261: Plot Twist: How to Succeed Through Failures and Transform Your Health with the Power of Sprouts with Doug Evans

In this bite-sized Plot Twist episode, Light Watkins dives into the transformative journey of Doug Evans, a trailblazer in the health food world. After a series of devastating family losses to diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, Doug’s perspective on health and nutrition shifted dramatically. These painful experiences set him on a mission to reimagine food as medicine, leading him to discover the power of sprouting—a practice he’s championed for over 25 years.

Doug takes listeners back to the beginning, sharing how his journey started with an encounter at a nightclub that introduced him to veganism. He talks about the impact of losing loved ones, the challenges of questioning a lifetime of eating habits, and the powerful transformation that led to co-founding Organic Avenue, a pioneer in raw food and juice culture.

The episode also unpacks the rise and fall of Juicero, Doug’s ambitious Silicon Valley venture that sought to revolutionize fresh juice consumption. With raw honesty, Doug reveals the hard lessons he learned from running a high-profile startup and how those experiences ultimately fueled his passion for sprouting.

Listeners will be inspired by Doug’s resilience and creativity as he explains how sprouts—a simple, affordable, and nutrient-packed food source—became his ultimate calling. This episode is a testament to the power of turning failures into opportunities, challenging norms, and pursuing health in its purest form.

If you’re curious about healthy living, the story behind sprouting, or the mindset needed to bounce back from setbacks, this conversation with Doug Evans is one you don’t want to miss.

Transcript

DE: “ Everyone around me was eating cooked food, processed food, meat, chicken, fish, dairy, Chinese food, soul food, pizza, Italian food, Greek food. Like we just ate. The idea of food was somewhat a reward system once I became financially quasi independent. The first clue that something was wrong with the diet was when my aunt got diabetes, and we were told that they were going to have to chop off her feet below her ankles, like a double amputation. For me, to just think about someone close to me losing their feet was very, very hard thing to process. And then ultimately she died of complications associated with diabetes after the amputation.”

[INTRODUCTION] 

Today, I've got another bite-sized plot twist podcast episode for you. After losing his aunt to diabetes and his mother to stomach cancer, Doug Evans became a cereal health food entrepreneur who began sprouting over 25 years ago. And today he's become one of the world's leading advocates for the benefits of sprouting.

Let's listen in…

LW: you're eating the standard American diet and everything that comes along with that. Your family is starting to have some health challenges. Let's walk us through what that experience was like, leading up to you meeting Denise.

DE: I was just around 30 or so when that happened. It's incomprehensible to me to envision what it would be like.

Now we could see, guys like Stephen Hawking had incredible lives using his brain and little things with little faculty. There's people at the time for me to just think about someone close to me losing their feet was a very, very hard thing to process. Then ultimately, she died of complications associated with diabetes after the amputation. Then my uncle died of heart disease. Then my other uncle died of heart disease. Then my mother got stomach cancer and died. It was like, within three months, I thought maybe she had an ulcer, or had something else, or whatever a kid who doesn't want his mother to die is thinking. We were in definitive denial that she was dying. She went downhill and she died.

Then my father died of heart disease in the same hospital as my mother. Then my brother, who was less active than me, my older brother ended up becoming overweight, obese, having the first of three strokes and a heart attack. Then I met Denise.

LW: At a nightclub, at 2 in the morning.

DE: At 2 in the morning. Yeah. I was still just out there, not wanting to go home. It's like that movie, Repo Man. Like, where could we go next?

LW: She tells you about this funny type of diet.

DE: Denise was vegetarian going vegan. I had never heard of vegan. I had unknown vegetarians. It was really powerful for me. I just did a class with John Robbins, who wrote Diet for a New America. Someone had given me his book 10 years before I became vegetarian, or vegan. I opened up the book, and it talked about all these atrocities to the animals. I closed up the book, and I stored it on my shelf with the book cover spine on the inside, so you would only see the paper, because there was something haunting in the words of that book that I didn't want to read. That was the expression. The blinder’s on, the cognitive dissidence of not wanting to know, and so I could continue life as it was without having to face the atrocities that I was directly, or indirectly participating in.

LW: How did this lead to you co-founding Organic Avenue with Denise?

