When life gets busy, it’s easy to forget to take care of ourselves and our bodies – whether that be skipping our skincare routine or foregoing a healthy dinner for a bag of chips. Even with the healthiest of diets, it can be hard to tell if you’re meeting your nutrient needs each day. Knowing this, Dayli Nutrition has stepped in as the go-to product for filling the gaps in your diet using real, nutritious and delicious food ingredients.
CEO Christine Jagoe understands more than anyone that the choices we make on a daily basis directly impact our future selves and our health; through her own life’s twists and turns she’s come to realize the impact we can have on our own bodies with a few simple choices each day. When Jagoe met the founder and formulator of Pranin Organic, the parent company of what would become Dayli Nutrition, his attitude towards “food as medicine” spoke to Jagoe in a way that made sense. It was then that she began to wonder how to bring this ideology to life while creating an enjoyable and convenient product with a sustainable business model built to last. And with that, the idea for Dayli Nutrition was born.
ABOUT DAYLI NUTRITION
Dayli Nutrition offers a line of delicious and efficacious ready-to-mix drink blends with nutrients that are designed to fill the gaps in one’s diet. Dayli offers three blends – the Sunshine, Vitality and Greens blends – that are crafted with real fruits, veggies and superfoods to transform a regular glass of water into a boost of essential vitamins. Just one packet of Dayli can help support energy, digestion, mood and immunity; the delicious taste is just an added bonus.
Dayli’s Sunshine Blend is a delicious way to brighten any day. This best-selling blend will give your mind, mood and immunity a boost with an invigorating blend featuring lion’s mane, turmeric, and 100% of your daily recommended vitamin D. Start your morning with this blend’s refreshing peach and mango flavor, comprised of organic ingredients such as quinoa sprout, acerola cherry, and sunflower oil without any artificial flavors or sweeteners.
With a unique elderberry and raspberry flavor, Dayli’s Vitality Blend offers a refreshing boost of nutrients to support immunity and longevity. It’s built to bolster the body’s defenses with the fortifying power of antioxidants and 100% daily value of vitamin C, sourced from elderberry and acerola cherry. An excellent source of 11 essential vitamins, this blend provides the benefits of whole food ingredients in a vibrant and delicious format.
Dayli’s Greens Blend helps to nourish and cleanse with a boost of nutritional goodness from green vegetables like spirulina, wheatgrass and spinach. This delicious and refreshing lime and mint flavored blend, referred to as “the greens juice for people who don’t like greens juice”, supports healthy digestion and detoxification and provides 50% daily value of Vitamin K.
OBSTACLES & OPPORTUNITIES
“In my personal group of close friends, I’m often referred to as the glue, meaning I’m the one that brought us together,” said Jagoe. “It’s a lighthearted joke really, but if I’m honest I actually think that with Dayli, that’s one of the key roles that I played early on – bringing the right people together. I arrived in this position with a deep understanding of business and a very diverse set of skills but needed to lean on industry experts for advice in areas such as CPG and formulating. I think the fact that at the beginning, at least, I wasn’t emotionally attached to the product allowed me to make decisions that were based on logic rather than emotion. I was able to maintain a clear perspective on what choices were right for the brand, not which choices I wanted for the brand, and there’s a big difference in that.”
Creating the brand led the way for both challenges and opportunities that were new to Jagoe. She knew that to break out in the category (or in this case, to create a new category entirely) Dayli had to be different from others of its kind in the market. In developing the product, they made a commitment to stay true to their “food is medicine” ideology – sourcing ingredients that were as clean and organic as possible and focusing on reputable suppliers that offered nutritious ingredients without harmful additives.
In doing their research about the best way to deliver high quality ingredients to consumers, Jagoe learned a great deal about how our bodies receive vitamins and nutrients. Rather than being just another pill or tablet to pop in the morning, Dayli was crafted to be a high-quality powder that fills the gaps in one’s diet to ensure they are staying hydrated and nourished at the same time. The product became a way to educate consumers about what they’re putting in their bodies and what our bodies do, or don’t do, with what we put in it.
But to Jagoe, building Dayli was so much more than that. Jagoe wanted to build a brand that not only worked for the body, but worked as a business as well – a brand that was built to last and withstand the obstacles that came its way. In the nearly three years since taking on leadership at Dayli Nutrition, Jagoe has refined her skillset with plenty of expertise to share with others looking to break into the industry. More than anything, Jagoe has learned that all businesspeople must be prepared to pivot quickly – and often.
In the past, Jagoe had watched while brands purchase all of their ingredients from a single supplier, leaving them in a sticky situation if that supplier shut down, faced supply chain issues, etc. Jagoe ensured that Dayli would not only source clean and organic ingredients, but they would source them from multiple suppliers; in turn, every single ingredient in Dayli’s formulation has a supplier and a back-up supplier. Despite the critique and pushback Jagoe received when this decision was made, she trusted her instincts. Not too long after, the disruption of the industry caused by the COVID-19 pandemic proved Jagoe to be correct in her decision and led the way for many other decisions she has made for the brand since.
Keeping the environment in mind was important to Jagoe as well. “A mentor of mine once told me: ‘don’t ship water.’ As simple as it sounds, this message really stuck with me as we worked to create the product and business model,” Jagoe said. “We created lightweight stick packs that are easy to manage and ship, while also being mindful of the environment – our cartons and tubs are recyclable, with plans to move to biodegradable stick packs in the coming year as soon as they’re approved for large scale manufacturing. Had we chosen heavier glass jars or bottles, we would have been restricted in the ways we could pivot if we faced the ongoing supply chain obstacles that still affect us today.
ADVICE TO OTHERS
Jagoe would advise all aspiring entrepreneurs to keep in mind that creating both a sustainable product AND a sustainable business is key. “While the goal is always to make a product that is great for us, delicious, enjoyable and easy to use – it is equally as important to create an exceptional business model as well,” Jagoe said. “It is so easy to think only about the short term and what is right in front of you, but it is so important to think years ahead to create a sustainable business model that will be profitable long term and go the distance. If you are having the tiniest doubt, you have to take a step back and look at it from all angles to get the full picture of what your business can and will really be.”
According to Jagoe, building the team around you can make all the difference as well. One of the best decisions she made for the brand, she says, is trusting her team and letting each team member shine in their own respective role. One of the most important parts of success is not being afraid to ask questions and learning from the people around you who know that what they’re doing is best. “I’ve always believed that you shouldn’t tell Picasso what to paint,” she said. Combining the expertise of her team to build out Dayli from all sides – development, branding, messaging – is what allowed the brand to become what it is today, and Jagoe could not be more grateful for the team that has helped her bring Dayli Nutrition to the next level.
So, as Jagoe would advise: “Go ahead and pour yourself a glass of cold water, drop in your favorite blend and feel good that you’re doing something to nourish your body and take care of yourself. Dayli Nutrition makes it easy.”
