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You probably drink coffee every day. Maybe twice. Maybe more. But here's what you probably don't know: over 80% of the commercial coffee sold in the world contains traces of mold and mycotoxins. The headaches you blame on caffeine? The stomach aches? The brain fog? That's not the coffee. That's what's hiding in it.
Caleb Sloop knew this before most people did — because it almost destroyed his mother's health.
Seek founder Caleb Sloop breaks down why he started a coffee company as a teenager, why the industry's regulatory vacuum is making Americans sick, and how two brothers decided to fix the most contaminated crop in the world.
Caleb Sloop shouldn't be here. That's not a metaphor.
When he was two years old, he was diagnosed with retinoblastoma — a rare stage four cancer in his left retina. The doctors found it too late for chemotherapy. They removed the eye entirely. And then, inexplicably, the cancer stopped. His doctors told his parents there was no medical reason their son should be alive.
That kind of beginning shapes a person.
Without depth perception, Caleb was put into gymnastics early to rebuild his spatial awareness and balance — something most people take for granted because they have two eyes. He competed for 14 years. And somewhere along the way, he developed a lens on life that most people never find: every day is a gift, full stop. Not as a motivational poster. As a lived reality.
That foundation — gratitude, obsession, purpose — is what eventually built Seek.
But the trigger was his mom.
For over 20 years, Caleb's mother battled mold toxicity and a cascade of chronic illnesses: Hashimoto's, lupus, Sjogren's syndrome. The family is passionate about coffee — it's a daily ritual, a comfort, a constant. But somewhere along her health journey, they started connecting the dots. Every time she drank coffee from conventional cafes or commercial brands, her symptoms got worse.
When they dug into why, what they found was staggering: coffee is one of the most heavily mold-contaminated crops in the world. The growing process, the shipping, the storage — mold can take hold at every single stage of the supply chain. And because there's no centralized regulatory system in the US to stop it, most of what ends up in American cups is what the European Union and Japan have already rejected for their own markets.
So two brothers (Caleb and Will) decided to do something about it.
They sourced from small, organic, family-owned farms. They shipped the beans to a third-party laboratory and tested for mold, yeast, mycotoxins, and pesticides. They roasted carefully to preserve the antioxidant and polyphenol content. And they made a clean cup of coffee for their mom.
It didn't make her worse. It made her better.
That small, quiet win became Seek.
Most coffee companies talk about origin and roast profiles. Seek talks about what's not in the cup.
The premise is simple but radical: coffee shouldn't make you sick. And for millions of people — especially those already navigating chronic illness, gut issues, or autoimmune conditions — conventional coffee is doing exactly that. They've blamed the caffeine. They've given it up entirely. They've lost one of the most meaningful rituals of their day.
Seek's approach starts upstream. Organic farms, carefully selected. Third-party lab testing across multiple panels — mold, mycotoxins, yeast, pesticides. Optimal roasting that protects both taste and the bioactive compounds that make coffee one of the world's most antioxidant-rich substances. The result is a product positioned not as a premium coffee, but as a wellness product that happens to taste exceptional.
"We're not a coffee company," Caleb says. "We're a wellness company that happens to create really, really good coffee."
The distribution strategy reflects the same conviction. Seek launched direct-to-consumer first — deliberately. Not because the math forced it, but because Caleb wanted to hear directly from customers. He reads every testimonial, every DM, every email. He responds to as many as he can. That feedback loop doesn't exist when you're on a shelf at Whole Foods.
The partnerships Seek has built are equally intentional. Rather than chasing influencers, Seek has built relationships with mold-literate clinicians, practitioners, and wellness spaces like Remedy Place. The logic: get the product in front of the people who actually need it, recommended by the people those customers already trust.
This is Caleb's sharpest observation.
When you've been sick long enough, you stop noticing. The headaches after your morning coffee feel normal. The afternoon fog feels like just how you are. The stomach aches feel like something you manage, not something you fix.
