Venture Everywhere Podcast: Alex Abelin with Emily Groden
Alex Abelin, co-founder and CEO of Kiki Milk, chats with Emily Groden, co-founder and CEO of Evergreen Waffles on episode 93: Healthy Growth with Kiki Milk.
In episode 93 of Venture Everywhere, our host is Emily Groden, founder and CEO of Evergreen Waffles, a clean-label frozen waffle brand on a mission to make better-for-you breakfasts effortless. She talks with Alex Abelin, co-founder and CEO of Kiki Milk, the first plant-based milk designed for kids and loved by all. He shares how frustration with the lack of clean, allergen-friendly options inspired him and his wife, and co-founder Lauren, to create Kiki Milk and build it into one of the most promising next-gen CPG brands. He opens up about how Kiki Milk combines mission-driven innovation with disciplined growth to redefine plant-based nutrition for modern families.
In this episode, you will hear:
Kiki Milk’s impact on families with dietary restrictions and allergy needs
Building a mission-driven CPG brand rooted in integrity and sustainability
Moving from kitchen formulation to scalable, co-manufactured production
Expanding from D2C success into national retail distribution
Upholding ingredient transparency and glyphosate-free sourcing standards
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Emily: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Venture Everywhere Podcast. My name is Emily Groden. I am the founder and CEO of Evergreen Waffles. And I’m so excited to be here today with Alex Abelin, co-founder and CEO of Kiki Milk. Hi, Alex.
00:00:50 Alex: Hey, Emily. So good to be here. Thanks for interviewing me and having a conversation today.
00:00:55 Emily: I am so excited for this conversation. We have known each other for a couple of years, but it’s been a while since we’ve caught up. So I can’t wait to hear all the updates on Kiki Milk and dive more into your background and how you got here.
00:01:09 Alex: Absolutely. I remember our call. I was walking in downtown Black Mountain in North Carolina and just thinking how cool you were and how cool Evergreen is because my wife and co-founder, Lauren, and I are customers of your product and we’re just fans. We think what you’re doing is great. So I remember that call with a lot of good memories. I’m happy to reconnect today.
00:01:29 Emily: Oh, well, thank you for the kind words and support. As we have said, waffles and plant-based milk go together really nicely.
00:01:37 Alex: They do. The new peanut butter and jelly.
00:01:40 Emily: Yep, exactly. So I would love if you could start off by telling us a little bit about your background, which isn’t the classic CPG training into CPG emerging brand founder. So how did you get here, Alex?
00:01:55 Alex: Absolutely. So growing up, I always felt in my bones, I would be an entrepreneur when they would ask you in school, like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I thought I want to take ideas and I want to sell and I want to change the world and I want to make money and I want to do it on my own accord, my own style.
00:02:15 Emily: Did you have entrepreneurs in your family? Did you have a model of entrepreneurship?
00:02:21 Alex: I didn’t model it from my family, but I was inspired by them in their careers to do something meaningful and also different. So both my parents worked corporate America jobs, nine to five. My dad was... background’s in law, my mom’s backgrounds in human resources. So they have very traditional careers.
00:02:39 Alex: I think I wanted to build off that and do something untraditional. The conversations we had around our dinner table, around business and law and HR, I thought those are really good building blocks to then go build something totally new and different with. And my parents at the end of the day, they’re hippies from Brooklyn.
00:02:57 Alex: Then they got plugged into corporate America in the eighties and nineties. And I think deep down they were artists and more free spirits. They attended Woodstock. They beat to their own drum. But I think a lot of their generation just went to school and got a job and provided for their family and did the white picket fence thing.
00:03:16 Alex: And for me, I want to certainly provide for my family and have stability, but I want to go create and be more of that artist mentality. So I went to school. I studied business at UC Berkeley. Got some of the fundamentals there. It’s a great school at Haas.
00:03:30 Alex: Then I got a job at Google and I looked at Google as my PhD, real life training, getting a real network. At that time it was consistently voted best place to work in the country. I was the first 5,000 employees at the company. So this was back in late ‘05 and I was there for seven years. So I went ‘05 to ‘13 at Google.
00:03:52 Emily: And what was your role within Google?
