Snacking at nighttime is a common habit that you can help.
Millions of people every night indulge in a nighttime snack session and most often the snacks are in the less-than-healthy category of foods. In today’s episode, Nightfood Founder and CEO, Sean Folkson, joins Kinsley and Quinn to discuss Nightfood – the nighttime snack that actually aids in the sleeping journey and is delicious.
Dos Topics:
1. What is nightfood, why did he create it, and what does it have to do with sleep; and
2. How nighttime snacking affects the sleep cycle and the role sugary foods play in overall sleep wellness
Go Deeper: Connect with Sean and see how you get Nightfood into your area!
FULL TRANSCRIPTION
Mark Kinsley: I am in the mood for some night food. It’s nighttime snacking with better sleep in mind. And the founder and CEO, Sean Folkson is here. The Dos Marcos Show begins right now.
Mark Kinsley: Quinn, you’ve got a World Series smile on your face.
Mark Quinn: I’ve got a huge World Series smile on my face. Oh my gosh. Uh, I was in, uh, Houston for, uh, the final game of the World Series and it was really cool Kinsley because my dad is a big Astros fan.
We have a lot of family. They’re Cardinals fans and give us crap all, all the time for different reasons. And so anyway, when I found out that Astros were gonna be in, uh, you know, back, back here playing potentially to win it. I got tickets and took my dad and it was so cool to, to be there with him. And I sent you the video of his face when we won that game.
It was magical. I’m, it’s like this memory I’m always gonna have of the joy he had cuz he watches all the games. But anyway, so it’s really cool from that perspective. But I, I have to tell you man, before the game, I found out that mattress Mac Jim Macin be, who was kind enough to write a blurb for us in our book.
So he was gonna throw out the first pitch. Now if you’re listening to the show and you didn’t catch it, but when McMinville was in Philadelphia, he got into a yelling match with some Philly fans. Because they were attacking Astro’s character because of the cheating scandal years ago. And so Jim says, Hey, look man in, in, in a interview.
After that, he’s like dropping the f bomb Fs, F you, F you, you know, don’t come at my Astros. And he said, look, I’m cool if you’re going to. Like attacked Astros and go, oh, we’re gonna beat you and you know, we’re gonna take you down. Like that kind of banter is fine, but when you start questioning the character of my guys, and of course he knows these people very personally, he’s like, then it’s on and I have to defend my guys.
So anyway, that’s the context. So now Jim walks out onto the field to throw the first pitch now, and when he walks out onto that field, there’s over 42,000 people in that stadium. And I’m telling you, the decibel level rose like four or five points. And people came alive when he walked out there and he threw that first pitch.
And that in this city absolutely loves that guy. And then I thought, you know, what do you have to. As a furniture hawker, as he calls himself a huckster, right? So a furniture salesman essentially to walk out into a stadium, number one, to be asked to throw out the first pitch. And then at the World Series, and then number two, to walk out to a standing ovation by 42,000 people like you.
Like that is such an insurmountable task. But here’s this guy who did it and I just blew you away. And so all I’m saying is what business are you in as you listen to this show? Whatever you think about Jim, when he walked out to that kind of ovation. That guy has done something incredibly smart and special in this town and what great evidence of it was in that moment in time.
So I had to share that story. Being in that building was crazy when he walked out there and I recorded it. So there
Mark Kinsley: you go. Mark Quinn, play by Play from the World Series. How cool is that man? And Jim is just such a, an icon in this industry. He’s the second most known person in Houston, Texas, right behind George Bush.
But I would say, I wonder if that’s starting to trade places. I wonder if Mattress Mac is now the most well known person, especially when you’re willing to throw hands against the Phillies fans.
Mark Quinn: Man, I’m telling you when that, when that video went viral, he was like F U F U, like really defending Houston.
So I think when he got back here, Houston was like, yeah, Jim’s got our back. He was in Philly representing now. Jim also just won 70. Million dollars million doing that. So anyway, but way more importantly, like I’m gonna tell you Kinzie, why we were there. Uh, we were in a suite and they had hot dogs and hamburgers and fajitas and ice cream, and the bad kind of ice cream, not the kind of ice cream our guest has.
