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Meet The Experts: Brandon Eriksson of Readywise
(upbeat music) - Welcome to another episode of Meet the Experts with Howie Car. We are living in a truly historic and unprecedented time. Volatile markets, vulnerable technologies, and uncertain political landscapes are having real effects on American households. What's your plan for the next emergency? Do you have a plentiful supply of food and water? How will you get energy for necessary appliances? Brandon Erickson, Vice President of Sales at ReadyWise, can help you give a more confident answer to those questions and more. Here's your host of Meet the Experts, Howie Car. (upbeat music) - Welcome to this latest episode of Meet the Experts. Today I am joined by Brandon Erickson. He is a Vice President of ReadyWise. You know ReadyWise, if you're a listener to the show, it is a freeze-dried and emergency food manufacturing company based in the United States of America in Salt Lake City. They've been around for about 15 years and they're a very, very good provider of emergency food supplies. And we just wanted to talk about what you should know about setting up a stock of emergency food supplies. Brandon, thanks for being with us. - Howie, thanks for having me again. It's always a pleasure to speak with you and hopefully provide some insight on why everybody should be prepared. - Tell us about ReadyWise, what makes ReadyWise different and what you guys provide. - You know, at ReadyWise, we understand the importance of being prepared for any emergency, whether it's a natural disaster, a power outage, civil unrest, an unexpected crisis, and you know, just providing reliable access to nutritious and delicious food. You know, that can really make the difference. So, you know, when we're producing our emergency food, we have, you know, our families and your family's needs in mind. The food lasts up to 25 years and that really can give you peace of mind knowing that you'll have food available to you when it's needed most. And, you know, that's why we're here to help you choose and make this easy for consumers. It can be a daunting task wondering, you know, what to do, what you should have in a preparedness kit, how you should even prepare food in the event of an emergency. And we've taken this approach. We've made it easy. We put the food in mylar pouches. They're generally stored in convenient buckets for five gallon buckets, depending on which supply you get. The bucket is a great utility, but that food lasts up to 25 years. You add water, some of them you have to boil the water, some of them you don't. Some of our accessories, you don't have to have water at all, whether it's some of our side dishes like fruits and vegetables, but we've got solutions that are for people that have dietary needs, like gluten free. We even have kosher options. We've got organic options for people that are concerned about, you know, what might be in their food. So we've tried to make this an easy solution for anyone to be prepared and to, you know, have an opportunity to not have their family go hungry, even just for a few days in the event that something should happen. - And, you know, you don't have to believe in Armageddon or the end of the world to wanna have a food supply. I mean, there can be problems. Look what happened last week with CrowdStrike and just the general disruption of many high-tech aspects of American life. I mean, there are all kinds of problems like that all the time, aren't there? Where you might be unable to buy food for a day or a week? - Yeah, I mean, definitely. We've seen it with lots of different things, whether it's related to the internet or the infrastructure of IT and how that impacts supply chain and just the delivery of goods to your local grocery store. You know, obviously COVID was only four years ago, but nobody imagined that that could happen to our country before that where the government would mandate shutdowns and you'd have to stay in your home or you'd have limited access to resources, which following that we saw disruption in our supply chain because of that, there's been issues in the supply chain as well with droughts, with, you know, also conspiracies around stuff going on with different crops and agriculture and obviously with our beef supply. I mean, I think everybody's concerned with what's going on there and with who's buying up our farmland, whether that's foreign countries or individuals here that think they have our best needs in their mind in terms of what we should consume, whether it's fake meat or other things. And so there's lots of things to consider, you know, and then based on geography where you live, everybody probably faces some sort of potential mother nature issue, whether it's, you know, on the east coast with hurricanes or nor'easters in the Midwest with tornadoes, out west with droughts and flooding and a whole variety of different things. You have the ice storms down in the south during the winter that destabilize communities. And so it's really important to have something on hand in order to feed your families. And this is the solution to help make that easy. I don't think anybody wants to risk not being able to feed their kids and especially if it's because of something that they can't control. And so we have a lot of different options that make it easy for someone to purchase a bucket or a longer term kit that allows their family to eat meals that they're familiar with. They're friendly with macaroni and cheese and pasta alfredo and teriyaki and rice and a whole variety of different dishes. And I did mention kind of the meat supply and beef and what's going on there. We do have freeze dried meats as well. So you can add protein to these meals with freeze dried beef or freeze dried chicken. So lots of different options. We've really thought of everything from the food aspect and we support that with other emergency supplies as well. - This is probably a good time to mention that if you have any questions before you make your purchase, you can talk to a product specialist at ReadyWise. Why don't you give everybody the number for the product specialist at ReadyWise? - Yeah, that's a great point, Howie. So we have a toll free number, which is 855-95-ready or 855-957-3239. And we have product specialist standing by literally from eight in the morning till eight at night that will help answer any questions you have with regards to different packages, the ingredients that come in the