Daniel Lubetzky spent 10 years pouring himself into a mission-driven business that, for all its good intentions, was barely surviving.

While working punishing hours, traveling the world, and training for the New York Marathon, he kept hitting the same wall. He couldn’t find a snack that was both healthy and good to eat.

So he set out to build the one that didn’t exist.

That snack became KIND, which grew from a windowless basement into one of the most successful snack companies in history.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share Daniel’s remarkable journey as well as:

Enjoy this KIND story...LG

One of the stories Daniel Lubetzky heard constantly growing up was about a soldier and a potato.

At a Nazi prison camp, a German soldier threw a potato toward a starving boy. The soldier could have been punished for it, but he did it anyway.

The boy was Daniel’s father, Roman. He always believed that potato saved his life. It came when he had nothing left.

After the war, Roman built a life in Mexico, but he never let the story go. He told it to his family again and again, until the soldier and the potato lodged in his son for good.

Daniel grew up hearing about that kind gesture long before he understood what he would do with it.

THE MAGIC YEARS

Daniel grew up doing magic. He started young, performing at bar mitzvahs and weddings around Mexico City, and it taught him more than tricks. Practice. Discipline. How to hold a room. How to think past what looks impossible.

When he was sixteen, a wave of anti-Semitic incidents pushed his father to move the family from Mexico City to San Antonio.

At Trinity University he studied economics and international relations and spent his summers performing magic across Europe, from the streets of Paris to the squares of Bulgaria. The shows paid his way and showed him the world.

He got his law degree from Stanford and became a lawyer at a prominent Wall Street firm. But that paper left a lasting impression on him. He soon left to pursue a fellowship he had earned in school, focused on economic cooperation in the Middle East and he ended up back in Israel.

THE POWER OF PASTE

While doing research in Israel, Daniel discovered a sundried tomato spread unlike anything he had tasted.

It wasn’t available in the U.S., so he tracked down the owner, only to learn the company had gone bankrupt. It had been sourcing tomatoes from Italy and jars from Portugal, too expensive to survive.

In that moment, his thesis came alive. Source the jars from Egypt. The olive oil from Palestinian farmers. The tomatoes from Turkey. Sell it in Israel and the world. Make the business work, and make adversaries depend on each other to do it.

What kept him in it was his suppliers. When he talked about winding it down, they told him their livelihoods depended on it. This is our future, they said. You can’t just walk away. His class paper had become their living. So he kept going, believing things would get better.

BE KIND TO THE WORLD

About that time, Daniel was working 12-18 hour days, traveling the world for PeaceWorks, and training for the New York Marathon. 

Wherever he went, he couldn’t find a snack that would sustain him. Everything in the airport was the same. Too indulgent, or tasted like cardboard, or full of things he couldn’t pronounce. Every time, he had to sacrifice either his taste buds or his health.

He rejected the choice. He wanted healthy AND tasty. Wholesome AND convenient. A business AND a mission. The refusal to accept OR became the whole philosophy.

Advisors told him not to do it. It had nothing to do with PeaceWorks, and snack bars were a risky bet. But he felt in his gut it would be big, because it solved a problem people actually had.

Then he thought back to the potato, and the kindness that saved his father. That became the name, and the promise. Do the KIND thing for your body, for your taste buds, and for the world.

THE BASEMENT AND THE BEAT-UP CAR

KIND launched with about $10,000 of Daniel’s savings. The office was a windowless basement that ran $500 a month, reached through a laundromat and past a trash compactor. He furnished it with desks off the street.

The product looked like nothing else on the shelf. Most bars were ground into paste and pressed into slabs you couldn’t see into. Daniel wanted you to see exactly what you were eating. Whole nuts, dried fruit, and honey, through clear packaging.

That made KIND brutally hard to make. Competitors blended everything into a uniform mash-like mix, so every bar weighed the same. Daniel’s whole ingredients didn’t. One almond might weigh twice another. To never shortchange a customer, he gave away more product than the label promised.

He was obsessed with quality, tasting samples from every batch, cutting thirty to forty a day into pieces to check them himself.

It was also hard to sell. Buyers didn’t know where to shelve it. It looked too healthy to taste good. He had to explain not just why to buy it, but what it even was.

So he did what he’d done for a decade at PeaceWorks. He sold one store at a time. 

Days were for pitching, delivering, stocking, and sampling. Nights were for invoices. Weekends were for fixing the product. He drove a beat-up car with the trunk taped shut leaning on the retail relationships he’d spent years building. He was able to keep the lights on with $100,000 from PeaceWorks friends who rolled their stake into KIND.

Retailers ordered, then reordered. Shoppers came back. By the end of year one, KIND had done about $1 million.

When brokers pushed him to add products and categories, he refused. He kept the company on its Fruit & Nut bars and made them better. The focus held the whole thing together.

Over the next few years, KIND grew store by store, into natural grocers, specialty shops, and independents across the country. Slower than a venture-backed company would tolerate, but steady, and hard to knock over.

Then came Walmart. About 1,000 stores. It felt like the breakthrough.