00:03:54 Alex: I had a lot of different roles and I think my entrepreneurial spirit was shining at Google because I was in four offices. I was in Mountain View. I was in Dublin, Ireland. I worked abroad. I then opened up the San Francisco office. I was the founding team of Google SF. And then I transferred to Google New York. So I was in the Chelsea Meatpacking office.
00:04:14 Alex: Over seven and a half years, 14 managers. I split my time between sales and policy. I created my own role at Google. I started Google Cares SF, which was the social do-good arm of the office because we just opened up the San Francisco office and I wanted to do something meaningful for the community. Work with nonprofits, raise money for charity, hands-on volunteering, and that work flagged me to run policy for New York.
00:04:41 Alex: So I moved to New York and I left my sales gig for a public affairs policy role. I loved my role there. It was a dream job at a dream company. But I remember growing up in what was in my bones, which was being an entrepreneur and I was turning 30. This was spring of 2013.
00:05:01 Alex: I looked in the mirror and I said, if I don’t leave Google now, I may never leave it. It was too good. It was too lucrative and too fun. The people were amazing and the work was meaningful. I look back on that smiling, knowing what I’ve been through now for the last 13 years. Plant Baby is my third company. So I did two in between Google and Plant Baby and Kiki Milk. And I’m so glad I made the leap of faith.
00:05:23 Alex: Outside of making the decision to marry my wife, Lauren, I’d say leaving Google was up there at the top two or three most important decisions I’ve ever made. I’m really proud of my younger self for doing it as difficult as it was. So now, living my entrepreneurial dream.
00:05:38 Emily: So plant-based milk for kids is obviously a leap from Google…
00:05:44 Alex: I think being an entrepreneur is being curious and walking this world with open eyes and figuring out how to make things better. So my first two companies were in New York, were in tech, also very different from CPG and plant milk. I built a jobs platform called Liquid Talent. And then I built a company called Liquid Wi-Fi, which we sold to Verizon in 2016.
00:06:06 Alex: And we effectively re-imagined payphones on the street and built touch screens, iPads for the street. It was a smart city play. Verizon bought us in ‘16. I worked at Verizon for two years. After my two year anniversary and the acquisition incentives were complete. My wife and I have moved to Hawaii, did a whole 180 from New York grind to kicking back with our feet in the sand in Hawaii and just taking a beat.
00:06:32 Emily: That’s a shift for sure.
00:06:33 Alex: A huge shift. And we didn’t know this, but when we flew to Hawaii, Lauren was pregnant. So Alaka‘i was already with us when we landed on the island, and 10 days after landing there, confirmed in fact Lauren is pregnant and we were expecting a son later in the year. So our whole Hawaii, post-New York, post-Verizon experience was completely changed.
00:06:55 Alex: Of course, for the better, we’re so thrilled to be parents and raise this amazing little boy. But to get to the plant milk question, that’s how this all happened is our son joined us November of ‘19. And in early ‘20, we needed to supplement Lauren’s breast milk with infant formula. We learned early on that Alaka‘i had a sensitivity to soy and dairy. So we couldn’t buy off the rack infant formula.
00:07:20 Alex: We thought how crazy in 2020 that there’s not a plant-based infant formula on the market. We were making it in our kitchen. My wife was definitely a lead chef and I was helping her strain it and just figure it out. Talking with our pediatrician, understanding the nutrients that he needed and just totally frustrated and perplexed that we couldn’t buy something that would fit his dietary needs.
00:07:44 Alex: Turns out that the FDA is very involved with infant formula and it’s an incredibly complex and highly regulated environment to launch a food company, not the most startup friendly product. As we were learning that our son graduated from formula to solids, he didn’t need a formula, he needed a plant milk.
00:08:03 Alex: At that point, we were like, all right, let’s continue working on infant formula, but what plant milk are we going to give him? Similar customer journey experience. We went shopping online, in store. There was no plant milk we felt good about giving our son. We weren’t going to give him Oatly, we weren’t going to give him Silk. We looked around and we go, that’s it. That’s our launch product.
00:08:24 Alex: The first plant-based milk designed for kids and enjoyed by all. You make a product safe for kids to also safe for adults. But that was really the light bulb moment for Lauren and I to say, okay, we can get a product out to market. We don’t need to go through the complexity of the FDA and clinical trials. And we can design something that our son actually needs, make it for him and make it for families all around the country.
