Advertise on podcast: Predicting The Turn w/ Dave Knox

Allan Shen grew up in his parents' herbal apothecary in San Francisco, where his "toys" were ginseng and reishi. That background shaped MoonBrew, the melatonin-free sleep brand that started life as NoonBrew, an afternoon energy drink, until customers kept asking for a sleep version. When the data showed sleep had stronger unit economics, stronger repeat behavior and a category starved for innovation, the team retired NoonBrew and moved the whole company to MoonBrew. In this episode of Predicting The Turn, Dave Knox and Allan dig into why the sleep category has been measuring the wrong thing, how feedback that the first product tasted like "potpourri in bath water" led to a hot cocoa that sold out in its first month, and why deliciousness is an adherence strategy, not a gimmick. They also get into MoonBrew's rule of going deeper into the night and never wider into the day, the decision to launch MoonBrew Kids under the parent brand, and the thinking behind taking hot cocoa into Target's sleep aisle, a wall of white bottles. Allan closes with a hypothesis about wearables: one day you may see a green recovery score badge on the shelf. Allan Shen is the co-founder and CEO of MoonBrew. Key topics: The pivot from NoonBrew (energy) to MoonBrew (sleep), and the unit economics behind itSleep as a nightly ritual and full-cycle recovery, not sedationUsing taste and flavor variety to build a habit people stick withLaunching MoonBrew Kids under the MoonBrew brandLeaving DTC-only for Target's sleep aisle, and where wearables take the category

A family vacation to London changed Mark Flint's life. He booked an escape room he had never tried because it was the number one thing to do in the city, and everyone in his group of eleven walked out having loved the same hour. That single experience became The Escape Game, which today runs roughly 60 corporate-owned locations and has collected more than 300,000 five-star reviews. In this episode, Mark sits down with Dave Knox to explain why the company treats the guest experience, not advertising, as its real acquisition engine, and why it refuses to franchise even after countless offers. He walks through the decision to build the 60,000-square-foot Adventure Factory, where every set, prop, and piece of technology is made in-house, and why 59 of his 60 general managers started as game guides. He also gets into Cosmos, the operating system that helps the business scale without letting a robot run the room, and the launch of a second brand, Great Big Game Show.It's a conversation about conviction in an uncertain market, the discipline of putting the guest first even when the creative team falls in love with its own ideas, and what it really takes to build an experience that no competitor can copy overnight. **Key topics:**- The London family trip that sparked The Escape Game, and the $70,000 first location that did over $250,000 in a single month - Why word of mouth beats marketing when the experience is unique enough - The case for corporate ownership over franchising, and building culture from game guide to general manager - Inside the Adventure Factory: owning fabrication, design, and technology end to end - Stretching the premise with Murder with a Side of Meatballs and launching Great Big Game Show

Ken Ehrman spent 25 years putting tracking technology on forklifts, trailers, and rental cars. Then his niece's dog escaped an invisible fence and was hit by a car, and he realized the invisible fence was the last wired product left in the home. That tragedy became Halo, the GPS dog collar he calls the iPhone for dogs. In this episode, Ken sits down with Dave Knox to break down how Halo scaled to $100 million in sales, why he is targeting $140 million this year, and how the company built a razor-and-blade model now generating roughly $45 million in recurring revenue. He gets specific: 600,000 collars sold against 90 million dogs in the U.S., return rates cut from 20% to under 1%, and 12 million times in a single month that Halo stopped a dog from leaving its fence. Ken also makes the case for choices that go against the grain, from running a fully remote hardware company with talent in Taiwan and Eastern Europe, to partnering with Cesar Millan so the collar never has to shock a dog, to asking early team members to invest real money instead of simply handing out stock. **Key topics:**- The tragedy that turned an IoT veteran into a consumer hardware founder - Building the "iPhone for dogs" across five hardware generations - The razor-and-blade model and the compounding math of recurring revenue - Why Amazon drives 40% of sales and hands over a list of 1.6 million likely buyers a month - Refusing to shock the dog: the Cesar Millan training methodology - Running a remote hardware company and making everyone an owner Listen to Predicting The Turn with Dave Knox for the full conversation.

