We recently connected with Manette McDermott and have shared our conversation below.
Manette, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
Two experiences around the same time led me to commit to the business we are building.
First, I had severe sciatic pain in one of my legs for an extended period. I sought help from conventional medical professionals but didn’t find anyone who could relieve the condition. When one said to me, “It’s not unusual given that you’ve had 4 children. Periodic cortisone shots for the rest of your life is probably the way to go,” I knew I was in the wrong place to find a solution. I began to experiment with my diet and found that, once I removed refined sugar, the pain went away quickly. Sugar was creating the inflammation that triggered the sciatica.
Around the same time, my mother was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease. A cocktail of meds was causing her to experience very uncomfortable constipation. I read a lot about gut health and began to experiment with making fermented foods. What I produced for her seemed to offer relief. She shared my creations with friends who also provided encouraging feedback. Before she passed away, my mother encouraged me to form a company so that my food could help more people.
No refined sugar and fermented foods for gut health — those are cornerstones for what we do at muun chi.
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?
I am the daughter of Chinese immigrants. My parents came to the US to study in the late 1940s and didn’t return to China when the government changed in 1949. They were cut off from their families, found each other, married, and created a family of four children while integrating into life in America. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of cooking with my mother. They inspire me today.
I didn’t know anything about business. After college, I received a Ph.D. in linguistics, mastered sign language, and found joy in helping hearing-impaired children. I focused on raising my own children and never thought of being a business owner until they were grown and I found the passion to help people with organic real foods that support gut health. Fortunately, I have a partner who tends to all areas of the business where I lack experience.
Our focus at muun chi is the gut microbiome, which an explosion of scientific research in recent years has revealed is critical to many areas of personal health. We make and sell a collection of fermented probiotics, which bring live beneficial bacteria into the gut, and fiber-rich prebiotics, which feed those good bugs and allow them to flourish and balance the microbiome. No pills or powders. Only real food that the body knows how to process. All of the ingredients we use are organic plants that come directly from nature and have wonderful microbes from the soil. None of our creations have dairy, gluten, or refined sugar. We also avoid anything artificial or processed, such as dyes, preservatives, and emulsifiers.
Personal health is one of the company’s pillars. Environmental sustainability is another. Our beautiful Earth is what produces all of the plants we use. We aim to support it as much as possible. We package our products exclusively in returnable, reusable glass bottles and jars and are blessed with a community of regular customers who bring them back to us. We love upcycling as a promising strategy for reducing the food waste that burdens growing landfills. We recover organic almond pulp each week from a local juicer, dehydrate it, and include it as the main ingredient in our granola, muesli, crackers, and snacks. Why throw away this fiber-rich food! We also practice a closed loop approach with our production, where a by-product of one process becomes an ingredient in another. The beets that ferment to produce our Kvass become ingredients in our version of kimchi. The turmeric and ginger that ferment with the beets become ingredients in our fermented honey. We hate generating food waste but, inevitably, have some. It’s picked up by a local organization to become compost in the garden programs at two local high schools. From the soil, back to the soil.
We are most proud of the community that has formed around the company. Wonderful people who provide support and encouragement and enormously helpful feedback on what we produce for them. The stories they share about how muun chi foods are helping them to live their best lives inspire us to learn as much as we can about real food as medicine for the body.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
We are conscientious communicators. We collect email addresses from people who are comfortable sharing them with us. We send a weekly communication to our mailing list, as well as a monthly newsletter. Education is a third pillar to the company’s mission. We have absolutely no disappointment if someone visits the store, talks with us about gut health, samples many of our products, and leaves without a purchase. We love sharing what we know about gut health and learning from the perspectives of others.
We use our communications to share what we are learning about the importance of gut health, both from the scientific literature and from customer feedback. The 50+% open rate on our communications continuously surprises us and confirms that the members of our growing community are eager to join our learning journey.
Most of our regular customers appreciate our enthusiasm for innovation and creativity. It’s an important part of the muun chi brand. It’s not unusual for someone to walk into the store and ask, “what do you have this week that’s new?” A new soup, a new snack, a new beverage. I’m always working on something new. The desire to surprise with a new food that’s delightful and delicious is my fuel at the end of a long day.
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
We make everything that we sell. It’s been an adventure! I knew very little about fermenting when I started. The learning has been trial-and-error. I think I might have been a chemist in a previous life. I am endlessly fascinated by the complexities of the fermentation process.
It took me a year to train ancient kefir grains, which favor the lactose in dairy milk, to ferment coconut milk. In the early batches, most of the grains would die off. I would harvest the few survivors, add them to a new fermentation, again watch most fail to survive, and repeat again and again. Eventually, I had a vibrant community of hardy grains that love converting organic coconut milk into muun chi’s fluffy, non-dairy kefir. In developing our Kvass, I learned a lot about how temperature and humidity influence fermentation outcomes. It’s amazing to observe how plants interact with other plants in controlled environments to produce bacteria that can have such a powerfully positive impact on our health.
Along the way I also learned how important it is to celebrate the diversity that nature provides. The beets I use in our Kvass fermentations are not the same week-to-week. The golden beets might be more yellow one week and more orange the next. That leads to variations in our Kvass and other creations. I don’t try to produce a uniform product because the body loves diversity. Delivering different foods to the gut gives our microbes different types of work-outs, just as varying work-outs at the gym improves flexibility and adds strength to a wider range of muscles.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.muunchi.com
- Instagram: muunchifood
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/muunchifood/
- Yelp: muun chi