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Radiate Miami is changing the city culture by changing the culture in your gut

Three years ago, Susan Duprey was questioning whether she’d made the right choice when she decided to move her family to Miami from California, where she’d been living for 10 years immersed in that state’s yoga and holistic health community.

“I hated everything about [Miami],” she said.

But two years into her stay here, something clicked, and she became “completely obsessed” with Miami, and all the ways it was changing.  

Last December, she opened Radiate Miami, a modern apothecary. Duprey says she’s already signed up large numbers of distributors of her products, especially her kombucha, which is now featured in places like TRIO yoga studio in Wynwood, Mendez Fuel in Coral Gables, and remote sites like the Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival.

What is it?

The apothecary features organic beauty products, a food box subscription service that features  raw vegan foods, and the kombucha, which you can also get on tap at Wynwood Yard.   

Most of the ingredients for her products are sourced through the Little River Cooperative, a sustainable farming community in the Little River neighborhood. That’s a large part of what ties all the components of Radiate together: community and culture, in both the social and biological sense — i.e. the microbiomes that operate in your stomach, something she says she has studied intensively as part of her clinical work.

Why microbiomes?

There’s been a wave of recent studies showing how gut “cultures” or bacteria can dramatically impact one’s health; red meat consumption, for instance has been found to act like an atomic bomb to your overall health because it releases a toxic chemical in your stomach.

“My interest is gut microbiomes, soils, and localizing food systems, and connecting how one is essential to another,” she says.

She uses the example of the word “company,” which is actually a modernized form of saying “group of people who break bread together.” (Con-Pan…)

“It’s my philosophy that through localizing our food system and cultivating ‘culture’ via fermented foods that we can come to more common ground,” she says.

Duprey says he’s gotten offers to ship her products to New York and Los Angeles but has turned them down because she wants to stay local.

Who’s behind it?

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thank you for highlighting @radiateapothecary @wynwoodyard!! so much appreciated!! Repost from @wynwoodyard using @RepostRegramApp – @susanduprey is the woman behind @radiateapothecary, one of our newest businesses. It's a modern version of the old-school drugstore. That means, just like in the old days, you can pull up to the @radiateapothecary counter and talk to Susan, a certified nutritionist and holistic health coach about your questions. All of the tinctures, beauty products, toothpastes, deodorants, kombucha and other fermented products sold at the counter are made from scratch from all-natural ingredients. You can visit Radiate on afternoons during weekdays and all day on weekends or message Susan at @radiateapothecary to make a set time to chat! (beautiful counter by @customfinishing and photo by @jessicakassin) #radiateapothecary #TheYardLife #entrepreneur

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Radiate isn’t even Duprey’s day job (although in some ways this is changing). She’s a trained nutritionist, with a private practice for clients interested in getting certified in holistic medicine, yoga and organic food prep. She grew up in Connecticut but found her calling out west, first in Northern California and then in Los Angeles.

Family needs brought her to Miami. She had long taken a heavy interest in organic food, and started doing pop-up dinners at Wynwood Yard, which she was initially attracted to for its sense of community. She shrugs at being called a “vegan chef,” but interest in her meals began spreading so much that she was asked to do weddings and other events.  

Eventually, she set up full-time at Wynwood Yard, where she can be found today — but as mentioned earlier, Radiate products can now be found all over the region. And it’s all been through word of mouth.

“I haven’t done one sales meeting,” she says.

What’s next?

Radiate has been so successful that she has on occasion found herself working 20 hour days.

“Right now I’m in that growing space between not big enough to have a staff and employees, but too big to maintain it on my own,” she says.

But most important for her has been being in Miami in 2017.

“There’s a really special moment happening in Miami right now, and I feel super blessed to be part of it,” she says. “Yeah, it took me two years to love it, but it also feels like a completely different city than it was two years ago. This wave feels like…there’s a wellness wave, a conscious wave happening. We’re creating the city we want to live in.”

By Rob Wile
Rob Wile, the curator for Startup.Miami, is a writer and entrepreneur living in Miami Beach. He’s a former staff writer for Fusion and Business Insider. His work has also appeared in Slate, Newsweek, Money Magazine and The New Tropic. He writes a newsletter on tech, business, and the South Florida economy called The Heatwave.