How I Built This with Guy Raz - Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

Dave Dahl's entrepreneurial journey began in prison. In 1987, he was addicted to drugs and incarcerated for home burglary. For 15 years he bounced from one sentence to the next. But in the mid-2000s, Dave returned to his family bakery where he was inspired to make bread – organic, nutty, and slightly sweet. He sold the loaves at farmers markets and shared his story of recovery on the package – a branding decision that attracted fans and media attention. In 2015, the Dahl family sold the business for $275 million dollars. Today, Dave's Killer Bread sells over a dozen types of bread in grocery stores nationwide. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," armpit entrepreneurs Jason and Erica Feucht tell us how they turned whiskey and vodka into the natural deodorant Pit Liquor. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I hope to see you there. And one more quick thing before we start the show. The How I Built This Summit, sponsored by American Express, is coming back this fall to San Francisco. It's happening on October 22nd and 23rd, and this year it's going to be amazing. You will have the opportunity to spend the day with some of the most inspiring entrepreneurs in the world. And many of them will be hanging around to chat and give advice, literally. People like David Nealiman of JetBlue, Stuart Butterfield of Slack, Sarah Blakely of Spanx, Kevin Sistram of Instagram, Marcia Kilgore of Bliss, Jen Rubio of Away,

Tim and Joey from Allbirds. This conference is unlike any other you've ever attended. It's designed to build and nurture a community of builders. Come join us in San Francisco, October 22nd and 23rd, and hopefully I'll see you there. To find out more about the summit, go to summit.npr.org. It just hit me that, wow, I'm either something really good or I'm something really bad, and I'm really bad. I'm a big problem. And look what I've done.

I've let down all these people, all these employees, all these investors, all these people who believe. in me, and I just couldn't live with that. Rahman PR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they don't. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Dave Dahl, after years of prison and drug use, turned his life around by baking loaves of healthy whole-wheat bread, Dave's killer bread. So, if there's one clear lesson we've learned from making this show, it's this. The story matters. It's the why you do what you do. But more importantly, it's the thing that allows your customers to deepen their connection to your product or brand. But companies and businesses don't always put their stories on the label. Think about Roxanne Quimby selling beeswax candles and lip bomb at farmers markets in Maine while trying to scale up Bert's bees. Or how Steve Ells wandered past a burrito shop in San Francisco's Mission District in the late 1980s and

came up with Chipotle. Now, it's highly unlikely that you buy Burt's products or a Chipotle burrito because of these stories. If you're a fan of either company, you probably just like what they make. But in the case of Dave's Killer Bread, the story was crucial to its early success, and it was printed on the wrapper of every loaf, and his story has more struggle than probably any story we've featured on this show so far. In his 20s, Dave Dahl was a... a pretty messed up guy. A misfit, a loser, those are actually his own words, and he spent a lot of time in prison. At times, Dave thought he might even die behind bars. But eventually, he transformed his thinking. And when he was released from prison, he went home to his family

bakery. And he started making bread, really good bread. And people loved it. And the family bakery grew pretty quickly. Seven years on, they were selling Dave's killer bread across the Northwest, doing over $50 million in sales. But we'll get there. Dave was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1963, where his family ran a small bakery. His mom and dad were Seventh-day Adventists. It's a denomination known to practice a really healthy diet, no alcohol, no caffeine, and lots of grains. And Dave's family? They were very concerned. My mom was very religious. My dad was a believer. They were very strict. And we were expected to be honest. We were taught to be truthful. We were taught not to fight. You know, everything was about getting ready for the afterlife for heaven. What did your parents do for a living? What was their business?

Well, they were bakers. And my dad was a hardworking man. We did lots of jobs. different jobs, odd jobs, until he was able to muster up enough money to buy a bakery that was failing. And that's where he started back in the 50s. And so they did a lot of birthday cakes and donuts even, all that stuff. But at some point, my dad decided that he wanted to do more whole grains and no animal fats. That was revolutionary at the time. But that was definitely the Seventh-day Adventist influence. So because of their religious sort of views, he's thinking, I'm going to start making, you know, healthier whole-grained breads, which must have been kind of a hippie-dippy thing in the, you know, late 60s, early 70s, right? Yeah, that's a funny thing,

because my dad was the opposite of a hippie. He did try to go with more of a liberal, sort of a liberal mindset for a while, but he couldn't stand hippies. He would just get so upset that these When he would go... Why? Well, he had to like him because they were keeping him, you know, in business. Yeah. But there was, he just didn't, you know, he was basically for, he's kind of a Nixon Republican. And do you, I mean, are some of your earliest memories just working in the bakery with your siblings?

Yeah. Some of the earlier and more standout memories were maybe going and visiting my dad where he was working. Because you had to be a certain age and certain sons. to be able to work in the bakery. You had to be able to get your hands up over the work table. And I was nine years old when I was able to start working. Of course, I couldn't wait to start working. And what would you do at the bakery as a kid?

Mainly, we had one of these cookie machines that had two rollers that would dispense cookies. And we were making natural cookies for these hippie places. And we didn't work on Saturdays because we were 17th Adventists. Right. That's the day of rest, right, in church. That's right, yeah. But Sundays were wide open. It was often our biggest day of work.

And, you know, the Adventist, that was their day of recreation was Sunday. And so I became more and more resentful at that young age that I wasn't able to go to these to be a part of what my peers were doing. But, yeah, we worked. We worked our butts off on Sundays. And his bakery was not, like, hugely profitable, right? Like, you did not grow up with lots of money, right? No, we worked for our little bit of money.