00:08:45 Emily: And I feel like you’re not giving yourself quite enough credit because plant-based milk is also complicated to make. I make waffles, which also feel very complicated sometimes, but plant-based milk is a whole other beast. So how did you go from making it in your kitchen to producing it and getting it on shelves?
00:09:03 Alex: So we took the research and the experience and the inspiration of the infant formula and the blender. We use that as a prototype to what we wanted in our plant milk. It was pretty similar. We knew that it was dairy free. We knew it was soy free. We also wanted it nut free because we wanted it to be very allergen friendly for schools and for kids with any types of allergies.
00:09:24 Alex: So the list of what couldn’t go in was exhaustive and it limited us to what we could put in. But there was plenty of amazing things that we could put in it. We spoke with our pediatrician. We spoke to nutritionists and we eventually hired a food science team at Berkeley just next to my alma mater.
00:09:41 Alex: That team and Lauren and myself and a couple of our Plant Baby teammates, we spent almost a year in the lab formulating the product. We took it really seriously. We knew and we hoped that we would be eventually in the households of hundreds of thousands or millions of homes. If that’s the case, let’s make sure this has the highest integrity, highest efficacy product.
00:10:04 Alex: So we really went deep within the R&D formulation process. We had our working prototype from the kitchen. We used organic hemp seeds. We use organic sprouted pumpkin seeds. We use coconut, which we were inspired by being on Hawaii. Banana as well. We had a really good base. We added some organic glyphosate-free residue oats.
00:10:28 Alex: My wife is incredibly diligent about testing and making sure that our products are certified organic and sourced responsibly and glyphosate is a huge issue. It’s the active ingredient in Roundup and it’s linked to causing cancer. So we test all of our ingredients for glyphosate.
00:10:45 Alex: We have this really awesome nutrient dense and also really delicious plant milk that we came to at mid to end of ‘21. Then we raised a Safe Note 1 – a pre-seed friends and family Safe Note. We were able to raise and Everywhere Ventures joined us for that.
00:11:02 Alex: So then we went to Tetra Pak and then we tested it in Denton, Texas, which is their R&D facility for Tetra Pak. One of the most challenging things of this journey was once we had our packaging partner and our working formulation is who’s going to produce it. There’s only so many co-manufacturing that could do plant.
00:11:19 Emily: That was my next question. And anytime you bring a truly innovative product to a co-man who’s used to making a similar product, but not the same nutrient density, not the same nutrition guard rails.
00:11:32 Alex: They use emulsifiers and gums and chemical agents so that it processes easy through their lines. So we came in with a really thick, nutrient-dense whole food beverage that wasn’t designed to go through mass production like the co-man that we’re in. So in the first year and a half, we had a ton of loss. They were learning how to run it just as we were.
00:11:54 Alex: Luckily they stuck with us and we had a five year agreement and they were committed to figuring this out with us. But our food scientist team said, you guys getting a co-man is as likely as me winning an Olympic gold medal. I remember that was our last call with him. And for me it was like, all right, well, there’s another mountain to climb. If you tell me I can’t do something and let me show you that I can do it.
00:12:17 Alex: And the team and I went out and we eventually secured one of the best co-mans in the country for this product. The challenge also is they don’t need startups. They have a ton of established brands that do a ton of volume. They run Horizon Organics. They run Elmhurst. They run other brands that don’t need to take many flyers or risks with emerging startup companies.
00:12:41 Emily: So what do you think it was about Kiki Milk that made them take on, not only a smaller brand, but also a more difficult brand to run?
00:12:50 Alex: It’s a great question. I think one, they saw the white space that we saw. They also saw the values and the ethics and the morals that were behind what we were doing. We had a really warm introduction by one of our other VCs. So Safe Note 1, we had Big Idea Ventures and Everywhere Ventures come in. And Big Idea Venture had worked with this co-man in the past.
00:13:12 Alex: So there’s a little bit of a red carpet for me to walk through into the door, but we still had to sell them on it. There’s no obviously gimmies or guarantees and they saw the white space. They saw the passion. They take on maybe one startup a year, every other year. So they do occasionally, it’s just very infrequent.
