In his 15 years at Target, John Peine met with hundreds of brands looking to get on their retail shelves. And while marketing and package design could help you stand out momentarily, the brands that sold the best were the ones where the product just plain worked.  This lesson is at the heart of FRISKA, a new wellness brand John recently started aimed at achieving better overall health through improved gut health. We sat down to talk about his journey starting the brand and why he thinks digestive enzymes and gut health are the next major trend in wellness.

Knox: What is FRISKA and how did the business get started?

John Peine: FRISKA was founded first and foremost by my belief that supplements, as they continue to increase in popularity, should be founded on the principle of “they have to work.” As a retail executive at Target for 15 years, I saw a lot of great products come and the one consistent throughline is the products that worked are the products that sold the best. We wanted to have a great connection with today’s consumer that is increasingly focused on proactive wellness. Our belief at FRISKA is that if you want better wellness, there’s no better place to start than with gut health. Better gut health equals better overall health. Getting that at the forefront and making it easy for consumers to understand was critically important.

The journey started with a medical incident I personally experienced where my body wasn’t producing digestive enzymes the way it should. That incident started me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand the role of enzymes and what they do. While many people might be very familiar with probiotics and vitamins, digestive enzymes are more unknown. To put it short, they help your body break down the food that you eat and make more nutrients bio-available. I underwent some personal research and then canvassed the formulator and manufacturing landscape and met up with a PhD in the space that helped really round out the formulations. Each of the enzymes contain what we call the FRISKA proprietary blend, that is P-A-L. P is for protease, it helps you hydrolyze and metabolize the proteins that you eat. A is for amylase which goes after carbohydrates. Lastly, L is for lipase, which helps hydrolyze and metabolize fats.

Largely the food that we eat consists of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and what FRISKA does, is help your body break those things down and increase the bio-availability of the nutrients in your food. We started with that. The second core tenet of three was a clinically proven probiotic. We are all about generating products that work at FRISKA. We weren’t willing to use generic, commoditized probiotic strains. We went after a clinically-proven form of probiotic that we knew our consumer would be able to feel. Finally, we went beyond gut health. We added an additional botanical lens namely, specific vitamins, to help overall health in each of our formulations. Boost for instance, has that great gut health formula, but then is complemented by echinacea, elderberry, vitamin C and zinc.

Knox: You started your career at Target on the merchandising side. What has it been like making the leap from being on the retailer side to the startup CPG side?

Peine: It’s been pure oxygen. The pace has been considerably different. Innovation is really core to what Target was all about and that was what was of most interest to me. Ultimately, what ended up making me take the leap was that desire to want to be able to innovate, move quickly, capitalize on the trends of today’s consumer and what they want out of their wellness journey.

At FRISKA our core mission is to try to make things easy for our consumer, to make it very understandable for how they can approach the products and how the FRISKA supplements will fit into their daily life. Simplicity is core to the first 10 products that we launched. Nightly Reboot helps you get a better night’s sleep and it’s going to help you restore your gut health overnight. Women’s and Men’s Daily are things that can easily be understood. They are products for women and men to be taken on a daily basis with food to get more out of whatever it is that you are eating via the digestive enzymes in each product.

Knox: The concept of gut health is one that’s really been gaining a lot of steam over the last few years. How do you expect people to engage with the lineup of products?

Peine: There has been an avalanche of consumer awareness osurrounding the role of gut health. Couple that with the fact that people aren’t sleeping well, people are stressed out and immunity is top of mind. I should also call out, that depending on the research that you look at, about 70 to 80% of the immune cells in your body reside in your gut. We wanted to start with that fact and then hit  other needs states like,”I want to sleep better.” So for Nightly Reboot we helped with some botanical sleep aids. With Energy Boost, people want to have more energy to get through the daily grind. We didn’t want to give them the refined caffeine that they’re used to so instead we utilize organic caffeine from green coffee extract.

The gut health aisle can be very clinical, intimidating, hard to shop. There was this arms race of how many billion CFU can we stuff into a probiotic capsule. Since we have a clinically-proven probiotic, we really tried to pivot away from that notion of more CFU is better and make it approachable and empathetic and create a brand that people can really see as an extension of themselves, because we do feel that great design is important to having great products.

Knox: You have met with hundreds of brands that wanted to get on the shelves of Target. What lessons from those meetings inspired your approach to FRISKA?