I remember starting at 25 cents an hour, and part of that money, part of that 25 cents went to paying for my school unclose. So when do you remember, like, at what age do you remember starting to kind of rebel against your parents? It must have been about 11 or 12, probably 12, by the time I started looking at things as like, well, I don't believe this stuff. And I, you know, I read the Bible. I started, I was very sincere about it. I made a decision when I started having doubts that I would just read the Bible and hopefully God would tell me, you know, what I need to know. And it didn't work. I mean, it just gave me more doubts. And so I started being more and more, you know, fighting with my dad and mom.

By the time I was 13, 14. And my mom was just really bummed out about it. She tried everything she could to try to help me, you know, to get back to the faith. And my dad was just mad. He was just angry. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like at that point it was probably sort of typical teenage rebellion. Were you doing drugs at that point?

or not, not yet. No, I drank a little. I think I was 14 when I first drank some beer and smoked some weed. Eventually, it got to be more and more of that. None of it really agreed with me. It didn't do me any good, any favors. But at this point, I was trying to find my way outside of the Adventist world. And I was finding other misfits.

Did you finish high school? No, I took off on a trip. on the second day of my senior year, took off cross-country, got stuck in Nebraska, and turned around, came back. You just took up, you just, like, decided to just go on, like, on a bus or just by yourself? No, I hitchhiking. I always was like, I always wanted to throw myself into situations and see what happens. And so I was 17, and I took off on this trip, and I was about as naive as, and green about life as you could get. And it started a sort of a lifelong thing of running away from things and going somewhere and having to run away from there. You know, everywhere I went, I was running away.

But, you know, there I was every time. Wow. I guess pretty soon after you kind of dropped out of high school and were trying to figure things out, you decided to enlist in the Marines, right? Yeah. It was just one more, one more grass is greening around the other side kind of an idea. And a friend of mine went into the Marines, he was another misfit like me, another, you know, we would call ourselves losers, I guess. And he went to Marines and it was just, he came back, transformed. It's the first transformation I ever saw in my life.

And I thought, wow, you know, they can make a man out of me too, right? But I went in the Marines and I wasn't ready for that. I just got hell. I got hell from those drill instructors. And I couldn't take it. I wasn't built for it in those days to, I didn't have a thick skin at all. And I eventually took off, ran from there. So you head back to Portland after that.

And what did you do? What do you remember about that time? It wasn't too long after that that I ended up getting married. It was just another crazy idea. and I met my first daughter's mother, and we got married, and I was drinking, and at this point I probably started doing the cocaine. I was just doing cocaine, but I wasn't at a level

or a serious addiction level. It was just a recreational level. So you were 22, you had a kid, and you didn't really have much of a future, you know many like prospects for the future i guess at that point no that's that's exactly it i mean at that time i had no perspective on you can go out and and learn to become to to create a life for yourself but i didn't know that i didn't see that and i just thought well i was born to lose i don't know anything everybody else knows more than i do everybody else has is more built for life and i

Myself, I had such ADD, and even though nobody would have called it ADD in those days, and I didn't have anyone that could diagnose me like that, I couldn't focus on a conversation. Like, what we're having right now, there's no way I could have done that. Wow. And I couldn't listen to anything, and that's another problem I had in the Marine Corps. I couldn't listen, and I also was, I refused to wear glasses, and I was supposed to wear glasses.

So I couldn't see the chalkboard. I mean, I was just like, a lot of stuff was converging there and a lot of bad stuff. And I was low self-esteem, depression. And my thought was always, well, who wouldn't be depressed with a life like mine, you know? Yeah. That's a tough time in life for most people in general. I mean, your brain is changing. There's all kinds of things happening.

you're sort of all of a sudden expected to be an adult. Here you are. You've got a child, what appears to be like a growing alcohol and drug addiction and undiagnosed depression on top of that. Yeah, all those things. And then I would smoke weed and then I would do acid, I would do LSD, and almost always it was a terrible result because your mind, you can't go into a trip like that

and have a mind that's all torn up. It just gets worse and it makes you nuts. Do you remember the first time you use meth? Yes, I do. It was my first transformation in life. It was the first time that I saw that my life could be a lot better, at least my thinking at the time. Wow.

And, of course, we called it crank in those days. And I'd always been warned that crank was, only for the lowest of the low. But at that point, I was like, well, I am kind of the lowest of the low. Why don't I embrace it? And I did, and the very first time that I did the meth, put it in my arm. And I was instantly happy and ready to go and kick ass. And it made me just forget all the things that were messing me up.

And I kind of just left the world that I was, in this bummer world that I was in and went to a world where I was happy. The problem would be when I would run out and that happened a lot. Because you didn't have money to get more, I guess, right? You never job. Yeah. At first, you know, I was working at the bakery. This is your family bakery. Yeah. And the last thing in the world I wanted to do was be a baker. I didn't want to be what my dad was. I didn't want to be what my family was. I didn't want to be. I didn't want to to be this guy. I always thought being a baker was a sissy thing, you know, but I didn't know what else to do. Eventually, it was unsustainable. And so I lost that job, and I started doing

car burglaries, and eventually business and house burglaries. To... To pay for the dope. And you would steal things and take them to pawn shops? Well, we had fences. I would work with guys who had a little bit more experience at this, and they would find ways to offense the things. And, you know, I would feel guilty at times when I was robbing someone and see the fear that they had. I would feel that guilt. And I remember actually saying, I'm sorry to one person.

But it didn't matter. I still had to do it. So this is around like 1986, 87, and this is going to sort of be the beginning of like 14 years, maybe more, maybe like 16 years. It comes up to just around 15 years in prison and jail. Do you remember the first time you were incarcerated for burglary? Like, do you remember how you felt? Were you scared?

Were you? No, because by that time I had almost come to the conclusion that I was eventually going to go to prison, and that would be a good learning experience for me. And I didn't like prison. Don't get me wrong. I hated it. but I also looked at it as sort of a badge of who I was now. Were you ever personally violent or angry?

