Dr. Daryl Gioffre: Unlock Your True Potential For Optimal Health Through Moderation, Not Deprivation

Health and wellness is more than just a priority for Dr. Daryl Gioffre; it’s his life work. He is a well-known celebrity nutritionist and longevity expert who uses cutting-edge nutrition to help you achieve and maintain an optimal level of health. As a former sugar addict, he knows firsthand what it takes to overcome adversity and challenges in your health. His area of expertise is identifying the underlying causes of chronic disease and inflammation.

In 2013, Dr. Daryl founded Alkamind to help individuals optimize their health and energy levels through a simplified pursuit of an alkaline lifestyle. His goal is to help you find an approach that’s right for your lifestyle and practice moderation instead of deprivation.

He is also an author, chiropractor, certified raw food chef, ultra-marathoner, motivational speaker, and educator. As a passionate health coach, Dr. Daryl’s greatest satisfaction comes from helping people break through barriers and plateaus in their health so they can live an active lifestyle full of vitality.

Making something great out of a bad situation

Dr. Daniel first discovered chiropractic’s extraordinary healing benefits when his athletic career was restored after he sustained a serious injury while playing soccer for Boston College and the United States Men’s National Soccer Team.

“Here you are at this moment where the doctors are saying the only thing you’re so passionate about, you can never do again,” he recalled. “It’s like the worst news you can hear.”

His life changed course after that – not only did Dr. Daryl find his passion in chiropractic medicine, but he also dedicated time helping others get back on track. He founded Gioffre Chiropractic Wellness Center and has been a board-certified chiropractor in the state of New York for 21 years or so.

“I used to say everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe in that anymore. What I believe is from a bad situation, you could really draw from that situation something very positive.”

Overcoming his sugar addiction

Having some sort of product-based company has always been a burning desire of Dr. Daryl, he said. Four years into practice, he dislocated his shoulder and was told he couldn’t practice for six months – which he was able to shorten into 30 days through biohacking and physical therapy. And without any income coming in that month, he realized he was acting as a business operator, not a business owner. “It was a big kind of wake up call for me and ever since that injury, I really started finding other things that I was passionate about, things I wanted to do.”

His sugar addiction was what really motivated him to get into nutrition. For many years, he was a doctor that took care of others while his own health was in bad shape. “I was a walking contradiction,” he said. He would advise his patients to improve their diet, then go back to his office and drink soda or have a candy bar.

It took an embarrassing and painful incident for Dr. Daryl to realize he had to raise his standards. With the addition of 42 pounds, he  understood that it wasn’t something he could just ignore anymore.

“I decided that I have to step up, be a role model, not just for myself, but also for the people who I take care of,” Dr. Daryl said. “I really decided to become a health investigator and find out why I was addicted to sugar.”

He eventually discovered the alkaline diet and from that experience, Alkamind was born.

Having a strong “why”

Dr. Daryl’s mission is to help people get off the stress-eating rollercoaster and move them towards strength-eating by teaching them to live a life of moderation, instead of deprivation. While deprivation can be an effective approach for some, it doesn’t address why you crave sugar in the first place – which is often due to ​​a mineral deficiency, especially magnesium.

Sugar is something that many people are struggling with. “I can teach anybody the strategy of how to get off sugar. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be successful,” he said. It all boils down to their “why”.  If they know their purpose, it becomes a stronger link to achieve whatever their goal is.

A classic example is New Year’s resolutions. Everyone would be excited to leave the past year behind and have a fresh start – until this enthusiasm dwindles as the weeks go by.

“January 15th, the research shows 92% of people fail. Why is that? Because they associated making change in their life with pain, and that doesn’t work. It might be something that gets you going and motivated, but it can’t keep you going in the long run.”

According to him, having that compelling “why” accounts for 80% of their success. “The strategy, as important as it is, is 20% of the success.” Having those two things will push them to find ways to attain their goal rather than abandon it when difficult times arise.

Tune in to this episode of the Fascinating Entrepreneurs podcast to hear how he motivates lifestyle change in consumers!

Transcript from Podcast

[00:00:00] Daryl Gioffre: Just start with one thing. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s never going to be perfect. That’s the way to sabotage our health and our business. It’s about progress, not perfection. That’s what I mean. So just pick one thing that’s going to help you move that dial towards better. ‘Cause that’s the reality, you’re either moving towards health or you’re moving towards disease.

[00:00:18] Natasha Miller: Welcome to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. How do people end up becoming an entrepreneur? How do they scale and grow their businesses? How do they plan for profit? Are they in it for life? Are they building to exit? These and a myriad of other topics will be discussed to pull back the veil on the wizardry of successful and FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.

