Jason Burke is the Founder and CEO at New Primal, a clean-label meat snack brand making better-for-you jerky, meat sticks, and kid-friendly protein snacks. He launched the brand in 2012 after a homemade jerky recipe caught on with coworkers and has since built New Primal into a national CPG brand. In his role, Jason leads the company's growth strategy, product innovation, and retail expansion, helping push the meat snack category beyond traditional jerky into poultry-forward, lunchbox-friendly options.

Some categories seem fixed until a founder looks closely at what consumers are avoiding, compromising on, or never invited into in the first place. In better-for-you CPG, growth often comes from making the familiar feel easier, cleaner, and more relevant to everyday routines. So how do you take a dated category and turn it into something families, retailers, and new consumers can actually get behind?

As a CPG founder with expertise in clean-label meat snacks, Jason Burke answers that by focusing on access, familiarity, and long-term discipline. Rather than simply creating a better version of jerky, he saw an opportunity to rethink price point, format, flavor, audience, and usage occasion, moving from premium jerky into meat sticks that could work for lunchboxes, parents, and variety-seeking snackers. Jason emphasizes the importance of staying close to consumers, building strong retail relationships, using familiar flavors to reduce trial friction, and knowing when to narrow focus instead of chasing every adjacent opportunity. His approach shows that category disruption is less about one big breakthrough and more about consistent, intentional decisions that compound over time.

In this episode of the Brand Alchemist Podcast, Taja Dockendorf chats with Jason Burke, Founder and CEO of New Primal, about building a cleaner meat snack brand and reshaping a legacy category. Jason shares why focus matters, how familiar flavors drive trial, and what it takes to grow through retail. He also touches on packaging, expansion, founder resilience, and future innovations.

Liz Zwillinger is the Co-founder of Biologica, a wellness brand creating drinkable multivitamins tailored to women's hormonal life phases. Drawing on her own journey navigating hormonal symptoms, Liz recognized significant gaps in women's health and turned her focus to researching nutrition, hormones, and aging. She launched Biologica to simplify supplementation, combining essential vitamins, minerals, and botanicals into delicious, stage-specific beverages for women. Continuing to guide research-driven product development, she ensures every formulation meets women's evolving health needs.

Life stages bring shifts that impact energy, mood, and daily routines for many women. From changing hormones to evolving nutritional needs, navigating health and wellness can be challenging. How can women simplify self-care while supporting their bodies through these transitions?

Liz Zwillinger, an expert in women's wellness and nutrition, explains that understanding hormonal life stages is the key to targeted health support. She highlights the importance of combining essential vitamins, minerals, and botanicals to align with these stages, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all solutions. Liz also emphasizes taste and routine as critical factors for consistent supplementation, supporting both effectiveness and daily enjoyment. By tailoring nutrition to hormonal phases, women can better manage energy, mood, and long-term health.

In this episode of the Brand Alchemist Podcast, Taja Dockendorf chats with Liz Zwillinger, Co-founder of Biologica, to examine why stage-specific wellness matters. Liz discusses how to address hormonal health, simplify supplementation, and choose ingredients that support women. She also touches on product flavor, daily routines, and practical tips for sustaining energy and well-being.

Clara Sieg is the Co-founder and CEO of Loonen, a glass-bottled water company rethinking hydration through spring-sourced, purified water, third-party testing, and transparent quality reports. In her role, she guides the brand's vision, product standards, retail growth, and consumer education, ensuring every decision reflects Loonen's commitment to clean water without plastic packaging. As a former partner at Revolution Ventures, Clara spent more than a decade investing in early-stage consumer brands before launching Loonen after her pregnancy sharpened her concerns about plastics, toxins, and everyday water quality.

The products we use every day often feel simple because they are so familiar. Water, in particular, can seem like the most basic choice on the shelf, yet its sourcing, packaging, and testing tell a much deeper story. What happens when a founder starts questioning not just what we drink, but what our water passes through before it reaches us?

The answer starts with treating water as a product that deserves the same scrutiny as food, beauty, and home care. As a former consumer investor and founder focused on safer everyday essentials, Clara Sieg brings a deeply informed perspective to bottled water, from contamination risks to packaging tradeoffs. She explains why transparency matters, how comprehensive finished-goods testing can build trust, and why glass packaging requires just as much attention to caps, transit, and production systems. Clara's insights point to a larger shift: consumers are looking for proof, not just purity claims.

In this episode of the Brand Alchemist Podcast, Taja Dockendorf talks with Clara Sieg, Co-founder and CEO of Loonen, about rethinking bottled water through purity, transparency, and plastic-free packaging. Clara shares how pregnancy shaped the brand's mission, why testing matters, and how thoughtful design improves the everyday experience. She also touches on founder lessons, retail growth, and future innovation.