We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Asher Cowan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Asher below.

Alright, Asher thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

We use proper food processing techniques for all ingredients used in our products. For example, we take the extra time to sprout the grains in our granolas and nuts used in our nut butters. We also blanch or steam many of the vegetables used in our vegetable powders prior to dehydration to improve the bioavailability of the nutrients. It also has the effect of reducing the anti-nutrients like oxalates in leafy green vegetables, and breaks down the phytic acid in grains and nuts.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Growing up, I was always interested in food, nutrition and living a healthy lifestyle. I was always active in sports, playing basketball in college. Food was also at the forefront of my interests and passion. I learned to cook at a young age and ended up starting a restaurant while in graduate school. After school, however, I went into the corporate world, working as a consultant and financial analyst for several years. After realizing how unfulfilling corporate life is, I began planning my exit, looking for opportunities to combine my passions with my entrepreneurial spirit. We launched Dr. Cowan’s Garden to help people solve the problem of not eating enough vegetables with our line of nutrient dense and delicious vegetable powders. We believe that a eating a wide variety of vegetables is a key component to a healthy diet and achieving optimal health. Our vegetable powders are like seasonings or spices that people can use in their cooking to add flavor, extra nutrition and vegetable diversity to their diets very easily. They’re great for parents of picky eaters, home chefs, athletes, and anyone looking to improve their health through nutrition.
What makes our products different from the other vegetable powders available on the market is our sourcing and the way the products are produced. We use the tagline, “Beyond Organic. Simplified, because we work directly with small, family run farms that are going above and beyond the USDA organic standards, as well as biodynamic farming practices. We also get the vegetables to where they should be consumed before dehydration. For example, we cook our kale before turning it into a powder to make the nutrients more bio-available and cook off some of the oxalates and other anti-nutrients present in raw form. These extra steps produce the highest quality product possible.
As we’ve grown as a brand, I’m most proud that we’ve been able to add a wide variety of product lines to our suite of offerings, while maintaining the same level of quality. We source from beyond organic sources and continue to process the ingredients in the correct way. For example, the nuts in our nut butters, and grains in our granolas are sprouted to break down the phytic acid and add beneficial enzymes. The seeds that produce our seed oils are stone ground in a way that never adds heat to the process which would denature the proteins that make most seeds oils toxic.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We started off by growing the vegetables for and manufacturing our own products. This was a difficult process, because I was managing the production and facility remotely. We had a very limited budget for equipment, and had difficulty keeping up with demand. We were also battling with an old building that didn’t have the electrical capacity to meet our needs. Because of these factors, we felt we needed to find a partner to manufacture our products for us, The key was to find a partner who would take the care and do all the steps in the production process that we needed. Finding that was very difficult. Of the few manufacturers we where would meet their minimum order requirements, none were willing to pre-cook the vegetables in the way we needed prior to dehydration. It was only after I met someone who believed in our products and eventually started his own manufacturing company, that we were able to find someone. I was able to connect with the owner of the company before they launched, and because of the guaranteed business they would receive from us when they launched, they were willing to build their production capabilities around our needs. It was a great foundation for a great relationship that has lasted over five years.

I found this person by going to various food industry trade shows and events. I learned that being selective on who you partner with is very important because we had to maintain the same level of quality as when we produced all our products ourselves.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Shortly after we launched our website and started taking orders, we got the opportunity to present our products on a podcast interview from one of the leading podcasts in the health, wellness and nutrition spaces. The problem was, the majority of our inventory wouldn’t be finished until (what we thought would be) right after the podcast aired. The other wrinkle was that we were all away at my younger brother’s wedding, so we had less hands on deck to fulfill customer orders. We decided to take the risk and make everything available for sale, even though we would be cutting it close waiting for the products to finish.

The podcast interview went better than we could have expected, and we had over $30,000 worth of sales over the weekend, and only about $5,000 worth of product on hand, with the rest supposedly arriving any day. It ended up taking about two weeks for everything to arrive, and another to fulfill all the orders we received. Luckily, people loved the products and were able to forgive our tardiness on their first order, and many of these first customers remain customers almost seven years later.

Contact Info:

• Website: drcowansgarden.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcowanspowders/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcowansgarden
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asher-cowan-403a6ab/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DrCowansGarden