How I Built This with Guy Raz - LÄRABAR: Lara Merriken (2018)

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

In 2000, Lara Merriken was 32, recently divorced, and without a job when she decided to make energy bars by mixing cherries, dates, and almonds in her Cuisinart. Eventually, she perfected the recipe and launched her company: LÄRABAR. After just two years, the company was bringing in millions in revenue. In 2008, she sold to General Mills, but stayed on to help grow LÄRABAR into one of the biggest energy bar brands in the U.S. PLUS in our post-script "How You Built That," we check back with Gerry Stellenberg who combined his knack for technology with his love of pinball to create a company for modern pinball enthusiasts called Multimorphic. 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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There are a chance to see me and to meet other builders and fans of the show. It's all brought to you by American Express, and we'd love to see you there. So to get tickets, go to nprpresents.org, and I hope to see you in Denver. So Lara American was one of those people who owned a cuisine, but never bothered to use it. Until one day, she decided to make a new type of a snack bar. So out came the Quezonart, and about three years later, out came Larabar. If you haven't heard it, it's an incredible story that first ran in March of last year. And if you have heard it, totally worth hearing again. Enjoy.

What happened to that name? Well, the trademarking attorney called me at the 11th hour, and we were getting ready to launch. It was the year 2002 summer, and she said, I think you're going to need to change the name. And I just thought, you're joking, right? I've left working at Whole Foods and we're supposed to be launching, but we don't launch. And everybody's backing out because nothing's happening. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Laura American through dates, cashews, and drive, cherries into her quezon art and turned that mushy mix into Lara Bar, one of the best-selling energy bars in America. So if you've recently walked to the energy bar section of the supermarket, you might be surprised or rather overwhelmed by the number of choices. I mean, for starters, there are hundreds of different types of energy bars, which is kind of crazy if you think about it. They're protein bars and paleo bars and Whole 30 and vegan and gluten-free and cacao

infused with matcha powder, there is probably an energy bar out there for each and every one of us. And that whole revolution, it really got started in the 1990s with cliff bar. And if you've heard previous episodes of this show, you might have heard our interview with Gary Erickson who actually invented those cliff bars. Well, in the early 2000s, Lara American came up with a pretty simple concept that shockingly wasn't really out there in the world. It was an energy bar made from two or three rye ingredients like almonds or cashews, all bound together with dates. Now, Lara bars may not seem like a big deal today, right? You can get them pretty much anywhere, any 7-Eleven. But back in the day, they were kind of revolutionary.

And how she even came to inventing them to building this brand? Well, there was no direct path. Lara never intended to start her own business or even to sell a product. She grew up in the Denver area. Her parents ran a pretty successful high-end clothing store, and Laura was really into sport. She was actually good enough to make the USC women's volleyball team. But after she graduated from college with a degree in psychology,

she wasn't really sure what to do. So she came back to Denver and got a job as a social worker. And she started to work with kids and teenagers who needed help. It was hard. I mean, just emotionally difficult job. was intense. It was always chaotic. We were on call every six weeks. This is at a time where I had to carry a pager around. Remember the pager days? Yeah. And if the pager went off at two in the morning because somebody ran away from our treatment facility, you had to answer the phone call. But it was intense work

and to see, you know, 15-year-old girls, actually 13-year-old girls with kids. And I had to manage their care with the judicial system. I went to court a lot. I made recommendations. It was one of the most stressful jobs I've ever had in my life, and I was in my early 20s. How long did it take you before you got burned out? Like a year and a half. So by a year and a half, you're doing this, and you just decide, this is not, this is not for me. I knew I needed to change what the landscape looked like. So I wanted to help these kids, but I wanted to do it in more of a recreation. component. I didn't want to feel like I was the police all the time. And so I became a community involvement leader and I got these kids involved in the community. How long did you do that for?

About four years. I really loved being in the more recreational component with these kids and kind of opening their eyes to a bigger world and hoping that they saw opportunity for themselves. That was very gratifying. Like you would play sports with them and take them for like nature walks and stuff like that? I would do anything and everything. I mean, we went to a natural food grocery store one day and got a

tour of that and then I would take them to Rockies games because somebody would donate the tickets and then we had the cat petting club and I'd take them to the local animal shelter because they couldn't have pets in their homes. And then we would have our community garden and so it was a year-round program.

