Your Daily Chocolate with Sage Dammers

george grombacher 0:02
Sage Dammers is the co founder and CEO of addictive, addictive wellness. He’s a master chocolatier. He’s dedicated his life to the pursuit of holistic wellness and nutrition. Welcome to the show, sage.

Sage Dammers 0:14
Thank you for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

george grombacher 0:16
And I’m excited to have you on tell us a little about your personal lives more about your work, why you do

Speaker 1 0:21
what you do. I grew up kind of eating around the health world, I had the great blessing to have parents that were already kind of into it back in the 90s and early 2000s. And they had a Wellness Center in southern California when I was growing up. So being in and around that I was so lucky to be exposed early on to the ideas of the kind of the Eastern world of prevention is more important than waiting till you get sick and trying to fix things later on, because it’s generally a lot more painful that way. And so I would see these people come into their wellness center where they had Infrared Saunas way before it was cool and infrared, he had good massage breads, and we’re selling various, you know, supplements and superfood type products. And you would see people coming in their 40s 50s 60s after things had already gone wrong. So they weren’t really doing prevention, they were just taking the more natural way of trying to fix things. And that was great. I saw a lot of people get out of suffering and into a place of much better health, but I saw him just moving the dial from pain to pretty much okay. And it got me thinking, well what happens if you get ahead of the game here? And start doing all this now starting from okay, how far in that extremely awesome direction? Could you push the quality of overall life experience? And also your what’s now more commonly being referred to as healthspan in terms of how long it throughout your life, you feel awesome Do you Do you have the physical robustness of a 45 year old at age 70 Maybe or something along those lines, I didn’t know I didn’t have any examples in my life of what this would look like. But I was curious to push the possibilities and see what could be done. And I was getting into making these superfood smoothies for myself and I didn’t care what it tasted like I was results oriented I wanted what was gonna make me feel amazing because I would make this drink with like some hemp protein and I had this mix that had some other Western herbs like milk thistle and chlorella and spirulina in there. And I would just blend it with some some frozen fruits and add in some I started getting into maca because I wanted all the stories of what that was supposed to be going to do for me. And I didn’t care that it tasted like nothing I’d ever had before in a very negative way. I just wanted to feel really good. And that was working for me. But eventually, at a certain level of something benefiting yourself, the natural hero’s journey of it is to come back from slaying the dragon. And I’ve kind of slayed my personal dragon. And in terms of making myself feel amazing. You want to share the findings and learnings with your community. The problem is my community at the time was like late high school early college years, folks who were not held motivated, they were let’s get drunk motivated. Let’s be a part of the prescription painkiller epidemic motivated. So I didn’t know really what to do about that. And so I just kept it to myself, I would still go party, but I would show up with my herbal elixir with cacao and Mucuna, Pruriens and Bacopa and ashwagandha. And there, nobody really wanted to even know what was in there. And they just kind of, okay, that’s sage, he’s doing his thing. But then I went on a surf trip to Costa Rica with some of my best friends in college and I would go out and surf for four or five, six hours and still have plenty of energy, they were coming in to the beach after two hours needing to rest and eat and drink, etc. And they saw me in the corner over hustle making these smoothies, very quietly not saying anything about it. And they kind of realized I was up to something different. And they eventually said, Hey, can you meet me one of those. i This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. And I was excited. The only problem is I had forgotten how bad it tasted it because I was totally numb to it at this point. And so I made it for each of them and poured them each a little cup and they were so toxic from the overall college experience of the you know, prescription drugs and the drinking and audit Simonsson you take something that’s quite powerfully detoxifying, the toxins are just gonna get sent that same way back out of the system, because that’s the fastest route and so three of the four of them were vomiting within the next five minutes. And so I had to really reconsider my approach to sharing health and wellness with my community here. So that’s, that’s all I realized I had to go to the complete opposite extreme. If I wanted to make healthy living as accessible as possible to the people I cared about. I had to figure out how to make foods that tasted so good that people would eat and drink them. You because it was a sensational food experience, and just so happened to be maximally healthy in every way possible as an afterthought. I didn’t know how I was going to do this. But that was my goal. And then also in Costa Rica, I ended up learning how to make chocolate. And it was kind of mind blowing to me as I was learning more and more about the benefits of cacao as an elite superfood being the highest natural source of antioxidants. Highest natural source of magnesium, chromium, zinc, antioxidants. You have so much going on in there and then you get into neurotransmitters that make you feel happy that we all love that chocolate feeling with things like anandamide and serotonin and phenethylamine love bliss chemical. And so, this, to me, it was a really unique food, because it has a foot in both worlds, the worlds of foods that people definitely consider to be bad for you, but are really delicious, and the worlds of foods that are good for you, but people don’t consider to taste so good. And so this is a rare thing, because not many foods kind of transcend both worlds like that. And so I thought this could be the ultimate gateway health food, if done right. If you have that cacao source from the optimal place, and grown in the optimal way, if you could keep it sugar free, while using only the cleanest and healthiest sugar free sweeteners that have side benefits rather than side effects. And then my other passion I was developing was learning about traditional herbal systems of indigenous cultures. And these herbs tend to be quite bitter. And in the Western world, we don’t have much of a palate for bitter flavors, except the bitter flavor of chocolate. Somehow people have randomly accepted this one bitter flavor, I guess, because it comes in such a, you know, sensational package, apart from that bitter. And so I found that you could camouflage these great herbal ingredients and hide their bitter flavors under the bitter of chocolate, and nobody would mind. And so it started as something that I made for myself, my friends, family, and soon more and more people were requesting it. I ended up in a relationship with a girlfriend who was a total chocolate addict. And I realized I needed to start buying in larger and larger quantities of ingredients to keep her satisfied and keep her around. And then it got to the point. Okay, now I have wholesale accounts going for all my ingredients. Maybe it’s time to turn this into a business. And by the way, that girlfriend is still with me today and my business partner and life partner 12 years.