Did you have, was that inside of you? Growing up, there was a lot of anger in my family. That's one thing that was sort of, that came with the territory. The bakers, all the bakers in the family, we were all angry. Just angry with the world, with each other? I think so. With everything, yeah. I think looking back now, I think,

think my dad had similar problems that I had, you know, to mine. He was probably bipolar like me. I saw him angry and I saw him depressed. I saw him angry and I saw him depressed. So it sounds like during this period in prison, I mean, you were kind of dealing with a combination of depression and anger and addiction and just incredibly low self-esteem. Very low. I was so. I was suicidal many, many times in my life. I had been suicidal when I put that needle in my arm. And so, you know, you got to understand that.

I was back against the wall, nothing to lose when I did it. While you were, and I guess we should contextualize this a bit, while you were in prison, I mean, the family bakery was still going on, right? and your brother was involved with it. But while you were in prison, your dad passed away. Right, yeah. Were you able to go to the funeral? No, because, you know, I was confined.

Were you talking with your dad at that point, you know, around that time? I had started to want to talk to my dad, but I wasn't quite to the point that I got to later where I really wished that I could have had that. you know, that final, you know, some time with him. So you're serving your final prison sentence. You were going to be, you're going to be incarcerated for a long time. I guess around 2001, something happened to you that made you start to think about your life and what you wanted to be.

What was it? What happened? Did you find God? It was a religious experience. Like, what was it? It was like that. My own form of God, I guess, and I experienced enough adversity

and enough time where I couldn't run away. I was either going to take myself out, I was going to find a way, because I really had decided there's no reason why I should be alive. But being at the end of my rope like I was, I finally did something that they talked about in AA, and I surrendered.

I said, well, I'm going to let these, authorities who may be able to help me, I'm going to give them a chance to help me. And it was a big deal because it's like you're telling on yourself in there, you know. The last thing you want to do is tell the authorities what's on your mind. But that was the wrong advice. The right advice was, yes, let down your guard and get some help. After that, I got called in and, you know, I didn't tell him everything. I didn't say I was suicidal because I didn't want to get in more trouble.

but he said well look we got this stuff called Paxil you want to try it and I said yeah let's give it a shot and it was they say it takes quite a while to take effect but it was fairly quick with me and sometimes I don't know how much of it

was just the humility and the whole deal that it took to make that happen that changed my that sort of a placebo effect yeah I think it might have been partially a placebo effect But I think the drug did help. It worked.

And I had been on a waiting list for a computerated drafting program, which was a vocational training opportunity, very rare, a very rare and great opportunity I found out. At first I was just scared to death of it. I was like computers and, you know, drafting. I have no idea what they're talking about. But this time, I didn't give up. And I think a lot of the reason why I didn't give up is because of those meds and because I had, I had come to the point of acceptance of who I am, and I didn't care what other people thought of me.

So I had a great time. I just started within a couple weeks. I was having a blast in there, and that changed my life. So you're in prison, you're taking this drafting, computer-rated drafting course and design course. You are on antidepressants. You spent most of the previous 15 years of your life in and out of prison, but it sounds like you sort of woke. up one day and you're like, I'm almost 40. My perspective is changing. I'm not... I can't be a criminal anymore. Obviously, this is not working. I am not good at that. That's one thing

we can definitely say. So December 27th, two days after Christmas in 2004, you are released. The day you walked out of prison, your brother, Glenn, he was there to pick you up, right? Yeah. And do you remember any of the conversation was I don't know was he he's your older brother I think he's like nine years older than he was he eight years older yeah was he he was he I don't know did he scold you was he judgmental or is he just like hey you're out no no no I think that he'd seen a difference in me but he was still wary but he had to see what was going on when I was doing the drafting and things and just the whole deal where I stopped blaming people I took accountability didn't blame the system, the judge.

It was all, look, I did this, and I can, I'm the one who's got the power to change it. So I think my brother was a little bit put off by my energy. It was a little bit too much. Yeah, I can understand that. I mean, I would be wary, too, right, if, if that was me. I mean, he had been sort of dutifully holding down the fort, holding down the floor, running your parents' bakery and business. Yeah, he had managed to keep the business going various ways,

because he was a hard worker and smart, and somehow they managed to become contract manufacturers for Trader Joe's, which was really the bread and voter for the business before I got out. So when he picked you up after you released, did he say, all right, listen, you know, we got some work for you at the bakery and why don't you come and start working for us in a couple days? Is that what he said? The way I remember is that I asked him if I could come back,

because I'd been thinking about how I think I could make a difference in the company. And so he gave me that opportunity. I mean, I had to prove myself at the very low, the very lowest point, 12 bucks an hour. Just baking loaves of bread, basically? That was the priority, it was bread. But his bigger thing was the marketing is how can we appeal to younger folks, you know? We were getting eaten up by the big guys who would figure out ways to sell bread that was more popular.

Sure. I mean, Glenn, he could see where, he could see the writing on the wall. Like the big companies were coming in, undercutting, I mean, they were probably their costs were far lower. And nature baked bread wasn't selling. You had to do something, right? in order for this business to grow and he sort of kind of tasked you to kind of look around. Yeah. Figure this out.

The one thing, I think the coolest thing that my brother did was to kind of just let me do my thing. He said, well, you know, learn what's out there and stuff. And because of my experimenting with, as a drafter, that's what you do. You replicate and then you make it better, right? Yeah, sure. And that's what I did. I would replicate other. varieties of other kinds of bread that were popular out in the market.

Like you were just experimenting in the bakery and just trying different flowers out and grains? Well, I had always wanted to make a bread with great texture. And one of the things I love is natural whole grain cereal that's not beat up too much. It's got to have some good chewiness to it. And it doesn't matter. It could be wheat, oats, whatever. So I made a soaker where you take the... cracked grains and you make them soft enough to make bread out of them but not too soft.

