The Whole Truth, and nothing else

In today’s episode we have Shashank Mehta the founder of The Whole Truth, (formerly known as and nothing else) with Sanjot Malhi, Director, Matrix Partners India. Sanjot and Shashank dive deep into the brand story, starting with Shashank’s real motive and personal journey behind founding The Whole Truth and the reason behind the recent brand transformation exercise.

Salonie:

Hi and welcome to Matrix Moments, this is Salonie and on todays episode we have Shashank Mehta the founder of The Whole Truth, formerly known as and nothing else. A 100% clean label healthy food snack brand. Within the first 9 months of existence the brand sold over 3lakhs bars, garnered a super engage following of over 90K brand lovers and won multiple emerging brand award accolades. This episode will be moderated by Sanjot Malhi, Director at Matrix Partners India. Sanjot and Shashank dive deep into the brand story, starting with Shashank’s real motive and personal journey behind setting this up. Why Matrix was excited to be a apart of the journey with Shashank. The massive problem that exit within the packaged food industry and how The Whole Truth aims to solve for it. Key miles stone that led to the brand early success and finally the reason behind the recent brand transformation exercise that was undertaken to further accurately represent what the brand stands for, which is The Whole Truth about the food. Tune in.

Sanjot:

Great. Welcome, everyone. Shashank, thank you for joining us on your first episode of Matrix Moments. It's a pleasure. We've been speaking about this for a while, so it's good to finally have you.

Shashank:

Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to it.

Sanjot:

Awesome. So why don't we start, Shashank, with how we met and how our journey together started. I remember I ruined your vacation in Tel Aviv, and I'm sure your wife still hates me for it. But why don't you tell the viewers a little bit about your personal background and, of course, a little bit about how our journey started?

Shashank:

Right. So yes, you gave away the Tel Aviv bit. So let me delve into it from two lenses. One is because what we're doing today is a culmination of both my personal and professional journey. Professionally, I was working with Unilever before I started out building And Nothing Else, which is now The Whole Truth. I was in my in my notice period then I was taking what I thought would be maybe my last vacation for a long time to come in Israel when you called in. I must say that I was quite surprised that you reached out because I had no clue that a fund like Matrix would be interested in doing a proper pre-seed like a paper plan investment in a CPG company. There were like too many "What the hell is happening here?" going on in my head at that time. Yeah, but I must say the speed at which you went was amazing. I was working with Unilever in marketing. We're building this brand called Ayush, before I left to build And Nothing Else. Personally, which a large part of the journey, which led to me starting up, so I've been a really, really obese kid all my childhood and teenage life. When I was 19 years of age, I was about 110 kg. And then one day, I just -- I don't know what it was. Maybe it was a girl's rejection or something. I can't fully remember, but I just went batshit crazy and I lost 40 kgs in nine months. At that time, I had no education in fitness and weight loss. I just stopped eating, and I started running. And then once I got thin, I thought, if thin is equal to fit and now I'm like one of those thin guys. So I can eat and drink and do whatever the thin guys do. I started doing that. Lo and behold, all of it came back in the next two, three years. Then I lost it again. Then it came back again. Then I lost it again. Then it came back again. So I've done this plus-minus 25, 30 kg cycle thrice in life which goes to prove I'm not the smartest cookie around because I should have figured it out in one go. But it was at the end of this third cycle that I started thinking that I might be daft, but I can't be that stupid that I keep doing the same mistake again and again, which is when I started researching and educating myself about food and fitness, which is also the time when I started writing my blog which was called Fitshitwhere I used to do these long 1,500-word technical breakdowns of the basics of food and fitness. And that pretty much was the genesis of leading up to starting up in the food and fitness space because I was at a time when people were telling me that it's the age of Instagram and no one will look at a photograph. Forget about reading 1,500-word article. People were pouring in, and people were asking questions relating to what I was writing. So that was the insight that I got, that the Indian consumer, at least a small chunk of it, is ready and they're worried about their food and they want to know a lot more. Today's brands are not doing justice to what the consumer is asking for. So yeah, I've seen marketing from the inside, and Unilever has seen food and fitness personally multiple times and the culmination of these two things led to starting up.

Sanjot:

Yeah. You know, we as a fund speak about being founders first. I think this investment was as founders first as they come. Like you mentioned, it was pre-product, pre-launch certainly. I remember what struck me was two things. I think one was just the mission and the purpose that you had in building this brand. You spoke about the journey from obesity and back and forth for yourself. I remember you and I bonding over having that fat kid syndrome. I think that's still drives up both of us in those small parts.

