Kevin O'Leary Investment RuckPack featured on Bloomberg TV

There tell people first of all about Ruckpack. What is this? This company and product? Ruckpack is a peak performance nutrition shot, pure and simple. It's good ingredients; it's the things you need that your body needs to stay on top, to stay in peak performance at all times.

Ok, so what's in it? I mean, is there caffeine or what is it? Oh, captain, and that's a very, very big point. We have zero caffeine in the product. It's vitamins, minerals, nutrients. We have our own proprietary blend, but generally, it's things your body already wants to stay healthy, to have energy. We just fill that gap that you can't get from the perfect meal every single time.

Ok, now one of the things you cannot get every single time when you're in the Marine Corps or anywhere in the military is that perfect meal, particularly when you're in the field or you've got an operation to focus on. Right? Tell us why you created this. So, while we're on deployment to Afghanistan, my first trip to Afghanistan actually with Marine Special Operations Command, we were taking supplements just because we had the MREs, but you need the time to eat the MRE, and sometimes you just don't have that time, right? So, we're taking supplements, and we started putting together, you know, why are we taking four or five, six or seven different types of supplements? Why don't we put it all in one place?

So we, you know, we looked for a couple different companies, asked them to make it, and when they didn't, we said, you know what? Why don't we make it ourselves? So that's what you did. That's exactly what we did. We spent three or four months basically making an in-the-field business plan.

And where is it now? Tell us about the company. Who's funded what? How big it's got. So it has caught a lot of speed. I think we did maybe thirty-five thousand dollars in the first year revenue just trying to get anyone that would buy it. We're in about a thousand stores now. We're sold online at Ruckpack.com. We'll be in nine thousand stores starting in January. We'll be doing a couple national chains chain-wide.

And all this, obviously, we got a pretty big bump off after we were on Shark Tank, but it continues to be very well supported because it's a great product. The product is one thing; you bring something else to the party, right? Because you not only are Ruckpack, but you also lecture, teach, and speak at various events. Tell us, for example, what you're going to be doing tomorrow.

Right. Well, tomorrow I'll be right back in class at the Naval Academy, teaching accounting and terrorist financing. The guys you just had with Unite Us, I think I met them at Columbia University speaking there. I want to go help vets, you know? That's why we started this company. We hire. We just launched our veteran distributor program today.

So tell us about that. So now you can go and get verified as a veteran at Ruckpack.com. Once you do, you have your user account; you can go start selling Ruckpack right now, today. We never need to meet; you don't need to interview, no phone calls. Start making money right now.

What's the business like for these kinds of energy and nutrition drinks? Because there's a lot of competition out there. There's a ton of competition. There are a lot of points of differentiation though from what we bring to the table with Ruckpack. So we know our story; we know our product. We don't really get into who's better or what's better. We just know that that's good to guys in the military.

Men and women, do they use the product in the military? They do. We ship a lot overseas, and now that's actually an option online now as well, so you can buy and you can ship some overseas. You can get some and give some at the same time. What about any new products on the horizon or new flavors?

Well, this is a brand new flavor that we just launched this week for Veterans Day anniversary. We've launched our blood orange shot. Blood oranges are... So you got two flavors now, right? Yes, tropical peach and blood orange. And why don't you pick blood orange? Was this a taste test?

It's, yeah, we... oh God, it was a taste test. We've tasted several different flavors; that's the best one. It just works well with the ingredients that we have in there. So why fight it? It works; let's go with that. Has it changed your love affair with meals ready to eat, with MREs?

You can't change that love affair. No, you know that. You're right, yeah. You can't change that, right? That's right. But in terms of calories, I mean, is this a supplement that replaces a meal, or is this designed to give you that boost? Let's say if you've got a strenuous activity, I've got an athletic event, I use it.

I use it for athletic events, so it has a lot of the electrolytes in there. A lot of people use it as a sports recovery drink. You know, they're drinking water the entire event, and now they're going to drink Ruckpack on there for the recovery as well. Is this also a response to the necessity of different kinds of nutrition out in the field?

And do you think that the government, that would be part of maybe it's not an MRE, but it would be something else? I mean, we're surprised when you were in theater that the food was... Well, the food, no. I think that, you know, you need to... you think of that MRE, what it's designed to do. Something like my product, you know, we're going to have to... you're going to have to have some shelf life in there. You know you need to be able to develop something for millions of troops over time, it's going to be an MRE exactly what it is, right? There's not too much.

Is that what you would like to do? You want to get this into the kits of...? We do; we want to develop something that's going to match well with the MRE. So it just throws those micronutrients on top of the macronutrients that they're providing. It just... it's a nice blend.

Can you describe a situation in which you were deployed where it was just horrible weather and you just really were not going to go and eat a regular meal and you wish you had something like this? Yeah, I just want one. Go ahead. How much time do you have? We had... I had two deployments to Afghanistan. There are a couple times where I've gone over 7500-foot peaks, two feet of snow, you know that typical thing, snowing uphill both ways, trip in and trip out.

And that entire time, like, there's just not a lot of time to stop and rest, and oh, I'm just going to hunker down here for the next half hour and have a meal. So there have been a lot of times that I really wish I had a Ruckpack. Throw it down, keep going, and it keeps you in the fight.

Exactly why we made it.