Chris Gaiomali

So they were like...

okay, maybe there's other products we can put protein into that would make us a ton of money.

And so Wheaties being, you know, their flagship sort of cereal product that like, you know, has Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and Serena Williams and all those people on the cover.

Better eat your Wheaties.

I better eat my Wheaties.

They realized Wheaties would be a good test for this stuff.

And so they went out to their roster of fitness enthusiasts.

And the information they were hearing back was a Wheaties protein product would ideally have at least 15 grams of protein per serving, which is kind of a lot.

The challenge for them was preserving the fidelity of the flake because Wheaties eaters are surprisingly hardcore about what a Wheaties should taste like and how hard it should be.

how crunchy it should be.

So it was actually wheat germ and soy protein isolate that they had to combine and make it somehow taste like the old version of Wheaties.

And they went through 40 different iterations over it, over a multi-year R&D period.

And it was kind of funny because they rolled out all these different versions over the years in little glass containers, kind of like little, I don't know, like Jurassic Park embryos or something.

And I asked them to take a picture of it.

And then they were just like, oh, no, we can't do that.

Like it was like Illuminati levels of secrecy for all these cereal shapes.

Yeah, it isn't too far off from Jurassic Park, as I understand it.

You're altering the DNA of whatever the food is on a very granular level.

You know, it's like they'll take the wheat germ that they were using for Wheaties, for example.

put in some protein and then they have like all these calculations about like how much liquid to use.