Today we’d like to introduce you to Peyton Elroy.
Peyton, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
For the last three years or so, I have been awakened to the sobering fact that health must be the number 1 priority in peoples’ lives. It’s not money, it’s not finding your soulmate, it’s not having designer clothes. It’s being as healthy as possible in order to even begin to think of all of those wonderful things we want in life. After all, what is life without health? Health is the foundation of everything we do. A healthy body is able to move and participate in daily life. A sick body prevents not only happiness but the literal ability to perform at your best! Let us not forget mental health, which is just as important as the physical. All in all, I believe society has put health on the backburner and created a stigma around it being a chore, instead of something that we should be proud to maintain. You may or may not have heard this term, but I love to reference it: Health is wealth.
My journey to this conclusion started when I was 19, I am now 22 and will be 23 in January (shoutout to all of my fellow Aquarians reading this)! Anyway, I was out of highschool and no longer played sports. I had a gym membership, and I’ve always been more health conscious than the average person. I would dedicate that fact mostly to an ongoing heart condition that was discovered when I was in 3rd grade. I kind of didn’t have a choice to be unhealthy EVER, but at the same time I never wanted to be that anyway.
I have always had high expectations for my body as a female. I will speak for others when I say that body image is something that is struggled with at a high percentage of females. So, being honest with myself, I realized that I was just unhappy with the fact that I was not seeing the results I wanted in my body despite eating (how I thought was) healthy, and exercising at the gym.
I heard about veganism again. When I say again, I mean that in 2015 when I was in college, I had a roommate who was completely vegan. I had never heard of this ever in my life before meeting her. I asked her questions about what she ate and I remember telling her, “Wow. Props to you, but this is something I could never even fathom participating in.” It was one of those moments where I was just absolutely shocked that there was a diet out there that consisted of no animal products (chicken, pork, beef, fish, cheese, milk, etc.). I told my roommate (Ally) that I could never be vegan.
Have you heard that term never say never? It happens to be a famous song by Justin Bieber. I should’ve listened to his advice. Speaking four years later, I have followed veganism close to a T (tee?) for about the last three years.
Let’s go back to “I heard about veganism again”. I don’t really remember quite honestly what it was that triggered my curiosity, but I knew that I needed to change my diet up in order to see those results I wanted in my body. It was also pretty helpful that I had a coworker who had been vegan, and she was someone I could again ask questions to.
I played around with elimination “diets” but it turned into me just eliminating one animal product item after the other. The first to go on my list was milk, and man was that a bit saddening. Whole milk and I had been buddies for my whole life, but now almond milk and I started getting to know eachother.
Fast forward to today, the only animal product I have consumed in the last couple of years is fish. I have gone for long periods of time being completely vegan, meaning ZERO animal products. I have also participated in eating fish a few times a year. But chicken, pork, beef, eggs, dairy, etc… those are a foreign language to my body at this point.
As I became more confident in this new lifestyle, I thought that it would be smart to be of service to other people just like me – people who wanted to make changes in their eating habits but didn’t know where to start. Despite having that coworker who was vegan, I have done an insane amount of personal research and trial and error to get to where I am today. I’ve had many battles to overcome that I think would enable me to guide anyone interested in a lifestyle change. No, it doesn’t mean being vegan. Just being someone that people could go to for health advice meant so much to me. I had an idea to start putting some of my vegan meatless recipes on Instagram to feature every Monday. I started a “Meatless Monday” trend and have been filming episode-like Instagram stories just about every week for over a year now.
Over time I have curated a lot of attention from people who follow me on Instagram regarding Meatless Monday. I have even had people message me on Sunday night saying that they’re excited for Monday’s “episode”. It’s been extremely heartwarming and to be honest, I get teary-eyed sometimes. Helping others has been a burning passion in my life always… it wasn’t until a few years ago where I realized that helping others through health in particular, just seemed like my true calling.
