I’ll never forget the day I was introduced to Sakara.

Picture this: It’s 2012 on a sweltering summer day in New York City’s Lower East Side. I’m tucked inside a raw food café called Gingersnaps Organics, a very IYKYK health joint during an era of super-seekers in the wellness space, where Jordan Younger (fka The Blonde Vegan) was hosting a meetup and every wellness it girl was in attendance. I watched as Nicole Berrie snacked on a plant-based hors d’oeuvre and chatted with Mark Sisson while flipping through the pages of Gabby Bernstein’s newest release, Spirit Junkie.

Also in attendance were Sakara’s founders, 20-something Whitney Tingle and Danielle Duboise, who leaned against the raw food chef counter in striking white silk suits, wearing bright red lipstick and tousled blonde Olsen-style hair. (My teenage self made a mental note to invest in white silk and red lipstick, ASAP.) This was an era where the best friends in business were giving the term “grassroots” a whole new meaning (pun intended). From spreading the word amongst influential groups of friends in health, to delivering their plant-based meals on bicycles around Manhattan, Tingle and Duboise had an instinct that meal delivery and accessible nutrition were about to explode.

“We really were on bicycles,” Duboise tells me over Zoom, reflecting on Sakara’s early days in NYC. “It was beautiful, but it was also intense. We gave it everything we had.” The nourishment expert with a master’s in functional medicine and human nutrition discovered the positive impact of plants and mindfulness after years of restrictive dieting. “As someone who grew up with disordered eating patterns my whole life, no one ever told you that you could nourish and take care of yourself and get the body wanted, so I’m proud to tell the story of just realizing food isn’t the enemy, but a tool to help me feel better in my skin,” she adds. As it turns out, skin health was the impetus of Tingle’s wellness journey, as she turned to nutrition to heal her chronic cystic acne (and it worked).

As pioneers in an industry that has since become a trillion-dollar market, Duboise and Tingle are doubling down on what nutrition means to them and their community of savvy health enthusiasts, including celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Victoria’s Secret angel Lily Aldridge, who have both been customers since the brand’s inception. “We are strong in our nutrition philosophy: eating whole foods, nourishing your body, getting enough plants, a variety of antioxidants,” Tingle attests. “Our [Sakara] way has stood the test of time, because it’s what makes people feel good. A trend is a trend — it will live and it will die. When it comes to nutrition, we believe plants are medicine.”

From Sakara’s foundational nutrition program to its Level II detox and array of supplements that support beauty from the inside-out, it’s their fashion-forward branding that sets them apart. “We’ve always talked about how it’s our job to really seduce people into taking care of themselves,” Duboise says. The brand’s community, cheekily called “Sakaralites,” know well that every delivery includes a bright-colored, Instagram-worthy bite due to natural ingredients like spirulina or turmeric. “Nobody wants to be told to eat well or take long breaths. People want a secret pill that’s going to do it all. And that’s OK, no judgement — that’s just human nature,” Duboise adds. “Instead, we lean into this really seductive presentation, because people need constant reminders that it’s the small things you do every day that equal a healthy, well body; the decisions that we’re constantly confronted with that matter most, not the thing we do every once in a while.”

Ahead, TZR unlocks Sakara’s secrets to living well — from private Pilates to the power of trusting your gut (with supportive supplements for good measure).

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

Danielle Duboise: I love our Daily Elixir, because I tend to do my things in the morning. I’m too tired to do any meaningful rituals at night. You can take a sip of this right away, and then you don’t think about it. There are so many times I’ve meant to take my supplements and I forget. When you think about your wellness “to-do list,” I’m grateful for the things that are easy and you can check them off. It has methylated vitamin B, vitamin E, and choline — so really high antioxidant levels. And it’s delicious.

What is an underrated wellness philosophy you swear by?

DD: Body intelligence is key. I don’t personally subscribe to the idea of intuitive eating — it makes it seem like you were just bestowed this gift of knowing, but true body intelligence is something you cultivate. It’s a muscle that you build, and you build it by asking yourself questions, by tuning in, by eating the right things. Endless benefits come from a healthy gut, a healthy connection to ourselves, and a healthy connection to our plate. Those were not things that came easily to me — so that’s kind of where the the relationship piece comes in, where you can ask and your body will answer.

Whitney Tingle: You have to change your mind before you change your body. Surrounding yourself with a community of people who can help you is so important, especially when the rest of the world isn’t necessarily trying to lift you up – for example, the wide range of tasty, but addictive, foods that are available. At Sakara, we want to give you a variety of different tools to help make living well easy and fun.

What are you listening to these days?

DD: I love to take really long walks with an audiobook. I did podcasts for so long, and I loved them, but sometimes I don’t want to learn — more literature, less science. I want to be swept away in a narrative. I want poems and words I have to look up. Right now, I’m listening to The Body is a Doorway. She’s an incredible writer, and she’s [young] and it’s a memoir — it’s a beautiful book about a very short life, and reminds you that a healthy person has a million wishes, but an unhealthy person only has one.

Do you have a favorite wellness practice?

DD: I do private Pilates every week with a teacher who has really changed my life. She doesn’t let you get away with anything! Two other things that always bring me back home to myself: playing with my kids — and it’s hard sometimes, because they’ll come to you and say, “let’s play this!” and your first thought is always like, I’m tired, or I have to cook, or I have do this errand — but I’ve really been trying to meet them in their joy, and follow their curiosity. It brings you back to being a kid yourself.

WT: I really cherish my bedtime rituals with my son, like getting to read every night to him, and we do a yoga nidra or body scan type of meditation for him. It’s something that my dad did with me, and I didn’t know that it was yoga nidra at the time. He would explain it like a ball rolling down my body, and as the ball rolled over a part of the body, then it would relax and go to sleep. And so I do that with my son, but I switch it up. Sometimes it’s snowflakes falling on him, or bubbles, or sometimes he’s getting covered in sand — it’s fun. It helps him relax, but also [helps] me. I’m only thinking about that, so it’s a form of meditation for both of us. That, and being in nature. It builds curiosity and expands your mind. Getting back on the frequency of the planet.

Do you have any favorite bedtime rituals?

WT: Skin care is definitely a part of my ritual, it’s something I do every single night. I love trying new products and tinkering with my routine all the time. I’m very into Vintner’s Daughter cleanser. I love serums by Marie Veronique, they’re made small batch in Berkeley, California, and are just really thoughtful products. Our new sleep supplement, too. It’s amazing because it’s not just about helping you sleep, it’s about how you feel the next day. So many sleep supplements are just trying to knock you out, but ours are about getting to the root cause of why you might be awake. Night Service has magnesium to help with muscle relaxation and the tart cherry, which is a precursor to melatonin. So instead of just hitting you with melatonin and trying to make you drowsy, it has pharma GABA, which is the natural form of GABA to help quiet a busy mind.

DD: Something I’m really into right now are microcurrent devices — I have both the Zip and the NuFace. I love them. I do them five days a week and I do one in each hand. I’ll do seven minutes each side of the face, using each one — so [about] 15 minutes total. I start at the neck and go all the way up.

What’s your go-to secret weapon when you want to look and feel good?

WT: Eat the rainbow; you’re getting so many different antioxidants. When you’re sick, you take vitamin C, that’s an antioxidant. It’s helping your body recover. When you get cut, you put vitamin E oil on it to help it heal and not scar. It’s an antioxidant, and like your body, needs antioxidants to neutralize free radicals and support healing and slow the aging process.

What’s a quote or mantra that you live by?

WT & DD: What I think, I create.