They'd come after school and then during the summer I basically ran a summer camp. And then I would teach them how to cook and do arts and crafts. I mean, anything I could think of to do, I would do. So this was like your MBA. That was your management training. It was good. It was really fun. I mean, to this day, I still think about these children. And I wonder where they are, what's happened, what they're doing. So during this time that I was being a social worker, working as a social worker, I was also cultivating this passion for natural foods. How did that happen? Well, so let's go back to college. College volleyball, our coach had a rule of no sugar and no red meat. So at the time, I was totally into junk food. I was 18 years old. You know, my favorite place to eat was any fast food restaurant you can name. And then I all of a sudden I'm stopping eating sugar and no red meat.

And he just and just to be clear, he felt that no red meat, no sugar would result in, uh, uh, and better performance from his players? Yes. And did he like enforce this rule? Oh, yes. This wasn't a joke. This was real. No, this was very real.

Like it was a rule in the team. And that was like, by the way, it must have been an intense team. And that's Division I volleyball USC, which is a major like Pac-10 school. Oh, yes. I remember thinking I can't believe I have the opportunity to play volleyball on this team. I will do anything this man tells me to do. And then all of a sudden I'm stopping eating sugar and no red meat. It was really an interesting experience.

So I started feeling better. So that was the first light bulb that went off for me. Post-college, I'm working as a social worker. I start doing all this reading. And then I started having migraines. I started getting migraines out of nowhere. I'd never had them. And I got a blood test and learned that I,

I was actually very allergic to wheat. Wow. You'd been eating wheat your whole life, and after college, you discovered this. Yes. I mean, wheat's in everything. Everything. So this is in the early 90s at the time, and there wasn't really many options. And their solution to this is stop eating wheat.

And I'm thinking, well, what am I going to eat? So at the time, I didn't even really know how to cook much. You know, I grew up with two working parents. My mom went to school, and it was just. She was not slaving over the stove every night, right? No. No, it was very much convenient food-oriented. So I really didn't even know how to cook.

Why I had to learn how to cook for myself because I had such a limited diet. And I got introduced to natural foods at the time. So things like kale and quinoa and all the things that we kind of know now as normal were totally foreign to me. Especially in the mid-90s, like. It was weird to me at first. And then I thought, well, I'm going to embrace this. And so I would read everything I could about recipes and nutrition. And I just got into it.

And I made the most of it. So then I started thinking to myself in the background of going through this whole experience and feeling better. I thought, I don't know. I love natural foods. This makes such, this is common sense to me. Why don't people know about this? Why isn't somebody teaching us about healthy food? And so my passion started to build.

So I guess at a certain point, you stopped working with kids. And did you find another job? Or did you kind of start to just like, did you start to think about what you had to, what you wanted to do? Well, I knew I had an excitement and passion for natural foods. I just didn't know how I was going to make a transition between being a social worker. and natural foods. They were two completely different worlds. What was going on in your personal life?

Were you single at the time? I was married and I was in the middle of getting a divorce. Wow. So it was a huge change for me. And I realized that I needed to get a divorce in the middle of all of this. So you were young woman married and getting divorced. Yes. And thinking about changing my career in a matter of like six months.

And what were you thinking about doing at? that point? I didn't know, but all I knew is that I needed to find the courage to take a leap of faith. And somehow, some way, I figured that out for myself. And I left my marriage, I left my job and decided, I'm going to go back to school and I'm going to study, I want to get into naturopathic medical school. And naturopathic is like natural, like homeopathic remedies and stuff? Yes. So there's a school in Seattle, Washington, and one in Portland, Oregon, and naturopathic medicine. And I thought, I'm going to practice that, which covers all natural medicine, nutrition, acupuncture, everything. And that's what I really, I think that's the

direction I want to go. I looked at the school for years, really renowned school. I thought, this is what I'm going to do. So I started taking chemistry and physics and all these science classes of the local community college. And actually, I'd moved back out to California. My parents were living out there. So I'm on my path of taking classes, and I meet a friend of mine, a dear friend of mine now, one day eating at the local health food store, we're eating lunch. And he drags me to this raw food class. And I have one of the most amazing meals I've ever had in my life at this class. And I thought, wow, raw foods are kind of amazing. And it just never had occurred to me.

