Community Highlights: Meet Juliano of Nature’s Wild Berry

Today we’d like to introduce you to Juliano.

Hi Juliano, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was born in Chicago into a family of entrepreneurs who never had much money but always had a restaurant. Everybody was chasing their own place, their own menu, their own shot, and everybody helped everybody. We’d get a taste of success, a good year, a busy corner, and then it would slip. Nobody ever made it big. But nobody ever stopped trying either, and that’s the part that got into me.

I bounced between family members growing up, and wherever I landed, I worked. Five years old, bussing tables. Then prep, then dishes, then the line, then whatever needed doing that day. When I graduated high school, everybody around me was heading off to college. That wasn’t on the table for us. There was no money for it, and there was no time. Rent was due, the lights had to stay on, and we couldn’t afford employees, so I was the employee. I worked in the family restaurants practically for free and helped carry the bills.

Eventually I moved from one family kitchen to another and started earning a little. Then I got a job outside the family, and something funny happened: people noticed. Owners, managers, the people next to me on the line. They noticed how hard I worked and how much I cared, and I realized that the thing my family had drilled into me since I was five, that you show up and you outwork the problem, was worth something out in the world.

The downside of working like that is you don’t get much of a life. I had a great group of friends and almost never saw them. One night I was home, feeling like I’d forgotten how to talk to anyone who wasn’t handing me a ticket, and I downloaded an app called Interesting Facts, hoping to have something to say. I’m swiping through and one card stops me: there’s a berry that changes your taste buds and makes anything sour taste sweet.

I had spent my whole life in restaurants. My first thought was, no way. If that were real it would be everywhere. There would be restaurants built around it. It would be its own genre of food. It doesn’t exist, so it isn’t true. I swiped past it. And I kept thinking about it.

So I looked it up. I found a place selling five berries for fifty dollars, and I bought them for one reason: I was sure it was a scam and I was going to enjoy the chargeback. They arrived. I chewed one, bit into a lemon, and it tasted like lemonade. I sat in my kitchen laughing. They worked.

The first thing I did was call my best friend. He didn’t pick up, so I left a voicemail: I’ve got these berries, they make sour taste sweet, you have to try them. A couple of hours later my phone rings. It’s him. He says, hey, I just read about these berries that change your taste buds, we should try them. I said, you got my voicemail, right? He said, what voicemail, I just got reception. Neither of us had ever heard of the miracle berry before that day, and we found it separately, hours apart, without saying a word to each other. Call it a coincidence. It never felt like one.

He came back to town, tried them, and couldn’t believe it either. He became my guinea pig for healthy food, and then he ran with it on his own. He started eating with the berry every day, and it changed how he liked to eat. About a year in he came to me and said, I’ve lost eighty pounds, I’ve kept it off, this changed my life, and I want to build a business to help other people the way it helped me.

I told him no. I said, I’m trying to build four businesses right now, I grew up with entrepreneurs, you can’t hang. You’re my best friend because when I need to decompress I come to you and we do absolutely nothing. I have never once seen you work hard.

He asked again. I said no again. He asked a third time, and I said, fine. I’ve got other businesses in the air, might as well throw this one in the loop. I know you can’t hang, but let’s do it. That was 2014. He has worked his tail off every single day since, and he even came through with the funding. I have never been happier to be wrong about somebody.

It took two years of research and development to learn how to freeze-dry the berry so it kept its magic, and Nature’s Wild Berry was born in 2016. A few years later we were standing on the Shark Tank carpet telling this exact story. And the berry kept teaching us. We learned it helps people living with diabetes enjoy food without the sugar. We learned it gives taste back to people going through chemotherapy, when everything has turned to metal and cardboard. We learned it makes medicine easier to get down. We learned you can pour a drink with no sugar and no hangover and still have the whole night. We’re still learning. That little fact on my phone turned out to be the truest thing I ever read.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Smooth? No. It has been hard the whole way, and I’ve made peace with that.

We bootstrapped everything. Nobody would give us a loan, so we never had one. We put in what we had, which wasn’t much, and we sold berries one bag at a time. By 2017 we were out of money and days from closing the doors. Then one purchase order landed. Sixty thousand dollars. It was more money than I had ever seen in one place, and I read the number three times before I believed it. That order saved the company. We filled it, we kept going, and little by little we started turning a profit.

In 2020 a competitor came into the market with a copy of what we had spent years building, and they undercut us. Our patent was still pending, so there was nothing to stand behind yet. It was pivot or die. Here’s how I’ve always looked at that: if you can knock me out of business, then I deserved to go out of business. Good for you. I won’t be mad. But I’m telling you now, I’m not going out of business, because I don’t deserve it, and I am not an easy one to knock out. I have struggled my whole life. I expect to struggle for the rest of it.

If you can’t learn to love the struggle, being an entrepreneur isn’t for you. It’s a three letter title, CEO, and it runs on three P’s: passion, persistence, and patience. Lose any one of them and the other two won’t carry you.