00:13:30 Alex: I flew from Oahu to JFK on a 10-hour overnight red eye. I didn’t really sleep on the flight. I got up and I went to Dunkin Donuts, which they recommend. The VC said, go bring them donuts.
00:13:44 Alex: So I go red eyed to Dunkin. I get two dozen jelly donuts and I go into this facility. And here we are now four years later and they’ve been a great partner and we’re scaling together. It’s been a lot of lessons learned, but they’ve been great and we’re doing a lot of volume now.
00:14:01 Emily: That’s incredible to find a partner like that who sees the vision and believes in you and in the product. I think one of the things that I’ve always found as a challenge in this industry, really at every step of the way, is that it’s always a chicken and an egg thing.
00:14:15 Emily: You can find an incredible manufacturer who wants to take that chance on you, but if you don’t have a retail partner yet, then it’s chicken and egg. Do you need the retail partner first? Or do you need the manufacturer first? And if you got a retail partner, but no manufacturer, you’re also screwed. So when you went to them, did you already have retail interest?
00:14:35 Alex: No.
00:14:36 Emily: No. Wow. Did you do your first production run before having retail presence or a commitment?
00:14:44 Alex: We used the capital from Safe 1 to go and do a run and we did pre-orders on Shopify. So we had kikimilk.com launched in October. And we did pre-orders for about six or seven weeks. And then we launched fully on Shopify, December 13th, 2021. I remember the date. And all those pre-orders and now the real orders sold us out by Christmas. So we spilled out in two weeks.
00:15:14 Emily: Holy cow. So you didn’t need a retail partner then?
00:15:17 Alex: We didn’t need it. I think we were so convinced that there was this massive white space. We were in COVID and we were in Hawaii as well. So D2C food brands and beverage brands were popping up and doing well in a pandemic environment. Plus us being in Hawaii, which has its isolating factors off the mainland.
00:15:38 Alex: My background at Google and running sales for AdWords and SCM all contributed to a perfect storm to do a strictly Shopify launch. 11 days later, we’re sold out and Lauren and I looked at each other. We’re like “validated. There’s a big opportunity here.” Thrive Market joined us right around then. They launched us with us around New Year’s that year. They sold out really quickly.
00:16:03 Alex: Then we went on Amazon in March, fulfilled by Merchant, started making some Amazon moves. And we just built with Shopify, Thrive and Amazon for a couple of years. Well, now we can talk more about retail and where we’re going, but there is a lot of chicken in the egg conundrums that go into this. How did you approach it? Did you get your retail commitment first?
00:16:23 Emily: We were retail first, but we’re also frozen. So it’s a little trickier to do D2C. We’ve always had D2C, but it’s always been a very small percentage. What is your breakout now between D2C and retail?
00:16:36 Alex: We’re still more D2C than retail.
00:16:38 Emily: You ship ambient?
00:16:40 Alex: We had two-year shelf stable ambient. So we’re shipping cases. But the problem is it’s a heavy liquid. So it’s not the most margin friendly thing to ship. But if you ship in volume and you’re able to make it work, Shopify is still the most profitable channel for us.
00:16:58 Alex: Amazon’s also really strong too. And Amazon’s growing crazy this year. It’s really interesting to watch how Shopify and Amazon work together and separate. And just really grateful that the Amazon presence is growing. One out of two transactions happen on Amazon online. It’s insane. 50% of online sales growth for Amazon.
00:17:19 Emily: Wow. That is a wild statistic.
00:17:22 Alex: And it actually may be more than that. That’s actually a couple of years old. It may actually be more than that now. So we need to win Amazon if we’re going to be a D2C forward brand. And last year we had one and a half percent of the plant milk market. This year we’re doubling up. We have 3.2% of the plant milk market. And hopefully we’ll just keep doubling up every year within Amazon. Are you like 90%-10% retail-D2C?
00:17:45 Emily: Not even. It is a passive net to catch folks who stumble upon our website and can’t find us in retailers by them, which gets smaller and smaller as we expand our footprint more and more. But speaking of retail, what is the plant retail expansion? People get your incredible ingredients lists. And I’ve also been lucky enough to taste your plant-based milk myself, and it is delicious. So it seems to me it’s this highly incremental product for the category. So what is the plan for retail expansion, asking for a friend with small children, AKA me.