But I got done eating so much crappy food, Sean, when I went home, I had a belly ache. I felt like. Six years old again. And my, my, my dad forgot to tell me, don’t eat that chili with that ice cream. It’s not gonna work for you. And of course, I got a really crappy night of sleep, so thank God in heaven. You are here,
Sean Folkson: We’re here. We’re here to save, save the world.
Mark Kinsley: Well, Sean, Sean, folks, and you’re the CEO and founder of Night. And our good friend, friend of the show, friend of the industry, uh, ultimate connector, Todd Weinstein, got us hooked up and he said, number one, you gotta know about night food. You gotta know Sean. He crushes it on qvc, I think was something he said, but you gotta tell us, like, tell us about you and tell us what is night night food because you said it’s formulated by sleep and nutrition experts.
A delicious treat that’s not gonna kill your diet and wreck your sleep like what happened to Quinn? Give us, give us the backstory of this and tell us about.
Sean Folkson: Well, I mean, I’m a longtime nighttime snacker and, uh, you know, I knew it was a problem for me. I, I would try to make healthy choices all day and, um, it was always a lot easier to make good decisions at, you know, nine or 10:00 AM than it was at nine or 10:00 PM And, uh, I realized that that wasn’t just me.
Now, When I started the company, I didn’t have all the statistics and all the research and all the experts that I could just speed dial, right? It was just a guy. It was just me. Um, but what we now know is that humans are actually wired at night. To crave excess calories, to put more energy inside of our bodies as a survival mechanism.
Just like, you know, bears before they hibernate for winter, you know, they pack on all this weight and it helps them survive, uh, through, through that period. So it’s a survival mechanism. So the, the snacking is not gonna go away, right? Over 80% of US snack regularly at. The most popular choices are exactly what you would expect.
Cookies, chips, uh, candy and ice cream. Okay? Because they’re loaded with sugar, they’re loaded with fat, they’re loaded with calories. You can’t, if you’re eating carrot sticks or celery sticks, you’re not gonna put those calories into your body that. You’re kind of wired to do so. Those things are not efficient enough.
The most efficient way to put calories in is through these, these super high calorie junk snacks. So knowing that the snacking is not gonna stop, what we did is we took the approach of if we were to talk to a sleep, Expert, a sleep doctor or hundreds of them and say, look, you know, your patients are gonna be snacking at night.
They’re gonna have ice cream. Millions of people every night across the United States have ice cream between dinner and bed. What should it have more of? What should it have less of? . Okay. And then the same question with cookies, the same question now as we’re, you know, starting to develop chips. It’s, it’s the concept of sleep friendly is what we call it.
Uh, we’re building this new category, nighttime snacking because people, people know intuitively that they shouldn’t be eating this stuff, but. We’re, this is how we’re wired. Cravings are up at night, willpower is down, and people feel bad about it. They’re, they’re exhibiting the behavior. They feel guilty, and it’s not something that happens just once or twice a week.
It might happen once or twice a week, or three or four, or five or six times a week, but it goes on for decades on. It’s not a finite process, it’s something people wrestle with for their whole adult lives. So we think it’s something really powerful where we can help people if they’re gonna be snacking at night, which we know many of them are, to just do it in a more sleep friendly way.
Mark Kinsley: Sean, this is such a big topic, especially right now because I talk to many of my friends in this industry that are focused on. And the conversation around nutrition in relation to sleep has bubbled up as a prominent point of conversation lately. And one of the things we’ve talked a lot about behind the scenes, uh, is sugar, you know, sugar and sugar being an empty calorie, sugar, uh, being something that ignites your system and actually prevents really good sleep.
So take us into, The formulation of night food, what research went into it, the sleep doctors you worked with, the nutrition experts you worked with, and what actually makes something sleep
Sean Folkson: friendly? Yeah, so you touched on one, one big thing is, is sugar, right? You want something that’s much lower glycemic, uh, before bed and, and, and it’s kind of insidious for people.
So, um, I think people. The feedback loop is very imperfect. Okay? A feedback loop, let’s say, with caffeine is, is probably a little bit more precise. You have too much caffeine late in the day, you cannot fall asleep, and you connect those two things right away, uh, because they, they, they offer that connection up.
But a lot of times at night when you have these high sugar, high fat snack, You actually do not have a problem falling asleep. There’s, everybody knows the concept of food coma. We’re coming up on Thanksgiving. Um, you know, it’s a real thing. Um, so what, but what happens is your sleep quality can be very much impaired.
