You may have realized that being healthy feels different than it did in the past, now that you're over 50. If you want to maximize your health potential, but don't have time to read through overwhelming pages of Google links, this is the show for you. Welcome to HealthyTips After 50. We love doing the research, finding solutions, talking to health experts, and learning what works and what doesn't.
Now, your host, she spent the last 25 years dedicated to feeling her best, and is here share her best findings with you, Susan Rosen. Welcome, everyone, to this week's Healthy Tips After 50. I have a new guest, someone who hasn't been on the show before, and his name is Jake Melman. Did I get that right? Yeah. Oh, good. Okay. I always end up asking. Jake is all about mushrooms.
I'm going to ask him to introduce himself and tell us a little bit more about what he's doing, how he ended up getting into that field, and about his... And maybe a little bit about his partner who wasn't able to join us today, unfortunately. So welcome. All right. Thank you so much, Susan. Thanks for having me on. Like you I'm Jake Melman. I am the co founder of the company Troop Nutrition. We started actually the first ever mushroom gummy.
We were the first company to put functional superfood mushrooms into a healthy and delicious gummy. Wow. Yeah. I'd love to tell you how we got started. It's a pretty interesting story. Sure. Go for it. Definitely. My co founder, Stephanie, who was supposed to be on, unfortunately, couldn't make it, is actually my cousin. It's a family-run business, which has its pros and cons. Oh, yeah. No, we can share anecdotes after we finish doing this. Okay, great. About family business.
Yeah, we've learned a lot, let's say. Yes. So how it happened was the business actually was founded organically, no pun intended. But basically, it all started on the very first day of the COVID lockdown, March 14th, 2020, I was actually in a really terrible ski accident. So I was skiing and I fell and I broke my leg super badly. Oh, no. On the On the very first day of lockdown.
So that was very confusing for me because the whole world shut down and simultaneously I had a broken leg and was locked away anyways. Oh, my God. Yeah. So it was very interesting time in my life. Why? I bet. Yeah. I was also an entrepreneur at the time, and I owned a marketing agency, but we did local businesses. Okay. And all of the businesses shut down. So my The entire agency basically was eradicated in a week's time.
All of our clients reached out, said, Hey, we don't want to pay for marketing because everything shut down. So all of my revenue and all the money that I had to live was just immediately evaporated, as well as my leg was broken. Hospital bills. Yeah. Safe to say, it was a challenging time. Oh, I love it. Yeah. I really thought that you go into dark places and you think my life's over, basically. So what happened after that is I was forced to move home with my parents.
So thankfully, they were able to accommodate me and help take care of me because I wasn't able to take care of myself and also couldn't pay rent anymore. So that was, again, another challenge, what it felt like, but it ended up being for the best. About a month in, my cousin Stephanie decided to move into my parents house with me to help take care of me. She's around the same age. Oh, nice. Her and I are very good friends. And so she was just bored as well.
Also, she got fired from her job because everything shut down. Right. Yeah. So she moved in and we did the usual stuff, the Netflix, Binge, baking the banana bread, et cetera, as I was healing. And then one day, she just all of a sudden said to me, Hey, do you want to grow some mushrooms? And I was like, Sure. I'm not saying no to anything. I don't have anything else to do. I'm not going anywhere, right? Exactly. So Her and I started growing mushrooms in the closet, actually.
Dark. Yeah. Yeah. Like the traditional mushroom entrepreneur. I always say tech companies started in the garage and mushroom companies started in the garage. In the closet. So we started growing lion's mane mushrooms in the closet. And after that, we started to do a lot more research. We started to really dive deep into these functional mushrooms. We felt like we had discovered this ancient secret that nobody was talking about. It was really wild.
Once you did the research and found that people have been using these mushrooms as medicines for thousands of years. Oh, my God. Yeah. And they were widely, widely used before Big Pharma was invented in the 1800s. And then Big Pharma just eradicated them from the history books, from the medicine books, from all these traditions that these mushrooms were widely used and working. They were actually working. And we felt like this secret was out there and we weren't seeing it anywhere.
Me, I was taking so many pills and powders and all these different things for my healing. I was so over all the pharmaceuticals and all these different things that they had me taking. I was depressed and I was anxious, all these different ailments that I was suffering. Then I started taking all these different mushrooms, all these different functional mushrooms. I was able to remedy basically everything.
My anxiety, my focus problems, my sleep issues, my health, just my overall health and wellness, my immunity, all from these incredible mushrooms that have been used for thousands of years. So once I healed all of this, Stephanie and myself, we were both very entrepreneurial, and we wanted to share these mushrooms with our community. So a lot of people started asking us for them. So we started growing them, and we would put them in.