It became a hard lesson instead. KIND’s sales had outrun its systems, and it had no way to track an order that size. Shipments went missing. Within a year, Walmart was gone.

It stung, but it didn’t break them. The real engine was never one giant account. It was the thousands of stores added one at a time, still ordering, still reordering. By the end of year five, KIND was in roughly 20,000 locations and doing around $15 million a year.

THE MOMENT

By then, KIND was one of the fastest-growing brands in natural foods, and investors started to notice.

That year, VMG Partners and Vitaminwater invested $16 million. The money bought two things. Peace of mind that he could provide for his family. And the courage to risk more.

He poured it into letting people taste the bar. The sampling budget went from $800 to $800,000 in a single year. The result was almost absurd. Nine in ten people who tried a KIND bar bought it again or told a friend (the industry average was just over 50%). He just had to get it into more hands.

The next year, a Starbucks deal put KIND in front of millions of the exact customers it was built for. Units sold climbed from 20 million to nearly 460 million over the next decade. For ten years, sales roughly doubled annually, cash-flow positive the whole way.

THE GAMBLE

Despite the growth, the equity partners wanted to sell and cash in on their return. Daniel believed KIND was barely getting started.

So he bought them out, using company cash and bank loans. Any dip in revenue could have meant defaulting on the debt and losing the company for good.

The company kept growing. Several years later, Mars acquired it for a reported $5 billion.

Today, KIND sells more than 80 products in over 150,000 stores and 35 countries. And the early PeaceWorks investors who rolled their stake into KIND saw returns of 1,000x to 5,000x.

Daniel Lubetzky built KIND by weaving his story and meaning into every part of the company. The name, the product, the mission, and even the way the bars looked on the shelf all reinforced the same message. Customers weren’t just buying a snack. They were buying into an idea. Here are 3 storytelling lessons you can learn from Daniel’s approach:

#1. Build Your Story Around Powerful Ideas

Most companies talk about features. Daniel talked about ideas.

The potato that saved his father’s life became a symbol of kindness. The company’s name became a daily reminder of that value. Even his philosophy of “AND instead of OR” became part of the story. Healthy AND tasty. Business AND purpose. Success AND kindness.

These ideas gave people something bigger to connect with than a snack bar.

ACTION: Identify one or two ideas that sit at the heart of your company. Make them simple, memorable, and easy to repeat. Great stories often spread because of the ideas behind them, not the products themselves.

#2. Let The Product Tell The Story

Daniel didn’t just talk about transparency. He built it into the product.

While competitors hid processed ingredients inside opaque wrappers (partially to hide the pastiness), KIND used clear packaging so customers could see the nuts and fruit inside. The ingredients list was short and recognizable. The product itself became proof of the message.

Customers didn’t need to be convinced. They could see the story for themselves.

ACTION: Look for ways your product, service, or customer experience can communicate your story without words. The strongest stories are often demonstrated, not explained.

#3. Give Your Business A Purpose Beyond Profit

Long before KIND, Daniel built PeaceWorks to create economic cooperation between groups that traditionally viewed each other as enemies. When he launched KIND, he carried that same sense of purpose into the company.

The mission wasn’t separate from the business. It was woven into it. The name, the culture, and the products all reflected the same belief that business could be a force for good.

ACTION: Clarify the purpose behind your business, the why beneath the what, and put it at the center of the story you tell. When people understand the mission and not just the product, they remember it, trust it, and pass it on.

KIND didn’t just sell bars. It started a movement. In 2009, they launched the “Do the KIND Thing” campaign that handed people simple cards encouraging them to do something kind and pass it on. Those cards traveled from stranger to stranger and grew into community missions that unlocked bigger acts of generosity, reaching roughly 300,000 subscribers and impacting nearly one million people.

That same instinct to stand for something showed up when the FDA challenged KIND for putting “healthy” on bars whose fat came from nuts. Instead of quietly changing the label, Daniel pushed back, arguing the definition was behind the science. He won. The FDA revised its guidance.

This short Shark Tank profile by ABC (Daniel is a Shark on the show) is a quick introduction to the person behind KIND. Daniel shares pieces of his family history, the values that shaped him, and the experiences that influenced the creation of the brand. In just a few minutes, you’ll get a feel for the optimism, resilience, and “AND instead of OR” mindset that became central to both his life and his business. Watch here:

Here is a slightly longer version of Daniel’s story where he walks through his early entrepreneurial ventures, the creation of PeaceWorks, his desire to build bridges through business, and how those experiences ultimately led to KIND. It’s a fascinating look at how purpose, persistence, and entrepreneurship can compound over decades. Watch here:

ABC-Meet Guest Shark Daniel Lubetzky - Shark Tank
https://youtu.be/OoeHdQEcV3I?si=PQRKxDeNNoDbRFsQ

CNBC Make It-How I Built KIND Into A Multibillion-Dollar Business
https://youtu.be/sibESmao22A?si=0eQ31mEFR44mFRMH

Need help with your story? I got you.

Send an email to [email protected] and someone from my team will circle back with you.