All right, so, But because you fall asleep, okay? People don’t connect, oh, I really shouldn’t have the ice cream at night because it keeps me up. That’s a much more precise and impactful feedback loop than, oh, I had ice cream. I fell asleep just fine. I was in bed for, you know, seven or eight hours. But I wake up feeling, you know, I, I, but I don’t have any energy.
So I go out and I grab a five hour energy or a cup of s. Right, and people don’t make that connection. They just assume that that’s how it’s supposed to be. So, um, sugar is, is a big, uh, problem. You know, people talk about, oh, if I have sugar, I’ll be jacked up. Well, yeah, that lasts for about a half hour to 45 minutes, and then you get that insulin crash and you feel drowsy.
So people don’t get, um, that feedback and they, they are able to fall asleep. But, you know, sugar, uh, fat calories, anything that really taxes the body’s digestive system and, um, forces the body to allocate resources away from the recovery. Uh, and rejuvenation that’s supposed to happen. And there’s a lot of things that can help you fall asleep, uh, that will impair sleep quality.
Eating the wrong thing is one of them having too much alcohol at night. I think everybody’s familiar with that. Um, you know, nobody confuses the fact that you fall asleep easily after you have a few drinks. With good quality sleep. Um, and I would imagine getting hit on the head with a frying pen is another example.
You fall asleep, right? But you feel like garbage when you wake up. So I think nutrition, yeah, it’s, it’s definitely starting to become a topic. A lot of the big food and beverage companies are starting to talk about it. And honestly, there’s more that we’re gonna learn, uh, over the, you know, coming years about specific nutrients, specific ingredients.
Uh, for us, we stay focused on the big picture macro. Uh, typically night food snacks are gonna be less sugar, less fat, fewer calories, more protein, definitely more prebiotic fiber. That’s a big one. Um, and then we identify ingredients and nutrients, uh, that can work in a specific format. So for instance, uh, talk about Thanksgiving.
Uh, our ice cream has about twice as much Tripp to fan as a pint of regular ice cream. Um, we wouldn’t try to go for high Tripp Tofa in something like chips. It wouldn’t necessarily make sense. So for each format we identify what can we do that would make that more sleep friendly? Um, as opposed to feeling like we’ve got this ingredient or, or this combo of ingredients that we try to force into every snack that we make.
Because, At the end of the day, literally and figuratively, if what you’re eating is not delicious, you’re not gonna stick with it. And what’s the point? I sh
Mark Quinn: Sean, I, I am so fascinated by this, uh, Kinsley, you and I talk a lot about. Um, you know, education being such an important part of what this industry has to do, so it’s the education around products can help deliver good sleep, can help you live a better quality of life.
Like a lot of people don’t connect the dots. Sean and I think about what you’re doing, and I’m like, oh my gosh. Like, talk about education, right? Like, this topic would require so much education because I, I’m guessing, and I want you to talk to us about this. When you, when you talk to people that like hotels or when you tell people the business you’re in and you go, it, it’s really about sleep, food, or food that’s like, do people just look at you like, like, what does that even mean?
And like, do you, do you feel like. There’s just this massive rock you have to move and just helping people understand that diet can make a huge impact on the quality of sleep, not getting to sleep. Right, but the quality of sleep. Yeah. And then how you feel the next day. Is that like a, a, a huge piece of the,
Sean Folkson: of the puzzle for you?
I think a big part of the, the, um, I won’t say misunderstanding, but the misconception, the initial misconception is when people hear about what we’re doing, they assume it’s got ingredients to knock you out, and it’s about getting to sleep. The, the nuance of sleep quality, I feel, is the toughest nuance for people to get.
I think a lot of people feel you’re either. Like a computer, you’re awake or you’re asleep. Um, but that’s, you know, we know that that’s not the case. So sleep quality is what’s really important and, but I do wanna stress to you guys, so we’re not in the sleep business. I shouldn’t, we’re not trying to solve the sleep problem.
We’re trying to solve the nighttime snacking problem. And the main problem with nighttime snacking, there’s two. One is that it’s generally unhealthy. The other one is that it’s generally sleep, disrupt. Okay. Now there’s a lot of companies out there, a lot of snack companies that have come out with healthier versions, you know, better for you snacks, and they’ve stolen billions of dollars in market share from the legacy brands.