00:18:19 Alex: Just to the point of delicious, I think it’s really important when you’re running a food or beverage brand to start with, is it delicious?
00:18:29 Emily: Oh, if it’s not delicious, forget about it.
00:18:31 Alex: And you need a lot of different palates to tell you that too, because palates are different and taste buds are different. But I think it’s clear and blind taste tests show in four years of now traction in the market, we are the most delicious plant-based milk ever commercially made. My son’s almost six. He’s probably 30% of his life’s calories have come from Kiki Milk.
00:18:54 Emily: Wow.
00:18:55 Alex: We feel so good about it because it’s high in protein. It’s high in calcium. It’s so nourishing and he obviously loves the taste of all the flavors. So it’s a hack for us. We can get him chicken nuggets, but if we pair it with Kiki Milk, good. He’s gotten a complete meal.
00:19:09 Emily: That is what parenting is all about.
00:19:12 Alex: All about figuring out the way to get the right nutrition by any means necessary. We launched Erewhon January of ‘23. It’s only 11 doors, but it establishes us a brand, as a certain cache and feel to it. One of our larger angel investors runs Woodlands in the Bay Area, which is a premium organic grocery. So we had experience with retail through Woodlands.
00:19:35 Alex: And then we’re just doing some mom and pop. We got through 23 with maybe a hundred doors. And then in November of ‘23, Wegmans reached out to us direct. And they have a hundred doors. And Wegmans is known as one of the great groceries in the country. They’re like, we will go direct with you. You don’t need to use a distributor. We love your product. Let’s get you in all doors.
00:19:54 Alex: So we went 100 doors at Wegmans at the end of ‘23. And that got us a little bit more street cred in the retail space. But at that point we still only had like 150 doors. And then in ‘24, Laura and I were like, I think we’re ready to do this. I think 90% of milk purchases happen in retail. So if we want to have the scale and the impact, which we do at Kiki Milk, we need to be found in grocery stores. People buy milk in grocery stores. That’s the way it goes.
00:20:21 Alex: For us to be doing it as well as we’re doing on e-commerce and only 10% pool of milk sales is really encouraging. And we started thinking more broadly about retail in ‘24 and we worked really hard to get Sprouts. We thought Sprouts would be a great next step from Wegmans. Took us maybe eight months to get Sprouts excited about us. It’s long sales cycles.
00:20:46 Emily: These sales cycles are very long. But some of the best partnerships come out of the longest sales cycles.
00:20:52 Alex: Amen. Like a life partnership. You want a date, there’s steps to this. So we went through that in ‘24 with Sprouts on our own, and we got the commitment to go nationwide at the end of ‘24.
00:21:05 Emily: Amazing.
00:21:07 Alex: So we launched Sprouts nationwide on Jan 6, ‘25. And that was huge. So we went from 150 doors to then 600 doors.
00:21:16 Emily: Yeah, it’s a big one.
00:21:17 Alex: That was a big jump for us. We’re a team of six and we said, let’s go find a real experience brokerage agency that can help us do the retail well. And a lot of these markets want to work with brokers. They don’t want to work with the brands directly. So we signed a contract with Alliance.
00:21:35 Alex: Alliance is number three brokerage in the country. They have the scale, they have the know-how, they have decades of experience. We’re paying them in a unique way. We’re blended equity, blended cash. So they see the long-term opportunity within Kiki Milk, which really helps me managing our cash to have them.
00:21:56 Alex: And so they’re incentivized for the company to grow in the right ways. They joined us in April. A big win in retail on ‘25 is Target. So Target reached out to us in February. It was almost like I did a double take. Target? Are we ready for this? We thought Target eventually for sure. 2,000 doors and the right shoppers that are looking for family friendly and better for you products.
00:22:20 Alex: So we thought eventually we get to Target, but they came to us in February and six months later we launched in Hawaii, California and Washington, regional. So we’ve been in Target for two months. We’re now in about a thousand doors total retail.
00:22:34 Emily: Wow.
00:22:35 Alex: So we started the year at 150, we’ll end the year at over a thousand. Still Shopify and Amazon are the bigger channels for us, but I think if we look at the next two, three, four years, I would imagine retail eclipses that.