If you’d like to know how to scale and grow your business and make more profits. Sign up on my website, natashamiller.co to get on the waitlist for my entrepreneurial masters course.

Today, we learn how an addiction to sugar helped catapult the launch of a supplement brand, how being featured in the national media could take your business if you’re not prepared, and how to diversify so you’re not stuck when things like a pandemic threaten to shut down your business. Now let’s get right into it.

[00:01:19] Daryl Gioffre: I’ve been a practicing chiropractor here in New York for about 21 years or so which is just crazy to think about that, but I’ve always had this kind of burning passion to have some form of a product based company. And it’s interesting because so much of what I do it’s all about service. Everything is based on a relationship.

I will never forget this one thing that happened. Early on, I was thinking, it was maybe three or four years into practice and I dislocated the shoulder. It was a horrific accident and took about three different doctors to put it back in place. But I wasn’t able to practice. They told me it was going to take about six months before I could practice again.

Again, literally 30 days to that injury, I was back adjusting about 40 people a day, which is incredible on its own. That’s by no means to impress anybody, but to impress upon you that when doctors make recommendations, they make it based on what the average person does. And most of that is really nothing just based on what they tell you to do.

But when you go above and beyond and start to really find other ways to biohack your body, lower inflammation and release speed up, accelerate that healing process as much as possible. It’s incredible what your body has this potential to do. But for me, that was a huge lesson because for 30 days I couldn’t take care of patients.

And obviously there was no income coming in because of that. So I was lucky to find a chiropractor that was able to come in and basically see my patients, but that’s not the easiest thing to always find. We got through that and I was back practicing and we carried on. But ever since that moment, I realized that I was a business operator, not a business owner.

And what I mean by that is if I’m not there, I can’t bring in income to basically be able to serve my patients and to live my life and pay the bills and things like that. It was a big kind of wake up call for me and ever since that injury, I really started finding other things that I was passionate about, things I wanted to do.

And fast forward, many years later, I really started getting into nutrition because I had a massive addiction to sugar. In my first book Get Off Your Acid, I called myself the shoemaker with no shoes. So I go out, I adjust the patient. They feel good as hell. “Okay, don’t do sugar.” Obviously it wasn’t that type of conversation, but that was the gist of it.

And then I go in the back office and I’d be drinking a Coca Cola or having a Nestle’s crunch bar. And literally I was a walking contradiction. And finally, I just raised my standards. I drew a line in the sand. I said, this is not going to happen anymore. And it took a very embarrassing, painful moment for that to happen.

I was leaning down to adjust the patient and my pants literally split right down the backside because my story with the years of sugar addiction, when I was younger, you can get away with that. Your body’s got a fast metabolism, but as I got into my later twenties, that started catching up with me and I literally gained 42 pounds heavier than I am today.

In that moment, when that actually happened, I decided that I have to step up, be a role model, not just for myself, but also for the people who I take care of. I really decided to become a health investigator and find out why I was addicted to sugar. Why I couldn’t get off that stress eating roller coaster after so many years of trying, because I was doing it by deprivation and deprivation just doesn’t work.

So I decided to change my approach. I learned about something called the alkaline diet. And what I did was I just started adding. The process takes a little bit longer that way. And I started with a green juice. Now I say to this day, the green juice is the core of a strength eating diet. So I started drinking the green juice every single day.

And I’m going to tell you, Natasha, the first time I drank it, it tasted disgusting. I call it swamp water, but it really wasn’t the green juice. It was really my taste buds that were so used to all the sugar that I was eating in sugar. It’s not a food, it’s a drug.

[00:04:57] Natasha Miller: I want to ask you about what you did to get over your injury in 30 days versus six months. What miraculous thing did you do?

[00:05:07] Daryl Gioffre: I obviously was seeing the people I needed to see. So I had physical therapy. I was doing BioSync so different forms of musculo therapy. That just doesn’t put you on a machine like stimulation, like a lot of PTs do. And we were really getting into the muscles, the ligaments, the tissues, I was getting adjusted.

That’s so important because chiropractic, it’s not just about back pain. It’s about freeing up your nerve system, which really controls how quickly your body heals. So I was doing that. I was putting in all the nutrients into my body that I was learning about that my body was deficient in. That was basically inhibiting my ability to heal at the level that I needed to heal.

And that was doing some biohacking for inflammation. I was doing different forms of anti-inflammation. Something called PEMF. Not sure if you’ve heard of that. It’s pulse electromagnetic frequency. So basically it’s like a map that you lie on. And one eight minute session is going to lower the inflammation in your body by 50%.