We dry them and put them in a powder and give them to our brands. But people didn't want to eat them. And it made sense to me because I I also didn't want to eat them. I hate the powders. I hate the capsules and teachers. We looked at the products on the market at the time, and all of the products were very ceremonial and very, for lack of a better word, hippie. It was all like- Now, it's my age group. For lack of a better word. I definitely feel like a hippie now myself.
But at the time, I was very anti. I was very Western medicine and very like... I lived in the city in Los Angeles. We can compare notes on that one. Okay. I didn't want to go live in the forest and abandon society in order to be healthy. I wanted to live in society and have my phone and computer, but still be healthy. So all the products we saw were very leaning towards this forest life style, very earthy and ceremonial and spiritual. And that just really didn't resonate with us very much.
So we started Troop. And the name Troop actually means a group of mushrooms that grows together. Is a A group of mushrooms. That's why we named it that. And I'll tell you a few more reasons. I was curious. Yeah. So we decided to put it in a gummy because we thought, Well, for me, I love gummies. I love candy. I love gummies.
If you can put a supplement in a gummy, you're going to increase the odds of me taking it by like a thousand %. So we put it in a gummy, and we spent basically a year on the formulation of the gummy because we wanted to put the absolute highest quality mushrooms in a gummy that is powerful and delicious. We always say If it's not delicious, why even be in a gummy? We spent a year formulating, and then we launched, and then we had a lot of early success, and we saw a lot of press.
People were very interested in the first mushroom gummy. We got into specialty stores like Air One in California. When you look at our branding, you can see what we wanted to do with this. We made it transparent bottles because we want transparent ingredients, transparent mushroom, transparent everything. And we felt like people in the mushroom space are really not doing great things right now. There's a lot of shady actors in the mushroom space, and I can tell you a bit more about that, too.
But that's basically how we got started. And it's been a wild journey and extremely grateful. And now I feel grateful that I had that injury. It changed the course of my life to one that healed me. It actually ended up healing me. Wow. Yeah. Isn't it... I was going to say funny, but it's not funny, ha-ha. It's funny. Weird, right? The way Things the way that life works.
It just you may meet somebody on the street and next thing you know, you're in business with them or you've married them or whatever. I mean, It's very strange. It's very strange. Is it our energy that's doing it or is it the universe, or is it all of it together? Totally. Yeah, it is super strange. And we actually threw a launch party for the launch of the company, and at the launch party is where I met my partner. How funny. Yeah, she ended up being there just randomly.
And so I like to say the mushrooms guided me. So it's another one of those funny random things. Yeah, it is. Life is very, very bizarre, and human beings are even more bizarre. We're not going to go down that road. Okay. So Okay, so how many different kinds of gummies are you making? And are you Are you concentrating on certain types or certain... I don't want to say diseases because I don't think you'd probably get to that level. But certain Things that people have.
Oh, somebody has headaches or somebody has aches and pains from too much running around or working out or whatever. We have three different products that we launch with that use different mushrooms, and they do cover different benefits. The first one we started with was Lion's Mane. Lion's Mane is an incredible mushroom. It's probably the most well-known mushroom right now in terms of the functional superfood mushrooms. I don't believe this is a coincidence. It actually looks like a brain.
It actually has the shape of a brain. Yeah, it's got the hair stuff on it, right? Yeah, it's got this shaggy white hair all over it, which is why it's called Lion's Mane. But the shape of it is very close to the shape of a brain, which I don't think nature makes those mistakes because they have shown that it has incredible benefits for your brain. So it has an immediate benefit of reducing brain fog and improving mental clarity.
It has longer term benefits of improving memory, improving cognition. Actually, it's being studied right now as a preventative measure for cognitive decline and degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia. So it's great for just every daily protection of your brain because it's definitely a thing. People losing their memories. It's such a sad thing to witness and sad thing to experience because our memory is us. It's not fun at all.
Yeah. So again, we wanted to make a mushroom product that was as easy as humanly possible to take because me, I have ADHD, and I forget to take my supplements. You could tell me, you could guarantee me that the supplement will extend my life by 20 years, and I would still forget to take it. So we put it in a gummy because a gummy, you're actually excited to take it. You see it, you're like, Ooh, a delicious gummy. It's a little treat.