packages, pricing plans. We obviously know that everyone is on different budgets and so we wanna make this work for you. So they'll tell you how to get started and how to fit in your budget and where you should start and answer any questions you have. They're a really good resource because this can feel a little bit out of our comfort zone and people may not know where to start. And so that's a great way to just to kind of walk through some questions and kind of understand how you can get started and where you can get started. - And when you make your order, you can use promo code Howie to get an extra 25% off your order. That's promo code Howie to get an extra 25% off your order. So Brandon, let's start out. Someone has not got any emergency freeze-dried food on hand. What are the first steps? How do you get started? - Yeah, the basic fundamentals of getting started are really ask yourself, how many people am I preparing for first? Am I preparing for one person? Am I preparing for two people or four people or six people? How many people do I wanna feed? And then understand your situation and how long you would wanna feed them for? Is it three days to start? Is your goal 30 days? FEMA tells us we should really have up to three months of food on hand, ideally, in the event. I mean, it's a little bit scary that our government is telling us that and in the same breath, they're telling us they'll help us no matter what. But three months should ultimately be everyone's goal to have. The food lasts for 25 years. You can incorporate it into your regular plan if you wanna kind of rotate through it. But understand how many people and how much food that you want. And once you have that, you can call in and talk to one of our product specialists. If you have any dietary needs, if you have any preferences, they'll work with you on that to help put together a plan. Whether you can buy it all right away or if you wanna buy it over a period of time, three months, six months or a year, they'll put together competitive plans to make sure that you're getting product every month and meeting your budget. So that's really where I would start, Howie. How many people and how long do you wanna prepare for? - So in the product specialist can set up a plan to buy it on an installment basis. - They call it a subscription plan. So you'll have a small monthly payment. And then based on that, they'll ship a portion of your total order. So if you wanted to buy a three or six month plan and you wanted to split that up over three or six months, they're not gonna charge any interest. We're just gonna do it in house. And every month they're gonna ship you a portion of your product based on the payment plan that you have in place. - Now, should people be buying water or do you sell water or what do you recommend? - We do have some water. I mean, water is obviously expensive to ship and it's limited a little bit based on the different materials that it's produced in. And so what we suggest that you do and what we saw on our website is we have these really useful 55 gallon water storage drums that you would fill up yourself. And you can order those, they stack nicely. The product specialist or even our website, there'll be information on how much water you need, but water's also important, not just for rehydrating the food, but for also consumption as well. We need water. And we also sell a variety of different water filters in the event that your water's contaminated or even if you wanna filter out the water that you store just to be extra safe, which is not a bad idea. We have portable water filters that are 28 ounce bottles that have carbon filters that are gonna get really, I used them last week on a backpacking trip and just put them into a lake and then drink right out of them. We have bigger gravity filters that utilize the buckets where you can fill the buckets up and stack them and then it'll gravity fill into the lower bucket. We have some pump water filters. And so that's what we would suggest for water. It's a lot more economical in terms of getting it to you. It's a lot easier to kind of plan around and be more reliable is to get a water storage container and then have a couple of filters on hand to make sure that that water's safe and filtered when you're ready to consume it. - We're talking to Brandon Erickson. He is the vice president of ReadyWise, which produces emergency survival foods, freeze-dried. And it's a food manufacturing company that's based in the United States. Give us the product specialist again, the number for the product specialist that people have questions and want to start thinking about what they want to order from ReadyWise and laying in a stock. - Yeah, it's 855-95-Ready or 855-957-3239. - A lot of people think that if you have emergency freeze-dried food, it's going to be tasting like cardboard. What does emergency food taste like from ReadyWise? - That's a great question. And I think in the past, maybe some of those concerns were valid. We've done an incredible job at making sure these formulations of food taste like food that you would eat every day. So, I mean, the meals are regular meals and regular recipes. These are formulated the same way, but with dry ingredients. And so, you have meals that your kids will eat. I have a 16 year old son that absolutely loves our pasta alfredo. He almost prefers it over what we'd get at a restaurant or even what his mom makes. And so, we've got pasta alfredo, we've got macaroni and cheese, we've got a lot of rice dishes. We have fake potato casserole that has, you know, dried potatoes in there with a whole lot of real vegetables. This is not artificial product. These are real peas, real corn, real carrots that go in there. It's real pasta and the sauces are real. They contain dried ingredients that allow it with milk and cheeses. And so, all of that's rehydrated together. Obviously, when you're cooking it with warm or hot water, it tastes a lot better and it rehydrates and cooks a lot faster. But these meals taste good. And I would encourage anybody that buys them to open up the bucket. It's got a hinge lid on it, take out a pouch, prepare it for dinner. And I think people are going to be really, really pleased with how easy the product is to prepare. And that's something you need to understand in an emergency too, is there could be a lot of chaos going on, especially if it's a natural disaster or there's issues. You don't want to spend a lot of time necessarily trying to find different ingredients