Catalina Crunch: Krishna Kaliannan. From Homemade Keto Cocoa Puffs to Breakfast Aisle Breakthrough

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Krishna Kaliannan** (3:23)
I happened to meet a friend in Central Park, and I had told him that I'd been trying out the cereal I was making, and he could try some if he wanted, and then he Venmoed me for it. And I think he Venmoed me like 7.99 or 8.99, what looks like a grocery store price, and that's when it kind of struck me, oh, you could actually make food and sell it to people.

**Guy Raz** (3:58)
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Krishna Kaliannan created a high protein, low carb breakfast cereal in his New York City apartment, and grew it into a $100 million brand, Catalina Crunch.
A few years ago, I tried the ketogenic diet, and for about a year, I ate no bread, no pasta, almost no sugar at all. And I will tell you, it is brutally hard, because once you start paying attention, you realize that carbs and sugar are in nearly everything. A bagel with cream cheese can blow the whole day. So can a plate of pasta, or for that matter, a bowl of cereal. Americans spend somewhere around $20 billion a year on cereal alone. There's 60 feet of it in almost any grocery store, dozens and dozens of brands. But for decades, it was basically the same stuff. Corn or rice, a lot of sugar, a little bit of color, and a different name on the box.
Today's guest, Krishna Kaliannan, wanted to make something different, a high protein, low sugar, low carb breakfast cereal that actually tasted good. And to do that, he had to work with ingredients that were barely known or were just starting to enter the CPG marketplace at the time. Things like pea protein and monk fruit. Those early experiments eventually became Catalina Crunch, a keto-friendly brand of cereals and snacks that's now doing around $200 million in annual sales. Now, one of the reasons Krishna became an early adopter of the keto diet was because he had to. He had type 1 diabetes and epilepsy, and he needed to cut sugar and carbs from his diet. Krishna grew up in Orange County, California in the 90s and 2000s. As a kid, he played tennis and also became a competitive chess player. His dad, who's an immigrant from rural India, was a veterinarian, and his mom was a nurse.