And meanwhile, I'm taking my classes. I got accepted to this program, two schools, one in Seattle and one in Washington. And I thought, I'm going to be a naturopathic doctor. That's what I'm going to do. And I went to a meeting with all the doctors in California. And they were very limited in their scope of practice there at the time because the laws weren't open there. And I went to this meeting and it was like, April. I was moving to Seattle in July of that year. This is like 90. This is the year 2000.

You 2000. Okay. So I was three months away from moving to Seattle. I was thrilled to death I got into the school. I went to this meeting with all these, you know, naturopaz that had been naturopaz for 20 years. And this meeting scared the living daylights out of me. Why? Because all of these people were passionate, but because the state of California didn't allow them. to really practice their scope of medicine because the laws limited them, it just looked like a giant struggle. Yeah. It looked frustrating to be able to have a degree in something and not be able to really do it. And then I went back to Colorado over Memorial Day weekend to visit one of my dearest and oldest friends. And I went hiking and I was just kind of eating a trail mix and thinking of food and raw foods

and thinking about moving to Seattle, and all of a sudden, I'm on this mountain and this light bulb goes off for me. And I think, why isn't somebody made something made of fruit, nuts and spices, like something very just pure, simple, real foods, but it's portable and convenient. But it tastes indulgent like you shouldn't be eating it, like junk food. I mean, I don't know, that day at that moment, it was like this surge of energy I got. I could feel this excitement over an idea. It's not like I hadn't had ideas before. I mean, people are walking around every day with ideas. But for whatever reason, at that day and that time and all those little experiences that built up, I just felt it.

So what did you do? Did you, like, run home and start, like, writing things down or drawing pictures? Or did you just kind of mull it over for a while? So I ran down the mountain. I got out of a notebook, and I started with a notebook. and I started writing down ideas. And then when we got back to Denver, I thought, how can I take fruit nuts and spices and turn them into something really exciting?

And I would get ideas from pies and cookies and cakes. And I think, okay, how do I take cherry pie and make it just in my cuisine art, basically a raw, raw unprocessed food, and make it taste like cherry pie or apple pie or banana bread or. or what have you. Did you immediately think, hey, I can turn this into a business, or was it more like, I just want to try to experiment and see if I can make this snack? I did think I think I can turn this into a business.

I don't even know. I think it was like a day later. And the next thing you know, I'm thinking, I'm going to start this business. And I'm going to do this in the next three months. I mean, how naive is that? to think that you're going to start a business in three months. And I called my parents, and everybody thought I was completely out of my mind. Did they think it was like an early middle life crisis?

I don't know what they thought. They just thought we've centered, you know, through private high school, USC. She's graduated. She's 32 years old. Oh, my God, what's going on here? But it was actually great that people questioned me and wondered why I was doing what I was doing. And especially my family, because it made me dig in more and recognize that I really did want to do it. That I didn't need to get approval from anybody, but that I needed, I had found something that was important to me. And I just could not be stopped.

I arranged to stay with another friend of mine, moved in with her. In Denver. Yes. And then I would take these concoctions that I would come up with using the Cuisinart that I had had for years, by the way, I'd never actually used it. I didn't even know how to use the Cuisinart. And for some reason, I got the Cuisnerd out. And I would do what's called, well, they officially call it a focus group. I didn't even know the name then.

And I would, I created my own little survey and I would ask people, why do you, you know, what do you eat energy bars for? Why do you like them? Why don't you like them? you know, all these things and people would fill them out. And then I would give them my concoctions and say, please tell me what you think. And so is that how you developed your recipes? Yes. The interesting thing is the recipes came fairly quickly.