Shashank:

Very true.

Sanjot:

That mission combined with a very specific market problem that consumers suffer from, I think that confluence is really what got us very, very excited, in addition to, of course, your capability. So coming to the second part, you and I have spoken about the specific problem and this dichotomy that exists in the market where people are becoming a little bit more conscious about eating healthy and wellness. Actually, if you look at the numbers, that part of the market is growing twice as fast as the overall market. But at the same time, lifestyle diseases are at an all-time highs and growing like obesity, heart disease, and so on. So talk a little bit more about the specific problem that you're solving and how you sort of thought about that and the solution.

Shashank:

Yeah, I think that dichotomy sets up the problem in the starkest way possible, that food and fitness, depending on how you define it, is either a $1 trillion industry globally or a $4 trillion industry globally. This industry, this part of the global GDP is growing at 2x of global GDP and yet all markers -- obesity, heart disease, diabetes -- are at all-time highs. Even in a country like India, we used to actually be a fairly scarce population. We used to have only 12% people who were overweight about 15, 20 years ago. That number has gone up to 20%. That number for the US is 40% and growing. So how is it that the people are supposed to solve this problem are growing massively, and yet the problem is worsening? Clearly, something is broken. When you cut off the riffraff because it's such a cluttered market, it actually comes down to just two things, right? If I keep the wellness and mental wellness and wellbeing part of the industry aside, biologically, physically, it comes down to food and exercise, right? That's how consumers understand it. There is food and exercise. And the age-old adage is true that 80% of the problem gets solved by food. In fact, food is a curated part of the problem. Exercise is normally the -- sorry, food is a preventive part, and exercise is normally the curative part. People get onto the exercise bandwagon generally when things have already gone wrong. So fundamentally, thinking about it, it was clear to me that if you have to solve this dichotomy, you have to start with food because solving it at its root requires to solve it from the inside. Otherwise, you'll always be chasing two steps behind the problem.

Sanjot:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So actually, let's come to the solution and for our viewers who may not know, this company started out as as being called And Nothing Else as the brand. Recently, you've made a transition. So why don't we start with the first part of the journey, And Nothing Else? How were you going about the solution? And how did you know there's something working early on?

Shashank:

Right. So once I came down to this point, that food is what I want to solve for, I started thinking about a lot of people were writing to me during the Fitshitdays and ask me, is this healthy? Should I have this cookie? Should I have this? Is this healthy? And it's a very tough question to answer, right? Someone thinks keto is healthy. Someone thinks vegan is healthy. Someone thinks high protein is healthy. Someone thinks no sugar is healthy. What is healthy? So I had this constant pursuit in my head as I used to write the blog that I want to arrive at this one universal principle of answering what is healthy. I think after two years of writing the blog, it struck me that good food is made of good ingredients. If you put in good, natural, homely ingredients in food, all your macros, all your micros will sort themselves out. So rather than attack the problems through specific lenses of high protein, low sugar, high fat, low fat, attack it through the innate, which is the ingredients, right? And the clue there was your mom's food. No one ever got fat or unhealthy eating at home? Why? By the way, everyone thinks that their mom's food is the tastiest. Why? Because of the ingredients, because she sources locally. She doesn't put anything that came out of a chemistry lab into your food, and she makes it fresh, right? So that was the big realization, where now when people ask me, is this healthy? I will tell them, turn the back and just read the list of ingredients. If there is something that you can't pronounce or you haven't heard of or isn't found in your kitchen, drop it. So that became the core insight and we said that, okay, if we have to now create a food solution, which is built on this insight, how would we do? And the answer was then very simple, that, hey, create a brand where you declare each and every ingredient up front. So you go and say the food you're about to eat has A, B, C, D, E and nothing else. That's how the brand name came about. That's a very powerful thing to do because it removes any possibility of lying or obfuscation from the table. You can't do it. So we very proudly call ourselves perhaps the only 100% clean label brand that you know of because you're not even -- this has been turned into a marketing trick that some brands will put some of the ingredients that they want you to see on the front of pack and make you feel as if this is all there is. But if you add it up, it will add up to 80%. What is the remaining 20%? Why is it hidden at the back? I'm no rocket scientist, but I'm fairly certain that people hide stuff that they're ashamed of, which is why ingredients are written in small, microscopic font at the back. Why is the front reserved for shouting out sugar-free and fat-free when at the back in microscopic font you have ingredients? So we said, we'll bring the back to the front, and we'll never put anything in our food that we are ashamed of. And the proof of that is we'll declare it up front. So that was the genesis of And Nothing Else.