So it was a texture that I was aiming for. Plus, I was going for sort of a brown sugary flavor without brown sugar. So I used organic cane juice and molasses for that flavor. And I wanted it to be like a masterpiece of art too. And I didn't call it killer bread right away. I called it Blues Bread, the first one. And it had a beautiful blue color to it, like, I was aiming for.

How did you get that blue color? It was just blue cornmeal. Oh, you sort of had blue cornmeal around the, like you rolled the bread, the dough into the corner. Inside and out. And every bread that I made pretty much, I named first, and then I created it. So I remember thinking, I want to make a loaf of blues bread. One of my varieties is going to be called blues, because I love the blues.

And I thought, well, I'm a blue bread. Yeah. And then I liked, then I was like, well, the other one was always killer bread. I always wanted to make a variety called killer bread. And the biggest difference in it was that it was made with nuts and seeds rather than just seeds and grains. When you were experimenting with the different kinds of breads and what would become Dave's killer bread, like, I don't know, do you remember taking that first loaf out? Do you remember knowing that, what do you remember about that? Oh, man, it was great.

I'll never forget it. It had a great fullness to it, a great beauty to the shape, and the blue cornmeal was, you know, just made it like no other bread before it. It was beautiful, and I took it out of the oven. It was five loaves. Tasted it pretty quickly, and I was like, oh, God, this is good. I mean, it fits my flavor profile, you know, what I want. And then I gave a loaf to our maintenance guy.

I think we had like 2530 employees at the time, but the maintenance guy, he took one home, and he came back the next day, and he just couldn't stop raving about it. And eventually got, you know, more people to more people were starting to say, hey, Dave, that's a good bread. Really good bread. Can I ask you a technical question? Because obviously, right, like, as I've made bread and I, you know, baked things before. and pretty much like anything you take out of the oven and eat right away, like whether it's a chocolate chip cookie or a piece of bread, is amazing. The test is whether it's still good four hours later, right?

So, like, I can imagine your bread was amazing, but, like, this had to be bread that could sit on a shelf of a supermarket or a grocery store. So had it, like, was it still great? Like, I don't know, five hours later or the next day? Definitely. In fact, I hardly ever would eat it hot because that's really not a good test of how good it is. And, you know, the process of how it's done and rotated and everything, you know, it's got to be good for five days on the shelf there. And it's got to be good for a few days once they get it. Yeah. People really didn't expect it to be, to last forever because it's natural and it doesn't have chemistry.

in it. Yeah. So, in fact, that was my slogan, just say no to bread on drugs. And in those days, in those days, that was a pretty popular slogan. All right, so you make that loaf. Your maintenance guy comes back the next day. You know that you're onto something. And then did you, did you go to Glenn, your brother, and say, hey, try this out. Tell me what you think. Yeah, I wanted him to love it, you know, but it wasn't his idea of a killer, of a great bread. What I give him so much credit for is that even though he didn't really like my bread, he understood that it wasn't his taste buds that mattered. Like I said, I totally give him props for that.

He wasn't controlling. Like most companies would say, you know, hey, we've got to keep this, and this price, you can't go beyond this. And fortunately, he did not say that. I remember when we got to the point of realizing we did a couple. cost analysis on it, and we started realizing how much we were going to have to sell this for. And it was a more difficult bread to make than the average loaf of bread. How much did you have to sell it for?

Well, we went to the farmer's market, and we sold it at $4, and the nuts and grains was $4.50 because the nuts were more expensive. Yeah, $4.450 in 2001, that's pretty expensive. Yeah. I think everybody was working. worried about the price. And they also, they didn't like the bread. I mean, in the upper... The upper management of the company?

Yeah, which was a pretty small company. But the people who had been around for a while, there was sort of a, this is the way bread is, and this is not bread. So what we did is it was actually an opportunity. This was actually a project that my nephew and I, this was our opportunity to build equity in the company. And that was really what my brother said.

He would always own 51%, but he was going to give us an opportunity to buy into the company. And in order to buy in, we had to produce sales. We had to increase revenues. So you essentially spun off. You sort of created a separate company

to sell Dave's Killer Brand. Separate brand. It was actually a separate brand, but it was a whole different operation. And my nephew and myself, we ran the operation. This is Glenn's son, Shobie. Yes.

And Shobie was like a prodigy kid, you know, really smart kid. He graduated in three years, Magnacom, Lodding. I don't know how you can say that. From Willamette University, which is a prestigious, good university, in economics of all things. So he gets out, he's 21 years old. He gets the same year I got out of prison, he gets out of college. Wow. And he had a whole different way of looking at things.

And he really didn't like me being around, but we were partners, and we managed to find ways to work together. And we had our own duties that we would do for the most part. And that kind of kept us out of each other's way. I mean, you were the guy who came up with the actual product. You came up with Dave's Killer Bread. But let's just sort of reflect on this for a moment. I mean, it's probably unlikely that, you know, Dave's Killer Bread would have become. a brand at this point without your brother and his son's business acumen, probably.

I would say it's impossible for it to happen without, first of all, my dad starting what he did, even though my dad was basically a knucklehead like me, it worked his butt off, but he didn't really, you know, he wasn't really a businessman per se. He wasn't like that was his focus. He was a creator, and he was a hard worker, and that's what I see myself as. my brother and my nephew had more, definitely had more of the, they were looking at the finances and all that stuff more. I was always passion driven. And so there was a lot of disagreements on how things should be done.

But honestly, there were many times that because it felt so bad, the way we got on, that it almost derailed. What was so hard about it? I mean, obviously we're only hearing, you know, your side of the story, but... Right, and that's why I don't want to... But what was... Was it just a personality clash?

