I've long been passionate and curious about how we nourish ourselves. I grew up on a farm in Oregon and studied international agricultural development in undergrad.

This took me around the world, working with farmers and entrepreneurs from Morocco to India and Vietnam. I was fortunate to work at the UN and the World Bank, quickly learning of the frustrating bureaucracies and inefficiencies of bigger organizations and policy.

In the summer of 2017 I was going through my own health journey with an intense bout of breakouts, adrenal fatigue and so forth. I underwent months of allergy tests and different diets in an attempt to understand what was happening to me.

Ironically, I had always been a skeptic of vitamins! But after learning that I was deficient in key nutrients, I turned to supplementation to fill gaps in my diet.

For almost a decade before the health incident I had worked with farmers, scientists and women entrepreneurs all over the world and had learned a lot about cleaner, more sustainable ways to get your nutrition- which is how I first turned to algae, specifically spirulina and chlorella.

These are the most nutrient dense plants on Earth and the most sustainable. For instance, 1 gram of spirulina is equivalent to 1kg of fruits and vegetables. Did you know that algae creates half of Earth's oxygen and doesn't need a lot of space or pesticides to grow? It's not only better for human health, but the planet's too.

With running a start-up there are A LOT of "wtf" moments. I don't think it ever ends. But I do believe there are two important qualities in an entrepreneur that can help to avoid getting lost in those WTF moments: persistence and optimism.

"You need radical belief and hope in what you're building and you need to be able to pick yourself up and keep going to achieve it. Working on your mindset early on when you're building a company is so important." 

When I was initially conceptualizing the idea of GEM, I had traveled to Brazil where I was working with farmers on upcycled products. At this point I started to see the bigger vision of what I was really doing.

It's not just America- our global food system is broken. For instance: we have hundreds of plants we can utilize, yet a majority of the world's daily calories come from just four (corn, soy, wheat, rice).

At a certain point, it wasn't something I should do, but I must do.

I ended up coming back to the US, hired an herbalist and a team of health-conscious women. We pulled in scientists, researchers, nutritionists and farmers from around the world to figure out how to create an entirely new definition of an important daily health hack: vitamins.

In a world of processed food and fake supplements, GEM is the first unprocessed daily vitamin- the only way to get real nutrition cleanly and conveniently.

GEM is made with 13 nutrient-dense plants without all the fluff and junk. It's designed to give you the nutrients your body needs the most, with nothing that it doesn't, based on women's common deficiencies.