Sanjot:

What would you say were the early signs of perhaps success or you as a founder knowing that your thesis is working?

Shashank:

So I think while they were numerical markers which I, actually apart from numerical markers, also love to look at anecdotal stuff which tells me that this is working. There were three things which we started seeing very, very early. One was people started loving the product, like the kind of consumer reactions I have a whole folder of long emails that consumers have written to us about how they felt that, how the hell is this this tasty? In fact, people asking us, "Are you sure this is healthy?" because it is this tasty, right? These were the fundamental pieces that we started. Our food philosophy told us that when you use good ingredients, food automatically becomes tasty. It is a false dichotomy. Again, mom’s food is the example. It is a dichotomy that healthy food, it is a false dichotomy that healthy food leads to taste like shit. It doesn't. So I think that was the first marker. The amount of product love we started getting in the beginning told me that, hey, at least this front we seem to be sorted. The second one was, again I came from the school of thought that just pushing product, product, product down people's throat is a really bad way of marketing. Consumers engage with brands either to get informed or to get entertained. There is nothing else. You either make me laugh or cry, or you inform me. So that's exactly what we started doing. So Instagram is perhaps the only social channel where we're really active. And if you go down our Insta feed, 60% of our posts don't even have our brand logo on it because we're talking about whole wheat bread versus white bread, sugar versus honey versus jaggery, ketchup. We don't even sell these products, right? Why am I talking about these? I'm talking about these because they matter to my consumer and the kind of love we started getting there, like we went, in the first three months we had 10,000 followers. In the next three months, we had 80,000 followers. Today, we have 85,000 followers and today is also, by the way, eight and a half months down the line. So it's not been a long time. So I think that was the second marker of consumers getting not just the product but the brand. And the third thing was, again, I felt that our marketing language and brand marketing language is stuck in the '80s. Brands still talk to consumers as “ Pesh Kartein hain, aeye dekheye” Who the hell talks like this now? Consumers want brands to be humans and treat them as intelligent humans, not as dumb humans. In the early days, we were always taught that dumb it down for the consumer. She doesn't have the time to spend on reading too much. She's not very intelligent. You need to dumb it down. We went the other way. We said we'll amp it up. We'll detail it. We'll talk in layers and layers and layers and bring out the truth. The kind of accomplishment we started getting, that hundreds of comments on each information posts where people are trying to have conversations on the comments and bring in a new one told us that the brand identity that we're trying to create is working. So I think these three things: product, brand, and brand language, brand identity is what told me that we're onto something.

Sanjot:

Yeah, yeah, and I couldn't agree more, Shashank. I think we, as investors, talk a lot about product market fit is just a fancy way of saying product love or customer love. I can't think of a single brand that has more of that than The Whole Truth. Actually, you and I have been measuring this in different ways from the beginning, so NPS of over 80, which puts you in a league of the Teslas and the Nikes and Amazons of the world, actually higher than some of them as well. Repeat rates are extremely high, more than 50% repeat month on month. Inherent virality in the brand. So people not only love consuming the product, but they love talking about the brand, which is your point about engaging with the consumer. I remember at one point we measured almost 10% of buyers actually end up posting organically on Instagram on a daily basis which creates crazy virality, unpaid virality for the brand itself, and which therefore leads to organic growth. I know that's been the majority of our growth unpaid month on month. So that virtuous loop to me as an investor, I think, is actually bullseye of what one wants to do in any sort of consumer tech company, where the love is so strong that it leads to high repeats, high word of mouth, people telling their friends, which leads to organic growth and then kind of keeps going from there. So yeah, I think that's something very, very special in terms of what you've built so far.

Shashank:

If I may just add a thing there because the minute someone starts chasing us the superstitious middle-class guy in me stands up and says, you’re just nine months. Don't let this go without the caveat. Otherwise, the gods will frown upon you. I must say that this is not a done thing. It's not Abhi ye hogaya hai. Now we have it. It's something that needs to be earned and re-earned every day. That's what I keep telling my team internally that it's not done. It's not as if a Abhi consumer love milgaya hai. It is replying to comments and having conversations within 10 minutes of them getting posted that you earn it every day. It is through constantly thinking about how can I wow you the next time you open my box that earns it every day? So I would also, just to make sure that this is my touch wood version of doing this, that I don't think -- like we're very early in the journey, and we can lose it any day. Hence we are very cognizant that we have to keep re-earning it, re-earning it, re-earning it every other day.

