A drink company that began with a diagnosis
Or: how the worst day of a freshman year became a business plan
Here is a fact that is either grimly ironic or quietly perfect, depending on your mood: the founder of an electrolyte-drink company got his start because a diagnosis forced him to read ingredient labels very carefully. Jerome Tse was a Division III rower at Cornell's Hotel School when, on Christmas Eve of his freshman year, he learned he had cancer. He was treated at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, went through chemotherapy, and came out the other side - and has stayed cancer-free for more than a decade since.
The part that turned into a company was what happened in between. Recovering, Tse changed his diet toward organic, plant-based food, and went looking for hydration drinks that fit. What he found on the shelf did not: the mainstream sports drinks and rehydration solutions were, to his taste, over-processed. So he did the thing that founders do in the retelling and that is genuinely hard in the moment - he made his own. Coconut water, sweet potato, ginseng root, sea salt, maqui berries. Ingredients you can picture in a field rather than a lab.
The company that grew out of that - Berri Organics - now sells two lines. Berri Lyte, an organic plant-based electrolyte solution pitched as a cleaner alternative to products like Pedialyte, and Berri Fit, a line of fitness beverages and powders. It is a straightforward CPG business with one unusual feature bolted onto the front of it: a portion of every sale goes to the pediatric cancer causes connected to the founder's own treatment. The mission is not a slide at the back of the deck. It is the reason the deck exists.