Plant-based diets have moved out of the fringe and into the mainstream as conscious consumers adopt the lifestyle for health, environmental, and moral reasons. The past decade has seen the introduction of dozens of new food brands in the plant-based market. In fact, grocery sales of plant-based foods that directly replace animal products have grown 29% in the past two years to $5 billion. While it’s easier than ever to be vegan, what isn’t easy is filling the nutritional gaps specific to a plant-based diet. That’s why Wholier is here, with a vitamin and community to help plant-based people live their best lives. Founder Lisa Gonzalez-Turner talked to us about coming up through the food world and ultimately solving a problem close to her heart (and stomach).

“The trend with my entire career and my life is I’ve always tried to defy what was expected of me.” - Lisa Gonzalez-Turner

Lisa, the youngest of three girls, grew up outside of Philadelphia. She likes to compare the eldest child to a CEO who’s always in control, while she credits being the youngest with her lifelong desire to break the rules.

“I was always devious from a very early age, always the one bending rules. ” Lisa said. “I always had different hobbies I was exploring. It was a combination of finding different avenues of creativity and being defiant in the classroom and in my personal life. “

With both parents as doctors, Lisa thought that medicine was her path in life and initially majored in pre-med biology at Penn. Later on, she switched to the popular Politics, Philosophy, and Economics major because of the array of more fulfilling opportunities it opened up for her career. Lisa’s first job out of college was at the iconically pink PR firm Alison Brod, a departure from many of her fellow students at Penn who ended up in typical finance jobs.

“I was excited about being a part of all of these different businesses,” Lisa said. “I think that PR and communications generally are frowned upon as being not super strategic, but Alison Brod is full of hustlers. They’re brilliant and work extremely hard. We were not publicists - we were coming up with campaigns and massive events for multinational companies.”

After 4 years with the firm Lisa took 3 months to backpack around Europe. In a month-long stint on a farm in Sweden, she adopted a plant-based diet, the personal motivation behind eventually founding Wholier.

“I became weary of the lack of transparency in the supply chain and I was afraid of not knowing where my food was coming from. People who live the longest generally eat the least meat and dairy. At the time I was vegetarian, and after my experience on the farm I cut dairy out of my diet,” Lisa said.

Upon returning, Lisa wanted to get more involved in food and ended up working for Inday, Spindrift, and Daily Harvest. While at Daily Harvest Lisa oversaw community and public relations, social media, events, and built out the company’s nutrition network. She saw the company grow from a scrappy team of 25 to 100 employees in a beautiful office in Chelsea.

The Aha Moment

“I just didn't understand why there wasn't something that was tailored to me. We segment things based on men and women, but we don't have things specifically about someone's diet. That was the initial problem and I was like, ‘what's the bigger picture here?’” - Lisa Gonzalez-Turner

Over her years of working with brands and innovative companies, Lisa had an array of business ideas ranging from packed foods to tech products. Ultimately the decision to start Wholier came from a place of personal need when Lisa learned her plant-based diet was leaving her lacking in some nutritional areas. She went to the doctor and discovered she was low in vitamins B12, D3, and iron - all common deficiencies experienced by people who are not eating meat and dairy.

“I like to caveat that by saying it’s not because I'm vegan, it's because I'm human,” Lisa said. “9 out of 10 people in the US are nutrient deficient because of something. Because I’m vegan I have different nutrients I’m missing.”

Lisa’s journey through the vitamin aisle brought her to the realization that in order to make up her deficiencies with supplements, she would have to cobble together a ridiculous amount of pills. She knew others would be facing the same problem, and began working on Wholier in 2018.

“Plant-based lifestyles are being adopted at an extremely rapid rate because we now realize the impacts it can have on your health, and obviously the environment. Why wasn’t there a vitamin that was specifically adapted to this group of people that have different needs, different values, and different desires? A multivitamin felt like a really good entry point,” Lisa said.

Launching Wholier

“I'm not from the supplement industry so I'm not jaded by the way things have been done before. I'm doing them my own way. I think that really is important. “ - Lisa Gonzalez-Turner

Lisa rolled out Wholier with a tested, iterative approach, reaching 1,000 subscription customers in the first three months. From there, she shut down marketing to focus on listening to her customers and improving the product.

“When I launched Wholier I always knew things were going to change,” Lisa said. “I thought the product was 90% there, but I wanted to get it out into the world and see. I had bootstrapped it, so it was not intended to be perfect, it was intended to be a test. I spent the first 3 or 4 months learning from our customers, sending personal emails to them, and doing surveys to understand what they really cared about. From there I took the learnings and went back to the drawing board, tweaked the formula and brand a little bit, and tweaked our packaging.”

The new and improved Wholier officially launched in August 2020. Currently, the company offers a whole food multivitamin to meet the needs of plant-based people, in a no-nausea, delayed-release capsule. Lisa and her advisory team of nutritionists and doctors combed through hundreds of clinical studies to hone in on the right dosage of 8 food-based nutrients in their most bioavailable forms. Her larger ambitions are to continue to build the company into a set of tools for plant-based people to be as healthy as they can be at any point in their process.

“What I want us to offer is a home for anybody who is on their journey to be plant-based, whether you're entering into it or you've been on it for decades. I think that historically veganism has been very rigid and forces you to live one way or you're not part of the community. I want Wholier to be a place of acceptance, meeting people where they are and helping them along the way. That means offering them products that support their nutritional needs, and down the line being a really robust content resource. We want to share the stories of other plant-based people and their journey to becoming vegan because most of the time it's a progression,” Lisa said.

The Advice

Lisa has years of experience working with startups as a consultant, in-house, and by launching her own. We asked for the most important lessons she’s learned along the way:

Trust your gut, especially when it comes to the people around you. It takes time to undo mistakes made by bringing on the wrong people to your team.
Go in with a beginner’s mindset to everything that you do. Go in believing that you know nothing and absorb information from other people.
Don’t be afraid to take the first step. Once you start getting the momentum going, everything seems more manageable.
The only thing you can do to keep yourself from failing is continuing to move! If you fail, pick yourself up and do it again. The worst thing you can do is not try.

Looking to add a vitamin to your vegan vida? Check out Wholier.

Photo courtesy of Wholier.

Written by Kendall Embs.