Sanjot:

Absolutely, absolutely. Actually, on your point about brand, that's in addition to the product, I think that's been one of the key features of the short journey so far and the success story so far. So let's talk about that because I think that's one of the biggest things you're undergoing today, right, the transition from And Nothing Else to The Whole Truth. So maybe talk and tell our viewers a little bit about how that came about and what the journey has been on that.

Shashank:

It's another example in a constant streak of seemingly stupid stuff. So it was about, I think, four months ago, pretty much in the first month of the lockdown hitting and the pandemic hitting that I think all of us were forced into taking a pause and introspecting about where is humanity as a whole and hence what we are doing in it going. At that time, you were just five, six months old, but we've seen the food industry from up close and personal. I had started realizing that our initial hypothesis that the problem with food today is that ingredients are not declared up front was correct, but it was a narrow definition of the problem, because the industry has made a science out of obfuscating facts. And there are many, many layers to how it is done. So why is it that my oat cookie, which is sold to me as this really healthy thing which has oats, why is it that it has just 7% oats when I turn the pack? Why is it that my protein pack cookie has two grams of protein per 100 grams? And why is it that my sugar-free chocolate has maltodextrin, which is worse than sugar but it doesn't need to be classified as sugar? How do they get away with it? And when I thought about it, I realized on the front of pack, you'll have a large shot of drippy chocolate which will make you feel that, oh, this is such a luscious, luxurious thing when you realize otherwise, or there'll be a claim saying protein packed. I can't take you to court because you will say that, hey, I tagged two grams of protein in 100 grams of product. So you can get away with it. So legally claim wise, photography, design, all of these come together to create a camouflage. I realized that if we have to take off this entire camouflage, then we have to talk about a larger mission than just we'll bring the ingredients to the front of pack. That's when the idea of The Whole Truth started taking, you know, feed in my head. I took it to my team and they thought I'd gone crazy because, as we said, And Nothing Else is seeing some decent amount of success and why fix something that isn't broken? That's perhaps rule number one of management. Don't touch something that is working. But I think I'm very proud that we stood behind our convictions and said that, hey, it is this conviction that made And Nothing Else whatever it was becoming in these six months. We need to take it to its logical conclusion because we might not be broken, but the industry is. So we are doing this not to fix ourselves, we are doing it to fix the ecosystem and to prove, be a positive example that you can do well by doing good. These two things are not in loggerheads with each other. You can sell the truth, You don't need to sell lies. So that was pretty much, again, it was a heart-led decision, a gut-led decision. But I think over the years, I've realized that your gut is nothing but a subconscious compilation of your experiences. So I felt we should stand by it and the entire team got behind it, and hence we evolved from And Nothing Else becoming The Whole Truth.

Sanjot:

Very impressive. I think you mentioned a couple of interesting things there, and one is very close to my heart as well, which is the purpose and the mission of the brand. So let's talk about that. One, why does it matter? Why do you need to have a mission or a purpose? And then second, how does The Whole Truth fulfill that purpose or mission?

Shashank:

I think that's a great question. It strikes at the heart of why brands came to be in the first place. So if we take a small trip down history lane, let's say go back 200 years. We were all eating and living locally. We had our local bakery, our local butcher, or in the Indian context, our local atta guy or local dal guy. At that time, brands didn't exist because I didn't need them. I knew John's bread is the best. I used to go to his bakery, get his bread, come back, right? Then industrialization happened. Cities have happened. People moved away from their food sources. Now food was made in some obscure outskirts of the country and then brought in to me. And then when I went to the supermarket, I didn't have the time, energy, mental bandwidth to try and figure out, ye jo 10 bread padi hai on the shelf, which one is the best one? So I told John that, hey, why don't you put your label saying John on your bread so that I can identify this is John's bread. I know John's bread is great, I trust it, and hence I'm going to pick up this bread. So brands started off as a symbol and a shorthand for trust that all brands were. As this progressed and industrialization happened, most products started looking like each other. At the back end, consolidation happened. Economies have scaled. Today, for example, all the lipstick in the world is made by two or three global manufacturers sitting out of Europe. Similarly for all personal care, for a lot of food etc. So consumers also caught on. They realized that most of the products mein itna differentiation abhi nahe hai and all of them are, you know, especially in personal care etc, they are effective because there are certain molecules which do the job, and hence consumers moved on to asking brands to go from just being custodians of trust to standing for something larger than the product that they sell, which is where purpose came in. Consumers said brand, you need to be the best version of us. You need to be holier than thou. You can't have the imperfections. You can but you should aspire to be the best versions of us and hence have a purpose. Are you about the planet? Are you about women empowerment? Are you about ensuring that no child abuse happens? What is it that you stand for? And that, by the way, something that I've learned from Unilever. It's always been a company which has been focused on purpose they track. So Lifebuoy isn't just a piece of soap. Lifebuoy does everything it can to help a child reach five because we know that a large percentage of kids die before they reach five purely because they don't wash their hands and they get infected and their immune systems are not strong enough and then they die. So soap gets elevated to another level when it says, I'm going to help your child reach five because when a child reaches five, the chances of mortality drops dramatically. So I think branded with purpose, not only do they matter, they are the only way for brands to exist in today's world. And in the food and fitness world, the step one, which was custodians of trust, that itself we are falling short on. We are losing consumers' trust. Forget about taking step two and going to being a purpose-led brand. So I think there's a huge opportunity that opened up to do a business which fits very well with your conscience, does the right thing, and makes money because the beautiful thing that capitalism is the checks and balances have given made this a viable market.