george grombacher 7:21
Awesome. And here we are. So how, from, from the moment of the smoothies in Costa Rica to where we are today? How many years has that been?

Speaker 1 7:34
So that was around like 1819. And now I’m 34. So 16 years? Nice. Yeah.

george grombacher 7:45
All right. And when you tell people that you’re a master chocolatier, I mean, imagine that that’s one of those good conversation starters.

Speaker 1 7:53
It always, you know, it’s gonna be a good conversation starter, when the eyes open up a little bit, you know, a lot of jobs and a lot of versions of what I do, I could tell people like, oh, I, you know, I run a little business. They go, Okay, that’s pretty cool. Have you ever considered going on Shark Tank, but you say, I make chocolate they go, really. So it’s definitely a nice blessing and a dream to be kind of living Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

george grombacher 8:22
I have to imagine I just because I’ve no idea. It’s probably probably really, it’s it’s probably really difficult to accomplish what you’ve accomplished, which is taking all these wonderful super foods and, and healthy things that can improve healthspan and lifespan that people don’t necessarily want to eat, but you’ve made it delicious. So that in itself is very challenging, but then to scale it and to make a lot of it that can’t have been easy.

Speaker 1 8:50
Definitely, the the production of something as you scale it up is become definitely brings complexities in terms of how you make it, different problems arise nuances in the production chocolate is so temperamental, it has to go through this very precise series of temperature fluctuations. To solidify it and habit to have the right milk point the right creaminess in your mouth, it has to just like to a 10th of a degree changing the process will change the final product. And so scaling this up, as things are larger and larger, they tend not to cool down as fast you run into all kinds of weird production issues like this. And that precision is something that has been Yeah, a huge learning experience to achieve because I didn’t go to you know, traditional chef school traditional chocolate making school. It’s just been me figuring it out as I go. But that’s it’s an opportunity to keep learning which I think kind of keeps your brain sharp and yeah

george grombacher 9:46
100% Yeah. What it made me think of we’ve here in live in Arizona, and it’s probably true in every state that we’ve we’re going through this this craft beer Renaissance or golden era and Do people love craft beer? But we disparage, I certainly have in the past large beer makers like a Coors Light or a Bud Light. And I thought about I’m like, you know, it’s pretty amazing that they can make their beer tastes the absolute same and produce this huge quantity of it every day. And so that’s what I was thinking, it’s probably it’s one thing to create a great chocolate bar, but how do you create huge quantities of it that tastes, just the quality is consistent and the same?