I have a lot of ideas for ways to help others through health. Meatless Monday is one, Produce with Pey is another. I had this idea earlier this year to show people how to pick produce (fruits, vegetables, herbs) at the grocery store, my favorite in particular called Sprouts. I planned to do it every week but knew I needed to create space aside from Meatless Monday, so I chose Wednesday. Also, at Sprouts, Wednesday is when they have something called “Double-Ad Wednesday”, it’s where their ads overlap each week so there are double the deals. I love this about Sprouts and was already going to be there every Wednesday, so I figured doing Produce with Pey would perfect timing on that day.
My ideology for Produce with Pey was that if I could show people how to pick the best produce at the best price and give them all kinds of great info on this, they would be compelled to buy more produce! Produce is so important to me because I try to encourage others to follow a more plant-based lifestyle. That means we consume more plants than anything else. They are the most natural food source on Earth, so it is my personal belief that every human would benefit from following this kind of lifestyle, if not something very similar.
Last August (of 2018) I started working on a startup with my friend from high school. Let me cut this story to a fraction – it didn’t work out but I immediately developed a juice business from the situation. This happened because the startup was based around drinks (smoothies, juices, protein shakes, etc.). I was the main “chef” if you will, for the creation of the drinks because I had my own personal experience of making delicious healthy drinks. They are a huge part of my diet anyway, so it went hand-in-hand. Since the startup didn’t literally startup… ha ha… I continued my creation of juices and decided to sell them independently. My business currently has no name, but there ya go! I make and sell juices that I make from scratch – real fruits and vegetables and a juicer.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
My health journey was absolutely the opposite of a smooth road at the beginning. I had all kinds of roadblocks that came up that range from personal lack of will power, judgments from people very close to me, and even health scares. The initial and most eye-opening experience of my health journey though was when I got a kidney stone at 19 years old.
It started on a road trip to Washington state. It turned out to be about a 22-hour drive and by the time I had arrived in Washington, I noticed a cold coming on. I thought “Great, I’m about to be sick at the start of my vacation”. Luckily, someone had recommended a vitamin supplement to me. It was called Emergen-C. If you’ve never had it before, it’s a powder in a tiny packet that you combine with water. They are pretty delicious by the way. One packet contains 1,000mg of vitamin C, which is the max recommended daily dosage for people. I thought I would take 2 in the morning and 2 at night to really combat the sickness that was coming on.
The next day, I was brand new. No cold, no stuffy nose, no headache – it was a miracle. I decided to continue my regimen of 4,000mg of vitamin C daily so I would never get sick again.
Fast forward three months, I was still doing this daily. All of the sudden on a Saturday as I was getting ready to go to my younger brother’s football game, I started noticing an ache in my middle right back. I didn’t think much of it until the pain gradually increased throughout the day, and I had to take Advil. Something people around me know about me is that I do not like to take pills or medication of any kind unless I am absolutely desperate. This was one of those moments because the pain was untouchable- meaning I could feel it in my body but I couldn’t physically rub my back to soothe the pain because it felt like nothing was there! It was bizarre.
As mentioned before, the pain gradually increased and I ended up laying down in my mom’s car during the football game because I really could not stand or sit without having the pain in my back. That evening I decided that the following day (Sunday) I would head over to Urgent Care to fix this if it didn’t go away.
Come 2am, I was in excruciating pain. I felt a stabbing sensation in that same area of my back and I started feeling sick. I wasn’t willing to deal with this pain through the night because the Advil didn’t work and I had no relief. I drove myself to the emergency room at the hospital near my house and a CT scan revealed I had a kidney stone.
The few days that followed included a lot of pain… the worst thing I have experienced in my life. I remember sitting upwards in the fetal position rocking myself back and forth on my bathroom floor, screaming into my knees. The stone took three weeks to escape my body.
After putting 2 and 2 together, I realized that the cause of this stone had to be the high amount of Vitamin C I was consuming daily. The doctors had no explanation for why I got this, but they somewhat agreed that the supplementing was the cause because I was eating a clean diet otherwise.
