Big Announcement, we’re evolving
Big Announcement
We’re changing our brand name!
From now on, and nothing else becomes The Whole Truth.
It’s not really a change. It’s an evolution. And here’s why we’re doing it.
Let’s begin with the argument that this is a stupid idea (it’s a strong argument).
In just 9 months of existence (yup, that’s how young we are), we’ve sold over 3 lakh bars, garnered a super-engaged following of over 80k brand-lovers, won multiple emerging-brand awards, and just received so much affection from consumers that ‘overwhelming’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.
So it’s only fair to ask — why change a brand that’s doing so well?
Well, the answer depends on how you define doing well. And change.
Indeed, seen from the lens of our investors and customers and well-wishers, we were doing exceedingly well.
But from our own lens, and what we set out to do, we decided, not well enough.
Allow me to explain.
Purpose
Rebuilding the world’s trust in its food
Before we had a product or a brand name or a team or VC funding, we had this one line. Our purpose. Our reason to exist.
Having spent two years writing FITSHIT, unearthing the lies and the trickery of the food industry, I’d become convinced that consumers had lost faith in packaged food. And with all the chemicals and refined sugar and incomprehensible stuff lurking in those packets, absolutely rightfully so.
I felt that consumers were desperately looking for a truthful food-brand. A brand that didn’t make them turn the pack and search, squint-eyed, for a barely legible list of highly suspicious ingredients they couldn’t pronounce even if they found ‘em.
I hypothesized that a packaged food brand that makes real food, and simply lists its ingredients upfront, with no gimmickry or tall claims or sexy photo shoots, would do well.
It seems I was right. But that wasn’t enough.
Iceberg
We’ve only been alive a few months, but starting on the path of creating a food-brand, has brought me up close and personal with the ‘health-food’ industry. I’ve had a glimpse of it’s inner workings, and I now understand that my hypothesis, while not incorrect, was definitely incomplete.
Because the malaise isn’t just what unspeakable ingredients are put into our food. It’s how marketing tricks are used to sell it as ‘healthy’. And how legal tricks are used to disclaim any liability. And how design-tricks are used to highlight only that which they want you to see. And how ‘food-technology tricks’ are used to label man-made substances as ‘natural’. I could go on.
The rot runs deep. And I now firmly believe, that if we’re to re-claim your trust, if we’re to truly re-earn it, we need to do better than just tell you the truth about ingredients.
We need to tell you the truth about everything.
The truth about nutrition labels. The truth about diets. The truth about disclaimers. The truth about why juice concentrate isn’t the same as real juice. The truth about ‘fat-free’ and ‘sugar-free’. And why maltodextrin is the sugar that you need to be worried about, more than sugar itself.
I could go on. And I intend to.
When we created and nothing else, we went beyond what other seemingly clean-label brands were doing, and declared each and every ingredient upfront.
And we were just beginning to get happy about it. Only to realize, it’s not nearly enough.
Evolution. Not Change.
I’ve used the word ‘I’ throughout this piece, but we really are a ‘We’. A team of mission-driven folks who got fed up with the food-industry, left their cushy day jobs, and decided to do something about it.
and nothing else was that ‘something’, that we gave our lives to. So you can imagine that this decision doesn’t come easy.
What helped though, was the lockdown. As the world came to a grinding halt and humanity got forced into deep introspection, we too decided to pause and reflect on what we’d been creating.
Funnily enough, as we scrolled back on our Instagram page (pretty much the only social platform we’re active on), we found that less than half the posts there had any reference to our own brand or product!
From comparing ‘whole-wheat’ and ‘brown’ bread, to explaining how ketchup is basically sugar, to decoding how your salad sauce got away with its ‘78% fat-free’ claim — turns out, we’ve always been a lot more interested in helping you decipher the products you use, than in selling you our own.
Somewhere during this lockdown, as idealistic debates about the state of our food turned into deeply introspective, slightly inebriated, late night zoom meetings – we found ourselves.
And it dawned on us that, since the very beginning, we’ve never really been in the business of selling you and nothing else. We’ve been in the business of telling you The Whole Truth.
And so this isn’t a change at all. It’s a re-commitment. A doubling-down. A coming of age.
It might still be stupid. But it’s who we are.
The Whole Truth
So here’s the deal. Nothing’s changing. Apart from the name, of course. And the website domain. And the Instagram handle. (That’s it. God promise).
The product itself, the food-philosophy, the marketing-mission, the self-deprecation — all of those remain. And the commitment to purpose, gets a lot deeper.
To be clear, the audacity of claiming to speak ‘The Whole Truth’ isn’t lost on us. We’d be lying if we said that the ‘absolute’ promise inherent in the name, doesn’t scare us. It does.
Yet we decided to do it. Because we wanted our commitment to be public. And final.
The way we see it, we’re renewing our vows with our purpose. And we’re calling upon you to bear witness.
Will we falter? Of course. Will we come-up short at times? I don’t see how we won’t. It is, after all, an impossible ideal to aspire to.
But we’re committed to trying our absolute best. Because that’s what you deserve. The Whole Truth. and nothing else.