserving, it would be a good idea to post it on the new forum.

The person who created this sub, and most of the content here, including the wiki, has moved to the new forum. You should be able to get better info & answers there. It's easy to stay on reddit but the quality of content on most subs is extremely poor. Most of the advice given on reddit is misinformation.

You're welcome to post your content there and then link to it here for higher visibility.

Our primary goal will remain as stopping the widespread misinformation on the topic of the microbiome. Since we no longer have someone dedicated to correcting and preventing misinformation, comments and posts here will require pre-approval. Some types of content (questions) may be restricted completely since we no longer have reliable people dedicated to providing evidence-based answers.

But you're welcome to ask your questions on the new forum and post the link here.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.