Speaker 1 10:28
It’s definitely a part of the challenge. And as something is a smaller scale, like you’ve probably encountered in the craft brewery world, there are going to be more natural fluctuations, especially to batch harvest to harvest the levels that large, large scale food manufacturers go through to kind of smooth all those things together is more than a little company can do. But you kind of have to educate the customers and help them understand, okay, from one season to the next, it might taste slightly different because it’s nature, maybe there was more rain or cold that this time of year or that time of year in this region or that region. And then we go through also the challenges and adventures of sourcing ingredients from all around the world, from Ecuador, to Thailand to India to China. And so an example is like right now in Ecuador, there’s a massive surge in violence that makes it really challenging to get any shipments out of the country. So that’s, of course, on a human level, something very sad, but also on a on a business level, you have to really plan ahead and be strategic about these things. So it’s a very dynamic experience running a business.

george grombacher 11:33
So what I’m, I’m confident that there’s lots of challenges to doing what what what you’re doing. Helping people to, to understand that chocolate can be really, really, really good for you, when we’re conditioned to think that I should never eat chocolate and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 11:55
Absolutely. But it’s, it’s a it’s one that people are pretty open to receive. I’m not trying to talk them in drinking wheatgrass, it’s I think it’s a harder sell than talking them in did having chocolate, it’s it’s one of those things where when somebody really is happy to do something anyways, telling them, it’s good for them, they’re more ready to hear it like the average American if I told them a study came out last week that said that watching TV, a minimum of two hours a day is actually good, because it brings you stress relief, they’re gonna say I knew it. I knew it was good for me all along, I’ve been doing the right thing. Fortunately, this is actually true in the case of chocolate that it does bring stress relief and does have a tremendous list of health benefits. So I don’t have to mislead them put instead, I can litter them along this beautiful chocolate path where nothing but goodness awaits.

george grombacher 12:46
So nothing but goodness awaits. It’s a win win. It’s all these positive things. What what has been pushed back if if, if any.

Speaker 1 12:58
Using the highest quality ingredients, of course, comes with a cost and so will never be price competitive with a Hershey’s bar that is grown in low quality soil in Africa, procured using questionable sources of labor grown in contaminated heavy metal toxic laden soil. And combined with really cheap, conventional GMO sugar. We’re trying to take the absolute highest quality jungle grown, wild grown, cacao, combine it with the highest quality herbal extracts in the world, keep it sugar free. So it’s something that for some people is going to be a rare treat. But I still encourage people look if you just have it once every now and then. And this kind of acts as a way that when you would have otherwise turned to an unhealthy retreat, you can have this there as your backup in those moments. Great if this is something where you have the financial abundance to enjoy on a daily basis, also great. And the other part is being sugar free. A lot of people have experienced that. Sugar free products can use unhealthy sweeteners. There’s a myriad of those out there in the mainstream food world. So they’re a little hesitant to believe that sugar free can be healthy sometimes. And also a lot of sugar free sweeteners that are maybe healthy have weird flavors and aftertaste to them that we’ve managed to avoid. But sometimes it takes some convincing of the customer that that they’re really going to enjoy this. And so we’ve always had like 100% Satisfaction Guarantee that usually helps us to get around most of that because we take away the risk.

george grombacher 14:28
Yeah, it’s a good point. If you’re not happy, we will give you your money back. Was it that

Speaker 1 14:32
simple? It’s that simple. Exactly. And we’ve had a remarkably small number of people over the past 10 years have any issues.

george grombacher 14:41
I love it. Are you folks your parents still alive? They are Yeah. And are they still doing the health food wellness, the wellness as

Speaker 1 14:50
they transition from their wellness center to running they’re basically have the largest US dealer of clear lights on us is there Isn’t it so they’re in the infrared sauna business now and I kind of mood like they’re working in their business as well. It’s, it’s a really cool blessing to also be able to take some time and work with my parents and have, you know, most people only talk with their parents every now and then they don’t see them that often. I’ve always kind of wanted to maximize my time with him, it’s something I’ve kind of had an awareness up since I was young, it, they’re not going to be around forever, I really want to make every moment count. And so I get it. So getting to work with them is is really special.

george grombacher 15:27
Yeah, for sure. And it’s certainly that sort of what what I was trying to get at was the entrepreneurship piece of this, because it’s one thing to be passionate about helping others and serving your loved ones in your community, but then quite another to make something commercially successful. So

Speaker 1 15:47
yeah, I also was fortunate in the sense that on my mom’s side of the family, almost everybody have there are six brothers and sisters. Right? She’s one of 605, brothers and sisters. They’re all entrepreneurial, by nature. So I had a lot of examples of that growing up, which I think is a huge impact. If somebody grows up and everyone in the family or just, you know, career people working in the machine of a large corporation, you kind of have a different picture of the world and how adulthood and making money and the whole financial Adventure Works. i Yeah. Who knows, maybe my life would have been easier if I had that. stressful sometimes. But at the same time I get the great adventure of entrepreneurship. Yeah,

george grombacher 16:28
which certainly is and you use the hero’s journey, as we’re getting started, because that’s 100% what it is, and you have to have a driving force that’s animating you to go through the tough times. And obviously, the fun times are easy for everybody to go through. Can you pinpoint a moment or a certain time? Where that oh, my gosh, is this worth doing?