Definitely. There was definitely the attitude that, wow, this guy comes out here and he's kind of a wrecking ball, you know? He comes out of here just like he's got the cowboy shooting from the hip, and, you know, half the stuff he does fails, and, you know, he's just, you know, he's crazy. Was it like that, though? But, Dave, was it like that from the... Because you guys founded this brand?

hand in 2005, right? And no one knew what Dave's killer bread was in 2005. No one was really going to know what it was for several more years. Well, it didn't take very long for attention to get attention. But was there tension between you and your brother and your nephew from the beginning? Like, even like right from the beginning? Really? Very, very right from the beginning. Oh, my God. And the way I always saw it was people loved my story. They loved what I had gone through and how I'd overcome it. But my family was too close to it or something. and didn't see it that way. And they saw it as more like, well, he doesn't deserve this.

But I went out and I had a lot of love from the people in the community. You would talk about your story and you would say, and look what I'm doing now. Yeah, I actually wrote my story, put it on the back of the bag. It was like a few paragraphs. I've got it in front of me. It starts some. I was a four-time loser before I realized I was in the wrong game. 15 years in prison was a pretty tough way.

to find oneself, but I have no regrets. And then it went on to describe this bread. Diversity. You're trying to make the world a better place, one loaf of bread at a time. That must have been incredibly powerful for people to see that on the packaging. And this is when you're still just selling at farmer's markets, right? Yeah. And I would sit there, I would stand there at the farmer's market, pass a loaf of bread to this doctor, this attorney, this, you know, professional person.

and people I never would have met, you know, and I started meeting these great people, and they loved the idea, and they loved the bread. Pretty soon after you launched, did you put that sort of cartoon, like the caricature of you on the rapper? Yeah, you know how that came about? It was my brother, my nephew, and myself,

sitting with a copyright attorney, Mike, Hau Browner. He said, you know, this bread's great. You know, he got good, I think the name's great. You know, what you're missing is a logo. And my brother had been suggesting that we have a picture of me on the back with my guitar, with my story. And I thought that was a good idea.

But when I heard this guy talking about this, I said, I started sketching. And I ended up sketching. The idea I had was this guy who represents me with his guitar and Dave's bread in big block letters, all this is painted on the wall, on a brick wall in an alley. Now, somebody comes along with their red spray paint can and tags killer over that. And that doesn't ever show up. Nobody ever gets that from looking at what we ended up with. But that was the original idea.

Oh, yeah, I see that the killer. Now I see that that's the graffiti on the guy. I got you. Okay. But making that in a logo is really hard. By the way, I read, and please, be honest with me, just let's level with me. I read that you asked the cartoon. I read that you asked the cartoonist to make your biceps bigger in that cartoon.

Yep. I said, look, I'm paying you $150, dude. And he did. He did making him bigger. And then I said, bigger. Yeah. Because they're definitely a little exaggerated, yes. And they like the idea of calling it Dave's Killer Bread?

They, you know, it's an interesting thing. We went to a marketing firm to tell this story, this ex-con, this killer bread, and they're like, no, no, it's too risky and all this stuff. I can't remember the dynamics of all the situation, but I did get kicked out of the marketing meetings, and I was very, you know, not very happy about that. But eventually, I know that my brother and my nephew came around to the idea that the killer bread idea and the ex-con thing, was going to be acceptable. You know, this marketing firm was full of crap. When we come back, had Dave and his family take their killer bread from the farmer's market to the supermarket, and then later, why Dave was banned, physically banned, from walking

into the very company he helped start. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So in 2005, Dave's killer bread is getting more popular. The loaves are selling, there's media attention, and people love the story of Dave Dahl,

the ex-con who turned his life around with bread. But up to this point, he's just been selling the loaves at the farmer's market, and that's just a seasonal thing. As the market was coming to a close around November-ish, people were like, well, how are we going to have this bread, you know, afterwards? And he was like, no, I thought you never ask. Tell your local stores. Tell the stores you buy it.

Tell them you want the bread there. And they did. And they started, and we got into one small co-op, and we got into one vegan grocery. And then in a couple more months, we got into new seasons, which was like the first big, big break. But it was, boy, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work doing all those demos. Oh, my God. I think, so you launched the...

this with your brother and your nephew. It's got about 30 employees. Obviously, you're sort of a side project of NatureBank, right? At that time, yes. At that time, it may not have felt fast, but like when you look back on it, like within, I think five years, you have 10090 employees working for you. What was the turning point? Do you remember when it just started to just blow up? We were at a small, okay, we had a 15,000 square foot facility. We had a 15,000 square foot facility that was making nature bake when I got out of prison. And within a very short time, we outgrew that. And we had to find time on the floor to, we had, we had to share our time with nature bake production. And we had entirely different crews. And they were actually

kind of at each other's throats, kind of like my brother and my nephew. Right. And we moved out of there. I don't know how many employees, we probably had 100 employees or so. I mean, I don't think we even had 100 at the time, probably 50 when we moved out of there, to Bob's Redmills old facility. We've known Bob forever, and we go back a long ways. We know Bob. He's been on the show. I know I heard the whole episode, and I enjoyed it. And Bob is great. He's a wonderful guy.

In fact, my dad was Bob's first whole wheat flour wholesale customer. Wow. So you guys move into an old Bob's Redmill facility to expand. production of Dave's Killer Bread? Yeah, and the biggest challenge we had at this point, and this was like 2007, 8, I can't remember for sure. My brother needed to get, I didn't have any credit, I didn't have anything. Sure.

So, you know, when Shobie, he was young and didn't really have anything established. So Glenn had to go to the bank, put up his house, and couldn't get our regular bank, you know, one of the biggest banks in the country, wouldn't take a chance on us. Yeah. So we had to get a local bank who was willing to, you know, take that chance at a fairly high interest rate. It cost us a million and a half to move to this new facility. And a million and a half to us then was a lot of money. Sure.

