This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What started as a collegiate adventure and getting around the legal drinking age requirements led to a 10-year journey and now a full-time business. Hey, what's up, friends? Chris Guillebeau here, your host of Side Hustle School. I'm also hosting this segment, which is part of our Throwback Thursday series. We get to hear from a side hustler, somebody that we first featured long ago, and they've got some updates to share.
Today, the co-founder of a business that turns upcycled grains from breweries into delicious snacks. Pretty cool business. He describes it as a sustainable food company, but as I mentioned, it actually had the origin story of kind of an underage drinking experiment, and then it turned into so much more. Last week in this series, we heard from Alex Kennan. She's been a longtime friend of the show, first featured nine years ago and still going strong with her urban hiking company in San Francisco, urbanhikersf.com.
Today, we're going to hear about regrained, and Dan is going to tell us the story, going to pass the mic to Dan. I'll come back at the end with a few words of wrap up. [Music]
My name's Dan Kurzrock. I am the co-founder and chief grain officer of regrain, and we were on episode 606. My side hustle is actually currently my full-time hustle.
The company is called regrained. We are a sustainable food company. We're primarily an ingredient company, actually. We have a patent around this technology we developed to rescue food. We work with breweries.
We take the grain that they've already used to make beer. We make a really cool, nutritious alternative flour from that that can be used in a wide range of applications. We've got consumer products that are on the shelves at places like Whole Foods. And so definitely it's a hustle hustle. I got started with the business actually as an underage undergraduate home brewer.
I was making beer at age 19 when I was at UCLA. Every time I made a batch, which was about every week, we made sure to not have class on Fridays. And every Friday we'd make a batch of beer and five gallons at a time, about a third of a keg. Every time we made beer, we'd have all this grain leftover, like a whole cooler full of it. It was like enough oatmeal to feed a middle school that would be hauled to the curb and didn't have much to do with it.
So I started making loaves of bread with that grain and we'd actually sell those loaves of bread to friends. So my side hustle had a side hustle to begin with while I was a college student that would then generate the proceeds in order to buy more ingredients to brew more beer for free. And that really sent me down this line of inquiry asking about what the industry at large was doing and really identified that there was this huge opportunity to close the loop in a really meaningful way, well beyond my own home brewing hobby, well beyond my aspirations to have a brewery that was also a bakery to actually work with commercial breweries and commercial food producers and kind of help connect the dots in a new way to create better for you and better for the planet food products. So much has happened since Regraind was on the show. Around that time we were in really active R&D on developing the technology that ultimately has become the main driver of the business.
One of the reasons why no one had figured this out before is because there's actually some technical hurdles around safely and efficiently taking the grain from breweries and creating food products out of it. We worked directly with USDA. We actually have a patent on this process and one of the things that we've discovered over the last few years, after we've kind of engineered and built and deployed this is that it actually works really well for other ingredient streams. So we can work with the oats, for example, over the milking process and create similar ingredients from that. In terms of advice, one of the things that I always like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs, be it a side hustle or a full-time hustle is to make sure that you don't burn out.
And I've been building this business now for, you could argue 10 years, right? It hasn't been full-time in that amount of time, but it's an endurance sport and not burning out requires that you take care of yourself. If you want to build a sustainable business, you've got to be personally sustainable too. And so while you might not be able to take huge vacations and things like that to reset, I think you can really find these micro moments of finding perspective for me. That's been a lot of mountain bike riding and skiing and things like that that kind of clear your head.
They're really physical and that's where you do your best thinking. Another thing for me that helps me not burn out and so inspired is reading a lot, especially a lot of fiction actually. You think of a lot of, you might think, "Oh, yeah, I got to do all my reading time on business books and on nonfiction." But actually I find personally that I get more energized and actually more inspired. And I think I learned more, frankly, a lot of times from reading fiction and the alternative perspectives that come up from that. And taking a bigger step back just like practical advice, when you're building a business, you can't control your luck, right?
But you can control how many opportunities you have to be lucky. Like there is a numbers game that you're facing every day with the business and the more conversations you have, the more you put yourself out there to kind of get lucky. That's what really makes a difference. For example, with fundraising, you're gonna get more no's than yes's and you might only need one yes in order to get what you need. And that might be true for sales and distribution too.
And so you don't get what you don't ask for and you really wanna be generating as many of these opportunities to earn that yes as you can. [Music]
Dan, thank you so much for sharing those updates. And listeners, check out Dan's business, upcycledfoods.com. I'm not sure if they had a rebranding at some point from regrained, but upcycledfoods also sounds pretty good. Again, upcycledfoods.com.
They describe upcycledfood as not being a trend but a transformation with huge environmental stakes, a market that's already moving, consumers ready to reward brands that step up. Anyway, well done, Dan. Listeners, let me know what you think, who you'd like to see featured from our archives of thousands of stories, 3,400 plus episodes and counting. You can access all of those episodes for free at sidehustleschool.com and also continue to listen for the new episodes that come out seven days a week. That's all for now.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