DE: I really was attracted to Denise. We ended up spending a lot of time together. Then we became a couple. Denise was working as a speech-language pathologist at United Cerebral Palsy. Her heart was in to helping people, and she was very loving, very compassionate. Her sister died of leukemia when she was seven. Denise was commuting from my apartment in the West Village to Long Island, to go to United Cerebral Palsy.

I said, “Look, why don't you do something that you're passionate about?” She was exploring, doing tofu cheesecakes, or doing the beginning of e-commerce for different natural products. Then, I moved into a loft space in Chinatown. In there, we said, well, maybe we'll have some potlucks and we'll invite people over. Maybe we'll have a movie night and we'll show conscious movies, Who Killed the Electric Car or the like. When we would come over and then we would do these dinner parties, turns out, the potlucks were a bomb, because people wouldn't bring high enough quality food to work.

Then we said, well, maybe we'll bring in a chef. Denise went to the raw food festival in Oregon, and recruited top raw chefs to come and then we would have dinner parties. Then, we learned about juice. We learned about raw food. We started to buy products, so when people came over, they could take some product with them and go home. Then that became the genesis of Organic Avenue.

LW: You were operating the whole thing from your loft in Chinatown, correct?

DE: Yeah, for a couple of years. Until we had so much inventory and no foot traffic. The only time people could come is when we invited them, or had an event, or something. Then to me, we had more inventory than it costs for rent. It makes sense like, oh, we'll get a store and then work in the store and then you could get foot traffic and be available and make it a thing.

LW: This is 2002. The idea of opening up a store in Manhattan seems very costly. What was your financial situation at the time? How were you able to make that happen?

DE: I was always working, always to saving money, and very calculated. I remember, we furnished the store with furniture from IKEA. We bought the absolute necessities. We went to the garment district, and we found some glass shelves and racks. We found a handyman to help put them together, and we sanded the original wood floors. We did things in a very scrappy, entrepreneurial way.

LW: I remember that beautifully minimal orange branding. Did you design that?

DE: I did not. A different Rand student did.

LW: Interesting.

DE: I didn't have the talent. It was really not very good for my confidence regarding my design. It was good for my confidence in execution, but not in design. I found another Rand student, a friend of mine that I trusted, who did this every day, that I thought would be able to embody what Paul would think was good.

LW: This was your first exposure to sprouts. You mentioned in the book, the sprout guy would come and deliver the sprouts from upstate New York.

DE: Yeah, we got that. I was probably exposed to the spouts a little bit even earlier than that in the Union Farmers Market. We would get sprouts delivered, and wheatgrass delivered by some guy named Harley. It was just such a seemingly different lifetime. When I think about how many years ago, like two decades, over two years ago, seems like a long time.

LW: You said that business grew a 100% a year and you exited 10 years later. Were you financially “free” at that moment in time, where you could pretty much do whatever you wanted to do?

DE: To a certain extent. Everything is relative. For my lifestyle, yes, because I could buy raw food. I could go where I wanted to go. I never got hooked on the trappings. I didn't want that – To me, fancy cars would be more anxiety. Where are you going to park them? Now you're going to have to get a garage. What if someone scratches them? I really think that automobiles were not designed for utility, as much as they were for ego. I didn't want to be stuck in that trap. I had an aversion to the trappings of fancy and material things, even back then, whether I could afford them or not.

LW: Then there was the Juicero era, where it was a five-year long thing. You glossed over that in the book. What did people get wrong about Juicero?

DE: I mean, what they got wrong was it was all the writings and all the things were all about a mockery of Silicon Valley and a mockery of me and this expensive machine that you could squeeze the pack by hand. When in fact, I had 10 years of making juice by hand, using semi-mechanical advances to make juice. I knew a lot about making juice. One of the observations that I had was that unsweetened green juice, or even green juice that was sweetened was the best possible, healthiest beverage option one could have, other than spring water.

If you look at the alternatives to beverages, that people could have, beer, wine, soda, energy drinks, highly processed juices from concentrated that were pasteurized, or making fresh juice in a juicer. Anecdotally, people who had a home juicer were maybe using them once or twice a month. People who had an espresso machine, were using it once or twice a day. You could say, well, you could just go buy a bottle of juice from the grocery store. It turns out that there is a federal law that makes it illegal to sell raw juice over interstate lines, or in retail.

