Krishna Kaliannan says he first coated Catalina Crunch cereal in a washing machine

Before Catalina Crunch became a national keto cereal brand, Krishna Kaliannan says he coated the cereal in a washing machine. Not metaphorically. A real washing machine, bought because the cereal needed cinnamon and chocolate on it and the usual food-manufacturing world had essentially told him, good luck with your little protein squares, kid.

This is the kind of founder anecdote that sounds like it was engineered in a lab to make LinkedIn people weep into their standing desks. But on How I Built This, it actually explains something useful: Catalina Crunch wasn’t just a clever keto label slapped onto Cocoa Puffs cosplay. It was a manufacturing problem disguised as breakfast.

And so I actually started by buying a washing machine and just not turning the machine on and just having it spin and then having the cereal inside of the machine. And so that was the first way that I was getting the cinnamon and the chocolate onto the cereal.

The backstory matters because Kaliannan didn’t arrive at breakfast cereal through focus groups or a wellness trend deck. He had type 1 diabetes, then epilepsy, and the keto diet became less of a biohacker costume than a practical way to manage his body. Eggs every morning, nuts for snacks, chicken breast for lunch. Very efficient. Also, spiritually beige.

So he started trying to make the thing he missed: Cocoa Puffs, minus the sugar bomb. The first versions were, in his telling, basically punishment pebbles. Pea protein, cocoa powder, monk fruit, baking powder, trial, error, more error. Eventually a friend in Central Park tried a bag and paid him a suspiciously retail-looking price on Venmo.

And I think he Venmo’d me like $7 .99 or $8 .99, but he Venmo’d me a price that it wasn’t like, oh, here’s $10 or here’s $5 for this stuff. Here’s like what looks like a grocery store price. And that’s when it kind of struck me, oh, you could actually make food and sell it to people.

The washing machine was not the cute part. It was the hard part.

Kaliannan’s best line is the washing machine, but the more revealing fact is why he needed it. He could get a co-manufacturer to make the cereal squares. He could not find the right partner to season them and put them in the resealable stand-up pouches he insisted on using. Cereal, it turns out, is not just cereal. It is cereal plus coating plus packaging plus shipping plus the tiny, humiliating detail that a pouch can defeat an entire business model.

He says the experts told him a protein-powder cereal couldn’t be made at large volumes. This is where the episode gets most Silicon Valley, for better and worse. The founder hears no, translates it into insufficient imagination, and keeps going. Sometimes that is visionary. Sometimes it is how people spend investor money trying to reinvent soup. Here, the verdict is kinder: the incumbents were built around cereal grains, and Kaliannan was building around newer ingredients like pea protein, chicory root fiber, and monk fruit. The old map didn’t fit the weird new snack.

I mean, you know, they’re the experts. They’re not geniuses. And experts every so often find themselves in the experts dilemma where they have all this knowledge, but that knowledge becomes outdated over time.

That line is a little self-serving. Of course it is. Every founder story needs a chorus of doubters, preferably wearing lab coats and holding clipboards. But Kaliannan backs it with a pretty concrete trail: a Texas A&M cereal course, a move from Brooklyn to Indiana, a cot in a 3,000-square-foot space, and yes, the washing machine. The romance of entrepreneurship, minus the romance.

The cereal aisle still won

Catalina Crunch began online, riding Facebook groups, diabetes communities, Instagram ads, and the late-2010s direct-to-consumer fantasy that every category was one viral ad away from being Dollar Shave Club. Then the math walked in and ruined the party.

But when you’re selling a bag of cereal for $7 and then you’re spending $7 to ship it to the consumer, that doesn’t work.

That is the real breakfast-aisle breakthrough, not the washing machine. Catalina Crunch had to become a grocery product because cereal is too cheap and bulky to live forever as a shipping-container lifestyle brand. Whole Foods came next, with a packaging change from low sugar to keto friendly, and Kaliannan says the brand became one of the top-selling cereals there within six months. The old aisle he thought looked frozen in time still had the power to make the company real.

The washing machine story is funny because it is ridiculous. It is useful because it is not inspirational wallpaper. It says the quiet thing about consumer packaged goods: the product can be smart, the positioning can be sharp, the market can be hungry, and you can still end up in Indiana at midnight, trying to make cinnamon stick to cereal in a household appliance.