I, you know, because I would sample my friends and they would give me feedback, like, I really like the cherry, but I don't taste cherry in every bite. And I would go back to the drawing board and think, I think I need to add more cherries. You should taste cherry. every bite. You shouldn't be searching for it. Then it doesn't taste like cherry pie, right? By the way, how did you make, like, how did you think of cherry pie? Like, what, do you dry cherries and, or, and I don't know, what else? Well, I, so I would go to this natural food store. Yeah. Because everything was less expensive there. And I would buy dried cherries and dried bananas

and dried apples. And then I would come up with the idea of, oh, cherry pie. Okay, let me see if I can make cherry pie with these cherries, the dates and the almonds. And they sold these tart unsweetened cherries. I will never forget. They were the best tasting thing because they actually are a real cherry without a bunch of sugar in them. Yeah. And then what is today larabar cherry pie is from these cherries.

So I'm just imagining this because I do a lot of cooking. And you're in your kitchen with your cuisinaard. And I'm thinking you put a bunch of dates and like nuts in there and you're just going get this like ball rolling around the quees and this sticky like sticky ball of a mass and then you would like take it out with your hands and like I would roll it out with a rolling pin and then I got a cutter and I would like a pizza cutter and I would cut it out just in your kitchen and I would make samples I mean batch after batch after batch and did you have any of your own I mean did you have any cash, did you have to sort of ask your parents to help you out in that year while you were not, you know, were getting a salary? How did you pay your bills?

Within about a week, I realized, oh, I had a little bit of money saved up. And then I thought, I'm going to start this business, but I have to work. I have to get a job, you know? Yeah. So Whole Foods opened their first door in Denver at exactly the same time. And I started seeing the building go up in the, and in the neighborhood. I grew up in, actually. And I thought, huh, I'm going to get a job with them. I'm going to work in their nutrition department doing what I love, but I'm going to figure out the business and how it works and use it as a learning opportunity, almost like a paid internship in a sense. I mean, that's like incredibly prescient. Like, that's really amazing planning. It reminds me we interviewed Ben and Jerry's and people think that they were just these hippies, but they actually

like stood on a street corner with a counter to count how many people passed the street corner when they were looking for a location for their Ben and Jerry's. You know, like that is a real planning moment. You were you were sort of looking ahead and saying, all right, well, if I'm going to do this business, let me at least learn natural foods and go like what be like a cashier at Whole Foods? I got a job in the nutrition department doing what I loved, which was working around all the nutrition products. So I thought, okay, I'm going to enjoy myself, but I'm also going to, I'll have a first-hand view of what it's like to have a product in their store. And what does that mean from the standpoint of the vendor? And it was one of the best decisions I ever made. So at what point did you think to yourself, okay, this is going to be really, this is really going to be a big deal? Like, this is people are going to want to buy these?

I'm not sure I ever thought that. It was such a gradual progression. So I first got my recipes together and I would give them out to friends. And then friends would say, I would buy those. And that little tidbit of asking me to buy it would make me feel so excited and motivated to get to the next place, which was, how in the world I'm going to manufacture these things? Yeah. Where am I going to get dates and almonds and chairs? and cherries.

I didn't even know. I'm buying them at a natural food grocery store in little baggies. Right. What do I know about almonds and dates and all that stuff?

What do I know about manufacturing equipment? And at the time, I started questioning, am I actually going to do this or should I just go to work for Whole Foods? Maybe I'll just do that.

And just to clarify again, how are you just like sort of funding this business, like buying the ingredients and stuff? Were you just using your own money? You know, I had a job at Whole Foods, and then I had a credit card. And were you nervous or anxious at all?

I don't know. I would have moments where I would be really gung-ho, and I would get all kinds of great information, and a month would go by, and I would find out about a piece of manufacturing equipment or just little things, and I would be so motivated, and somebody would want to buy bars, and I'd make them a batch of bars in these little Ziploc bags, in a little Chinese takeout box. And they would pay me like $22 or something for a box of bars. And I would think, wow.

And then another month that go by where I couldn't get anywhere, I felt like my feet were stuck in the mud. And then I would just get really unmotivated and nothing would happen. And this went on for the three-year period between my idea phase and when I actually launched. So I'm trying to figure out how you, maintained your optimism and confidence about all this because, I mean, you're 32. You're divorced. And I imagine you probably have some emotional ups and downs at this point. And I don't know, like was part of you, I mean, did you ever get the feeling that people look at you and kind of think, oh, yeah, that's Laura. She's got this kind of weird side project. Oh, a lot of people thought that. I mean, I would see people I went to high school with and they would come into Whole Foods. and, you know, they're already climbing the ladder of big jobs and finance and all kinds of things. And they say, oh, I didn't know you worked here.

