Brendan Ruh / Santa Cruz Medicinalsdiscussed
Santa Cruz Medicinals / Santa Cruz Paleo (founded 2018) — DTC better-for-you supplements (creatine, electrolytes, sleep; originally CBD)Ingredient-literacy content → DTC supplement brand with a cult following
Creator Fund Weekly — Sep 14, 2026Sam Lessin, Eddie DeDomenico, Jack Raines, Megan Lightcap, Caroline Singer
Brendan Ruh: Santa Cruz Medicinals and the ingredient-literacy cult
5:04
from 25:00 in the recording
Creator Fund call, Sep 14 2026 (Riverside)
Megan flagged him after hearing friends 'would buy anything he recommends.' A former medical-anthropology student turned 'ingredient literacy guru': he teaches people how to read a label and audit a grocery aisle, and turned the following into Santa Cruz Medicinals — founded 2018 around CBD, now centered on paleo-space better-for-you products like creatine and electrolytes, reportedly doing very well DTC with no outside funding. The cult is unusually deep and skews 18–21: he got thousands of high-schoolers petitioning for an extra hour of outdoor time ('touch grass'), showed up in person, and was performatively arrested during a nutritional lunch break at a local high school in March — while also counting major UFC fighters among his devotees. Jack's riff: he looks like 'a sitcom character that got dropped in 2026... Billy Mays' nephew' — old-school infomercial energy that could sell anything, a type that doesn't exist anymore. Megan's comps: Justin's Ingredients and FlavCity, both doing an estimated $150–300M revenue — these things can grow extremely fast when the product is real and hits the zeitgeist. Eddie has tried ~6 emails; next moves are LinkedIn spam and the brand's customer-service inbox.
Things We Like
- The cult is real and weird in the best way: thousands of high-school kids petitioning (and rioting) for an extra hour of sunlight, plus major UFC fighters — an 18–21 cohort AND elite athletes on the same brand
- Category-proven comps (Megan): Justin's Ingredients and FlavCity are doing an estimated $150–300M revenue — ingredient-literacy creators converting trust into CPG scale extremely fast
- Products already working: DTC numbers 'doing amazingly well' with no outside funding taken (Eddie's read) — this would be primary, not a rescue
- A genuinely differentiated character: 2000s-infomercial salesmanship (Jack: 'he could sell ice to an Eskimo... this type of person actually doesn't really exist anymore') aimed at Gen Z wellness
- Ingredient literacy as the trust wedge: teaching label-reading is evergreen, algorithm-friendly and maps directly onto his own product line
Key Questions
- Why is the cult so deep? Eddie explicitly wants to do more work on what's driving the devotion before engaging
- What are the real DTC numbers? Eddie bets they're 'pretty massive' but nobody has seen them
- How do we reach him? ~6 cold emails out, he's on the fringes of Eddie's wellness network — plan is LinkedIn plus the customer-service email backdoor (Megan's suggestion)
- Interesting demo split: the recommendation came via someone's daughters, not sons — what's the actual audience composition?
Conversation Quotes
- “There's like a serious, serious young person cult following on this guy... he's got this interesting 18-to-21-year-old cohort that is obsessed... but then he also has high-performance athletes, major UFC fighters who are all in on what he does.”Eddie
- “His entire phenotype is like a dude you used to see on TV in the mid-2000s... like Billy Mays' nephew. I feel like he could sell me anything... this type of person actually doesn't really exist anymore.”Jack
- “There are two examples in this general category — Justin's Ingredients and FlavCity... both of those businesses are doing anywhere between $150 and $300 million in revenue. These things can grow really, really fast.”Megan