You can literally put a strap on the area of the injury, which kind of like laser focuses that, and what it does is it’s bringing blood microcirculation to that tissue. And what does that do? It brings in nutrients to help heal that tissue. But what it’s also doing is taking in the old damaged tissue that needs to come out.

So by just accelerating all these different things, and there were a lot of other things I did. I was literally able to narrow that gap. It’s just incredible how your body has this innate potential and power to heal itself. We just have to remove those obstacles that are getting in the way of your body’s ability to do that.

[00:06:35] Natasha Miller: And it sounds to me like you took this as your full-time job to get better. And then you had all these bells and whistles and tricks and tips from the career that you’re in. So it’s so wonderful. And it’s great that you’re out there helping other people that don’t necessarily have the intrinsic access to these things like biohacking, which is new to me.

Very interesting. You lost this weight. You figured out how to do it. It kick-started you into the successful entrepreneurial endeavor. So many entrepreneurs when they start, they’re like, oh, this is my baby. I love it. I have to do it. My clients have to talk to me. My clients have to be adjusted by me and you cannot scale or grow a business if it is based on you alone.

I imagine that at this point where you were potentially out for six months, you saw the writing on the wall. You probably didn’t realize until it happened to you. Oh, this could really screw up everything. Talk to me about what you did and how you created Alkamind.

[00:07:39] Daryl Gioffre: So much of what we do, we learn by the experiences that we go through in life.

And I’m going to tell you in all the years I’ve been in practice, even before that as a competitive soccer player, I played at Boston College. I played for the national team and that’s what led me to chiropractic in the first place. ‘Cause I had this horrific injury. So here you are at this moment where the doctors are saying the only thing you’re so passionate about, you can never do again.

It’s like the worst news you can hear. You have to take that experience. I used to say everything happens for a reason. I don’t believe in that anymore. What I believe is from a bad situation, you could really draw from that situation something very positive. A perfect example is the pandemic this past year and a half.

It’s awful. What’s going on out there in so many ways, but there are so many, several linings that I’ve seen for myself with my patients and things like that. So that’s like this optimistic, positive mentality I’ve always had. But to your point, you can’t do it alone. And I never was in a situation where I felt threatened by the ability to actually be able to see my patients and going through that, it was such a huge learning experience for me.

And basically from the information we learned, we can go one or two ways. I realized that I know what I know, but there’s so much that I don’t know. And I just started to really find people that were doing the things that I wanted to do. There’s a saying that role modeling says success leaves clues. So I found those people and I just started really picking their brains and getting mentors.

I find that was probably the best thing that ever did for myself, because you’re going to make tons of mistakes. But the goal is to make as little mistakes as possible. And these other people that have been there and done that and know the road ahead, they can anticipate those things. If you have those people on your side to help you and guide you and mentor you, you’re going to make less mistakes.

So for me, that was so critical in the forming of Alkamind. In the beginning, it was just me, my wife is incredible. She worked for Gucci and Burberry. So she did strategy and planning, but yeah, I was their sample size at one point after I lost the weight. So it was a lot of benefits to that as well, but she was really able to help us, but it was just the two of us.

And I realized that you can’t be on an island. You can’t go at this alone. You need to have other people around you to fill in the gaps of the things that you don’t know. And that strengthens your company. That strengthens your certainty. Alkamind was launched in 2014. It really was something that I was always passionate about.

We started with two products. We started with what’s now called our Acid-Kicking Greens and our Acid-Kicking Minerals.

And that’s the foundation of a strength eating diet of an alkalizing diet. So that’s really how the company launched. And over the years I’ve nurtured relationships. And I believe that when you nurture relationships, people, if they find value in what you do, they want to do things for you.

And I think that’s the beauty of life and that good karma. So Kelly Ripa came into my office a few months after we launched Alkamind. And she brought her daughter in, who came back from summer camp, who, you all know how summer camp goes, the types of food that it feeds you.

So she wasn’t really feeling at her best health. And as I was working with her and we were talking in the office, I noticed that Kelly was moving around. And basically she was telling me that she was having these unusual aches and pains. I’m telling you she is the energizer bunny, but at this time her energy wasn’t quite where it was that she wanted to be.

They decided to do my seven day alkaline cleanse. And literally after just a few days, she felt so good. Kelly, she went on her show and she talked about how this just changed her life. And it was incredible. We had about a hundred thousand hits on our website that day and yeah. When all this broke the internet…

[00:11:07] Natasha Miller: Did it break your business? Because I know that when you end up on national media, it can really actually be a detriment to your business if you’re not prepared to answer the call of orders and bandwidth for the website. How was that for you? Were you ready?