And there was no cash flow to support that. It was all based on the future. So he put up, he basically had to take out a second mortgage or a lot of credit against his house to fuel the right to get some capital to fund the business. Yeah, and his house wasn't enough to completely collateralize that they had to take a chance on everything. I mean, they would have owned everything if we hadn't made it. So how are you able to get any equity in the company if you had no cash? Like, how are you able to get any ownership over this? Eventually, my brother sold it to us for our percentage of the valuation of the business at the time that we started our project.

Right. And instead of owning a certain, a larger percentage of Dave's Killer Bread, I settled on a smaller percentage of the entire company. Of NatureBake. Yes. And I'm very glad I did. So how did you guys continue to expand, like into bigger chains like Costco? How did you do that? Well, Costco, I would get these letters. I got this email from somebody at Costco at buyer saying, our customers are asking for your bread. And we would like you, you know, to come up and present to us. Well, we were still at the old facility with 15,000 square feet.

And absolutely no way we were going to be able to handle Costco then. But the fact that we had Costco coming was a big factor in how we got that loan. Sure. Still actually executing the idea was a whole other matter. It took us a long time to finally reach a deal and finally have the ability to produce. enough bread to meet Costco demand, and we just kept working and working and working and promoting, and we're able to secure partners in co-man, co-manufacturing. Essentially other facilities that would bake your recipe to your specifications, because you

couldn't possibly have done that all on your own for Costco, right? Just the scale was going to be impossible. No, and I'll tell you what, man, when you have a culture of a product trying to get another culture to adopt it is a whole another challenge. And to create that product and to have consistent quality was a real bear. I would go and see the operation, surprise them. And I was very unpleasantly surprised myself sometimes until we were able to get it right. but people will cut corners when they get a chance. And so we worked our asses off to make sure that that didn't happen.

So the Costco, I mean the Costco deal clearly transformational because you had to scale up fast. You had to increase a number of employees and it was going to create a huge revenue stream, a huge windfall. At a certain point, about a third of your workforce, so now you're getting close to 300 people, were ex-cons. Like was that was that a was a deliberate thing like did you think let's start hiring other ex-convicts to work to work? Because it's really hard to get a job when you've got a record when you're an ex-con. It was especially then. It's got a little better now. You know, I had a certain mentality about that that came from my own experience of having transformed my life.

I was like, you know, this is something. This is a real thing. People do change. And when they're ready, how great. would it be to give them that opportunity? And then we get an amazing employee. So it just made sense to hire some of them. But that wasn't something we were aiming for. But once they, once the temporary services, and that's how we recruited our people generally, once they found out that we were felon friendly, it was funny. It's all they sent us. That's all they sent you.

We were hiring so fast that, you know, we ended up hiring a lot more. felons and it just worked out. I think around, like what's incredible is that I think it was like 2011, 2012, you guys are doing like 40, 50 million dollars in sales, which is phenomenal. And I guess around that time you get an offer from like a private equity company to buy in. And then I think they bought out like half the company in 2012. Exactly half, yes.

But I think around this time, like the relationship you, between you and your brother and your nephew was so bad that at times you guys were literally emailing each other in the same office, which just from an outside perspective, it just seems so sad. Like I'm, you know, I think people would say, but guys, you're, you're so successful, like this bread is doing so great. You're hiring ex-convicts. Like, are you seriously not getting along? Like, it just seems so weird, but then, of course, family dynamics are complicated. They are. Yeah, I don't even know how. to explain it.

But what we did have, you know, the wisest thing we ever did, and I think this was credit to my brother, that we got someone that could advise us. This guy was actually a family business advisor, but mainly for succession plans and things like that. Right.

But he said, you guys need a vision and a mission. You guys have it, but you don't all agree on what it is. And he was right. And once we got those established, and they were pretty simple. Like one of them, like the vision was to make the world a better place one loaf of bread at a time. So I was gratified that they agreed to that.

And so we were able to solve some of our problems and get along and be in the same room that way. So you, I mean, pretty quickly, and I guess by this point, 2012, you became famous. Like you are this caricature on the bread. People want to know your story. You're doing media. You're speaking. How did you feel about that? Did you love that attention?

I did because it was for a good reason. I always felt like I was doing good work, you know. Like there was a purpose. And for the first time in my life, I had this purpose. It was just unbelievable what was happening and the love I was getting. And I really couldn't keep up with the demand for speaking. but I never had a prepared speech, you know. You just go out there and tell your story now.

So as your profile was growing, do you think that it had an, I mean, it must have had an impact on your own ego, right? This is natural. Like it's normal. Like the more attention you get, the more people hanging out, the more people telling you're amazing, the more people saying, you're awesome, you're great. Oh, Dave, this. Like, it probably did inflate your ego, right? And I tried, you know, the thing that helped me so much with my transformation in life, the two things were acceptance and humility. Yeah.

And so when this was happening, I was always telling myself, look, you know, I'm very fortunate, I'm blessed, I'm grateful for this. I was always trying to tell myself that. And unfortunately, you know, I took my first vacation a few years into this, went to Mexico, and I discovered tequila. And it took me years for it to have to graduate to a level where I was really an alcohol, full-blown alcoholic. But you were drinking all that all along, while even after you got out of prison and in a four-women. Yeah, and a beer or two here and there. Other people would get wasted. But drug, but not drugs.

You were done with drugs. No. But it wasn't until things got a little easier, got easier. And I had more employees doing my work. And eventually it was easier to drink and just be a drinker. and, well, look, I'm successful. I'm kind of a rock star. See, there you go.

