How Element Apothec Is Blending Ancient Remedies and Modern Science to Create Effective, Natural Solutions
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Show Notes:
In this episode of Mission Matters, host Adam Torres interviews Davina Kaonohi, CEO & Co-Founder of Element Apothec, on how a deeply personal family journey evolved into a science-led plant-based wellness brand. From handcrafted tinctures to global product launches, Davina shares how data, purpose, and healing drive the mission behind Element Apothec. Recorded live at the Newport Beach Investor Conference.
About Davina Kaonohi
Davina Kaonohi is a visionary founder, dynamic strategist, and trusted advisor helping businesses, founders, and leadership teams evolve at the intersection of growth strategy, technology innovation, and human-centered leadership.
As CEO and Co-Founder of Element Apothec, and through her leadership roles at Dreamore and Artest Management Group, Davina works at the intersection of business evolution, leadership development, AI and advanced technology integration, and future-ready organizational design. Her expertise spans business strategy, AI-driven transformation, M&A advisory, organizational scaling, founder success coaching, and brand innovation.
At Element Apothec, she has led the company’s transformation into a pioneering force in wellness blending science-backed innovation with purpose-driven leadership to create sustainable, impactful solutions that bridge science, nature, and human well-being.
Watch Full Interview:
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on ER guest to apply. All right, so today I’m in Newport Beach at the Newport Beach Investor Conference having all kinds of fun we’re doing where we’re listening to investors, we’re seeing pitches, people are raising capital, a lot of investors in the room that we’re talking to.
And my next guest is Davina Davina, welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you for having me here today. All right, Davina, so Newport Beach Investor Conference. Have you been to a con this conference before or is this your first time? No, I’ve been here before. I think this is my fifth or sixth time coming to this year.
Oh, you are a pro. What keeps you coming back? I mean, it’s just such an amazing event with the people that come here, the quality of people, the conversations, the networking, the presentations. Yeah, it’s, it’s one of the better investor events that I attend, and I always tell people, this is. One of the events that you should come to just because of and the range of different types of companies and products and things.
There were so many other events are much more specialized. Yeah. Here you get a broad range of so many different people and so many different types of investors as well. Hmm. So tell, tell us a little bit more about your company, speaking of companies. Yeah. So my company is Element Apathic. Our whole purpose is grounded in blending the idea of ancient science and modern medicine.
Mm-hmm. So how can we help people live better lives through. Natural plant-based products mm-hmm. That help their bodies start to heal themselves. Of course, western medicine’s important in some aspects, but there’s many ways that we can heal ourselves and take care of ourselves and be more proactive in our care through plant-based remedies.
Hmm. How’d you get into that business? Well the products actually started with my great aunt. She was quite sick. No way. I was diagnosed with over eight autoimmune diseases in three years. Oh. She was getting sicker and sicker by the day, taking more medication, having to take other medications to manage the symptoms of those mm-hmm.
Medications. And so she, she just started thinking she’s religious also. And she was like, why in the Bible where. People taking risso and frankincense and yeah, she started looking at other cultures also, and why are they taking this and why are they taking that interesting? And why am I continuing to be prescribed medication, right?
Mm-hmm. It doesn’t always make sense. So she started this journey of really understanding plant-based medicine. Yeah. What each of the different products could do, the ingredients, how you could mix them together. Her kitchen became like, you could imagine this like giant workshop of plant-based medicine and ingredients and stuff.
It was super cool. And so she started taking, making products that started help her. Did she, real quick, before you go further, did she have a background in this? No. She, was she in like medicine? Was she in this, that, or she was just literally in the kitchen like she was in and she was learning. She was reading, she was buying books.
Yeah. I love stories. Like, like this process. It was such a, she literally just, yeah, just like in it. And just How long was that? Like, if you remember Roughly. Just like, it was a couple years where she was, you know, learning and understanding and mixing. And then she did end up taking some courses. She got certified in essential oils.
Mm-hmm. And. I take took some plant-based medicine courses, but it started out just as, what was it like during those early days when you go over her house? Like just tell, gimme the insights scoop. It was like, you’d be like, what is going on? Like, like you’re walking into like this mad kitchen, right? It’s like Harry Potter, like you’re, yeah, kinda like that when they’re kind of like in class, there’s bottles and jars and all, something like that.
You’re like all an yeah, it’s exactly like that. What is in that bottle? But then she would make you something like, I had eczema and I had always had taken. New steroid creams that stop working. Mm-hmm. You have to take this, take this pill. My whole life was like that to the point where sometimes I’d get so bad I would wear turtleneck as it’d be around my neck or wouldn’t go to the beach ’cause I would have eczema so bad.
Mm-hmm. She made me this lotion and it cleared it like nothing ever had. And I was like, whatever she has going on is amazing. My son had severe anxiety and she made him some, a tincture that helped relieve his anxiety. They wanted to put him on medication. So yeah, through the process. I started to un and I always had, you know, I was the friend that was like, do you know what makeup you’re putting on?