[00:11:25] Daryl Gioffre: Exactly. And that’s exactly where I was going with this. No, you think you’re ready, but you’re not ready at all. But it’s like we had this very small team, me and my wife and a couple of consultants here and there.

But when that happens, it was amazing. It was such an amazing blessing when it allowed us to come into so many more people that we never would have been able to reach out to, to help. Cause that’s our goal. That’s our mission. We want to help as many people as possible break through their struggles and their barriers.

And she allowed us to do that. But on the flip side we realized right then in there, how many holes we had in the company. And again, it was another incredible learning experience. It’s all about how you recover from these things. We sold out of our products that day. We didn’t have a lot, cause I was financing it myself in the beginning, but you do what you can do and you make the best of it.

But it was incredible for so many different reasons, the press that we got, and we quickly put a team together, revisers to realize how we can capitalize for something like this and not make those same mistakes moving forward.

[00:12:25] Natasha Miller: How much time did you have between seeing Kelly in your office and being on her show?

[00:12:30] Daryl Gioffre: I don’t recall exactly, but I would say it was probably a week later. Yeah, it was a week later.

[00:12:40] Natasha Miller: So you did not have time to optimize the mention. If you knew you’re going to be on a national television show where somebody was authentically talking about how incredible you were, you would have put in place many things to prepare and you just didn’t have time.

So about your product, did you develop it? Did you work with chemists? What is that process like?

[00:13:03] Daryl Gioffre: Yeah, the process literally to launch those first two products took me about two years. I’ve always been a health investigator. And I think the reason why I decided I wanted to launch Alka mine was because I was so tired of everything that was out there.

And there’s a million different dietary supplements and products out there. There are some good, but most of them, I hate to say, they’re not great. If you look at the actual ingredients, you’ll see a million ingredients on there. And the problem with that is that there’s not enough of one single ingredient to make a market difference in your body.

And then when you look at the specific ingredients, a lot of these companies are using cheap ingredients. There’s sugar! These sugar manufacturers are getting away with murder because now you’re not seeing sugar on the label. They actually hide the name and 62 different names. So if you see something ending in “ose,” like dextrose, maltose, sucrose, that’s sugar.

So for me the reason why I launched out to mind was I wanted to create a product that was going to do the things that it said it was going to do. Transparent labeling. I always say, if you can’t pronounce it, you cannot digest it. And it’s probably doing something bad for you. It was less is more so something that was really going to do something for you.

And I created it for myself and for my family originally because either the ones I was looking for out there didn’t have the quality ingredients that I wanted, or it tasted like crap. And so we really were looking to solve that issue in the marketplace, which is to create the most powerful acid kicking supplements that do what they’re supposed to do in the body, which is lower inflammation and strengthen your body but at the same time, didn’t taste like swamp water.

So that’s how alkaline was born. And it took me a while because I wanted to create the product that I envisioned it to be. And when you talk to these manufacturers, they’ll say, “Oh, we’ll put citric acid.” Most people think citric acid comes from lemons and pineapples.

Years ago it did. But now it’s gotten too expensive. So citric acid mostly comes from aspergillus, fungus, which is actually a cancer causing fungus. So I was literally looking at every single ingredient meticulously to make sure that there was going to be no downside to it. So I was willing to wait two years to make sure that product was so perfect that when we got it out there, there wasn’t going to be an issue. It was going to do what I was telling people was going to do.

[00:15:14] Natasha Miller: And were you funded for all this research and the upstart yourself?

[00:15:20] Daryl Gioffre: I self-funded it. We bootstrapped it.

[00:15:22] Natasha Miller: It can’t be inexpensive.

[00:15:25] Daryl Gioffre: No, it wasn’t inexpensive, but yeah. I’ll never forget this quote by Tony Robbins, where he says “Your greatest resource is resourcefulness.”

I didn’t have the capital. I was a practicing doctor. So that was really funding Alkamind, but there was obviously other things that we needed to use that money for. So you have to really just prioritize where you’re going to allocate that money. So you have to really map it out. And again, I have a couple of advisors, one specific that I literally ran every business decision by, and to this day, I still run every business decision by because like I said before, he knew the road ahead and he knew exactly what that needed to look like.

[00:16:01] Natasha Miller: Someone in the industry?

[00:16:03] Daryl Gioffre: He is an entrepreneur and he’s launching many businesses and he’s not specifically in the dietary supplement world, but he just is extremely smart and bright.

And he has really helped me to get on the phone and have these conversations with the people I needed to and again, be that sounding board. I think the hardest thing is going at this alone because as much as we all might know, there’s other things that we need to know, you utilize your strengths, but what about the weakness?

