A few years ago, Ido Leffler , a Bay Area-based entrepreneur and founder, woke up in the middle of the night, suddenly bothered by a system he’d been participating in his whole life: the inflated cost of consumer packaged goods. “It just hit me: Why were we spending $15 or $20 on things that cost maybe $2 or $3 to make?” Leffler tells Fast Company.

Take granola, for instance. The farmers’ market and health store staple can be plucked off shelves for as much as $7 for eight ounces, despite the fact that all it is is an interesting arrangement of readily available grains and nuts. The steep price–which is a function of some of the ingredients, like nuts, falling on the expensive side, but also a response to consumer demand–has rendered the product aspirational (we tend to think expensive things are better for us), but also out of reach for many Americans.

That, Leffler thought, should not be the case. And when he met with Tina Sharkey, then the CEO of Sherpa Foundry, the incubator arm of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sherpa Capital, he learned that she’d long been thinking in a similar vein.

“We’re in a whole new phase of modern consumption,” Sharkey tells Fast Company. “There’s a generation of consumers now who don’t want their parents’ establishments, they don’t want their parents’ governments, they don’t want their parents’ industries, and they don’t want their parents’ brands.” It’s a sentiment that’s fueled the creation of direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane, whose mission it is to democratize access to good-quality clothing by eliminating markups (often in the region of 50% to 75% of manufacturing costs) associated with traditional brick-and-mortar retail, which necessitates that companies bring in extra revenue to pay for both staffing and property.

But there wasn’t yet an equivalent for consumer packaged goods, so Sharkey and Leffler set out to create a new landing point for a consumer who’s looking for quality and transparency, and eschews brand loyalty and the resulting choice overload familiar to anyone who’s ever stepped into a grocery store aisle. Their resulting venture is appropriately called Brandless, and it launched on July 11 with a curated selection of around 115 essential products (which will balloon to 300 by December)–from condiments to kitchen appliances to cleaning products–all for $3 or less.

“It’s very hard to fix a broken system,” Sharkey says. When she and Leffler surveyed the consumer packaged goods landscape, they saw a network of retail competition, layered with markups and inefficiencies and obscured by opaque business practices and pricing rationales. “So we decided: Let’s just start with a clean slate and build a new one,” she says.

Over the course of several years, Sharkey and Leffler sought out dozens of manufacturers in different areas of expertise to come on board the Brandless team and develop products to be sold through the platform. Each item sold on Brandless goes through rigorous testing, tweaking, and iteration at the company’s product development center in Minneapolis–because there is only one of each item sold on the site, Sharkey says, they wanted to ensure it was the best quality possible.