Peine: First and foremost, you have to have a great product and that was critically important as we’ve built FRISKA. Being a student of brand building over the last 15 years, it was all about getting those high-quality ingredients and also finding a collaborative retail partner. So we launched FRISKA at both Whole Foods and CVS. CVS has a great program called ‘Tested to Be Trusted’ with third party validation and verification of all the ingredients that you have. And everybody is well aware of the gauntlet of the Whole Foods quality assurance program. We specifically went after those two retailers because we wanted to get credit for the high quality of our product and felt shelf space at those two retailers really helps underscore our quality.

The second was it must be easy. Instead of having that intimidating, confusing, scientific approach that you see in the gut health aisle, we wanted it to be a little bit easier and avoid the confusing jargon and industry lingo. We used a condition-specific naming convention to help the consumer understand how to use it in their daily prototype.

And then last, but certainly not least, we had to complement our premium quality great product with a distinctive design at shelf. To underscore the quality of the capsules we wanted to make sure they were housed in a glass bottle and not in a plastic bottle; glass bottles have an impermeable wall and really helps the consistency and quality of the product. The problem with glass is that it could break, so we housed it in a protective recyclable paper tube. We then used that tube as the real estate to convey the premium nature of the brand, to have that clear nomenclature of each item for the consumer to know how they can use it and for consumers to be able to see that brand as an extension of their personality. I like to say that the iPhone would not be the iPhone if it didn’t have great design, and there’s no reason why that can’t translate in the consumer products as well.

Knox: What have been the challenges and opportunities of launching the brand during a pandemic?

Peine: Obviously, retail traffic has been hit hard from COVID-19. Add to that recent social unrest, which caused hundreds of storess to close across the country and it has been a tough environment for a brand launch. Stores like CVS and Whole Foods will weather the storm but are doing so with much less foot traffic than they’re used to. The overall foot traffic is certainly one component. Layer on top of that just the fact that shoppers are entering these stores with masks on, they are likely very specific in what they are trying to achieve and less interested in browsing for new brands. They have a list, they want to get in, get out and maintain their distance..

We really have turned up the dial on our social media engagements trying to help drive brand awareness and really educate as much as we can out of the store. Because as discerning as the FRISKA consumer is, it is a product that is new. Digestive enzymes do not have the household awareness of probiotics and even probiotics don’t have the household awareness of something like a multivitamin. We are doing a lot to try to educate and try to cut through the clutter, which certainly is a challenge but one that we are up to.

And then the second half of your question of what has been some upside; because of COVID and the impact that it has, people are more acutely aware of the importance of strong immunity and good proactive wellness habits. All 10 of the initial FRISKA formulations can boost your immune system. It can help people in multiple facets of their life achieve better health. This is a product you can feel work. You can take a multivitamin for 20 years and never really be able to tell whether it had an impact. Whereas in the formulas that we have, particularly if you have not been on enzymes or probiotics, you will feel them working. You might have a little rumble in your belly for the first seven to 10 days, but the energy is there, there is less bloating, less gas. Again, there might be some ramp up to that, but you really start to feel the impact and seeing the results.

Knox: What do you see as the impact on retail from the consumer behaviors that have changed over the last 4 months?

Peine: I was part of a retail forum at Harvard called the ‘Future of Commerce Initiative’ back in February. This was literally on the eve of COVID really hitting the U. S. and it was a two-day session about the future of retail and where will things be five years from now. I have to admit that many people in the room were somewhat skeptical of will this really happen in five years? And if you look at the impact that COVID has had, I think it has accelerated almost beyond that five years. We made five years of progress in terms of digital penetration and the importance of a strong digital footprint in roughly 10 weeks!

Digital adoption has absolutely gone through the roof in the last four months and really has taken years off the adoption curve. If there were any remaining naysayers of, “digital’s not that important or it’s not going to be here for long”, clearly, they have been proven wrong. The retailers and brands that will come out successful on the other side of this really do have a best in class strategy of click and collect and understanding the importance of connecting brick-and-mortar to a brand experience. People do not care where they are getting their products as much as they used to, they know what they want and they want it now. And as a brand, it is important for us to have that great brick-and-mortar presence, but also have that great digital footprint because that’s where people are increasingly being exposed to these new brands.