and do a whole lot of things and have different preparation schedules. This is easy, add water, ready to go in 15 to 20 minutes, in most cases. And the food's ready and you have a meal for people. And I think everybody will be really pleasantly surprised with how great the food tastes. - If the listeners want to sample it, you have samples available, do you not? - Yeah, if you call and talk to our product specialist, they'll get you a couple samples sent out for you to try. They'll send even a few more if you want to place an order and don't want to open up the bucket. They'll get you a few options to try. - So yeah, just be sure to ask them and they'll make sure we take care of you and get an option or two sent out to you. - Does the water have to be hot to make these entrees palatable or could you just use room temperature water? - Yeah, it really depends on the recipe, Howie. But there are some recipes that we have, especially on the breakfast side, room temperature water would work completely fine. What we found is hot water is going to rehydrate it better. In an absolute emergency, you wouldn't need it. You could use room temperature water. It's going to take quite a bit longer to rehydrate on the entree dishes just based on the pasta makeup. But a lot of the rice dishes are going to be fine with room temperature water. I'd always suggest hot water if you can. And we do have some options on our website for you to heat water, some stoves. Obviously, we have a solar power generator that you can purchase on our website as well, which is a nice accessory that would run a microwave if you needed to warm water up. It runs a refrigerator. So there's lots of different things to consider as part of your plan, but back to your point, I would suggest hot water, but not all of them require it. And that's a great point to make sure just in the event that you didn't have an option, there are quite a few meals that would rehydrate with room temperature water. - You'd only just sell the freeze dried products. What else does ready wise offer? - Yeah, we obviously, we've got the food covered in terms of entrees and breakfast and ingredients. And like I mentioned, gluten free and organic options. We've got a freeze dried coffee that tastes delicious in a coffee bucket. We've got milk and eggs. We have some really cool things and a lot of first responders for cities and counties purchase it from us. It's a self-heating meal. And so this is really cool. You can actually, you pour water into a pouch and then you put the pouch inside of another pouch. And there's an element that you add about a quarter cup of water and it actually heats the pouch. We've got self-heating meal kits. We have, I think, six or eight options available in that. And those are on our website. We've got backpacks and survival bags. Those contain more than just food. In a lot of those packs, you'll find water filters and flashlights along with first aid kits. And in most cases, you're gonna find a deck of cards in there because that's important to make sure that you're also trying to have fun and socialize with those that you're around in the event that you have to use this stuff. They also have matches and stoves and cups and things like that. Those are great kits to have to send to your kids that are in college to put in the trunk of your car to keep in your closet just to grab in case you need to get out because there's some sort of event. There's a little bit of food that'll last you for a few days. And then we do have the generators. We have a solar power generator. I've used it. We use it at our trade shows consistently, but I personally used it. We had an event here a few years ago where we had a terrible windstorm in Utah, but we had hurricane force wind and I was out of power for seven days. And so I used our solar power generator to run my router, to run a TV and also run a refrigerator. The temperature was decent, it was September. So we were lucky there. We didn't have to necessarily worry about cooling or heating, but it gave us the necessities to be able to communicate with friends and maybe watch a TV show at night and keep our food cold in the fridge. So there's a lot of things that we have that'll support an emergency plan all the way through that you can come to ReadyWise and kind of have a one-stop shop. A lot of people have older children that are just getting out and getting started and they're on their own and they may not have as many financial resources as their parents. So a ReadyWise gift might make a good thing to send to your children as they're getting started, right? Just so that they'll be all set in case something happens to them and you don't have to worry about them. - Yeah, it's such a great idea and we actually do have a lot of consumers that purchase different kits for wedding presents, for family members, whether it's nieces or nephews or special friends. Christmas time is big for us as well where parents are wanting to give something to their married children that is meaningful, that is helpful. And so we'll go through a lot of different kits or some of those survival backpacks just to help people get started and have something. So that's exactly right. We have a lot of people that send their kids off to college with a small package that they can keep under their bed in a dorm or an apartment, just in the event that something happens. And that's one thing we faced with COVID. We got so many calls from parents that were so concerned about their kids who were stuck at college and couldn't get home and they were on lockdown and they didn't have really anywhere to go, even where they were eating was closed. And so they were forced to eat out of vending machines. And so we sent so much product on behalf of parents and loved ones to kids that were at school just to make sure that they could get through for a few days until they understood how they could get home or have a food supply chain again. - What's the website for ReadyWise? - Yeah, it's readywise.com and you're gonna find everything there. There's a couple of tabs there for emergency. We also have some outdoor products that are great for camping that you can cook in the pouch. So if you're hiking or backpacking, similar concept in terms of how easy it is to make the product. And then we have all those emergency supplies that we've talked about, generators, water filters, all those things. One of the other items that we offer that's really, really popular is our heirloom seed bucket as