If you're selling juice on a shelf in a supermarket and you're not making that juice in that store, it must be pasteurized, which means, they are either cooking it to kill the microbial activity by 5 million to one, or they're putting so much cold pressure on it to kill all the microbial activity 5 million to one. As a raw vegan, I wanted raw juice. We resisted doing the processed, pasteurized juice. My insight was that the way you make cold pressed juice was that you take the produce, you triple wash it, then you dice it, slice it, grind it, shred it, so that you're opening up all the cell walls of the fiber, so that you then could put it into a piece of cheesecloth, and then separate the juice from the fiber.

If you couldn't squeeze juice out of the pack by hand, then there would be something wrong with that pack. It had to be. The fact was, it was mostly fresh cut produce and maybe some free liquid. If you think about the dexterity and faculty of these hands, in combined with your eyes and the senses, you could easily ring it, but you'd have to invest two minutes into wringing it, like you would a towel.

I, of course, as well as anyone who was in the juicing business, we could go watch a little video of Norwalk juicer, and you could see their process. The Norwalk juicer was $2,500. At Organic Avenue, we started with one Norwalk juicer, then we got a second one and a third one and a fourth one and a fifth one, and those will cost $2,500 each. My vision was, if you bought a Norwalk for $2,500, you still had to do, buy the produce, wash to produce, make the juice, then clean the juicer. The idea was if you could take the product of the grinding, shredding, putting it into a cheesecloth bag, and then the patent said, you take that cheesecloth bag with the produce, you put it into another bag that has a spout, you could then insert that into a Juicero press, or if you want to spend three times the amount, put into a Norwalk press, and it would press out the juice. That was the idea of Juicero.

What happened was, if we were creating a solar farm, and raised a 100 million, no one would even write a press release. If Starbucks was creating a new coffee grinding plant for a 100 million, no one cares. When you get a guy from New York who is running a lemonade stand and he goes to Silicon Valley, and big investors, Google and Kleiner Perkins and big people invest, then all of a sudden, you're on the radar. You're just on the radar, and you have a target. Then, a series of mistakes – Good things happen.

This is the great part about Juicero. I came up with an idea that was creative, out of the box, had never been done before. I wrote some patents. We got 40 patents. I hired a bunch of teams. I went to Canal Street. I had a Chinese kitchen place that I knew from my Organic Avenue days, build me my first prototype, so I could take the produce, put in cheesecloth, put in a Ziploc bag, put in my early Juicero, pressed it, and you are getting the best juice ever.

There was very little between the first machine I made and the 20th version that shipped. Then I went to Silicon Valley, and I raised a 120 million dollars. Then we hired 50 engineers, nine food scientists, quality experts, 12 PhDs in electrical engineering and packaging and firmware and software. I'm not patting myself on the back, but we sold thousands of machines. We sold over 1 million servings in our first year. This was doing a million dollars a month and growing.

From my perspective, I was like, “Wow, that was really great.” Now, I made some mistakes. One mistake was I wasn't meditating enough. I was working seven days a week. I was still listening to everyone on the board, as if they were my drill sergeants, wanting to please them, etc. Then when they suggested that the company bring in a new CEO, who was the former chief operating officer of Coca Cola, and the way they painted that picture was very glorified. Like, “Doug, you can design the trains. He'll make them run on time. He knows about leadership, and raising capital and building teams, and scaling globally, and retail and all these things.” I was like, “If you guys think this is the right thing to do, then I'm on the team. I'll agree with that.”

To all founders out there, when you are a founder, CEO, and then you are no longer the CEO, you're just a founder, it's possible that all of your authority can be removed, and you become a figurehead, and something just off in the side. To me, that was the beginning and the end of the company. Nine months later, they shut Juicero down. Much to my sadness, and much to what I learned is that that happened for me. I'm not a victim. No one made this thing come up and put a gun to my head. These were the decisions that I made based on my prior historical trauma, my military experience, my design, and my opportunistic and my desire to please, and my not taking breaths and me just wanting to work and work and follow this path.

Turns out, that was a decision that I made that should have required more thoughtfulness, and more reflection, and Juicero got composted. What emerged from the compost was this idea for sprouts.

LW: Was that revelation relatively immediate, or did it take some time for you to get there, maybe another one of those Vipassana trainings, or something, for in order for you to really embody that sense of, hey, this happened for me and not to me?

DE: It took probably years, and I'm still processing that.