I went to specific advisors for the answers that I didn’t have. And just to have that soundboard was so nice to someone to reaffirm, “Yeah, you’re right on. Keep going,” or “Maybe I would tweak that or do that,” which just gives you that certainty to keep on going.

And at the end of the day, passion was my drive. That’s like the world of the universe is going to bring you the obstacles in so many different ways. But when you have that hunger and that passion, you’re going to find a way around it to get to that goal. It’s not always going to be A to B. You might have to go this way or that way, but we’re going to get there.

And to me it didn’t matter what that time limit was or the amount I knew we were going to get there because nothing was going to stop me. ‘Cause my “why” was that strong.

[00:17:09] Natasha Miller: That’s great. Can you talk to me about why, especially in America, sugar is such an addictive substance and why it’s allowed to be processed the way it is and everything.

[00:17:22] Daryl Gioffre: When you say it’s addictive, this will put that into perspective. Research shows it’s eight times more addictive than cocaine. How insane is that to even think about that? You can really trace this back to the 1960s. When the sugar industry actually paid off three Harvard scientists, I put this research in the book, the new book Get Off Your Sugar.

They paid three Harvard scientists. At that time $50,000 was a lot of money to actually manipulate the studies. And those studies basically show now that fat was the problem. So for the past 70 years, what do we see in almost every product in the grocery store? No fat, low fat. And here we are in this amazing ketogenic trend, which is, I’m a big fan of the keto diet when you do it the right way, because there is a healthy way to do it and an unhealthy way to do it.

But here was the problem is that they basically made the fat to look like the bad guy. And now what did all these manufacturers do? They started taking the fat out. So there was a big problem. The food tasted like cardboard. So in came the sugar industry to rescue, and what you saw over the past 70 years was a huge amount of increase in the amount of sugar in these products and also artificial sweeteners.

But what we also saw was the same increase in chronic disease, like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and things like that. Listen, these manufacturers, they don’t want you to be healthy. I hate this. All they care about is their bottom line. And they want you to be customers of the sickness industry.

We all know you open up that bag of chips. You can’t eat one. You’re going to eat the entire bag, right? Because they’re addictive. They put the right amount of sugar, unhealthy salt, and unhealthy fats. Cause there’s fats that kill and fats that ill. And they know exactly what they need to do to keep you coming back.

So a big part of my mission is to help people get off that stress-eating rollercoaster and move them towards the strength-eating diet. But again, not by deprivation because deprivation, it’s a noble approach for a lot of people, but you’re not addressing the underlying reason why we crave sugar in the first place.

And that reason is because we have a mineral deficiency, especially magnesium. So I figured it out myself. And literally in 21 days, I was able to overcome a lifelong addiction to sugar and those nasty cravings and again, in about three and a half months or so I dropped about 42 pounds, but it wasn’t..

[00:19:35] Natasha Miller: I want to ask you about that. I was off sugar and carbs for a full year. And I think my being a type, A, maybe I’m a control freak, I wouldn’t eat it. I wouldn’t have a cheat day. And then I became really annoying to everyone around me, right? Because I’m needing seven almonds and a half a banana, which of course turns into sugar anyway.

And when I did start introducing carbs and sugar into my diet, it tasted horrible. But then I went down the slope and then just blew it all the way. But I do remember the way that it tasted. So how do you stay off sugar?

[00:20:11] Daryl Gioffre: So many amazing points there. First and foremost, your body is always recreating itself.

So every 120 days I test people’s live blood. The red blood cells will change, but every 14 days, your taste buds will change. So it’s incredible when people do our acid kicking, cleanses and detox. On day one, “Oh, these foods taste disgusting,” like I said about my greens. But on day 10 it’s, “That was the best salad ever.”

Not because you were starving yourself, it’s because your taste buds literally reproduce themselves. And if you’re putting in healthy foods that strengthen and alkalize your body, it’s going to actually have a craving towards that. So I think for you, is that when you went back to sugar, it tasted gross because you did make changes in the body.

But I think at the core surface of this thing, your body didn’t fully address the reasons why your body craves sugar in the first place. And here’s what happens. It becomes a vicious cycle. Your body basically can burn one or two things for fuel. It can burn sugar or it could burn fat. What we need to do is make ourselves metabolically flexible. So your body can burn whichever one it needs to in that moment.

If you are in a fight or flight state, if I saw a saber tooth tiger, you don’t want to burn fat. You need to get out of there so that you’re not lunch for that tiger. So that’s when sugar is needed, but the sugar is not an essential fuel.