That's not a personal failure. That's what happens when an entire food supply has a quality problem no one is officially measuring.
The regulatory gap in coffee is real. There's no US authority mandating contamination testing for commercial coffee. What the EU and Japan reject — produce that fails their mycotoxin standards — gets exported here. And because the symptoms of mold exposure are diffuse and easy to attribute to other causes, most people never make the connection.
Caleb isn't angry about this. He's focused. The wave he's trying to catch is the same one that turned "certified organic" from a niche concern into a mainstream expectation. Consumers woke up to pesticides they couldn't see. They're starting to wake up to mold the same way.
Seek wants to be there when they do.
The jump from competitive gymnast to wellness entrepreneur looks unusual from the outside. Inside Caleb's story, it's a direct line.
Gymnastics gave him discipline — the kind that comes from 14 years of training something that doesn't come naturally. It gave him a framework for obsession that isn't destructive but directional. And it gave him a relationship with his own body — what it needs, how it responds, what happens when you put the wrong inputs in — that made the coffee quality problem impossible to ignore once he saw it.
His philosophy on obsession is worth unpacking. He doesn't frame it as grinding or hustling. He frames it as stewardship. What gifts has your life given you? What vehicle do you use to bring them into the world? For Caleb, the gift was health — born from surviving cancer, forged in watching his mother suffer, and clarified by finally finding something that helped.
Obsession was just the vehicle.
The vision Caleb describes is bigger than a coffee brand.
Mold-free, toxin-free coffee is the first expression. But the underlying mission — clean products that don't make the people who need them most feel worse — has room to grow. The name Seek was chosen carefully. Everyone is seeking something. What you choose to seek each day matters. If you can fuel yourself right at the start of the day, you go out and seek what matters most with everything you have.
The brand is already showing up in the places that align: longevity wellness spaces, integrative medicine offices, communities where people have stopped accepting "sick" as a default state.
As consumer awareness around mold and mycotoxins grows — and the evidence suggests it will — Seek is positioned to be what Bulletproof was for the first wave: a category definer.
For someone who came up through elite gymnastics and runs a wellness company, the stack is refreshingly minimal.
Seek Coffee | Two to three cans a day. Coffee, he'll remind you, is the most consumed supplement in the world — naturally high in antioxidants and polyphenols. When it's clean, it earns its place.
Intermittent Fasting | Last meal around 7–8pm, first meal the next day at 1pm. No gadgets required. No cost. Just structure. He calls it the easiest performance tool most people overlook.
Oura Ring | HRV tracking, sleep quality, recovery. He's agnostic on brand — WHOOP works too — but the data matters.
Gymnastics Training | Still going, several times a week. Handstand pushups, splits, flexibility work. His framing: flexibility is youth. Movement keeps you young in ways the gym alone doesn't.
Blue Light Blocking Glasses | Underrated, he says. The impact on melatonin production and sleep quality is real and accessible.
Walking | Not a biohack. Just a lot of daily movement. Simple, consistent, effective.
His meta-point is the sharpest thing in the stack: less is more. The best habit is the one you actually keep. The field is full of people who tried everything and stuck with nothing. Caleb would rather do six things perfectly than sixteen things intermittently.
Caleb Sloop didn't build Seek to be a coffee company. He built it because his mom was sick, because he spent years understanding why, and because the answer — cleaner sourcing, real testing, honest formulation — wasn't actually that complicated. It was just inconvenient for an industry that had never been asked to do it.
What makes Seek different isn't the branding. It's the founding problem. When your mother's health is the reason the product exists, you don't cut corners on testing. You don't source from whoever offers the best margin. You don't stop reading customer emails when you get big enough to hire someone else to do it.
The mold-free coffee wave is coming. The regulatory conversation is building. And the consumers who've been quietly blaming themselves for how coffee makes them feel are starting to ask better questions.
Seek is already there with the answers.
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