Story
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It all started in the bright warm summer of 2013 in a tiny town in the middle of North Carolina, when Founder Loren was cooking out of the excellent Paleo cookbook Well Fed. It was in the pages of this sage tome that he discovered it was possible to make healthy mayonnaise. And he did. And it was good. But the preparation process was a bit involved, and he wished to buy it premade. So he scoured the interwebs in search of a commercially-available healthy mayo. But alas, he hunted in vain, as no decent mayo was to be found. And he was sad. But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? Inspiration! And he thought to himself:
"Well there are probably enough Paleo people out there that someone should mass produce some mayo . . . I guess I'll just do it. How hard could it be?"
And so began his quest.
As all proper hipsters do, he began with Kickstarter. And boy, was direct marketing harder than he had realized. He took the top 100 search results for "Paleo diet", Mechanical Turked the email addresses and contact forms, asked them all to help spread the word, and got a few blessed responses (shout out to Paul Wheaton, Melissa Joulwan, Karen Phelps, Amber Beam, Michelle Tam, Paleo Magazine, the Crossfit Diet, Caveman Keto, Paul and Shou-Ching, Scott Shapiro, and even, in the final hours, Mark Sisson). And they Tweeted, and they Facebooked, and they even Mailing-Listed! And he posted on all the forums and all the Reddits, messaged all the Facebook friends, and emailed all the contacts. And slowly but surely, the word spread, of an inspiring feat of culinary and organizational prowess, the best thing since they put crickets into bars, grass-fed pemmican into vacuum packs, and organs into sticks: the first mass-produced Paleolithic mayonnaise. (Can't you just see them, gathering nuts and lemons, stealing bird eggs, pouring it into glass jars on the assembly line, and hammering on the lids with sticks?) The Kickstarter was a success. Here is a list of the generous human beings who made Payo possible.
As all proper Kickstarter projects go, the estimated ship date was entirely too optimistic, and the project updates were riddled with setbacks. A new manufacturer had to be found, bulk suppliers for each specialty ingredient had to be found, and label stock had to be tested. Turns out that small-batch manufacturers with the right emulsion equipment are hard to find, and suppliers can be very bad at getting back to you. Founder Loren even resorted to hiring Renik The Friendly Assistant From Brickwork India to help call, email, and fill up the search spreadsheets. The first batch was finally produced in October 2015!