Your body doesn’t need it. Your body needs protein. It needs fat. It doesn’t need sugar. In fact, you have hormones in your body that can actually make sugar, even if you’re not needing it to get out of that dangerous situation when you need it. But here’s the problem fast forward to 2021, we’re still in this crazy pandemic.

Now we are all chronically stressed now talking about emotional stress, but here’s the thing. Our bodies can’t differentiate between the saber tooth tiger and this 24/7 low level and high level of constant chronic stress that we’re feeling every single day. So now when we’re stressed or bodies go fight or flight, it starts to burn sugar as your primary source of fuel.

Now here’s the problem. When you burn sugar, what do you think your body’s going to actually crave? It’s going to crave sugar. So it becomes that vicious cycle. So in the book, we have basically seven different steps in 21 days, and it’s the add approach. And the first three days we start with minerals because minerals is the underlying reason why we’re craving sugar in the first place.

But before we even get to that 21 day program, which is powerful and it’s all based on adding, not taking away. I think people love that because you can go at your own pace. But before we do that, we have to detox. So we literally spend a week where we’re detoxing our pantry. We’re detoxing our body. We have a three-day detox for the body and most important, we’re detoxing our mind.

And again, what we have is some very simple exercises that take just a few minutes, so you can figure out what your “why” is, your purpose. I can teach anybody the strategy of how to get off sugar. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be successful. And a perfect example of that is January 1st, I’m stopping sugar, my New Year’s resolution is I’m going to the gym!

And you know how painful that sounds right. And then January 15th, the research shows 92% of people fail. Why is that? Because they associated making change in their life with pain, and that doesn’t work. It might be something that gets you going and motivated, but it can’t keep you going in the long run.

I think for us is when you have that purpose, that “why,” that’s 80% of your success. The strategy, as important as it is, is 20% of the success. When you have that “why” and it’s so compelling that it moves you down to your very soul, when you get blindsided by a pandemic, guess what? You’re going to keep on going. You’re going to keep on strengthening and you’re going to keep on finding a way, but what happened? 

Most of us, when we got blindsided by the pandemic, we crawled into our foxhole. We didn’t come out and we started stress eating. In fact, the New York Times did an article about maybe two months ago, showing that the average person gained two pounds on average every month because of the amount of sugar that they were eating in those crappy carbohydrates.

So I think if you have those two things in place, you have that powerful why, and it’s very compelling. And then you have the strategy, that is the one-two-punch to get through it, but not just get through it. It’s going to sustain itself. It takes 21 days to make a habit, 90 days to make a lifestyle. So once this becomes a lifestyle, you’re not going to go back.

[00:24:20] Natasha Miller: Do you eat any processed sugar currently?

[00:24:23] Daryl Gioffre: No, I have no desire.

[00:24:24] Natasha Miller: And if you did, what would happen?

[00:24:26] Daryl Gioffre: When your body is very clean, it’s like my wife. She’s a very healthy vegetarian, because I coach a lot of vegans and vegetarians. And just because you’re vegan, vegetarian doesn’t mean you’re healthy. And I have so much respect, but I stopped eating meat.

A lot of vegetarians will start eating sugar and carbs. And my wife, she was eating a steak right now. She would have probably a very violent reaction because her body is so used to this clean type of eating. So for me, because my body has really throughout the years become so much healthier from just the way that I live in the way that I eat and the supplements that I take and the way I manage stress, if I was to eat something really bad, my body’s going to do whatever it can to get it out as quickly as possible.

Listen, better out than in. I enjoy my life. I have delicious foods. This doesn’t have to be like, not good. I’m a foodie. I live in New York city and that’s one of the reasons why I became a certified raw food chef.

If I was going to do this, it needed to taste good. These foods, they taste delicious as they are nutritious. We just celebrated national avocado day. So I was talking about my avocado chocolate mousse or there’s a chocolate chia pudding. This food is so good.

[00:25:32] Natasha Miller: I have to tell you, I saw things at Whole Foods, I think, that something like avocado chocolate was, and I’m like, seriously? But then I thought, oh yeah, it’s creamy. There’s potential. I haven’t tasted it, but we’ll see. I would love to know about the business. What your number one strategy for growth that was successful this year: Was it marketing? Was it team building?

[00:25:54] Daryl Gioffre: I think Peter Drucker said it best innovation and marketing. Those two things are so critical and we have very unique products.

Last year, we launched our acid kicking coffee line, which is changing the game for coffee drinkers. Ryan Seacrest talked about it. He was getting reflux. He started drinking this. His reflux was gone. Over 50% of Americans suffer seriously from reflux. For me, it’s a bigger passion to just reflux because my dad suffered with silent reflux for so many years.

