The idea

Someone in Bemidji, Fargo, or Anchorage will never find a mangosteen, a gac fruit, or black ginger at the store. The compounds that make those fruits worth eating can be packed where they grow and shipped anywhere.

That is the whole thesis. Thailand is the world's leading source of its rare tropical fruits: the largest exporter of durian and longan, at or near the top for mangosteen, with an orchard belt in Chanthaburi and Rayong that already has freeze-dry factories next to the farms. Freeze-dried fruit is already a major Thai export. Nobody has packaged it as a daily ritual for the American kitchen.

The category exists and it is big. AG1 built a billion-dollar brand on a green powder subscription. Bloom sold a majority stake to Nutrabolt in 2024. The shelf is a wall of green tubs. Ours is the one that is not green.

Why me, why now

I built and sold a licensed cannabis company in California. I know yields, process, labs, packaging, and what happens when you don't own the customer. I live in Thailand with four and a half years left on my visa, I'm vegan and eat this stuff every day, and I've wanted to spread plants around this planet since before any of this. This is the first thing I've looked at where all of that counts.

What went wrong last time, and why this is different

Paradise Factory had growing, manufacturing, packaging, and wholesale, but no retail. Vertically integrated giants shut small brands out, labs sold numbers, and distributors set the price. This venture owns the missing layer: the customer, direct, worldwide. And the chain is honest. ISO labs, certified co-packers, FedEx and containers. Nobody between us and the buyer can mark the price down to $50 and pocket the difference.

The product

Anthos. A daily color blend from 15 whole Thai plants, freeze dried at the orchard, every gram printed on the pouch.

Anthos is Greek for flower and the root of anthocyanin, the pigment that makes roselle, mulberry, and butterfly pea red and purple. The name is the chemistry in the glass.

It is a color powder, not a greens powder. The main pouch is the greens, gold, and flavor plants: moringa, gotu kola, holy basil, spirulina, gac, amla, passion fruit, snake fruit, turmeric, black ginger, torch ginger. That glass is olive gold. The Anthos color sachet holds the four pigment plants: red dragon fruit, roselle, Thai mulberry, butterfly pea. Pour it in and the glass goes from green to deep purple in front of you.

The ritual

1. Mix one scoop, 11.5 g, in the shaker.
2. Pour in the color sachet, 3 g.
3. Watch green go purple.
4. Drink. Thirty of each ship together as one month.

Principles the product is built on

• Real doses. Around one gram of each plant, printed. No proprietary blends, no dusting.
• No caffeine, no stimulants. The feel comes from sourness and the color shift, not a kick.
• One lightly sweetened recipe. About 2 g of fruit sugar plus monk fruit. No second SKU until 500 subscribers.
• Nothing else. No fillers, no carriers, no maltodextrin, no flavors, no added colors.
• One country. Every farm has a face and a province on the site. Every batch code opens that batch's farms and lab results.

Mockups only. Final packaging and brand work come later.

Formula draft, per 11.5 g serving plus 3 g sachet

These are test-batch numbers. Ratios get set by eye and tongue, four or five glasses side by side, before anything is printed. Serving sizes get a Thai university food scientist's sign-off.

Versus the category

AG1 figures from their published label and site. Where they don't publish a number, we say so.

Apples versus ancient fruit

Look at AG1's plant blend and the first fruit on the label is apple powder, with pea protein ahead of it. Apple is a fine fruit, but it's a modern one. The eating apple came out of Kazakhstan a few thousand years ago and nearly every variety on a shelf today was bred in the last two centuries for sugar, size, and storage.

Fleshy fruit itself is far older than that. Plants started wrapping their seeds in sweet, colored flesh tens of millions of years ago, as a deal with animals: eat this, carry the seed somewhere new. The color is the signal. Anthocyanins, betalains, and carotenoids are how a plant tells a mammal the fruit is ripe, and the same compounds protect the plant from sun and pests while it waits. The sourness, the pigment, the bitterness in the skin are not accidents. They are what the plant evolved so that something like us would eat it and spread it.

Durian, mangosteen, gac, snake fruit, and the rest of this list are old tropical lineages from the forests where that deal was struck, still close to their wild forms. Our ancestors ate fruit like this long before anyone bred an apple. A pouch of them is a different thing from a pouch of apple and pea.

Supply chain

Buy fruit where it grows, dry it next door, test it at an ISO lab, store the powder in the co-packer's climate room, ship pallets to a US warehouse.

Year one

• Start with established Thai freeze-dried powder suppliers for all 15 plants. Spec: 100% fruit, freeze dried, no carrier, a certificate of analysis per lot.
• One certified blender and filler for the pouch, sticks, and sachets. GMP, HACCP, Thai FDA licensed. Second qualified dryer identified from batch one so nobody can hold the brand hostage.
• Visit the suppliers' farms, film them, put the farmer's face and province on the site.
• Lab panel per batch: micro, heavy metals, pesticides, mycotoxins. Retained samples kept from every batch. Product liability insurance.
• Air freight the first two batches to a US 3PL warehouse. Ocean containers from the third.

