Daniel Lubetzky has spun chocolate, nuts and do-gooder rhetoric into a snack company worth billions. Maybe someday he’ll get back to his true passion: changing the world for the good.
Maybe that’s because Lubetzky isn’t really selling food. Rather he is peddling health and altruism, at least the cheap sort you can buy in a 1.4-ounce fruit-and-nut snack bar drizzled with chocolate. Clues to Lubetzky’s deeper ambitions abound in his office decor: On one wall hang framed photos of him with Pope Francis, President Barack Obama and Shimon Peres, the late president of Israel. Books about the Middle East line another.
By the company’s count—based on the number of #kindawesome cards doled out, employee volunteer activity and donations of snack bars to nonprofits—it has facilitated 11 million acts of kindness since 2004. That’s essentially 11 million marketing campaigns. Kind bars aren’t particularly good for you, and the very- much-for-profit company has given just a pittance to charity.
That success attracted the attention of Mars, the maker of M&M’s, Snickers and more, which bought an estimated 40% stake in Kind for an undisclosed amount in 2017. The influx of capital came at what appears to be just the right time. Kind’s growth had been slowing as new competition caught on and nutritionists questioned how healthy the bars really were. None of that has deterred Lubetzky.
After law school he moved to Israel on a fellowship to develop his cross-cultural business ideas but was stymied. “Nobody wanted this confused Mexican-Jewish attorney teaching them how to do business between Arabs and Israelis,” Lubetzky recalls. “So that went nowhere.” He started off with the sun-dried-tomato paste, which he brought back to New York and sold out of his briefcase. “People thought I was insane because the jars were all wrong, the olive oil was leaking, the pricing wasn’t right,” Lubetzky recalls. “But I would ask them for advice for what I needed to fix, and I would come back a few months later with a better product for them.”
Lubetzky remembers going to the Whole Foods in Denver and Los Angeles, helping managers stock shelves, following them to the warehouses in the back, inviting himself on their lunch break—all the while pitching his product and insisting they try samples of his snack bar until they eventually put in an order.
That was the boost it needed. From 2009 onward, Kind took off. Lubetzky credits the expansion of the company’s free-sampling program as the reason for growth at the time. In 2008, Kind spent just $800 giving away samples of its bars. In 2009, with urging from his new investors, Kind expanded its sampling and field-marketing budget to $800,000. Today the company has a $20 million sampling budget, which pays the field workers and covers the cost of free bars.
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