This is before I really knew what reflux was and how it manifested in the body, but that long-standing reflux turned into esophageal cancer where my dad and we lost my dad a few years ago. And my story was always about me and overcoming my sugar addiction. But now, my why, my purpose has become so much bigger.

It’s about my kids. It’s about my father. It’s about what is happening out there. So that acid kicking coffee product was a game changer. We’re Americans. We love our coffee, right? 85% of people drink.

[00:26:52] Natasha Miller: I don’t. Do you have acid kicking hot chocolate?

[00:26:56] Daryl Gioffre: Yes, exactly. This is what my kids do. So what we do is we get coconut milk and we froth the coconut milk so it’s warm. And then the same product, our mocha. Our Acid Kicking coffee’s not a coffee. It’s a powder you add to the coffee. And what it does is it neutralizes the acid in the coffee that is causing the inflammation in the body. So now you can enjoy the upside of the coffee minus the downside. And that’s the thing.

There’s a lot of benefits to coffee, but the one huge downside is this loaded with acid and acid drains you of the minerals that we need to perform. Every single day, mentally, physically. So every day my kids go, daddy, mommy, can you make us the mocha chocolate? So we’ll get the coconut milk and you’ll love it. I’m telling you. 

And then you add a scoop of the mocha. And it is the acid fighting minerals. There’s coconut oil and MCT oil, which helps your body burn fat. It gives you energy suppresses hunger, and it gives that nice creamy texture that we all want. There’s Himalayan salt, which helps the cravings for sugar.

And then there’s five different fat burning vegan enzymes to help turn your body into that fat burning machine. Plus it’s got the mocha taste. So you’ve got that chocolate taste. So it’s doing so many amazing things. So if you’re not a coffee drinker, by the way, bravo, that’s the way we want to take people.

How funny is this? I had to taste, test this product a million different times. I never was a coffee drinker. Now I drink a cup of coffee every day. It’s crazy. I’m like, no, we’re supposed to go the other way.

[00:28:13] Natasha Miller: I can’t do it. I don’t like the taste. So that innovation for this. Was that a pivotal time in your company this year?

[00:28:24] Daryl Gioffre: Yeah, that was a key driver of growth to the point that the acid kicking coffee line has become our number one sku. If you look at one product or minerals is the number one product, the acid kicking minerals. And we just launched a couple of flavors to that. But if you look at the entire line, the coffee line has become in just a year the top number.

And then on top of that, it’s about getting the word out. How can you solve the problem right? At the end of the day, how can I make their life better? So for me, it’s about getting as much education out there. So the book, the new book Get Off Your Sugar launched January 5th, and we really just had a lot of press and PR around that.

And that was a really incredible thing. And that was a big part of the growth. And then of course, social media’s become really big, but it’s a place where people, if they really believe in you and the things that you’re saying, want more of that  information.

[00:29:12] Natasha Miller: Did you hire a digital marketing firm, or do you have that in-house? How do you work that out?

[00:29:18] Daryl Gioffre: Yeah, we have a digital marketing firm to handle a lot of the actual content in terms of pictures. But at the end of the day, no one knows the information like I do and my wife, Chelsea does. We are in there every day. We know how crazy busy our days get, and you can be so busy doing things that you just don’t have time for B you have to make time for A.

So one constant we all have in our life is time, 24 hours in a day. So we make time to go in there every day and answer the questions ourselves, get in touch with people, get them the information that they need. And we do our very best job. Social media is a beast. We all know that, but our two biggest ones are Instagram and Facebook because that’s where the people that love the information that we’re providing.

We do that. And we really just try to get it out there. We send out recipes and different types of content to give them more information. I do different types of podcasts, like yours and summits. And we just really try to get the word out there.

But for me, it’s about adding value. If I can add value to someone’s life that makes it worth it. And I think if someone gets the value, they’re looking for, they’re going to want more of that and they’re gonna want to refer their friends. Yep. It’s really becoming credible. Yeah. It’s amazing. The grassroots, organic celebrity following, and just influencer following that we’ve been able to get.

[00:30:33] Natasha Miller: Yeah that works. Then everyone’s going to get on the bandwagon, which is amazing.

And of course, I’m going to be checking this out. I am not a supplements person. I have never really taken them. I have always been skeptical, but listening to you about you’re passionate about making sure it’s clean and void of all of the ozes and chemicals. I’m definitely going to check it out. So the last question I have for you is, what is the number one challenge you’re facing right now in your business or businesses that, I ask this because successful people, successful entrepreneurs, it’s not all glitz and glamour. It’s not all success.