And people would see me. And even if I had those moments with people where I would notice the fact that I wasn't on that trajectory, I finally just said, this is your path in life. And you have to go for it and embrace it and make it happen. When we come back, Hilara embraced the uncertainty. and slowly, slowly, figured out how to turn her kitchen project into a business. 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 it's 2001. Laura American is working at Whole Foods in Denver, and she's trying to figure out how to start a company, but she still doesn't have a whole lot of money, and she doesn't have any professional equipment or even a way to process and package her energy bars.

So eventually I went to a packaging company in Denver, and they weren't even taking me seriously. What did you say to them? You said, hey, how do I make this on a bigger scale? Well, I said, I need packaging. And then they'd look at me and go, huh? I mean, they couldn't take me seriously. I didn't even have a business. And they'd give me a giant book that looked so tedious to read through. And they'd say, well, read some of this and come back, and we'll talk to you about packaging. And then I would read enough that I would come back, partially educated, and then they started realizing I was serious about it. That you wanted, you were looking for somebody who had food grade packaging that could package your bars.

Yes. And meanwhile, back at home, you're still using your quezon art? Yes. I was using the quezen art. And I was trying to find a giant queesan art. I was trying to, I didn't even know what that was called. It's called a vertical cutter mixer. I learned.

And then that led to some guy that they knew that had a piece of. manufacturing equipment that lo and behold was the exact thing that I needed. The giant quezoner. Yes. And so because I had the tenacity to ask and I wasn't afraid at a time when a lot of people questioned what I was doing, but I knew that I needed to do it, it gave me the motivation to keep asking questions and to be curious and tenacious. And so I'd call the guy with a piece of equipment and I'd meet him.

And then I talked to this guy and he's like, well, I'm not really using it. If you want to use it, you can. And that's how it all kind of pieced together. Yeah. And did you, and you had the name by that point, Laura Barr's. Well, no, it was a different name. So I was going to name it mana bar. And your mana is your vital energy or your chi. How's that spelled? M-A-N-A. What happened to that name? Well, the trademarking attorney called me at the 11th hour, and we were getting ready to launch. It was the year 2002 summer, and she said, I think there's going to be a problem. And she said, there's actually manna bread, M-A-N-N-A. And I think it could be confusingly similar. And I think you're going to need to change the name. And I just thought, you're joking, right?

I don't want to deal with this right now. naming is one of the hardest things. So I got the phone call, finally came to terms of the fact that that was going to have to happen. And a friend said, you know, why don't you call them Larbar? You know, you make them. They're your bars. It sounds kind of like a good, it rings, Larabar, you know.

And I thought, no way. I am not putting my name on this product. I don't want my name in there. No way, I'm not doing that. And then I just kind of sat with it for a couple of weeks, and I finally thought, huh, Larbar. I guess that could work. And by the way, you had raised some money from... No, I hadn't raised any money.

You didn't raise any money. Okay, I wrote it, sorry, I wrote a business plan. My dad helped me write a business plan. I had a few friends and family interested. And between the renaming of Larbar, Monabar to Larbar, and manufacturing issues, I was going to launch in fall of 2002, and that got delayed until April of 2003. And during that time, all of my interested friends and family backed out. Because they got cold feet because it was, yeah.

It was just getting delayed. Yeah. And all these people are starting to slowly back out because things are not happening. I've left working at Whole Foods. It's like mid-2002, and we're supposed to be launching, but we don't launch. And everybody's backing out because nothing's happening. So what'd you do? Well, I had to raise the money.

And my dad had decided he wanted to get involved in the company. He had a great business background in the retail business. He knew operations and how to run a company. And he called me one day, and he said, hey, would you want a business partner? And then how much money did you decide that you needed to raise? There really wasn't an amount. It wasn't really as specific. I think we came up the amount because I had to print packaging.

