Amy Cohn: Joydays are delicious blood-sugar-friendly snacks. We worked with top dieticians, doctors and chefs to create a first in market innovative product that won’t create blood sugar spikes, is 3g sugar for two cookies (70% less than leading cookies) and tastes like the chewy nostalgic cookies you remember. We have a unique process, and use low glycemic ingredients and different fiber insulins which are so important to improving insulin sensitivity, lowering blood pressure and increasing satiation in between meals. Everyone needs to understand that the right combination of fiber, protein, and low carb is crucial for every day health, as it’s that balance that is blood sugar friendly for your body.

51% of the US population currently have prediabetes or diabetes. This and conditions affected by blood sugar imbalance are the largest epidemics of our time, and affect people in food deserts and diverse communities the most. No one is currently creating accessible modern brands that focus on this enormously underserved vertical. Most brands that focus on helping specific medical or health concerns tend to look medicinal and dated—or you have the opposite end of products that aren’t developed with dietitians from the beginning but tack on marketing later to jump on being better-for-you without substantiation.

JS: Please talk about your health challenges, and how they inspired you to come up with Joydays.

AC: I went through colon cancer almost three years ago and changed my career from a tech exec to creating the Joydays brand after I went into remission. I learned that research suggests blood sugar spikes can contribute to colon cancer recurrences. I was shocked that marketing to people with chronic conditions looked like someone’s marketing idea of what that consumer should look like or even want, which in turn was ‘otherizing,’ which is essentially labeling a group to make them feel ‘otherized.’

The brand donates a portion of proceeds to Insulin for Life USA, giving insulin to those who can’t afford it, as well as the Colorectal Cancer Alliance, providing health equity access to screenings to those in need. Joydays is the only food brand accepted into Startup Health, a fund of global healthcare companies tackling the world’s largest healthcare moonshots.

JS: Then, please tell us about the early days before Joydays’ treats were available to consumers—how did you decide which items you would put out there, how did you balance health and taste, etc.

AC: Cookies are our first product, and we have much more coming in the pipeline. We polled several thousand people with diabetes and asked “What do you miss the most?” and their first answer was cookies. So we started off with this as our product, looking at replicating a mainstream cookie. We brought in dietitians who gave us the nutritional requirements to meet the standards first, then we brought in a chef from Noma to create our benchtop, and then a very seasoned R&D food scientist who created Grandma’s cookies and also has 30 years of baking experience at Gamesa, Nabisco, and others. We also have the former president of the American Diabetes Association as our advisor—so we have a well-rounded team from many areas.

JS: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in getting off the ground (i.e. getting backers, convincing retailers to carry your goods, etc.)?

AC: Ha—I think for any early stage founder the challenges vary almost every day. We were incredibly lucky to have people who believed in us as a team, and believed in our mission. I think the biggest challenges are infrastructure and manufacturing. With a cookie, there are many ingredients and variable things so finding the right team to give consistent quality in the product you set out to do took some time. After trial and error, we found the right team to make the cookie that’s now the closest to our benchtop we’ve ever had. At the end of the day, it’s assembling the team that’s the right fit for all the jigsaw puzzle pieces you have, so it takes a while to find those fits, but when you get that, the engines just start humming and it’s awesome.

JS: Tell us about your growth and expansion since Joydays was founded in 2022.

AC: We soft-launched in October 2022, and launched into retail in March of 2023, so we just hit our first-year mark and are already in 2,200 retail doors. We knew we wanted to focus on retail as our primary channel due to the nature of the product and the consumer target. We have some very ambitious goals for 2024, and we are already making strides to hit those milestones and be differentiated in the CPG space by doing a different playbook than most.

JS: What’s next?

AC: We have a new product that we are launching first in the market with a retailer soon that I can’t wait to get out in the world. We are keeping our promise of giving our consumers products that are blood sugar friendly, but with an indulgent twist. Ideally we want to create a much larger mission driven brand that is focused on creating accessible solutions for people with chronic conditions. We made Joydays as a brand so it could be flexible for the bigger ideas we have, but our goal is to always bring joy and happiness, and hopefully to disrupt new areas that have been antiquated for some time. We feel we have the right mix of people with strong backgrounds in CPG, healthcare, and tech to achieve that.