On today’s episode, I sit down with Kiki Couchman and Elan Halpern, the co-founders of Sourmilk.

Sourmilk is built around a simple but differentiated premise: take something 92% of households already consume and engineer it to deliver measurable gut-health impact. We talk through how they formulated around specific probiotic strains rather than optimizing purely for flavor, what it looked like to source grass-fed dairy without prior industry experience, and how they built a co-manufacturing relationship from scratch.

We also get into their deliberately high-friction, self-distributed drop model as a way to validate demand, measure retention, and collect first-party customer data before entering retail. From there, we discuss cold-chain constraints, retailer relationships, geographic saturation before national expansion, fundraising discipline, and what it takes to build defensibility in a category dominated by large incumbents.

I learned so much from Kiki and Elan, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.