And I had five flavors that I was launching with. And each... There were a cashew cookie. Okay, cashew cookie, cherry pie, apple pie, banana bread, and chocolate coconut chew. And there was a minimum print run of all of those. And I actually printed at this company in Minnesota. And I remember it costing somewhere around, you know, $150,000. And the manufacturing wasn't working out.

I had been to now four manufacturing places that did not work out. And I had a giant vertical cutter mixer in the back of my old land cruiser that I would haul around to each facility, whether it was two hours away, an hour away, two hours away, what have you. That you would have them install in their facility ideally. You bought this thing? I borrowed it. The giant, the giant Kuisinart.

Giant Kuisnizniz. It was 400 pounds. It was on a palette and they'd have to forklift it into the back of my land cruiser. So I was running around the state of Colorado trying to find somewhere to manufacture. And when you're new to business, nobody takes you seriously. They don't even know how to make your product. You know, they just want me to fit into what they're doing. And so I'm running around trying to find a place to manufacture.

and all the additional investors have now backed out. And I remember it was just like a dark night in January, and my dad was getting discouraged. So I said to him, you know what, I believe that this is going to work out. I really have faith, and I think the right people will come along at the right time. So I started talking to some other friends about it,

friends in yoga class, friends I worked with at Whole Foods, and then all of a sudden a whole new group of people came that were just thrilled, like six people and said we'd love to invest in it. Yeah. And how much did you raise? Well, it was a total of $150,000. $150,000.

And that was going to get you through some production and printing. More or less. And then a little bit of extra just for operating costs. But we were operating out of a tiny duplex in Denver, so the overhead was extremely low. Okay, so you have the manufacturing and the printing nail down. But how did you then find you? find the stores to buy and then sell Lara bars.

Well, let me backtrack to when I was working at Whole Foods before I left. So one morning I was there, because this is also part of what you're asking me. So I was on the early shift at 8 a.m. And one of the grocery guys, he said, Lara, the guy you need to meet, he's the regional buyer from Austin. And he's the guy he's coming in, you know, this next week. he's the guy you should talk to about your product. So here I am. I'm taking trash out one morning. It's about 8.15 in the morning. And he walks across my path on the back dock of the store,

this buyer. And he says, oh, hey, how are you? What's new? You know, he just, he was being friendly. He'd seen me before. He didn't know who I was. And I, in that moment, I thought, this is my moment. And I said, oh, hi, you know, this is what's, new. I've been working on this product. I'm creating my own nutrition bar, this and that. And he literally kind of dead stopped and started doing this motion. I didn't really mean that. Don't pitch me. Don't pitch me. I didn't mean that. And I'd like to run away from you right now. And he said, well, I'm only here for two hours. Do you have samples? And he's just trying to get rid of me. And I said, actually, I do have samples. I'm leaving in two hours. I said, well, I can go home and get them. And I mean, I had an answer to

everything. He just tried to make me go away. And I wasn't going away. And he said, okay, bring me the samples and just kind of walked off. And so I said to my coworker, I have to go home right now and take my break. And so I gave him to him. And then like an hour later, he's sitting there and he goes, Laura, this is the most innovative product I've tried in years. Wow. And I'm standing there. I couldn't even believe my ears. You know, I knew I made a great product, but he's a buyer. He's a regional buyer. And he said, when you are ready, here's my card.

He said, give me a call. Let me know. He said, dot your eyes, cross your teas. I will let you bring it into the Colorado stores. Huh. And that was just such a motivational moment for me. I bet. I mean, this is, you know, two years in, and I'm questioning what I'm doing.

and why I'm doing it. I'm tired. I don't know what I'm doing. And he says this. And I think, wow. So what, like a few months later, you were, you were ready to put Lara bars out into the world, right? Yes. I finally have raised all the money we wanted to raise and found a manufacturing facility. It was the fourth one. And how many bars did you have them make for the first big push, the first launch? They didn't make the bars. We made the bar. You did. Okay, how many did you make? 500 bars by hand. So I had rolls of packaging and a vertical cutter mixer essentially.