But our question is, if you’re gonna be snacking at night, how can something you eat really be better for you if it wasn’t also formulated with better sleep in mind? So that’s, you know, while we’re solving the nighttime snacking problem, what makes us unique is that we are addressing it from a perspective.
Better sleep quality. And in terms of the education, it is a very heavy lift, and that’s why we’re focusing our attention on hotel distribution. Where, uh, what we’ve found early on now in our hotel rollout is that when people see these snacks, night, food, snacks, it says sleep friendly, right on the package.
Um, When they see that in the hotel, it makes sense. There’s context and it reinforces to that guest that what you eat before bed must be important, or else the hotel wouldn’t have these snacks in there. And so our goal is to be in tens of thousands of hotels. People will see us everywhere And while, while it may not be a full education, it will be an awareness.
Um, you know, on our cookies for instance, I dunno if you guys can show a picture, but you know, it says what you eat before bed matters in big, bold letters. And that’s the message. As people accept that truth, then the whole category comes to life. They don’t need to necessarily understand all the nuance of it, it, but it is important.
You know, what you eat before bed matters.
Mark Kinsley: Talking with Sean Folson Sean, you are the CEO and founder of Night Food and I looked at your linked. . And have you been at this for 12 years? Yes. Okay. So now you’re in hundreds of stores. I noticed you have a very strong presence in the Pacific Northwest, in the Chicago land area.
You’re in a couple of hundred hotels. What’s this journey been like just from a, being an entrepreneur? Were there certain inflection points along the way?
Sean Folkson: Yeah, I mean, uh, certainly. So, um, I think a lot of people would’ve given up. Uh, what we’re trying to do is, is not easy. It’s hard. We’re trying to create a category, um, and.
Consumers think in categories, but to a consumer, a category is really another word for problem. So, you know, the thing that’s always kept me going is that the problem that we are working to solve is one that is massive. It’s shared by a lot of people. They feel it. They feel it emotionally, and there has to be a solution for it.
This is not a habit, this nighttime snacking. It’s not a, it’s not a fad, right? It’s hardwired biologically and Americans combined to spend well over a billion dollars a week on snacks consumed between dinner and bed. We know what the most popular choices are. We know what they’re doing to people’s sleep.
So the idea of giving up when things got tough, a few. Uh, you know, I guess it crosses your mind, but the, the reality of it is this category is inevitable, in my opinion, 100% inevitable. And I’m either gonna be the guy who sees it through, or, you know, we give up and then somebody else comes along and turns this into a billion dollar category.
So, uh, it’s been a very long journey. We’ve made some mistake. Um, you know, we’ve learned a lot along the way. Um, you know, when we started we didn’t have all the st I can throw out all the statistics and everybody can believe. Wow. Yes. That does seem to be inevit. At the time when I started this, I never would’ve believed how significant the statistics were in our favor.
I never would’ve, I never had the, uh, understanding of the science behind the cravings. Um, so while it’s been a long time and we’re still not there yet, um, The odds of me giving up over time have actually decreased. Um, we’re just gonna keep going until we solve it. Uh, I think the hotels, this is the turning point this year is when we got into our first hotel chain earlier this year, and that is the turning point.
The whole hotel industry is gonna have to come on board. You guys remember, or, uh, I’m sure you know about the hotel betting wars, right? One chain, uh, you know, uh, the heavenly bed, um, you know, uh, They put it in, and within a couple of years, every chain in the industry was spending hundreds of millions, billions across the, you know, at the flag level on, on their, their mattresses, their sheets, their pillows, and it was all to keep up.
Now that we’re in our first hotel chain, Listen, you go into the average hotel lobby shop and you’re gonna see Twizzlers and Cheetos and Klondike bars and uh, you know, nutter butter cookies, and that’s fine. They can keep selling that stuff, but in my opinion, they can’t keep selling that stuff without also offering sleep friendly options for their guests.
Sure, they’re in the sleep business, they can’t just keep going. Business as usual. So my opinion. The hotel industry starts to shift. We’re already out selling brands like Hagana and Ben and Jerry’s, and lots of the properties that we’re in the hotel industry shifts. We start rolling into more and more hotel chains.
From there, we can roll into mainstream supermarkets, and I wanted to do hotels. When we first started, I remember walking around Manhattan with a backpack full of nutrition bars, which is what we first launched. The lobby shops were not evolved. If you think back 10 years ago, it was just vending machines.