When Nima Fotovat and his three sisters launched Made Good in 2014, they made a bet that parents, kids, and classroom allergy rules could all be satisfied by the same snack. Twelve years later, Made Good is in tens of thousands of doors, manufactures everything in-house at roughly 500,000 square feet, and was just named the snack served on every Delta flight. In this conversation, Nima walks through why the family insisted on owning manufacturing from day one, how he holds a challenger mindset together at a thousand employees, why a "trust but verify" gut beats expensive consumer research, and the drastic founder advice he gives anyone serious about building a real CPG brand: burn the boats. Key topics discussed: The three-stakeholder tension (kid, parent, classroom) that launched Made GoodBuilding a snack brand with sisters and a wife, and why family forces commitmentThe case for owning a 500,000-square-foot factory instead of using a co-packerHow Made Good landed on every Delta flight by being the one snack almost any passenger can eat"Trust but verify": how 100 phone calls to schools beat formal researchBurning the boats: putting every family home and retirement dollar on the lineAbout the guest: Nima Fotovat is co-founder of Made Good, the Toronto-based, family-owned maker of allergen-free, organic granola bars, granola minis, and granola bites. Made Good is sold across North America in mass, club, grocery, and now on every Delta flight.

Tim Heitmann started Double Good as a 500-square-foot popcorn shop on Navy Pier in 1998 and grew it into a wholesale business that sold to Costco, QVC, and FTD. Then a handwritten letter from a fifth grader who had raised $300 for his band trip made Tim question everything. He walked away from wholesale and poured the company into a fundraising side business that was barely 5% of revenue. In this episode of Predicting The Turn, Tim shares the full arc: how he spent five years quietly building a fundraising tech platform with just three people in a WeWork office, why he focused obsessively on competitive cheerleading as his beachhead market, and how COVID did not create the pivot but revealed a platform that had been five years in the making. When growth exploded in 2021 (400% in Q1 alone), Tim explains the brutal reality of scaling manufacturing, watching SLAs blow from 10 to 47 days, and building a blackout feature to throttle demand before it killed the brand. Tim also explains why Double Good has never taken outside investment, why he thinks in decades instead of quarters, and how he is building an executive team and governance structure so the company can outlast him. If you care about purpose-driven brands, patient entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to disrupt a 100-year-old industry with technology, this one delivers.- From a Navy Pier popcorn shop to a fundraising tech platform - The kid's letter that redirected the entire company - Building the tech platform with 3 people in a WeWork over 5 years - Why competitive cheerleading was the perfect beachhead market - The 4-day fundraiser model vs. the industry standard of 30 days - COVID as accelerant: 400% Q1 growth in 2021 - Scaling crisis: SLAs from 10 to 47 days, 3,300 open tickets - Why Double Good has never taken outside investment - Building an evergreen company that thinks in decades

Will Nitze started IQBAR in 2018 to solve his own problem: long hours, a bad diet, daily brain fog. He designed the formulas for cognition, low net carb, low sugar, low glycemic. What he didn't know was that the rest of America was about to get obsessed with that exact macro profile for a completely different reason: weight loss. When keto took off, IQBAR was one of only three keto-compliant bars on Amazon. That lucky overlap was the first of several step-change moments that took a 15-person team to over 100% compound annual growth for 8 straight years, and into the shelves of Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart, and Target. In this episode of Predicting The Turn, Will unpacks why startups beat legacy CPG on speed rather than size, why he runs the entire company with a "benevolent dictator in every division" model instead of bloated marketing teams, and how IQBAR raised a little under $10M across 8 years without a single egregious fundraise. He also breaks down the move from D2C to mass retail, why packaging becomes the billboard when the shelf replaces the digital feed, and how the Bites launch turned into an incrementality test in real time.If you care about how emerging CPG brands actually scale inside Costco, Sam's Club, and Walmart without blowing up their cap table, this one is a masterclass. Key Topics - Why IQBAR's brain-health formulation became accidentally keto-compliant - The 15-person "benevolent dictator" operating model - Raising under $10M across 8 years and why bootstrapping isn't a virtue - Working capital reality when you move from Amazon to Walmart and Costco - Why packaging becomes the #1 marketing lever in mass retail- Building a platform brand across bars, hydration, coffee, and Bites - Running incrementality tests to avoid cannibalization - The three step-change moments: keto, Costco, Thomas Keller partnership - Picking a North Star that keeps you fired up in year 8

When there wasn’t enough fruit to make a juice business viable, Califia Farms co-founder Greg Steltenpohl looked out the window of his Central Valley factory and noticed something: demand for almond milk was quietly exploding. That pivot—from citrus to almonds—transformed a struggling startup into one of America’s leading plant-based beverage brands, with products in more than 20,000 stores nationwide. Now CEO Dave Ritterbush, the former Quest Nutrition chief who guided that company to a $1 billion acquisition, is placing new bets on organic lines, nutrient-dense formulations, and a foodservice strategy built not on retailers but on baristas.