There's that bad, creeping mentality right there. And so I can afford to do this. And I even would call myself the Aussie of bread, you know. I'd go speak to a group of kids or like a high school or whatever. And then right afterwards, I'd celebrate by drinking half, you know, half a fifth of tequila. And then I'd drink another half later, you know. And then eventually it was a half gallon. 2013, I think safe to say, was a pretty rough year for you.

And I want to talk about two things that happened that year. There was a moment that year where you were outside of a store, of Dave's Killer Bread, of a facility in Portland, and maybe you were drunk or you were having kind of a manic episode. I hadn't drank for several weeks at that point. I'd been, I showed up that day. I had decided that day that I was going to go against the new CEO's mandate that I was not supposed to be on the property. Now, I was very resentful about this. They didn't want you on the property because they felt you were disruptive at that point?

Yeah, they just, well, one of the things that happened was before this, I had gone up to my cabin. I had this cabin on Mount Hood, and I had taken some guys. with me and one of the people one of the guys I took with me I shouldn't have um he's an old buddy that was uh that we were dope buddies way back in the day and we're up at the cabin long story short he leaves he's he he left in your car right in my car and I led him you know it wasn't like he stole it I was sure I was too drunk to even use my use my head and this guy ends up uh they find him in a ditch 40 some odd days later decomposing. It's a really ugly thing.

And the company, first of all, said, well, you need to get an attorney. And things started spinning out of control. Well, they must have been worried because for a number of reasons. First of all, you're implicated, whether, you know, not directly, but indirectly in this guy's death. And you are the brand. You are Dave. You are Dave. You are Dave.

killing bread. And there was horrible. Yeah. And honestly, you know, when that guy died, I was heartbroken too, you know. And finally on November 14, I believe it was, I had been not drinking for six to eight weeks. I can't, I don't know for sure. I was getting more and more resentful. And there was becoming a clash between me and a company.

And here's this company that I've worked so hard to build a brand. So I'm feeling this loss. I'm losing my company, losing my bread, my baby. And one thing's leading to another. And finally, that day I showed up at bread quarters, we call it. And I'm not quite, you know, level, you know, in my mind. I see this cardboard cut out of myself. And without actually forming the thought in my mind, what I was thinking,

what I was feeling was like this guy, this cardboard cut out of me can be here in this storefront and I can't. And so I punched it. I never liked it anyway. So I punched it. And it didn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. But at the time, I realized that's, you know, it was just resentment and anger. And the day just got worse from there. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it got a lot worse. Like, you ended up, I think later that night, you ended up ramming your SUV into two cop cars. Yeah. And you were arrested. I went to jail for like 36 hours and I was seeing all this stuff about me on TV and I wasn't, you know, I was freaky. But my attorney tells me, look, dude, you have to check in to Cedar Hills Hospital, mental hospital. Um, um,

because you're not quite right. So eventually, I did follow his advice. I went there and checked in and stayed there for like two and a half weeks, and it was a good move. So this is now the beginning of the next episode of your rebirth because you'd already had that rebirth in 2001 in prison and you kind of had this amazing run of success and then you crashed really hard.

Yeah, you know, after that two and a half weeks in the hospital, in which I was very hypomanic and just like a laughing, joking knucklehead, I was back in my home. I hit the bottom. I hit the biggest, the most painful bottom I had ever hit. And it was after I read this story about myself in the Willamette Week called Breaking Bread, which was breaking bad. Sure, I read it. Yeah. And I read the bottom. And I read that, I thought, well, that's funny, breaking bread, and it's with a breaking bad logo.

And I go, that's cool. And I was still in a good frame of mind. And then, or I wouldn't say good frame of mind, but happy until I read that article. And it was the worst thing I'd ever seen about myself. And it just hit me that, wow, I have, I'm a big problem. I'm either something really good or I'm something really bad. and I'm really bad. And look what I've done.

I've let down all these people, all these employees, all these investors, all these, you know, people who believed in me. And I just couldn't live with that. It just hit me so hard. And it took me a while to come out of that depression. I mean, it really speaks to this idea that, because at this point, you had a lot, you already had some money. Like, you were clearly going to become a wealthy man. I was already a wealthy man at this point. I mean, we'd sold the first half of the business.

I mean, it speaks to this idea that money doesn't solve everything and oftentimes can exacerbate things, right? It's like, because from the outside, somebody might say, Dave, your life is set. How could you do that? How could you screw that off? Yeah, right. And you're saying, but you can't understand because I can't even understand. Like, you probably couldn't even explain to yourself what was going on. No, it's a unique and over-the-moon set of circumstances.

Yeah. But money has nothing to do with happiness. You know, it never has. I knew that from the beginning because I was so happy without ever making any money. I am used to having money now, so I would hate to be without it. But really, things are good because I'm good, you know, in my space. At that point, after you sort of hit that low, did you decide to do Alcoholics Anonymous? That you really had to do something?

I didn't really have a choice. I've liked Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, the 12 steps are just great. Very meaningful to me. I'm kind of, I would probably go anyway at this point, but it's something I have to do. Is it a struggle for you every day to avoid alcohol? It has been at times, but not for quite a while. One of the things that I have is an insurance policy, and I believe it helps, is Vivitrol.

That's the brand name of this thing that's kind of a modern antibuse. You take a shot. I get a shot every month. What is it? It's a medication that sort of blocks inhibits your desire to drink? Yeah, you wouldn't, you're not supposed to enjoy it. You wouldn't really enjoy yourself on it if you did it. So, you know, why screw around with it when it's not even going to be?

a good experience. And so that's a very good deterrent. So you are right now, you know, at this point in your life, in recovery still and really working at it, the company sold, entirely sold. So Dave's Killer Bread, no longer owned by the family. I think it sold for almost $300 million. And you... 275, yeah. Wow. Your nephew, Shobie, went on to do other events. ventures and he's involved in investing. You've got an art gallery in Portland. What's your relationship like with your brother, Glenn, and your nephew Shobie these days?