Sanjot:

Very interesting. Talk a little bit about the second part. How does The Whole Truth fit this narrative and your purpose? Why is it the right brand for you?

Shashank:

I think it's in the name. We wanted, you know, we kept thinking when we were thinking about what should be the name of the brand. Many thoughts came to our mind. Honestly Speaking with one example, and To Be Honest was one example. We went through a lot of names. And finally we said, why are we trying to overengineer this? What are we trying to say? We are trying to say The Whole Truth. Call ourselves The Whole Truth. And because what is transparency? What is trust? The beautiful thing about trust is it doesn't operate at 99% transparency. Even if there is the seed of a doubt, you lose trust. And hence, you have to seek the whole truth. Is it scary? It is very scary. We are not infallible. We don't know everything. Then consumers someday stand up and say, you also do this and why are you talking about this? Like the other day someone commented saying, "Will you also tell us how much profit you make out of these bars?" and "Where do you put this profit?" You'll have to tackle all of this because you are asking for it. But we said, we'll tell you the whole truth even about our shortcoming. We'll accept. Yes, we don't know everything, but we felt it that was the only way to set the foundation of the building that we wanted to make on top which is floor upon floor of unearthing the truth and giving you the complete picture, not trying to do seven effective ways to get six-pack abs. We are not that. We are about telling you the whole truth of sugar and how it starts and how it affects your body. Once we tell you about it, it's that Japanese saying that we will not give you fish, but we will teach you how to fish. Once we give you that, you will figure out the way to get abs. So that's why I believe this is where we had to be. This is truly who we were already. As I said on Instagram, etc., we were not talking about our brand at all. We were just disseminating the truth that we knew. We call ourselves that.

Sanjot:

I want to wrap up by talking about the future a little bit and again, it's something that you and I get very excited about in terms of the potential and the vision of where The Whole Truth can go. So why don't you talk a little bit about that, why this is just the bar is starting point and what the bigger vision for the company is?

Shashank:

So the bigger vision for us is, it's an internal statement that we happily put out there is to rebuild the world's trust in its food. And there are two ways, there are two things we need to do to rebuild that trust. One is put out content that people can look to to educate themselves. And the second is not just be a bystander, giving you comment and content but giving you an alternative to act upon, which is what we do through the product. When it comes to products, our philosophy is simple. If you create a Venn diagram of three intersecting circles, the first one is, is there a food category where consumers are being lied to or facts are being obfuscated? Can we make a food product which lives up to the whole truth philosophy in that category? And third is, is it tasty? because food needs to be tasty. Wherever these three circles intersect, we'll enter. That's the simple guiding mission that we have, that wherever we see these three truths coming together, we will do our best to give consumers the alternative that we believe they should have.

Sanjot:

Very cool. Thank you again, Shashank, for sharing everything so candidly. As a consumer, I'm thankful for a product that I don't have to feel guilty about having and actually I feel pretty happy about having. As a partner, it's been a privilege and a lot of fun having an inside view and working together. I hope to continue that over a long and successful journey. So thank you for joining us today.

Shashank:

Thank you. The pleasure is mine. And as I said, I am constantly amazed that you guys did this, that you backed us. You've been a big enabler. In my wildest dreams, I wouldn't have thought that someone like the Matrix would back such a CPG brand which had such a lofty vision and perhaps what initially looks like a small dam. But yeah, it's been a super-duper fun ride. Thank you so much for that and for having me today.

Sanjot:

It's been a pleasure. Thanks. Thanks, Shashank.

Shashank:

Thank you.

Salonie:

Thanks for tuning in. for more Matrix moments episodes you can head towww.matrixpartners.in/blogYou can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube for more updates.