I stopped taking the Emergen-C daily. For a long time after the stone, I was actually a bit afraid of it, but today I still take it from time to time if I’m in need of a quick Vitamin C boost. Otherwise, I generally rely on real foods to get my vitamins.
This one situation opened my eyes to the fact that despite being (what I thought) was healthy by taking supplements, I was actually doing more harm than good to myself. I had to learn the very hard way that there is such a delicate balance between what nutrition is, what it consists of, and how to not over-do it and cause unintentional harm.
This is when my REAL health journey began.
Oh yea by the way, no kidney stone ever since!
Alright – so let’s talk business. What else should we know about you and your career so far?
My business/company does not have a name, it’s something I have been teetering with for months. But what I do as I mentioned before is make and sell juices that I make with real fruits and vegetables. The drinks themselves do have names.
My whole life I have always been into cooking, baking, and just being in the kitchen. It wasn’t until I started eating mostly fruits and vegetables that I had to become creative in the kitchen with drinks, including juices and smoothies.
The passion I have for making juices is what sets me apart from others and my extensive knowledge on produce itself. Knowing what I know about produce, and actually nutrition too really has set me apart from some of the other brands I see on shelves. This is because I know what produce contains what nutrients, and use different items to combine to get the most out of the drink. I take this into consideration along with the actual flavors of the produce. There are even rules about digestion that I would say most companies do not take into account when making drinks. You can actually get better digestion of what you consume if you combine the right foods together. Some pairings of food might taste really good, but they don’t digest as well. It’s all been a mind-opening process to go through.
Something a lot of my customers have told me is that they are blown away at how the drinks I make contain no sugar and real produce. My drinks contain 0 added sugar, preservatives, or water (unless you are buying my ginger shot bottle called “Quickie”). I pride myself in providing complete transparency with the customers as well as giving them the cleanest product possible – because after all, that is how I consume things and I want to encourage others to follow the same kind of lifestyle. Clean eating is a huge part of accessing the better version of your health.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
Wow. There are a lot of people who deserve credit in my success with the juice business. First and foremost I have to pat myself on the back because I took the leap of faith to venture off with these juices alone after I pretty much parted ways with the failed start-up company. It has been an enormous amount of work and I’m honestly in the beginning stages still, even though it’s been about six months now. I’ve done just about all of the grunt work on my own and have dealt with a lot of trial and error and had to use my own money to start. I’m proud of myself for sticking with the venture though, and it couldn’t be possible at all if I had quit because well- everything is done by me!
The second person to thank for all of this has to be the customers. Another obvious part of this whole equation is that I could not sell these drinks if no one bought them. This goes out to every single person who has bought a drink from me, whether it’s 1 or 12 at a time, I wouldn’t be making the drinks if I didn’t have customers supporting me. I sincerely love you all.
A couple of other people who are part of the success are my parents for allowing me to use their kitchen for all of the experiments and being taste testers, as well as my two brothers for spreading the word and also being taste testers. I have to thank one of my longtime friends Brandon Ha for donating a juicer to me when the one I was using all of the sudden burnt out, for helping prep some of the juice orders, and for also spreading the word! Word of mouth is proven to be the most successful type of marketing, so anyone who has advertised for me is cherished beyond expression.
My absolute rock through the ups and downs, not just the juices but the start-up as well, has been Tyler Irwin. He is my #1 supporter and has been a hands-on person through the ENTIRE process. He has been there pretty much every step of the way and has given me so much direction.
I have some other dear friends who have been my outlets for advice and motivation through the whole process but this part of the interview would be too long if I went into detail about every person. They know who they are (hello Jordan, Veronica and Danny), they know they have been a tremendous help, and they know they are deeply appreciated.
I LOVE YOU ALL!
Pricing:
- $5 for each 16oz juice bottle
- $4.70 for a 16oz “Quickie” which is a Ginger Lemon and Distilled Water shot bottle
Contact Info:
- Website: PeytonElroy.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: Instagram.com/PeytonElroy
Image Credit:
Peyton Elroy, Jeremy Williams
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