So, yeah, taking Lion's Mane daily has been shown to give those benefits. It also reduces inflammation in the body as well, which That was really cool and powerful. Then we made our second product, which was called our Super Troop product. That's a six-mushroom blend. That has the mushrooms, Lion's Mane, Reishi, Chaga, Cordyceps, Mitoffy, and turkey tail. These all have a wide range of benefits.
For instance, turkey tail is being used actually at research centers around the world as in a cancer treatment. So it has very powerful anti-cancer properties. Then you have Chaga, which has strong antiviral properties. So if you're protecting your immune system, it helps with blood oxygenation levels. It also has Cordyceps, which is a mushroom that is incredible for muscle recovery, blood, oxygenation, and energy. So that's what we call our Multi-Mush.
It's just take it every day for They're all wellness. We've heard incredible stories from this product, such as one of our customers had never been able to donate blood before because they were iron deficient their entire lives. And they started taking our Super Troop. That was the only thing that was different. Their doctors were just astounded. Their iron levels were back to normal for the first time, and they were able to donate blood, which is something they always wanted to do.
It was really cool story easier to hear because of these mushrooms are so powerful at adapting to your body's needs and fulfilling the needs of your body. It's actually called an adaptogen. Okay, right. Yeah. And then finally, our third product that we launched with is Reishi, Reishi gummies. So reishi is another of the most well-known mushroom. It's actually been probably used the longest of any mushroom recorded.
They have records from ancient Egypt of reishi being used, and it was actually more valuable than gold. It was only for royalty because of its antiviral and immune boosting effects. It's known as the mushroom of immortality or the elixir of immortality. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's incredible for anti-aging, for your immune system. And it has an immediate effect of of anti-anxiety and anti-stress.
So I take Reishi every single night because it makes me feel like this sense of calm come over me, a sense of relaxation, which is really nice to feel. And that has helped me with my sleep issues. I bet. Yeah. So it doesn't make you tired or sleepy like melatonin would. It just reduces your anxiety and stress, which is the real root reason reason why most people can't sleep. Yeah. Oh, no, exactly. They lie there thinking about this and thinking about that. Exactly.
And then they start thinking about why can't I sleep and why am I Yeah, 100 %. I've been there so many times, and I actually had that for years, maybe like 10, 15 years of my life. I didn't sleep more than four or five hours a night. It was extremely brutal. So if you experience that, trust me, I know what it feels like. And there are ways to help naturally, to naturally help with this. Wow, that's great. So do you sell them like mail order, or are you in stores?
Or how was your marketing set up? We are mostly sold online. We do some mail order as well. The best place to find us would be our website, which is Try Troop, T-R-O-O-O-P. Com. Okay. Try Troop. That would be the best place to learn everything about the products. You can learn everything. And there's some first order discounts and things like that. We'll We'll give your listeners a nice discount as well. So that's the best place to learn.
We are also on Instagram at Try Troop, and then we're sold in stores all across California. Oh, wow. But we haven't expanded yet to other stores outside of California just because we want to basically figure out our market here first and then before we expand. Yeah. So mostly Southern California or all of California? Mostly Southern, but we do have some stores in Northern California as well. Okay. So you sell them through other stores or you actually have your own store?
Oh, no, we sell through other stores. We're in grocery stores. Okay. So we're in Sprouts, in Lassins, in Bristol Farms, things like Okay. Whole Foods? We're not in Whole Foods yet. That's going to be our next big- Just curious. Our next big store. Yeah, that would be big. It would be huge. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Interesting. Out of curiosity, is there a lot of competition in the stores? I mean, are there a lot of other mushroom, either gummies or put it in your coffee or do...
Yeah. There are now a lot of competitors in the mushroom space. We're generally the only mushroom gummy still. There have been a few that have launched recently, but we were the first on all the shelves. I think now they have maybe one or two other than us. But when you see ours, it's pretty clear because our bottle is just so different than everyone else's. Yeah. Given that we have transparent bottles, so you can see the gummies inside.
I was just going to say, does that affect the fact that it is transparent? Does light affect the gummies or not? We haven't seen any effect from the light. Yeah. And we've done third-party testing and everything. Good. We third-party test everything, all of our mushrooms. I don't know. If you're familiar with mushrooms, this will be really solid points for you. But we use fruiting body only, which is the best part of the mushroom. Never use any mycelium or grain in it.
All of our mushrooms are organic and sustainably cultivated. That's good. Everything from the United States. No mushrooms ever from China because Chinese mushrooms have been found with heavy metals in them. And all of our mushrooms are third-party tested to be the most potent and safe mushrooms out there. We basically wanted to create a product that was a very easy switch from if you were taking powders or tinctures.