There’s always going to be a point where you’re struggling with something. So what is it that you’re challenged with today?

[00:31:22] Daryl Gioffre: There’s a lot of external challenges that came up with the pandemic. And for me, it’s the same thing with your health.

It’s, we can’t control what’s out there. I can control what I put into my body, how I manage stress and the way I’m going to live my life. And that’s my focus. I’m not going to let some external thing that I can control stress me out more and make my immune system weaker. I need to strengthen my body and it’s the same thing.

The pandemic brought a lot of challenges for all companies, manufacturing delays. I think that was one of the biggest issues we had going back to when Kelly first talked about us running out of products. Yeah, it was great, but that was a huge problem because we couldn’t get our products for seven weeks.

Now, that lead time has increased because we’re sourcing amazing dehydrated, organic powders from France. All over the world. Most of it is in our country, thankfully, but my point is that you need to anticipate these changes. And in the beginning, we didn’t know that these lag times were going to happen.

We did basically have a period of time where we sold out of our products. We’re not going to make that mistake again.

[00:32:22] Natasha Miller: How can you avoid the mistake with supply chain? Especially during this pandemic where I can see where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, 12 to 15 barges lined up waiting to get into the Port to unload and they’ve been out everything’s behind.

So what do you do and how do you retain those clients and customers that are waiting?

[00:32:44] Daryl Gioffre: Yeah. And I’ve seen those barges. I know exactly what you’re talking about off the coast of California. So the first time we didn’t anticipate or expect that no one really could have, but now after the first time we did so we have to change our schedule.

We have to change when we order our products, we have to change the amount of inventory that we’re going to take into our warehouse. So now, instead of just shipping on the east coast, we actually opened the fulfillment center. The one on the east coast we still have. Now we have one on the west coast, so we can get our products to people faster.

So we’re continuing, trying to make it better. So our customers have that best experience at the end of the day. And some of these products that went out of stock, we just gave them other things to do in that time being we got on it as quickly as possible. People understood the first time, the second, third time, you can’t make excuses anymore.

So we adapted, I think that’s the key thing is you have to adapt and you have to anticipate the road ahead. And I think the most successful entrepreneurs can really know what that road ahead is going to be, and then not make that same mistake twice. That’s exactly what we did. And we haven’t fallen into that trap since then.

[00:33:47] Natasha Miller: And something about capacity planning, but also that takes capital and it takes time and people and the logistics planning. And it’s a fine balance, right? Because if you stock up and then you’ve got this product that I’m not sure what your expiration, your life shelf life is, but it’s a gamble, right?

You over order. And then something happens, who knows what? Let’s not even think about it for this moment. And you’re not able to sell those products because maybe the US postal service goes out of business or whatever it is. How do you navigate balancing that threat of potential ruin?

[00:34:29] Daryl Gioffre: Yeah, you need a contingency plan. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket. And when we first started, we were the same manufacturer because that’s all that I knew. But as we started to grow, we experienced really incredible growth in the pandemic. It’s amazing how people really value that they want to take better care of themselves.

So I was so happy to be a part of helping people do that, but you really have to just have that contingency plan and you have to really diversify yourself. We use a lot of different manufacturers now, and I have some advisors that are able to source us these different ingredients, not from just one person, but we have other manufacturers in the waiting line, just in case something happens.

We always want to make sure that we can get the products that we need, because at the end of the day, if we don’t have that one specific ingredient, we can’t create the product. And I think that’s the key thing is just really making sure that you’re covered on all bases. You’re allocating your funds appropriately so that yes, you are increasing the risk by getting more inventory in, but it’s a risk.

We’re basically getting the word out there. So I think if you really just know really how you’re going to do it, and you can diversify, you’re going to be in an okay safe place. Yeah. I think if I can leave everyone with one thing is that it’s just about starting it’s. We talked about a bunch of different things today.

Just start with one thing. It doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it’s never going to be perfect. That’s the way to sabotage our health and our business. It’s about progress, not perfection. That’s what I mean. So just pick one thing, that’s going to help you move that dial towards better, because that’s the reality where you’re either moving towards health or either moving towards disease.

[00:35:59] Natasha Miller: Dr. Daryl Gioffre is a passionate health and wellness advocate who is running a successful service and product business. To learn more about him and Alkamind, go to the show notes where you’re listening to this podcast.

For more information about me, go to my website, natashamiller.co. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you loved the show. If you did, please subscribe also, if you haven’t done so yet, please leave a review where you’re listening to this podcast now. I’m Natasha Miller and you’ve been listening to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.