00:22:47 Emily: Obviously scaled quickly this year. What has been the biggest challenge? And I always laugh when people ask me what the biggest challenge is. ‘Cause I’m like, “everything.”
00:22:56 Alex: Everything is the biggest challenge. Yeah.
00:22:59 Emily: If you could choose one associated with scaling as quickly as you have in 2025, what would it be?
00:23:05 Alex: It also makes me think about 2013 when I left Google and how lovely that was with very little challenge. And now being a three-time founder and entrepreneur and how much challenge it is, I have so much respect for you, Emily and everyone who does this work because you’re right.
00:23:22 Alex: I could literally close my eyes and throw a dart at a wall. And that’s a challenge that whatever it comes up with. I guess the most difficult challenge is navigating equity, debt and revenue to build a sustainable model to keep the lights on. We talked about this before our interview. We’re getting closer to profitability. We’re not profitable today.
00:23:42 Alex: So I can use the levers of revenue and equity and debt to bridge us to a place where we do get profitable. And then at that point too, I’ll still use equity and revenue and debt to grow. But there’s no easy way to say, let’s go double revenue.
00:23:58 Alex: There’s no easy way to say, let’s go raise millions of dollars in equity or for that matter, millions of dollars of debt. All of these have their own challenges when you talk to the people that are helping make these decisions. But I read something this week that said the golden rule of a startup is to not run out of money.
00:24:16 Alex: I was like, okay, that’s a pretty clear and simple yet profound golden rule, keeping a positive balance in the account. And it’s hard. It’s really hard and I have a lot of respect for everyone doing this work because it’s honestly like every month that you’re alive is a win.
00:24:31 Emily: You’ve now worked in several different industries, been a three-time founder. What’s your biggest surprise about CPG?
00:24:40 Alex: Going back to growing up, when I thought about being an entrepreneur, I always thought about having a product that I can hold and feel and taste. I didn’t think about running an experience business or a service business. I wanted to run something that’s tangible. It felt like the most real to me.
00:24:57 Alex: And then I was at Google and AdWords and it was like this disconnected cloud marketing. And I was like, are we doing anything? I can’t feel it. I can’t hold it. Obviously we were doing something. So being in CPG just almost feels like coming full circle to my early visions of my career. And I could actually hold it. And more than hold it, we digest it.
00:25:18 Alex: It’s really an intimate experience with our customers that they’re ingesting the food that we’re making and impacting their health. For Kiki Milk and Evergreen, we’re impacting it in the right ways. So many of our peers in the food and beverage space are impacting it in the wrong ways. And more than not, so much of the food is toxic and low quality and full of poison and chemicals. And it’s really criminal.
00:25:42 Alex: We have such a high bar for what we’re putting into our formulations and the testing that we do and the efficacy that we do. Just a surprise or more of the delight of CPG is that intimate relationship with our customer. We’re really part of their daily routine.
00:25:59 Emily: I totally agree. I had a friend who I haven’t seen in probably 20 years, a friend from high school. And she texted me a picture of her daughter eating Evergreen. And she said, I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. It feels like you’re here giving her a hug every morning.
00:26:15 Alex: Oh, gosh.
00:26:18 Emily: It killed me. But I just thought it was the most beautiful way to describe what it feels like. The privilege of being invited into people’s homes and being at their breakfast table or their lunch table or their dinner table, it really is, I think, one of the most special parts of being a founder in this industry.
00:26:37 Alex: That’s a really beautiful reflection. We’re on the exact same page. We had a customer review that they shared that their child is in chemo and that the only thing that their boy can stomach and eat is Kiki Milk. It’s his only nutrition.
00:26:52 Alex: I get the chills sharing it. Lauren and I read this and we’re like, God, we got to keep going. We have to win. We have to make this thing scaled and profitable and successful because of stories like that. It’s really meaningful and inspiring. I love the space that we’re in and I didn’t know I was going to be here necessarily in food and beverage when I went into Google and being in tech, but I feel like I’m on the right path.
00:27:18 Emily: I am grateful you’re here. We need many, many more products like Kiki Milk to fix this food system of ours. This conversation has gone by really quickly. It is time to do a little speed round before we wrap up. So first, what’s a book, newsletter or podcast that you enjoy?