Most grocery stores added “healthy” end caps; Thrive Market built a GLP-1 filterthat instantly rewrites your entire cart instead. In this conversation, Thrive Market’s Chief Marketing Officer Amina Pasha breaks down how strict EU-inspired ingredient bans, AI-generated smart carts, and a radically limited 7,000-item assortment are turning decision overload into trust and growth. For C-suites, founders, and brand leaders, it’s a playbook on using data, mission, and merchandising to stay ahead of the most health-obsessed generation of shoppers yet.

When Lucy Postins started The Honest Kitchen in 2002, she didn't just launch a pet food company — she lobbied the FDA to create an entirely new standard for human-grade pet food. Two decades later, the brand she built is the leading human-grade pet food in North America, with a 50/50 revenue split between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail. CEO Will Lisman, who stepped in three years ago after a career spanning Hershey, startup leadership, and brand building, is now scaling the mission while positioning the company against headwinds in affordability, pet adoption, and a category he believes is a decade behind human food in its health-and-wellness evolution.

Eric Skae was running Rao's — one of the most iconic pasta sauce brands in America — when his daughter told him she wanted to go somewhere else for her birthday. Not just anywhere: Carbone, the red-sauce Italian restaurant that had become the hottest reservation in New York. "It's the place for my generation," she told him. "I've already been to Rao's with you." Five years later, Skae has turned that generational insight into a sauce brand that has surpassed $100 million in retail sales, landed in 30,000 stores, and deliberately abandoned traditional advertising in favor of a strategy built on earned media, events, and a single borrowed philosophy from the restaurant: dinner is the show.

When Gene Oh studied abroad in Seoul as a Brown University senior, he discovered something that would change his career trajectory: jelly sticks that protect your health when drinking alcohol. These products dominate Korea's billion-dollar alcohol aid market, yet remain virtually unknown in the United States. As Co-Founders of day–guard, Oh and his partner Felix Lee are now bridging that gap, bringing Korean wellness culture to American consumers through a reimagined approach to social drinking. In this conversation, we explore how they navigated cultural barriers with Korean manufacturers, pivoted their brand strategy after rigorous customer research, built a team of interns while still in college, and why Oh gave up medical school to share a piece of his heritage with America.

For decades, Keurig has been synonymous with convenient at-home coffee brewing, revolutionizing how millions of Americans start their day. Yet despite being a household name in coffee makers, the brand has never sold its own coffee—until now. Christine van den Broeck, Vice President, Keurig Brand Marketing at Keurig Dr Pepper, is leading the charge with the launch of Keurig Coffee Collective, a premium coffee line crafted by internal experts the company calls "trailblazers." In this conversation, we explore why now is the right time for this evolution, how cultural intelligence shaped the strategy, and the role of employee experts versus celebrity influencers bringing this launch to life.

Blake Mycoskie built TOMS Shoes into a $650 million empire, pioneered the "buy-one-give-one" model that revolutionized social enterprise, and made over 40 of his first employees multimillionaires. Yet three years after selling the company to focus on family, he found himself in a dark place—depressed, isolated, and questioning whether financial success could ever feel like enough. Today, he's channeling that hard-won wisdom into ENOUGH, a new lifestyle brand that is fully owned by a nonprofit with a mission to help millions of people understand that their inherent worth isn't tied to external achievements. In this exclusive interview, Blake shares how he recovered from post-exit depression, why separating your identity from your business is critical for founders, and how the philosophy of "enough" paradoxically unlocks better performance and sustainable ambition.

In an era when many consumer brands chased venture capital and rapid expansion, Andrew Benin, CEO and Co-Founder of Graza, took a different path. Since launching in 2022, his olive oil brand has become known for its distinctive squeeze bottle packaging and methodical approach to growth, prioritizing product quality and strategic partnerships over instant gratification. Benin's journey from cooking at Gramercy Tavern to building what he believes will be a top-two olive oil company offers a masterclass in patient brand building. In this conversation, we explore Graza's unconventional approach to sourcing, the strategy behind its iconic packaging, how the brand navigated early retail partnerships, and what Benin sees as the future of consumer brand building.

When most organic food brands faced pressure to sell to multinational corporations, Arjan Stephens and his family chose a different path. As President of Nature's Path Organic Foods, Stephens has helped steer the company his parents founded 40 years ago to become one of the last major independent organic brands in North America. Under his leadership, the company has not only resisted acquisition offers but has built a $40 million food bank donation program that proves purpose and profit can coexist. In this conversation, we explore how Nature's Path educated consumers on organic food before it was mainstream, the company's approach to brand architecture and innovation, why staying family-owned matters to their mission, and how they're using product lines like Love Crunch to address food insecurity.