LW: Okay, that's honest.

DE: I'm still processing that. I think at the time, it was more shock. I was pouring my heart into this every day. Whatever the advisors of the board were telling me to do, I was doing. I could be combative. In this case, with the board, I was never combative. I was so agreeable, because we were doing things that were defying gravity in every step of the way. What we launched was an incredible product. The greatest part of that story for me, the Juicero experience was my original vision was that people used an espresso machine once or twice a day, people were using their Juicero machine once or twice a day. The people who were drinking soda, energy drinks, processed juice, coffee, who will never drink cold-pressed green juice, they weren't our audience and they were the haters. Out there was much more of them than us.

Unlike what I'm doing now with launching a movement for sprouts, I had a few 100 followers on Twitter, I had 3,000 followers on Instagram. I had no presence. All of my sales and all of my work was focused on recruiting people to the company and raising capital. I do not have an outward facing community aspect to anyone to defend anything that I did. The misinformation that was out there relative to Juicero was beyond my wildest dreams. I couldn't believe that legitimate media organizations were telling half-truths and exaggerating them and could be so out of integrity. I had never experienced that Machiavellian malice.

Because of my meditation and my lifestyle, I don't read the newspaper, I don't read the gossip parts. I never even understood the notion of clickbait. It just wasn't in my stratosphere. That just drove things. If they got anything wrong, which was your question, and this was a long, circuitous answer, people thought Juicero was about the money, and that was about fake. What I can say is, it wasn't about the money and Juicero was real as anything, and had  its great utility. What it was, for me was an opportunity to close the gap of fresh produce that the US Dietary Guidelines were recommending that people consume seven to 13 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. The average American was consuming less than one. That one serving that they had could have been French fries.

To me, the idea to make it easier for people to have a fresh, raw unpasteurized juice, without setup, without cleanup, even if it costs a lot of money. Who cares? We live in a society where you can fly to Mexico on Volaris, on United, on net jets, a private jet, what have you. That same flight from Mexico City to LA could cost $69 to $69 a second, if you are flying a charter G5 to go there. People have the right.

The fact that the juicer was expensive, the version one was expensive, we weren't forcing people to buy it. The people who bought it loved it. It was such an education to understand how you could be doing all the right things. If anyone would have asked me, what could go wrong with Juicero? I would have said, someone could get sick. You're doing raw produce, you're doing raw juice, you're on the fringe of non-pasteurizing part that someone could get sick. If someone gets sick, that's really bad. I never would have thought it would have been some farce of a financial escapade that would bring the company down.

I was just on the phone yesterday with a major entrepreneur, executive investor. We were talking about sprouts, and we were talking about Juicero. Every aspect of Juicero, he loved. He's like, “I love my Juicero. I love using it. I love the convenience. I love the design. Doug, you did a great job.” For him in my mind, because of all the evisceration in the media, I thought like I should duck my head in the sand and never come out. Then there are people who I respect, who loved the machine who loved the product, and they’re like, “Doug, it's not the critic who counts. It's the man who gets in the ring.”

When I realized I got in the ring, I actually did a really good job for my first time in the ring in Silicon Valley. Going from, you look at my career, I was a graffiti writer, then I was a paratrooper, then I was a graphic design intern. Then I did some different jobs. Then I ended up running a juice bar, which is pretty low tech. Although, I did program the website. I did design spreadsheets to manage logistics, where we could do 1,000s of deliveries a day and our e-commerce stuff, but it was still low-tech stuff. We weren't really inventing things.

Then to go to Silicon Valley, and actually invent something that was a combination of hardware, software, packaging, fresh produce, connected, things. This was a lot of brain expansion part. New materials, stretching my imagination, and my brain and my skill set exponentially, simultaneously in multiple directions, and recruiting and capital raising and investor relations. Who trained you how to run a board meeting? It's not like I went to Harvard Business School, and had any training, whatsoever. The fact that I went there, and I look at and I go, wow, in the whole scheme of things, I'm pretty proud of myself. My ego is not out of control. The business was shut down. Clearly, I was responsible for everything that happened.

Now, if I get to do something else, look at those lessons. I read a lot of books. I didn't read the lessons of how to prevent these things. I read different lessons of what to do, but everyone's life journey is different and the circumstances of which they are exposed to are different, so the best thing that you could do is be influenced by what other people are doing, but then really reflect on my own experiences and see how can I apply them to whatever I'm doing next.