well. And so that's something that you can keep on your shelf. And then if you wanna use those to plant crops eventually, there's a variety of different seeds in that bucket that you can use and it's manufactured in a way that those seeds are good for about five to seven years before you need to plant them. So lots of different things to consider in terms of where you're at in your journey and how far you wanna take it. - Yeah, remember Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, was not allowing Home Depot and stores like that to gardening shops to sell seeds during COVID. I never understood it, but I guess there is a reason to buy some heirloom seeds just to have on hand, isn't there? - There is and how it's about control for them. I think the more control they have over us, I guess the less of this is the country that our forefathers founded. And so this whole concept of being prepared is really American. It's about being self-sufficient, not relying on government, not having to rely on government, which is what some of these folks really want us to do. And if you think that they can't even protect a guy running from president and you feel like they're gonna protect you and push comes the shove, I think you're not using the right mindset. So this is an opportunity for everyone to get prepared and kind of put their future in their own hands in terms of whatever happens. It's really an insurance policy, right? We buy life insurance. We're forced to buy car insurance and home insurance, but some of those things we hope we never have to use it, but we have it and we pay for it in the event that something happens. And this should be no different in terms of the mindset that we have as Americans is let's have something to feed our family should something happen. And now we have seen things happen in the last five years and the media doesn't want us to remember those things or exactly what happened, but we've now lived through it. Everybody that's here has lived through things that we never thought we would and where things were disrupted, where you went to the grocery store and shelves were empty or the things that you're used to buying were no longer there. - That's the problem. You know, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It could just be the increasing incompetence of people in power. - Yeah, and I agree with that. And most of the people that we have in power right now have never had a real job, their lifelong politicians. And so we shouldn't expect them to know how to make quality decisions based on the fact that a lot of them have never been anything but a committee member and learned how to make tough decisions that benefit others. And so I think when you look at the cold hard facts, it makes a lot of sense to have something in terms of this to just make sure that you and your family are prepared. - You've said in the past that you ultimately have to be in life, either a provider or a beggar. You have a choice to make here. And what is ready-wise enable you to do Brandon? - Well, ready-wise enables you to not be a beggar and not that we want to condemn or judge anybody that feels like they're in a position where they need a bag, but it allows you to be a provider for your family. And even in some cases for your neighbors, if you absolutely had to. And so there's no better feeling than being able to do those things and to serve and provide, especially for your family. For people that have had the opportunity to do that, I think that they would agree that when you can give, it is so much better than to have to take. And this is an easy way to be able to do that. - Yeah, and don't be daunted by the thought of spending a lot of money. I mean, you can start small. It's just like anything else. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and becoming prepared for an emergency begins with just a small purchase and just get started and see what you can do and see what you like. Isn't that right, Brandon? - Yeah, so many different ways to start. I mean, you can start for under 40 bucks a month and start with three day supplies of food. You can start with ingredients. We've got a whole variety of number 10 cans that have fruits or vegetables or freeze dried meats that are low priced. And you can, every month or every two months, spend 30 to $50 and get food on your shelf at a last a long time and it tastes delicious. And so like we said before, call the product specialist at 855-95-Ready, talk to them, ask them questions, share with them what you're comfortable with getting started and how often. And they can help put together a couple different plans that you could pick from and we can modify those as you go to in case things change, in case your family grows or in case somebody moves away and you don't need quite as much. You don't think we'll work with you to modify those plans and make sure that we're aligning with your budget and help you right through that. Brandon Erickson from ReadyWise, give us the website and the phone number one more time. Yeah, the website is readywise.com, R-E-A-D-Y-W-I-S-E.com. The phone number is 855-95-Ready or 855-957-3239. And we do have a promo code for all the listeners how we, for 25% off your order. And again, this is a good way to get started and our listeners love ReadyWise and the product always moves right off the shelf as soon as we put it on our store at howicarshow.com. People understand that and we particularly have huge sales in the state of Maine, especially the further north you go in Maine. But you know what, you need some emergency prepared foods, whether you're in the Arustic County in the county, as they say, or you're in the city of Boston. You need to have something in case of an emergency. Totally agree. Wherever you are, you're not immune to anything and you're gonna be better off and have a lot of peace of mind knowing that you have some of this product under your bed or in a pantry or in a basement. Brandon Erickson from ReadyWise. We really appreciate you being with us and I hope people will take advantage of this great deal. Use promo code HOWE to get an additional 25% off your order when you order. Thank you, Brandon. Howie, thanks so much. You're the best. It's always great to chat and catch up with you. Take care. (upbeat music) Thanks for joining us on Meet the Experts with Howie Car. We'll be back soon with more interesting guests. You're sure to learn a great deal from. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (dramatic music)