Um, you know, maybe a couple of snacks out. Now it’s like a mini convenience store in a lot of these hotels. So the vehicle is there for us, and, um, you know, I’m just, I’m just more excited than I was the first day I started the company.
Mark Quinn: Well, Sean, you’ve been in the, you’ve been at it for a while, but honestly, think about your journey.
All the, you know, the Good Entrepreneurial podcast, the show, uh, how I built this consistency over time is always a big one, right? Yep. And so, did you ever imagine that you would be so successful that you were on the Galaxy’s Greatest Mattress podcast? I mean, just use that as some measure of like your efforts and like where it landed you.
Sean Folkson: Yeah, it’s gonna be hard not to get complacent at this point, you know, after today. Stop.
Mark Quinn: Stop that.
Sean Folkson: Okay, so they’re just like the, they just wanna repeat you. Right. No doubt.
Mark Quinn: No, we’re glad you’re here. But Kinsley, you know what just reminds me of so much, Sean. I love your spirit man, and I love that you’re in there fighting.
And for what it’s worth, I think you’re right. I mean, like it, this was one of those moments, Kinsley, where I’m listening to Sean talking, I’m like, holy shit. Like he’s right. You know, like. Food in hotels and I’m constantly, I’m the guy Sean, I’ll go to dinner and have a great, like, you know, steak dinner at some place and I’ll go to my hotel and I’ll go to that little cafe and what do I do?
I go for a Reese’s Cup or something like just a, you know, I just had dinner. It’s like the dumbest thing ever. And if your product was there and I could pick it, I would definitely pick it. Kinsley. Here’s the thing, you and I love the book. 2222 Immutable Laws of Marketing, right? It’s timeless. It was written a long time ago, Sean, and I don’t know if you’ve read, you’ve read that book, recent one of,
Sean Folkson: what’s that?
Uh, recent trout right. Exactly,
Mark Quinn: and one of the, one of the rules in there is if, if your category doesn’t exist, build your own kinsley. And I did it in the mattress category with the hybrid mattress category, and you did it in food with night food. I mean, it just, it’s remarkable. I think you’re on to something, no question about it.
And uh, it gets me fired up because Mark and I talked about the ecosystem of sleep. It’s not just about a mattress and a bed and the pillow and all. It is about stress and your heart and your mind and food and smells and light and temperature and like, so this is just fits absolutely perfect. Don’t you think Kinsley, if you go back to the immutable laws, he’s like, he’s blazing his unre and that’s what you
Mark Kinsley: gotta do.
Yeah. You gotta find a category where you can be the world’s first or the only one and you’ve definitely, uh, you know, planted that seed to, to be the, the first. I mean, when Todd got us connected, I had never heard of sleep friendly. Except foods like you described that might be meant to knock you out or drinks meant to knock you out.
And of course we don’t subscribe to that. You know, we want healthy options that actually encourage good sleep. You know, not something that’s gonna put you under because we know that uh, anything that kind of knocks you out tends to prevent deep restorative, rem rest. I wanna go to back to something that you talked about in the hotel space, Sean, and that was, uh, around this idea.
Getting into the, into these hotel lobbies that are more developed, like small stores. Now, I I, I conducted this research project, uh, around boutique hotels, and I’ve talked about this on the past show, but it’s really fascinating to me that what drives people into the boutique hotel space is not surprising.
You know, they want a more fun and unique, a better location, more luxurious, but once they’re on property, Out of 20 different options. The number one thing they said was most important for them was the comfort of a mattress. And number two out of 20 options was getting a good night’s sleep. So I think, you know, positioning your product as a compliment to what people most value is going to pay dividends.
Because even if, as I’m looking at this list of 20 different items, You know, you’re getting down to, you know, the coffee makers down toward the bottom, the quality and availability of a coffee shop is down near the bottom. Um, you know what, what matters is that good night’s sleep. So attaching food to that, I think is a
Sean Folkson: no-brainer.
Yeah. You know, and it’s funny because I think, um, the, uh, I don’t know if as much in the boutique space, but I know that in kind of in the mainstream space, I feel like they’ve kind of lost their way. You know, um, even, even when I speak to local hotel operators, um, you know, I stop in and they’re just like, well, we just put in whatever sells.