Make sure you have clean house. Yeah. Cleaning products. I was that person, but I hadn’t really thought about the medicines that I was taking. Mm. And trusting that everything I was taking was helping me. Mm-hmm. And not realizing that some of it was making things worse. Mm-hmm. Or not actually helping, but just maybe covering up what I was actually experiencing.
I hadn’t taken my. Clean living over to that side of it. But using her products was a big eye-opener for me. And, and I had taken, I work out, I was taking creatine and all these supplements. Mm-hmm. So I knew the value of addition of things, but I didn’t really think about plant-based medicine as a healing modality for myself until I started using her product.
She went on a couple more years, she developed 43 custom formulations. ’cause you might go and say, Hey Lola, my stomach’s hurting, my head’s hurting my skin. Can you make me something? And she would make products for friends and family through her church. So 43 custom formulations. And she just came to me and she goes, I, I really wanna do something with this.
Can you build me a website? Mm-hmm. I built her a website. Interesting. Which was really cool. It was called Inspired Home Blends at the time. Mm-hmm. And then she said, you know what, I really feel like we could take these products from the kitchen to the world. Just imagine how many people we can help. Mm.
And it just sparked, I was in between a bus, previous business, I had just shut down. Mm-hmm. And was trying to figure out what I was gonna do next. Mm. And it was right there. Like, this really is. So I said yes, but if we do it, we. The difference is a lot of plant-based companies don’t have medical oversight, so I really want to have doctors as our advisors.
Mm-hmm. I want a chief scientific officer that’s trained in pharmaceuticals. Mm-hmm. I want to have that validation so we can build and scale in a way that a lot of companies aren’t thinking about. I want us to write white papers. I, I see this vision where it can really all come together and be a synchronistic in the way that it works together.
Mm-hmm. So she says. Do whatever it is that you wanna do, but here’s my formulation. Whoa. So change the name to Element Apathic. I brought on a chief scientific officer who was a pharmacist mm-hmm. By trade that was doing a lot of education. Built an amazing medical advisory board with gastrointestinal doctor, a dermatologist, a tumor pharmacist amazing people.
Mm-hmm. Were recognized in the industry for their specialty. And so let’s all come together. Wow. Let’s. Look at what the formulation she has, let’s make sure the ingredients are actually effective, right? Mm-hmm. We don’t wanna just put something in there for the name of having it in there. Right. And maybe she only had a couple drops, but do we need five drops?
Do we need mm-hmm. 10 drops? Like, what do we actually need to function in and, and outside the human body? Mm-hmm. So we reformulated, we actually didn’t have to make many changes, which was, that’s interesting. Really cool. Because she already had done it right now. Wow. And yeah. And then we launched the brand.
It’s been about five years now. Amazing. We’ve just been slowly. Building, growing. Yeah. Adding new products. We just launched a mushroom coffee recently. Mm. Which is really cool. And just to see the products out there on shelf or in some retail locations. Mm-hmm. Our products are in Thailand. We’re talking about international expansion, so.
So we really have taken her products from the kitchen to the world, which is amazing. Oh my. What an amazing story. How did you know I wanna stay in the early days, just a little longer. Mm-hmm. How did you know that this was gonna be like a product that was marketable and like, ’cause it, it, although especially those early days, you had to have a lot of belief to, to take something to market and mm-hmm.
What was that for you? I mean, for me it, I am a, I am a scientist by trader, engineer by trade, so. I’m definitely more on the data analysis side. Yeah. So part of it was I used, so that’s gotta be a little hard, like you’re in the kitchen at the, the early days. Yeah. But there’s a, there is yes and no because Yes.
It was hard. But also, I personally had trusted the products. I had bought some of her products for friends. So, so from observational side I saw, but then from a data side, it was at the point where there was, it was starting to be, it was before COVID hit. Right. So, okay. But you started to see a shift in the data in terms of the types of people that were now looking for alternative based products that Oh, foods.
So the market was changing sprouts. The market was changing and expanding. So for me, I saw this shift in the way people were thinking about how they were starting to take care of themselves. Yeah. And that was the kind of data that to me and was like, okay, people are, yeah, coming along this path might be receptive for this now.
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s a combination of both the observational as well as the. Data to then say, okay, let’s go ahead and move forward with this. Amazing. Yeah. Well, Dina, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show today and get to know more about the journey, about the product and and your background as well.
So, last thing I want you to do, I want you to look into the camera. How do people order some, how do they connect? How do they follow up? Yeah, so you can go on our [email protected]. Mm-hmm. And you can order our products there. We’re actually launching our mushroom coffee on Amazon, which is quite.
Exciting so you can find it there. As well, we’re on Instagram and, and me personally, I’m on LinkedIn. I always love talking to people about their entrepreneurial journeys and I do a lot of advisory and mentor mentorship also for. New founders that are trying to figure out what it is that they want to do.
That’s awesome. And for everybody watching, just so you know we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet. Hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Dina, thanks again for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you so much. So much. Yes. Nice to meet you.
