Make A Buck, Or Make A Difference: The Story Behind Keto-Mojo

After having doors slammed in their faces by countless investors, Keto-Mojo founders Gemma Kochis and Dorian Greenow--a husband-and-wife team of entrepreneurs who became true believers in the benefits of a ketogenic diet--took out a second mortgage on their house to launch a company aimed at making a low-carb lifestyle accessible to everyone.

That was on September 12, 2018. Less than a month later, the house they’d just refinanced burned to the ground.

“We like to joke that the insurance payout saved the company,” Gemma laughs. “But seriously: while it was a huge tragedy to us personally, it did teach us what’s important. And what’s important to us is to show as many people as possible that keto is a doorway to a better life.”

The company they decided to build, Keto-Mojo, helps educate and empower people in their ketogenic journey. Their first product was the first affordable system to track blood glucose and ketone levels. By using the Keto-Mojo GK+ glucose & ketone testing kit, alongside the Keto-Mojo app and MyMojoHealth, users can gain insight, track their progress, and make informed dietary choices in real-time as they embrace a low-carb, low-sugar diet.

Discovering the Keto Lifestyle

Gemma and Dorian’s faith in the benefits of what they call the “keto lifestyle” isn’t just marketing. Keto changed their lives.

Dorian first embraced a regulated ketogenic diet back in 2015 after a long period of struggling with his weight. The crisis point came when his Hb1AC crept up into the pre-diabetes range. As for Gemma? A self-described serial dieter, she had struggled with her weight for pretty much her whole life.

“Up until that point, I’d probably gained or lost as much as 500 pounds if you added it all up,” she says. “I was a product of the dietary guidelines of the ‘70s: I lived for carbs, and so I was always either overweight or dieting. But nothing was sustainable.”

"Up until that point, I’d probably gained or lost as much as 500 pounds if you added it all up. But nothing was sustainable until keto."

That changed when they went keto. Within a few months, Dorian lost 47 pounds. Impressed by her partner’s results, Gemma soon followed. While it took her longer to lose weight, she was amazed both by the rich food options and the general sense of empowerment that came with a keto-based diet. “It was the first time I could eat well [on a diet],” she says. They soon began preaching the benefits of the keto lifestyle to everyone they knew. And it wasn’t just weight loss they experienced, but additional positive knock-on effects like ‘keto clarity,’ which describes the mental clarity that occurs when you enter ketosis and begin burning fat for energy instead of sugar.

Dorian chalks up that mental clarity to giving him the insight that launched Keto-Mojo.

Solving the Ketone Testing Supply Chain

A data guy, Dorian soon found himself diving into the metrics behind his metabolism. He picked up a ketone blood meter and started tracking how different food choices impacted his body in real-time. But while the monitor itself was relatively inexpensive, Dorian was shocked by the price of the individual test strips the device required to operate every time he tested his levels. “I was like, why are these 4 or 5 bucks per strip?” he recalls. So he broke out a spreadsheet and started tracking the ketone test trip supply chain from retail through distributors all the way back to where they were manufactured in China. Then he started making long distance calls.

“It turned out there was a huge amount of bloat in the supply chain from middle men and large med tech companies,” Dorian says. “So I talked to Gemma and said: what if we cut out the bloat and could bring down the price of three tests a day to less than the price of a latté? How many lives could we change?”

That impact might seem overblown, but one thing that is discussed too infrequently when it comes to what we eat is class. Unhealthy food–that is, processed foods with lots of carbs and sugars–is both cheaper and more convenient than healthier choices. This, in part, is why the low-income population in the United States is disproportionately affected by obesity and diabetes. To reverse this trend, it’s critical to not only educate people about the affordability and health benefits of a ketogenic diet, but also to bring down cost as a barrier to glucose and ketone testing. 

Affordability, then, is a health equity issue. It was with this issue in mind that Keto-Mojo was born. 

“It shouldn’t take a husband-and-wife team to use their whole line of credit to make ketone testing affordable in the United States, but it did,” Dorian says.

"It shouldn’t take a husband-and-wife team to use their whole line of credit to make ketone testing affordable in the United States, but it did."

By launching Keto-Mojo, Dorian and Gemma successfully brought the price of ketone testing down by 75% to just $0.99 per strip, making routine testing affordable. Through both direct sales and partnerships (including with Virta), their mission to make glucose and ketogenic testing affordable and accessible has already touched thousands of lives.

"What's Our Legacy Going To Be?"

But the story of Keto-Mojo continues to unfold and grow in scope. Intent on advancing knowledge on the science of ketosis, Dorian and Gemma founded The Ketogenic Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity. As part of their work with the Ketogenic Foundation, Dorian and Gemma now travel the world, speaking at conferences on how a ketogenic diet can be used to treat everything from epilepsy to depression to Alzheimer’s.

Looking back at a journey over the past decade in which they not only risked everything to make keto accessible to as many people as possible, but went through a literal trial by fire, Dorian and Gemma admit that there are times when they doubted it would all work out. But through it all, their belief in the power of a keto lifestyle to change people’s lives has never wavered, which gave them strength early on when the future of the company seemed uncertain.

“It wasn’t easy to risk everything on this, or to lose our home,” Dorian says. “And we could have just become another middle man, selling strips at a huge markup. But we really believe in keto, so we asked ourselves: what’s our legacy going to be? To make a buck… or make a difference?”

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