You know, whatever sells the most. Um, like without a thought of, you know, the hotels have invested billions in the mattresses and the pillows and the blackout curtains and the white noise machines because they know sleep is important. They all talk about it. They all talk about sleep is important. We’ll do everything for our guests to sleep.
And then you go into that lobby shop and not. Are there typically no healthy options? Well, if there are anything that’s even supposed to be healthy, it’s typically an energy bar, right? Like a cliff bar, which is, you know, their tagline is Nutrition for sustained energy. So why is a hotel making that the only option?
They know guests are in there eating the stuff at night. Um, You know, it, it’s amazing that, you know, it’s kind of a forgotten frontier, a forgotten touchpoint, uh, for the hotel. It’s a missed opportunity because they talk about sleep and they have made serious investments in sleep. They know how important it is.
It’s not just you and and me. And now the people that heard it on the podcast, they know how important it is, and yet when it comes to nutrition, they’ve just missed it. And it doesn’t make anybody bad, but they now have the opportunity to fix it. So let’s.
Mark Kinsley: Well, and so many different entities out there are aware of the data.
They understand diabetes health conditions. They understand this trend toward eating healthy. They understand that people are gaining more knowledge about nutrition and they have an awareness of health. So making sure that they present those options, I think it’s gonna be a good brand building activity for those different properties that invest in it.
And speaking of investment, Sean, it is really cool. I. Our audience would find this fascinating. You actually are funding the company and offering investment opportunities to pretty much anybody.
Sean Folkson: How does this work? Yeah, so it’s called Equity Crowd Funding. Um, and anybody can invest directly in the company.
Um, they can learn about, uh, about our mission and about the investment opportunity at. Night food.com we’re already publicly traded. Um, so people can just, you know, if they have an e-trade account or TD Ameritrade, they can just go and buy and sell shares of our stock. But the, the opportunity to invest directly, uh, comes with not just shares, but also warrants, which allow you to purchase.
Um, In the future at a fixed price. So it’s a really interesting opportunity. We’re super excited about the category that we’re creating. Look, it’s not just me. So I mentioned that I’m more excited now than ever. When I started this, there wasn’t much information, but I’ll tell you, in the last couple of years, companies like Nestle.
Unilever Pepsi, they’ve got executives, uh, coming out and saying, uh, how important, you know, people think people are starting to think about wanting to make healthier choices, specifically before bed. The CMO of Pepsi and, and CMO of Pepsi in this instance is not the chief marketing officer, but the chief medical officer.
And Pepsi is the, I think, second largest food and beverage company in the world. Said, look, we know that if we’re gonna be in function, Nutrition, we need to be focused on sleep. Unilever. Just launched, well last year, a research project to look at how what we eat can influence the gut microbiome specifically for the purpose of leading to better sleep.
So these are some of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. The CEO of Kellogg’s, CEO of Mandalay’s, talking about knowing what people are eating at night and how they tend to make more indulgent and less healthy choices at night. These are the largest food and beverage companies in the world.
We are attacking. This nighttime snack category, there’s over a billion dollars a week being spent. And once we prove that people care and we can help make people care by, by providing the education that you guys are talking about, these big companies will have no choice but to figure out how do they wanna address this problem, uh, this nighttime snacking problem, and, and what are they gonna do for the consumer?
So we think we’re in a really great strategic position. Um, people can learn about all this and decide if they want to make an investment, but we think we’re pioneering a billion dollar category here.
Mark Quinn: Hey Sean, have you done anything around quantitative sets? Right? So any kinda research, like just a thought, like if you’re gonna like say, Hey, if you have a pint of ice cream and then you have a pint of ours, this is the difference.
I’ve seen some of these things on TikTok and other social media where they’re taking glucose levels real time. Like some of that might be interesting. Have you done any of that to quant
Sean Folkson: quantify? We did a study a couple of years ago. It was, it was more, it was partly qualitative. We also did collect Fitbit data.
Um, the data, the qualitative data, the, the self-reporting information, which really is the gold standard in terms of sleep. Typically more so than, uh, than what the gadgets report back was very, very positive. Um, consumers indicated they, uh, slept better. They woke up more refreshed. Uh, for instance, when having night food compared to a couple of the other major ice cream.