We wanted to be a one-for-one replacement that you can make the switch so easily without having to think, without losing anything. Yeah. What do you use to create the gummies themselves? The gummy part. It is made of pectin from apple skins, so it's completely vegan. We don't use any high fructose corn syrups or corn syrups at all. We don't use any preservatives. We don't use any unnatural additives or anything like that. All the flavors are from fruits and vegetables.
All the colors are from fruits and vegetables. We really just went so above and beyond on the ingredients because we really believe that if you're going to be a health supplement, you got to be everything health. I've seen competitors that launched, very small competitors, that they have corn syrup in their gummy, and we're just like, Why are you doing a health product that is not good for you? Yeah, it's one of those, Really? Is that really? Yeah, exactly. Is that really? I don't think so.
Yeah. Wow. Well, we don't have to go down that road. I was going to ask if they're thinking what thinking they have. But then again, you're not doing it, so you don't really know what they're- I do know what they're thinking. Well, they're just out there to get sales, right? Exactly. They're just capitalizing on the buzzwords now of mushrooms because it is getting a lot of hype. Oh, my God. That's great. And it's also bad because a lot of customers are getting tricked.
For instance, with the whole fruiting body thing. So the fruiting body of the mushroom is the part that people think of when you think of a mushroom. That's above the ground. It's what you see. Underneath that is the mycelium. So that's the root structure of the mushroom. And that grows on... You can farm this and you can grow it on grains. You can grow it on rice, for instance, or other grains.
So what a lot of companies are doing right now, Because there's no regulation in this space, they're taking... Excuse me. No problem. They're taking the mycelium green. Sorry. I muted and it ended up muting the whole thing because I didn't want to cough in everybody's ears. Oh, no problem. So go back about 10 or 15 seconds. Okay, sure. Start again. Yeah. So the mycelium green is what grows underneath the ground. It's what spawns the fruiting body the mushroom that we know and love.
And that can grow on a grain. It can grow on rice or other grains. So what a lot of companies will do is they will grow this mycelium on a bag of grain, and then they will take that. And then let's say it sprouts a few mushrooms. The weight of the grain is 90 % to 10 % to mushrooms. So what they will do is they will take the whole bag, all the grain with the mycelium and the mushroom, but a lot of rice and starch, and they'll throw the whole thing in a blender.
They'll blend it all up, and then they'll throw it in a bag and call it mushroom powder. What the customer is getting is a ton of rice and grain, things that are not healthy for you at all and contain no beneficial properties. But it says on the bag, mushroom powder or mushroom tincture. They can a little extract from that. It's really important to check that you're getting fruiting body just to make sure that you're getting the highest quality parts of the mushroom.
It's 10X more expensive to use fruiting body than it is The myselium. So you will find it to be a more expensive product, but you know for a fact that you're getting what you're paying for instead of just a shot in the dark. Well, I would think also you probably don't need to use as much of the product as you would with this other grain that's got all this stuff in it. Yeah. I mean, with the grain one, a lot of people feel nothing because they're getting just rice.
You're basically eating starch. And the products are cheap. Don't trust the product that's too cheap. There's always a reason. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Boy, it's so funny how in every product. There's these exact kinds of just the names change of what the product is or what they're using around it or whatever. But there's always people that are out there just trying to see how fast they can get it on the market and how much money they can make.
Yeah. There are always those people who are just capitalizing on the name, and they don't care that people never buy They just want people to buy once. They take their money and run, basically. We're trying to build... Our main goal of this company is to build a long-term brand that consumers can trust. We want to be a really trusted name in the space of mushrooms. We really believe in these mushrooms, and we feel like it's just the tip of the iceberg that we've explored so far.
We're working with six functional mushrooms, but some scientists believe there could be millions of species of functional mushroom that are still undiscovered. So we want to be a trustworthy source of providing mushroom information and mushroom products for people so that you always know you can come to Troop for quality mushrooms. Do you also sell it where people can I can't think of what the word is, where they sign up and every once a month, they get a- Yeah, a subscription. Subscription.
Thank you. Yeah. Good. Yeah. We definitely do have subscriptions, especially given that it becomes more effective the longer you take it. The more that you take it daily, the more effective the benefits become, which research has shown this, which is very cool. We do have a subscription where we offer 20% off of the product to come every month. It just is super simple.
