Michael Fisher built Rotten from his kitchen during COVID with zero food science background and a simple belief that he could figure out what he didn't know. Today the brand is on shelves at Sprouts, Safeway, and Zumiez, with a 90s gross-out aesthetic rooted in garbage pail kids, creepy crawlers, and old school Nickelodeon that looks like anything but a health food.

In this episode we get into:

• The one-word answer for why he thought he could do this

• Designing for purchasing drivers in the right order

• The advantage of being new enough to ask the dumb questions

• A trade show flyer, a photo, and a legal letter weeks later

• The strange validation of getting noticed by a giant

• The hidden tax of legal on an early-stage CPG company

• Advisors from day one as the highest-leverage decision

• Therapy, except you just talk about work

• Comfort food as the signal something else is off

• $200K of out-of-spec gummy worms becoming Mutated Worms

• Why supply chain is the grunt work of scaling

• Watching strangers open the bag in real time

• The guilty pleasure that turns his brain off

More:

• Find Rotten: eatrotten.com

• Read Lucas' deep dive on takeaways from this episode here