Um, the, uh, the quantitative data was much more mixed, as you guys know. Um, and, and in fact, one of our advisors, Dr. Michael Graner, Who, uh, helped us with the study. Uh, he’s an expert in the gadget space and he’s, he’s opined quite a bit about it, uh, that sometimes they can do more harm than good. So the, the quantitative metrics were a little bit mixed.
It was hard to see a clear story there. But the self-reporting data, which again is the gold standard, uh, the feedback was very positive on, uh, having night food compared to having a pint of, you know, traditional full fat, full sugar ice cream, which, you know, typically there’s gonna be three to four times the fat, uh, the calories, three to four times the sugar, uh, literally 10 times more fat.
Um, in those, uh, you know, in a serving of Ben and Jerry’s or Hagen does compared to, uh, a serving of night. Leshaun,
Mark Kinsley: we are so thankful that you’re pioneering this category because I think that at any touch point when we can introduce the conversation about sleep, you’re introducing a conversation about health.
Yeah. And when people think about the decisions they make throughout the day, even if they make small decisions during nighttime snacking that are better for them, that could lead to better sleep, that could lead to better decisions during the day and. A healthier person, a healthier society. So I know that’s thinking big, but I think we should, I think we should think big and I Exactly where you’re going with this company.
Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s really, it’s really fascinating to see all of this unfold, especially since sleep science is, is fairly nascent. And, you know, we’re trying to connect these dots to this broader sleep economy, and, uh, we appreciate you being on the show. Did we miss anything that you wanna leave our audience with?
Did we not ask you anything?
Sean Folkson: I mean, we, we’ve touched on everything. You know, I can, I can go on for hours, so I don’t want to, um, I don’t wanna do that. I mean, we can always delve deeper. I know. We’ll probably be talking more. So, um, I think we touched on really all the important stuff. And, and, and the main thing to point out though is that, you know, you just talked about sleep hygiene.
People may or may not think of it this way, but you know, you could do the same exact thing 10 days in a row in terms. You know, the amount of exercise you get, the sunlight you get, uh, the screen time, you have what you eat, uh, throughout the day for breakfast, lunch, dinner, before bed, your sleep is gonna be up and down.
Um, I think that, you know, we wanna let people know not to try to micromanage the output of sleep, but to maybe micromanage or at least manage the inputs that we can. That better mattress, the clean bedding, uh, the cool and dark sleep environment. Take care of those things. The sleep will take care of itself hopefully, and the sleep will take care of you.
Mark Kinsley: And if you’re gonna try any flavor, I try it. All five. That, that I received. Sorry, Quinn. I promise I’m gonna get them to You. Don’t even mind. I, I’m always, I always gotta go to vanilla as my standard bear and I really enjoyed it. Had a nice creamy texture. And I’ve been on a, a very low sugar, um, journey here for the past couple of weeks just to reduce the amount of sugar intake I had.
And so I was very appreciative of how low sugar it was. But I have to say my favorite was the bed and breakfast. It was a home
Sean Folkson: run. Yeah, that’s, that’s maple ice cream. It’s maple ice cream with waffle chunks and uh, it just blows people away. It’s a winner. That’s
Mark Quinn: great. That’s good stuff. I, uh, you get Kinsley.
Don’t be eating all of it. I gotta have someone when I get back to Arkansas. Sean, you’re, you’re awesome for being here, man. Really, we’re really grateful to you. And I’m with Kinsley, man. I. Guys like you doing new things like this that fires us up. Uh, there’s clearly an unmet need and we are so glad that we get to be part of your story and kind of telling it here to this audience who’s gonna love it as well.
Uh, and if you’re listening, hey, you’re on a treadmill, you’re at running around, whatever it is, we’re grateful to you. Uh, for tuning into the show. You guys make it what it is, and because of that, uh, you’re a big part of the fam and we’re glad. So, go out, give, uh, Mr. Kinsley and his hair a five star review please, and, uh, wherever you follow us on iTunes or, uh, any of those other, um, places.
God, what else is there? Oh, Spotify. That’s a place wherever you listen to us. But anyway, Kinsley, anything else from you?
Mark Kinsley: Sean, thanks so much for being here and, uh, Dot night food.com, and then night food.com to find the goods. And then of course, there’s a store locator on there if you wanna find it in your local area.
And be on the lookout for night food during your next stay at America’s Fine Hotels.
Sean Folkson: Thank you guys.
