Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast. I'm your host, Jesse Freitag.

Health, happiness, hydration. Did you know the fruit of a cactus could help bring you all three?

That's why Kuan Yang and four of his other pharmacist's friends decided to found prickly

and create the quenchious prickickly pear cactus juice. Listen

in to hear how coconut water is moving over for a new plant-based water with half the sugar

and calories yet that's filled with antioxidants. Kwan is the CEO of Prickley and an active member

of our startup CPG community and he shares about Prickley's origin story, running around New York

in a cactus suit, their recent Today Show spotlight, and his tips for other aspiring CPG entrepreneurs.

Hi, Kwan, thanks for being here today. How are you?

I am doing awesome, Jesse. So excited to be here and so great to catch up with you again.

Awesome. Yeah, it's great to connect again. We were able to connect a few months ago and you sent the Live Bar team some prickly and oh man, they dove right into it and have become obsessed.

So I'm excited we get to talk about your awesome product today.

Yeah. I can share sentiment that the LiveB bars themselves were also gone in just a few seconds.

So, love it. Very good trade. Very good trade. Well, I would love if you can just dive right in and tell us all

about prickly. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, prickly is on a mission to build a sustainable plant-based

category around one of the most sustainable ingredients of all time,

the cactus, specifically the prickly pear. And so we start by making cactus waters that are

inspired by a traditional family recipe from Lebanon, where one of my co-founders Mo grew up.

So we use premium sustainably sourced prickly pear cactus fruit, which are full of antioxidants and

electrolytes, and these antioxidants boosts skin health, immunity, and recovery.

And they come in three different flavors, our original prickly pear, our strawberry

hibiscus, and our mango ginger, each in a sleek, slim, 12-ounce can.

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