LW: Speaking of which, I mean, it sounds like, you're very, and maybe the general public did not realize this, but how mission focused you actually were. Because our mutual friend, Amanda from Moon Juice, she had the same thing. She got caught up in the perception of, oh, this is for the effluent, so let's make fun of it. Let's stereotype it. Let's characterize it. When you get caught up in that, then, yeah, it becomes about something completely different than what your original purpose is in relationship to all of that.

You're asking this question after the fact, which is what would serve the world better at a fraction of the cost of a Juicero machine, even though that is at a fraction of the cost compared to a Norwalk machine, which, obviously, the media ignores. What were the answers that came to you, and how did you land on going all in? Because I don't know anybody who's more in on sprouts than you are?

DE: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you and I went to Air One together, but I know we've both been probably in Air One in the same day, in the same year in the same store. On one of my last trips to Air One, I filled up a big Yeti-like cooler, an Arctic cooler, 60-litre of cooler, with all this prepared gourmet, raw vegan food, fresh produce, etc. Fill up the cooler, come out to Joshua Tree, come out to Wonder Valley Hot Springs. I go into my yurt, and I'm fine. I've got the Milky Way. I got the hot springs. I got the stars. I feel grounded. I don't have a cement floor in the yurt. It's like, I'm grounded.

The next day as they go into the cooler, the ice packs are melting. The food supply is dwindling. I go onto my phone. My favorite app was Happy Cow. Go anywhere in the world, go to Happy Cow and I do vegan, nothing. Do vegetarian, nothing. Do veg friendly, nothing. The things that were close to me were Del Taco, 7/11, Burger King. Then when I use Google Maps, and I ultimately found the Whole Foods in La Quinta, was an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and a half away. I suck it up. I get in the car. I'm like, “This is not why I moved to the desert, to be driving all this distance.”

That night, I'm soaking in the hot springs, looking up at the stars in the Milky Way, may or may not have been hallucinating and seeing every star twinkling into a sprouting tail. I'm like, “No, really? Wow.” I'm getting this download from the heavens, from the skies, from the universe, that number one, sprouts were vegetables. Number two, those vegetables contained every micronutrient, phytonutrient, polyphenol, bioflavonoid, antioxidant, amino acid for complete proteins as mature vegetables, all in the sprouts. Number three, sprouts had medicinal properties.

I had no idea that those medicinal properties were backed by thousands of published white papers by top universities and scientists around the world. This was just coming to me like, “Oh, sprouts were medicine.” The next morning, I'm really excited. I go online, and I see that there's many more options in 2018 than there were in 1999 to 2002, that now you could get alfalfa, azuki, arugula, radish, clover, broccoli, chia, mustard, fenugreek, all sorts of lentils, all sorts of peas, all sorts of strains of hemp seeds that would sprout in their halls. I was like, “Wow.”

Within a month, I've got six jars in rotation and I'm growing thousands of calories of vegetables in days, not weeks, months or years, for under a $1 serving, AKA pennies is serving. I'm feeling light, energetic, alive, satiated, bright and clear. I'm like, “Wow, this is too good to be true.” This is unbelievable, within a month, basically, I'm eating sprouts.

[END]

If you'd like to hear how the rest of Doug Evans' story unfolds, head over to episode 119 and start at around the 1-hour-20-minute mark. And be sure to follow Doug on the socials @dougevans for more insights into the power of sprouts.

And if you enjoyed this conversation, I highly recommend checking out my interview with Dylan Smith in episode 131, a young architect who pivoted to become a world-renowned Ayurvedic practitioner after a life-changing treatment in India. Also, you may want to try episode 107 with The Happy Pear twins, David & Stephen Flynn, who independently went plant-based while traveling on opposite sides of the world and went on to create a plant-based empire in Ireland.

And if you know of someone else who's had an incredible plot twist in their life, and they're making the world a better place, please send me your guest suggestions. My email is light@lightwatkins.com.

Please take a few seconds to rate and review the show and I'll see you on Wednesday with the next long form conversation about an ordinary person who's out there in the world doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place.

And until then, keep trusting your intuition. Keep following your heart. Keep taking those leaps of faith. And if no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you and have a fantastic day.