Well, it's in limbo, I guess. I haven't, I would like to think that someday we will be more family than just like former business partners, but it's not, we just don't talk. Sometimes we have family gatherings that have nothing to do with, that are not put on by any of us, and we might meet up there. But what I want to do, this is weird, I'm telling you this instead of them, but I just want something real, real to happen.

You know, I don't want to force anything, and I just hope to have, at the end of this, before we all die, you know, especially my brother and myself, that we're going to find something, some piece. I mean, when you think about, when you think about your story, it is an amazing story, the ups and the downs and all that you've been through, which I think a lot of people can identify with because this is not a seamless,

this is not a simple story of going from one success to another success. Like, you've had a lot of ups and downs and you're open about it and you're honest about it. So first of all, thank you for that. I've realized the power of that. I realized it really early on that, look, people cared about the story. And if it wouldn't have been for the bread, the story probably wouldn't have mattered that much. But anyway, it feels good to talk about it. How much of what happened to you, I mean, the success of the company, the good sides of what happened, do you think are because of your hard work and your intelligence and your skill?

and how much of it do you think is because of luck and the luck that, you know, Shobie and Glenn were there to, you know, to sort of see in that product a potential, something that potentially be big. Yeah, a lot of bad luck before it was good luck. And when it comes to being a millionaire and becoming a very successful businessman,

that is not something that would have happened probably without, you know, having those associations, but who knows where it would have got to see? Because the most, the miracle of all this was the transformation I had in prison. That was what mattered, because my mind was free. I felt free. And having a contrast between the adversity that I'd had in my life and what I was going through, and I mean, just being able to create and just keep working towards something, you know, that was, that was the miracle to me. Dave Dahl, co-founder of Dave's Killer Bread.

By the way, the cartoon version of Dave is still on every package of the bread. Biceps as big as ever. Dave no longer has the mustache that's on the package, but he still does play his guitar. His band's name, Dave Dahl and the Killer Granddetties. And here they are. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today's story starts with a recipe. Black pepper essential oil, umkelobo tea, sea buckthorn tea, Greek mountain tea.

This is Erica Foyt. She lives in Livermore, Colorado with her husband, Jason. Sea salt, cloves, peppercorn, arrowroot, elder flour. And all of these ingredients, they all go into a natural deodorant that Jason and Erica make and sell. It's called pit liquor. Emphasis on the liquor. Vodka whiskey. Vodka and whiskey are, in fact, the key ingredients in pit liquor deodorant. Because like most spirits, they can actually kill the bacteria that make us smell bad. But beyond that, whiskey has tannins in it, which are antibacterial in and of themselves.

And then it's something that's fun. Anyway, all of this came about a few years ago when Erica was pregnant, and she was looking for a natural deodorant that would work without making her break out. And so Jason decided to see if he could make some, even though he had absolutely no experience in deodorant. Like his day job was an IT. I actually spent a lot of time reading textbooks on deodorant and on armpits. Old textbooks?

Yes, there are actually textbooks on armpits. So all throughout 2016, Jason was trying to find the perfect blend to fight BO, mixing vodka and whiskey and essential oils and black tea, and then storing these concoctions and mason jars around the house. And he tested all of them out on Erica. He stopped showering his armpits. He stopped washing them. And he would come to me and say,

I sprayed St. John's wort and vodka on this armpit. And I have juniper berries and this weird tea from China on this other armpit. And I want you to smell them and tell me which smells better. And can I just say here that on this show, we've talked to a lot of founders who are also married couples. But this, this is like a whole new level of collaboration. If you've ever stuck your nose in an armpit, you don't have good expectations. And I finally got sick of smelling and said, look, I think you have a winner.

Please stop. I'm done. I'm tired. And it turns out Jason really did have a winner, a mix of tea and vodka and whiskey and essential oils that worked really well for him and Erica. But what about everybody else? So we reached out to our friends on Facebook and said, hey, anyone want to try a natural deodorant that we've formulated? And their friends signed up. They tried it. They liked it. Word started to spread.

And Erica and Jason kicked it into high gear. They raised a little bit of money and they started to ramp up production of the deodorant. But then, customers began to complain about something the couple had not anticipated. They were really angry with these white spray caps that we had. Like, people were telling. us that when they sprayed the cap, the alcohol was just spewing up around their finger in like a fountain. It looked like old faithful. So Erica and Jason tried different caps, but they kept clogging or breaking. It basically leads us to a place where we're sending out free caps and free

bottles of deodorant, new bottles, and we just, we basically just hemorrhaged money. After a frantic search, Erica and Jason eventually found a cap that was sturdy enough to deliver the deodorant. But the bottle cap crisis almost sank the company. It seems like it's almost like falling down. Alice's rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland because it's just so incredibly deep and there's so much to do. It's scary. It's terrifying. But the bottom line is it's a blast. Pitlicker is now averaging about $20,000 a month in sales.

And the company hopes to be profitable by this summer. And by the way, some of the folks on our team have actually sampled the deodorant and they say it works and smells pretty great. Kind of like a very clean neighborhood bar, but to be clear, it is not drinkable. So don't drink it. For the same reason, nobody drinks their hand sanitizer. Nobody should drink. Nobody should

drink their deodorant. That's Jason Foyt and his wife, Erica. They're the co-founders of pit liquor deodorant. If you want to find out more about the company or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page. How I Built This.NPR.org. And of course, if you want to tell

us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at H-I-B-T at NPR.org. Our show is produced this week by James Delahousie with original music composed by Ramtin Arablui. Our editor is Neva Grant. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Sanaz Meshkampur, and Jeff Rogers.

Our intern is David Jop. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.