We came within a breath of bankruptcy more than once. People took our ideas. And every single year for nine years, we were told our patent wouldn’t be approved. No, no, no. Every year I had to find a new way to make them understand that the answer was yes. The patent was granted. We stayed in business. The competitor is gone, the brand is protected, and we’re still here.

There were moments, more than I can count, where I looked at the numbers and thought, that’s it, there’s nothing left to try. And I didn’t quit. Hank, my partner, didn’t quit. We just don’t. Failure isn’t quitting. Failure is being thrown down so hard you can’t breathe anymore, and as long as I have a breath in me, I keep going. I’m grateful every day that Hank is built the same way.

Years ago I read a line in one of the many books on building a company. It went something like this: if you don’t wake up every morning asking what am I doing with my life, is this the worst decision I’ve ever made, then you aren’t risking enough and you aren’t pushing hard enough. You should be questioning your whole life every single day. You can bet I did. You can bet I still do.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Nature’s Wild Berry?
Nature’s Wild Berry sells one thing: the miracle berry, a small red fruit that rewires the way you taste for about half an hour. You chew one, let it coat your tongue, and for the next twenty to forty minutes sour tastes sweet. A lemon turns into lemonade. A lime turns into candy. Plain Greek yogurt tastes like cheesecake, apple cider vinegar drinks like juice, and a glass of dry wine goes down like dessert. No sugar. Nothing added to the food. Your own tongue does the work.

That’s it. That’s the whole product, and it’s still the most fun thing you can put in your mouth.

The berry itself has been around forever, but it was nearly impossible to get: it spoils within a day or two of being picked, so nobody outside the tropics ever tasted one. We spent two years figuring out how to freeze-dry it so the magic survives the trip, and then we built the packaging to protect it: a plastic-free travel jar with 30 servings, and a 50-serving refill bag. One ingredient. Nothing added. Non-GMO Project Verified. We work with farmers around the world to grow the highest quality fruit, and we package everything right here in the USA. We took it on Shark Tank, and today you’ll find us on Amazon, at Target, at Walmart, and in the hands of people in every state and a long list of countries.

What sets us apart is simple: we were first, we are still the only ones who do it right, and we have never once cut a corner on the fruit. Copies have come and gone. The berry doesn’t lie. You can taste the difference in one bite.

What I’m proudest of has nothing to do with the sales numbers. It’s the emails. The woman going through chemotherapy who wrote to say that food had turned to metal in her mouth for months, and that with a berry she tasted a strawberry again and cried at the table. The dad who got his diabetic kid to eat fruit without sugar for the first time. The people who used it to change the way they eat and dropped weight they’d carried for twenty years, the way my partner did. The bartenders building cocktails with no sugar in them. The parents who turned “eat your vegetables” into a game. Every one of those started with somebody deciding to try something that sounded impossible.

Here’s what I want your readers to know. It’s real. It’s not a trick and it’s not a chemical, it’s a fruit, and it works on everyone. Order a jar, invite people over, put out lemons and limes and a bottle of hot sauce, and watch grown adults turn into kids. That’s the night we’ve been throwing since 2016, and we’d love to throw it at your house.

What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
What I love most about Los Angeles is that nobody here thinks you’re crazy. I grew up in Chicago, where a kid from a restaurant family saying he was going to build a company around a berry that makes lemons taste like candy would get a pat on the head. In LA, you say that out loud and the person next to you says, “Cool. Who’s your distributor?” This whole city is people who showed up with an idea that sounded ridiculous somewhere else. That energy is contagious, and it carried us through years when the idea was all we had.

Then there’s the food. I’ve worked in kitchens since I was five, and I have never seen a place eat like this one. A taco truck in a parking lot that would embarrass a white tablecloth restaurant. Grandmothers selling tamales out of coolers. Farmers markets where the strawberries taste like strawberries. Every cuisine on earth within a twenty minute drive, cooked by the people whose grandparents taught them. For somebody who sells a fruit that changes how food tastes, this city is the greatest playground on the planet.

And the ocean. I lived a few blocks from the water in Santa Monica, and there’s a version of every hard day that ends with your feet in the sand at sunset. It fixes things. It fixed me more than once.

What I like least is the same thing everybody says, and it’s true: the traffic, and the cost of just being here. The people who make this city what it is, the cooks and the artists and the ones running a business out of a garage, are the ones getting squeezed out of it. I’d love to see LA make it a little easier for the people who give it its flavor to stay. Because without them, it’s just nice weather.

Pricing:

• Plastic-Free Travel Jar, 30+ servings of freeze-dried miracle berries: $27.97
• 50-Serving Refill Bag: $22.97

Contact Info:

• Website: https://natureswildberry.com
• Other: https://linktr.ee/natureswildberry

Image Credits
Images of Hank Juliano and our product Nature’s Wild Berry