Year two and beyond

• Go direct to the dryer for the three or four hero fruits. Buy in season, dry at harvest, powder keeps a year.
• Hold two to three months of US stock at all times. A stockout on a subscription is the one thing that kills retention.
• Contract farming for the hero fruits once a container a quarter is normal.

Structure and legal

• Thai company, formed before the first real batch. Owns the formula, trademarks, supplier relationships, and inventory. As a US citizen I can own it outright under the US-Thailand Amity Treaty. Thai manager and staff handle work-permit matters; BOI promotion for value-added agriculture is the path to permits and tax relief.
• Las Vegas LLC. Importer of record, Shopify, bank, Amazon seller account, US FDA food facility registration. Fulfillment through a 3PL, not our own warehouse, until we're moving thousands of pouches a month.
• Thai FDA: the co-packer's factory license covers export. US FDA: facility notice, import rules, label review by a regulatory attorney once.
• Trademarks: Brother Gatherer and Anthos searched and filed in the US and Thailand before launch.
• Pouch claims we can make day one: caffeine free, gluten free, vegan, soy, dairy and nut free, no GMO ingredients, no cane sugar, made in a GMP and HACCP certified facility. Organic waits until a farm earns it.

Team and ownership

Four equal slices, one each. Parker's vests over time as the work gets done. Toby and his wife are one unit. Every slice is open for discussion on the call.

How decisions get made

Day to day runs on a simple majority, which is Brett's 51%. The big decisions need Brett plus at least one of you: selling the company or any part of it, taking on debt, issuing new shares, changing anyone's slice, or moving money to anyone who owns a piece. Those get written into the operating agreement so no one has to trust memory.

Numbers

All of these are estimates. First small batches will land higher than this. Nothing here is a projection anyone should bank on; it's the shape of the business.

One pouch, $79, where the money goes

Monthly, at 70% website and 30% Amazon

Fixed costs assumed at $8k to $12k a month: Thai staff, 3PL minimums, software, insurance, lab, accounting. No salaries to any of us until the company is profitable.

What a 12.25% slice earns

At 1,000 subscribers, a 12.25% slice is about $4,650 a month. At 2,000, about $10,400. Ownership of a subscription brand is also worth something on its own: brands with this profile sell for three to five times annual revenue.

Year one capital, draft line items

The ask

$75,000 to $100,000 over the first year, staged, from the family.

• Stage one, now: company formation, trademarks, test batches, brand work. About $20k.
• Stage two, after the test batch passes: first production batch, packaging, labs, US setup. About $40k to $50k.
• Stage three, after the first batch sells: second batch and stock. About $25k to $30k.

Each stage only happens if the one before it worked. If the test batch tastes wrong or the first 300 customers don't come back, we stop at that stage with the money that's left.

How the money is handled

• Every dollar in and out sits on one shared ledger all of us can open any day.
• No salaries, no personal expenses, no founder draw until the company is profitable. My living is covered separately.
• Every farm, lab, and supplier is on the books under the Thai company, not under me personally.

Risks and guards

• The drink isn't good enough. Guard: test batch first, 30 strangers through Amazon Vine before any family money goes to a big run.
• Customers cost too much to get. Paid ads in this category run $60 to $120 a subscriber. Guard: no ad budget. Friends, the feed, Amazon search, and a referral pouch for every friend who subscribes.
• Sprawl. A second product, a fifth farm, a site rebuild. Guard: one product, one channel, the ideas list waits until 500 subscribers.
• Supplier failure. Guard: second dryer qualified from batch one, two months of US stock.

Every one of these has a guard built into the plan, and every stage of money only happens after the stage before it worked. The category is proven, the margin is real, the fruit is already growing, and nobody is doing it from the source. The work is to build the best pouch in the category and put it in front of people. That part is on me.

After the first pouch

The first pouch builds the machine: the farms, the dryer, the lab, the warehouse, the customer list. Once that runs, the same machine can make a fermented line for cardiovascular health, single-fruit pouches like soursop and mangosteen, and single-serve sachets for 7-Eleven in Thailand. None of that starts before 500 subscribers.

Timeline

• OctoberFamily in. Trademark searches. Supplier outreach begins.
• NovemberRaw ingredients in hand: about a pound of each of the 15 powders from suppliers. Mixing month. Ratios, sweetness, color, taste, over and over at home until it's right. Thai company filing starts.
• DecemberFormula locked from the November mixes. Lab panels on the finished blend. Packaging design. US LLC and FDA registration.
• Q1 2027First production batch, 1,000 pouches. Website and Amazon listing live. Friends and family first, Vine reviewers, first hundred strangers.
• Q2 2027Second batch. Referral program. Ingredient pages ranking. Target: 300 subscribers.
• Q3 and Q4First ocean container. Target: 500 to 800 subscribers by year end.