It arrives to you every single month, and you can always pause or cancel or delay a shipment or swap your product if you want to try something else. We just want to make it so easy for people. Yeah. No, that's great. That's what builds loyalty. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. We have an average... Our average subscription is over six months long. Wow. People really are loving this subscription. They're loving the product. And yeah, we're getting amazing reviews of people just like...
It's just awesome to see people are really benefiting from it. We have definitely a lot of older folks who are taking this for their memory, for inflammation in the body, which is always great to see. Stephanie and myself, we have dementia runs in our family. We have an uncle who is going through it right now. So it's definitely very personal for us. And it's great to know that we're helping in some small way.
Also for younger people, for me, for instance, I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was very young and put on Adderall, which is just basically poison. Yeah. And Yeah. And now we have parents who are giving, instead of their kids on Adderall, they're giving their kids Lion's Mane gummies, and their kids are noticeably more focused in school without all the horrible side effects of these pharmaceuticals. Just a natural mushroom that people have been taking for thousands of years.
That's totally nontoxic. You cannot overdose on it. It's healthy, it's natural. So that, for me, feels really good because it feels like I'm really helping kids like me. I wish there was something like this when I was around, but there wasn't, and now we've created it. Yeah, that's okay. It's better late than never. Yeah. It seems to me that it's like a circle for you because it's helping you be better a business.
A hundred %. And by being better at running a business, you can get this out to people. A hundred %. Absolutely, yeah. I want to tell people, if people knew me, I would be the only advertisement anyone needs. I have such bad ADD. I had so much trouble focusing. I had so much struggles with anxiety and sleeping and insomnia and focus and all the things. And now I'm a radically different person than I was before I started this.
I wish people could see the two and be like, okay, if they could do that for him, Then I'm sold. Yeah, exactly. Well, do you have a picture from before and after? Put it on the package. I have pictures, but it's hard to show in a picture. Yeah, I know. I know. That's true. But yeah. Well, yeah, unfortunately, the whole thing of kids and adults having problems with ADHD and other things has really become so much more common, I think, than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
Definitely. Yeah. I mean, there's a huge difference. Not that kids didn't have some of that, but I don't think not to the degree. Yeah, it's definitely gone worse. I think there's a lot of factors at play. The iPad kids, the attention span economy. I think there's so many different pieces is. And also just recognition. I think people for a long time had undiagnosed ADHD all over the world. And we had to just... I still, to this day, I have people tell me, You don't have ADHD.
You just need to work harder. It's like, Okay. No. That's strange. Okay. That one, I don't know how anybody could come up with that as a... Other things maybe, but not- It's hard to imagine when you don't have it. There are people who are just naturally good at focusing, and they can get all their homework done and everything is easy, no problem. That's right. Then they're like, Oh, what are you talking about? They can't imagine a different way of thinking.
Yeah. Or just a whole different way of life, period. Yeah. Yeah, a whole different way of life, for sure. Yeah. Okay. Well, anything else that you would like to share with the people that are going to watch this? If not, we'll tell them where to go to find your product. Amazing. Yeah, we would love to offer your listeners a discount as well. A little bit bigger than the one on the website, 20% off their first order. That's great. Yeah. So we will use the code.
Let's see. T. T. A. Okay. H. T. A. Yeah, we'll do HTA HTA 20. H. T. A. 20? Yeah. How's that? Okay. No, that's fine. I'm just writing it down. Perfect. I told you, my memory is not very good. You got to start taking your lines, maybe. I know. I was just going to say, you can send me a sample. Absolutely. Yeah. Have we not sent you a sample yet? Let me check on that. We'll definitely send you a sample. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely.
Okay. Yeah, I think the last thing I would just love to say is we really are interested, and we want to change We want to change how medicine is looked at, and we want to change how people heal themselves and look at health and move from a curative medicine to a preventative medicine. Taking these mushrooms every day really leads to that effect. We're always looking for people. If you're interested in mushrooms, reach out to us.
We're always wanting to chat with people who are interested in this world and are willing to help us spread this mission. We really see it as a great mission that can heal and help so many people around the world. So definitely reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. Okay, great. So good. And you had said trytroop. Com? Yes, trytroop. Com. T-r-y-t-r-o-o-p. Com. Okay, great. Very good.
Awesome. And with that, I am going to wrap up with the same thing that I always say, which is that neither of us are doctors, and this is not to be seen as medical advice. And with all of that, I look forward to seeing everybody next week. This has been HealthyTips After 50 with Susan Rosin. To stay on the cutting edge of the most effective health strategies, subscribe to this podcast and let us know what you thought of the show with a comment or like on iTunes. Visit healthytipsafter50.
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