CHEERS TO PREVENTIVE HEALTHCARE AND PREDICTIVE LOGISTICS

Can I interest you in a beverage that eliminates your craving for dessert? 

“Yes, please, what a good idea! Can I get one of those every day, anywhere, and whenever I need it?”

Good Idea is sparkling water that you are supposed to drink before and during a meal. When you do so, the food coma you always get after your average lunch or dinner will go away, and it is suddenly not so difficult to abstain from that “involuntary” after-lunch chocolate bar.

For real? 

Yes, clinically proven.

Side effects? 

Nope, none at all. 

How can “just sparkling water” be so amazing? Or no, wait, first tell me where I can get it.

“Right now, the product is selling itself at two Swedish hotels—Elite Hotel Idéon in Lund and Elite Hotel at Gustaf Adolfs Torg square in Malmö,” explains Elin Öste, CMO of the company.

“Selling itself?”

Öste explains that Good Idea is a product that, in a preventive way, helps people improve their health. Therefore, she thinks it is very exciting to be able to build in logistics components that make it possible for the product to sell and distribute itself—predictively.

“LogTrade enables us to test and prepare for tomorrow’s market, which can look completely different from how it looks today,” says Öste.

What she means is that—in the long run—Good Idea will be able to “Minority Report” the whole supply chain so that the bottles can predict where demand will spike, for example, and be standing “right there” waiting to eliminate sugar spikes en masse before anyone even gets “there.”

Read more: They Reach End Customers Directly—Offline

 

WHAT ABOUT AMAZON? BEEN THERE, DONE THAT. 

Good Idea is a young company that, for strategic reasons, launched its business in the American market. The product was test-launched in the US already in December 2017.

“We started out using Amazon but quickly learned that it’s too expensive to bid for search words and also generally too demanding to establish yourself on that platform. You also lose ownership of your customer,” says Öste. She also confirms that Amazon is an intermediary that is only interesting if you have big financial muscle.

Read more: An Intermediary Should Not Get the Biggest Piece of the Cake

 

GLADLY FOUND AT THE BEST RETAIL CHAINS

But this doesn’t mean that Good Idea is opposed to selling its products via retailers—quite the opposite. 

“We strongly believe in selling our products in places where there‘s trained staff available to guide the customers. In the US, we’ve managed to get HyVee to pick up our products,” says Öste.

HyVee is a popular retail chain in the midwestern US that has nutritionists working in the store. The staff also own the stores they work in, which is why HyVee is known for such excellent customer service. Another chain store that has expressed interest in selling Good Idea’s product is the health-oriented Sprouts Farmers Market supermarket chain, which has a whole section for products that help regulate blood sugar. So far, Good Idea has held off on making its product available at Sprouts, though.

Read more: How to be Successful on Amazon

And then, of course, the entrepreneurs behind Good Idea think it is advantageous that their sparkling water is available in places dedicated to eating even though the ongoing pandemic has changed the workplace and eating-out cultures.

 

OKAY, BUT WHAT DO TOSE DROPS OF WATER ACTUALLY CONTAIN? 

A bottle or can of this magical water contains a precise combination of five essential amino acids and chromium picolinate, which together prepare and calibrate the cells’ ability to take up the energy from a meal in a balanced way.

“To get the desired effect, you need to drink half the bottle before the meal,” stresses Dr. Elin Östman.

Dr. Elin Östman not only shares almost exactly the same name as the company’s CMO—Elin Öste—she is also its Chief Scientific Officer and co-inventor. It is her research that has led to the development of the product.

Dr. Elin explains that by drinking half the beverage before you start to eat, you help the cells warm up before the real workout (the meal) begins. When the food is being processed, your body has the tools and the ability to handle the influx so that the blood sugar levels do not knock you out completely.

“It’s a strain on the body when blood sugar and insulin levels become too high during a meal,” explains Dr. Elin, “which they can if your lunch contains (fast) carbs. That’s why it’s good to try to eat several smaller meals with slower carbs throughout the day so the body can have a more pleasant energy-release frequency.”

But, since recommendations are rarely inspiring or easy to follow, there is now this little lifesaver.

 

THAT IS SO GREAT, BUT HONESTLY, ARE A FEW CARBS REALLY THAT DANGEROUS?

The human brain loves sugar. It always has. And carbs are the brain’s favorite fuel. Until about 100 years ago, this was not a problem. But today, when the whole planet, figuratively speaking, is a giant donut with all the people in the middle, there is a global health epidemic.

“Food-related diseases have skyrocketed, and we spend enormous resources on curing illnesses that can be prevented.” 

Dr. Elin explains that in the US alone, over 90 million people are in the pre-stages of or have unknowingly already developed type 2 diabetes. The numbers are expected to be just as alarming in Europe.

“If we’re going to be able to tackle this problem as humans, we need an enormous structural change in both the food industry and the health care industry.” 

This touches upon something that Dr. Elin is deeply passionate about. 

“Once upon a time, I wanted to be a medical doctor. But I soon realized that I’d rather work to try to prevent disease than to try to cure it. That is why I chose to become a nutrition scientist.”

 

A BUBBLING PREDICTION

Today, give or take 20 years of research later, she has taken the results of her clinical studies and her scientific discoveries, and—together with co-founder and CEO Björn Öste—put it all in a practical bottle of sparkling water.

That it was in this format, and not in the form of a pill, is no coincidence, of course. Dr. Elin explains that the fact that it is in the form of a liquid makes the content easier for the body to absorb. But having sparkling water with your meal is also a Swedish comment il faut.

“Flavored sparkling water has also had a real breakthrough in the US in recent years,” says Dr. Elin.

And it is somewhere here that the most potent ingredient in Good Idea is most likely found:

It is something everyone drinks already, but better.

In other words, the Good Idea drink not only rests on a solid scientific foundation, it is also fascinating as a business. It is an example of how the food manufacturing industry can be creative and preventive. And hopefully, this will inspire many more food entrepreneurs to come up with many more good ideas.