Speaker 1 16:53
There’s so many. But, you know, I would say like the COVID times were challenging for us, there was of course, the initial run up when everybody was stockpiling. And our sales were skyrocketing. I was like, wow, this is, you know, chaos happening in the world. But it looks like we’re gonna survive it. Okay, because people are really enjoying chocolate while they’re in lockdown. But then we ran into the problem that most of our the stocking up kind of sales slowed down. And it got to a point where nobody was shopping that much in retail anymore, because everybody was just ordering everything online. And for us going into the pandemic 90% of our business was through retailers, we weren’t in big, big stores, you know, none of the kind of big box type stores, but through kind of more Mom and Pop health food stores across the country, and doctors offices and gift shops and things of that nature. And when people shifted the buying online, even if the stores were offering an online platforms, you didn’t get that moment at checkout at the counter where you see that chocolate and you grab it as that last moment buy and to give yourself a little healthy treat. So that side of our business just cratered. And so we had to, of course, try to transition to really building ourselves into a more of an ecommerce online, first business. And we made the transition, but the runway was just barely long enough. We had at one point in the like late summer, early fall of 2020 headed take on a bit of a loan that we were then able to pay back to cross that bridge or extend our runway so to speak. And so that that was a scary time for us in the sense that there was like some nights where you just lay awake, like should we just wrap this up and you know, move on and and just do something else. And it’s just hasn’t worked, we tried. But we’ve fortunately pushed through and been able to continue building and now for a small business like us being online first is actually a much more sustainable way to do business because you have that direct relationship with the customer, which is also so much more satisfying.

george grombacher 19:00
And mild wordplay. But I bet I bet your products pretty sticky once people have it. Probably become customers for a long time. Yeah, it’s

Speaker 1 19:10
physically it’s slippery, no cacao butter. It’s like a credit to lubrication on your fingers there. But it’s definitely when people have it and they come to this realization of I can have the dream chocolate experience that I thought I never could if I wanted to be healthy. I thought this was going to be outside the bounds of what I could do on my health journey. Yet here this is that’s actually incorporating these herbs to support me with whatever my health goal is. It’s a beautiful thing and something that I’m so grateful to be able to share with people. Yeah.

george grombacher 19:41
Is it actually true that you can eat this every day?

Speaker 1 19:45
It is it is absolutely and our portion will vary from person to person based on various factors especially different people have different genetics in terms of how they are going to process different foods. We have this bio individuality for some People, they do a very small amount of chocolate and they have a tremendous reaction to it, the other half of one piece, a little square of chocolate, and they’re over the moon, most people on average will have something like half a bar of chocolate. And that’s kind of the sweet spot. And that’s what we put as the serving sizes recommendation on there. Some people have a whole bar. And that’s okay too, because one of the big motivating factors for me in wanting to make sugar free chocolate originally, is that even with some of the other healthy chocolates out there, that were using higher quality ingredients, they were still using some form of sugar, whether it was a coconut palm sugar, or maple sugar or something else. And with these, it’s not a bad bad problem if you’re just having a small amount, but it’s pretty quick that you get to a point where it’s like, okay, this is too much sugar, I gotta back off here. Otherwise, I’m going overboard. And so I wanted to remove that ceiling so people could enjoy a little bit more chocolate.

george grombacher 20:51
God bless you. And I can tell you that sage was kind enough to send some of the delicious chocolate to my house and I love it and my wife loves it. And I don’t think we’re gonna give it into our kids just because we love it so much. But that I can you guys enjoyed it. Yeah, I could certainly say that. That is awesome. So, so that sage, thank you for that. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you and how can they get their own chocolate from addictive wellness. If you enjoyed this whole area

Speaker 1 21:22
of conversation, you want to hear me talk more about my like over the top passion for health and wellness and nutrition and herbs and adaptogens and supplements. We have a YouTube channel. You can search addictive wellness on YouTube and we’re posting there a couple times a week. And if you’re interested in trying our chocolates or adaptions and other products, check out our website Addictive wellness.com And we’d love to stay connected with everybody.

george grombacher 21:47
Excellent. Well if you enjoyed as much as I did, so sage show sage your appreciation, share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to addictive wellness.com check out everything we’ve been talking about. Check out the YouTube channel addictive wellness, and I’ll certainly link all those in the notes. Thanks again sage. Thank you. Until next time, remember, do your part to doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.