00:27:36 Alex: I’m reading The Attributes by an ex-Navy SEAL. And the thesis of the book is it’s attributes, not skills that determine impact and success. So that’s a really cool book. And I listen frequently to All In, which is a commentary on economics and politics and finance and tech. I really like that podcast. Those are the books and the podcast I’m listening to or reading right now.
00:28:03 Emily: I’m writing both of these down. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be? You’ve already done Hawaii.
00:28:11 Alex: I know. We’ve talked about it. I’ve done SoCal, NorCal, New York, Hawaii, North Carolina. I worked in Ireland and I studied in Italy. I did a good job. I have 40 countries in my passport, 40 stamps.
00:28:25 Emily: Holy moly.
00:28:26 Alex: And all that was really done between ages of 15 to 30. I haven’t really done much of that 30 to 42. But if I could live anywhere for one year, I’d probably go back to Italy. I love Tuscany so much. I love the food. I love the style. I love their approach. I love the art. My wife is half Italian.
00:28:47 Alex: So, that would be a high list. Greece would also be really high on the list. I love the way that Greece does life. Shout out to Hawaii. We did almost five years on the island and what an unbelievable chapter of life that was.
00:29:01 Alex: We got married in Hawaii. We had our baby in Hawaii. We launched our company in Hawaii. Some mornings we wake up and just wish we were on the island and still in Hawaii, but things are good here in Northern California and life is good.
00:29:14 Emily: Favorite productivity hack?
00:29:16 Alex: I stopped drinking alcohol, New Year’s Eve ‘24. So it’s been 10 months and three days.
00:29:23 Emily: Congratulations.
00:29:24 Alex: Thank you. The productivity of daily sobriety compounds. And I’m committed to ‘25, doing a full year. And it’s been a really cool journey of feeling all your feelings and not having the escape button and not using alcohol for those reasons and just not be hung over on the weekends. The clarity and the health benefits of it have been really eye-opening.
00:29:50 Emily: I feel like that could be a whole separate podcast conversation. So if not a glass of wine or a beer, how do you unwind when you’re stressed?
00:29:59 Alex: I love sports. I’m a big sports fan. I love ESPN and I love watching sports. I love playing sports. I play golf. I’m playing golf twice next week, which I’m excited about. So I would say sports and fitness are the way to do it.
00:30:14 Emily: I have just taken up golf. It is my new favorite. I find that it is the one time when I cannot be thinking about work because you have to be so focused on all the things you have to do right to hit the ball that you cannot think about work. And so for me, it’s almost been very therapeutic.
00:30:36 Alex: Like meditative in that way.
00:30:37 Emily: Yes. 100%. I love it.
00:30:40 Alex: I wish it was easier.
00:30:41 Emily: Also wish it was easier. Yes. And less frustrating.
00:30:44 Alex: Such a tough sport.
00:30:46 Emily: It really is. And the most important question, where can listeners find you and Kiki Milk?
00:30:53 Alex: Kiki Milk is kikimilk.com. So check out our website. We’re really active on Instagram and TikTok. The handle’s @kikimilkco and my personal handle’s @alexabelin. And my email is alex@plantbaby.co. Emily, where can people find you?
00:31:11 Emily: You can find Evergreen online at eatevergreen.com and in retail nationwide from Whole Foods to Sprouts to Kroger down to Select Targets and Walmart and a whole bunch of places in between. Thank you for asking. Oh, and our Instagram and all of our social handles are @eatevergreen. Truly, my family has had Kiki Milk. My kids loved it. I loved it. My husband loved it.
00:31:39 Emily: It is a whole family product and so everybody should go out there and find it. It is really special. So thank you for bringing it into the world, Alex.
00:31:46 Alex: Thank you. And I feel the same way about Evergreen. You have an amazing product and we share so many of the same values and I wish you and your company all the success.
00:31:55 Emily: Thank you very much. Right back at you. Thank you for the conversation today.
00:31:59 Alex: Thanks Emily.
00:32:01 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Emily Groden in Founders Everywhere.
Read more from Alex Abelin in Founders Everywhere and as a host of podcast episode 19.