And it was you and a bunch of like friends and... It was me, my father, and then any friend that would help. And it took us about 15 hours to make 500 bars because I had to hand cut each wrapper off of the rolls of film, make the bar, you know, roll it out with a piece. with a rolling pin in a pizza cutter and then stuff it in a package and heat seal. And then what? You would take those bars to like Whole Foods and then like set up a table with samples and try to sell them to people who are shopping in the store?

Yes. So what I learned working at Whole Foods in the three years that I was there, among other things, was when you sample products for free to people, it's this kind of non-risky trial. So in my mind, the marketing plan for me was to do that, is to stand in the store, to talk to people, educate them. Because what I was doing, fruit and nuts. I mean, everybody was afraid of a piece of fruit at the time. The whole carb thing, the Atkins thing was very big, and everybody thought, like, eating a carrot was a very bad thing.

So I'm thinking, what am I going to do with, you know, cherries and dates, and then nuts have high fat in them, but it's good fat. And so there was a lot to explain, but I had to make it digestible and simple for people. So my whole strategy was to get in each store and as often as I could, lunch and dinner, demo my product. And you were manning the table and you were like saying, hey, you want to try a Lara Bar? I was manning the table. In fact, I have pictures of me doing all the demos. And within two weeks of being in Whole Foods, because one of my friends still work there, He said, Laura, you have to go look at the movement chart upstairs.

And I said, what? And he said, Larbar is the top five, one through five selling products in the entire store right now. It outsells olive oil and water. You had one of the five best selling products in that store within two weeks? Yes. That's insane. I mean, I knew in my heart, and from all the feedback I'd gotten that people were excited about what I was doing. But I also, on the other hand, knew that there was going to be challenges.

And that was the, I remember the day I got into the stores and I brought it after making those 500 bars by hand. And I remember standing there and I was just, I was excited, exhilarated, anxious, scared to death. I mean, it was like putting a piece of art on display. What do you think, I mean, like what explains why it sold so well? Like now you think about, you know, somebody who's, you know, somebody. People are paleo. I am in paleo and, you know, people are doing a whole 30 and all these. And that's, and raw food is just kind of, it's a lot more mainstream now. But in 2003, you know, Atkins was still really big. And so some of these ingredients were sort of uncommon to a lot of people. They would think, oh, well, I don't know if all the nuts and the fat. What explains how it took off so fast? It was simple. Yeah. Ten or, less ingredients. You know what these ingredients are. Almums, dates, cashews, cinnamon, I mean, depends on the bar, but cherries. And you know what these things are. And we've been eating these

items and, you know, they're grown on trees. We know what they are. It's not a question. And then they were made to taste, I blended them to taste like something you want to eat. So I didn't feel like you had to sacrifice, oh, it's healthy, but doesn't taste good. I wanted to blend both and I wanted make it something that you were so happy and excited to eat. And there's like two, three, four, five ingredients in the average Laura Bar, right? There are, like my all-time favorite, cashew cookie. Yes, me too. I love it.

And it's two ingredients, cashews and dates. It's so simple. And I think that's what resonated with people is people had never seen something like this before. Which is... Which is crazy because it's such a simple idea. I mean, it's complicated, but it's simple ingredients. Even my dad asked me one day, how come somebody else has thought about this? I said, I have no idea, but I have.

And I want to, this is why we're doing this. So once you launch in Whole Foods and you realize that you're on the top five sellers, and it's just that one Whole Foods in Denver, right? Yes. In that neighbor in Denver. How quickly did Whole Foods generally, you know, the Whole Foods, I don't know, Whole Foods come to you and say, actually, we want these to go national. That took a little time.

I mean, it was over the next year. that that started to happen. That wasn't as easy as it seemed, but it did come together. There was a journalist in Denver that worked for the Denver Post, and he wrote an article about me, Memorial Day of 2003,

and it literally put my company on the map just from that one article. I will always be grateful for that. And from that, the industry paper caught it, and then all these stores from California started calling, And so I started launching in California. And it just started to build.

How were you making the bars fast enough? We were doing anything and everything we could to make the bars fast enough. Were you still personally making them at that point? I was. My father started taking over manufacturing operations. And then we started just getting help. You had to hire people. Oh, yeah, we had to hire people.

And we were really riding a great wave. You were already getting a lot of attention at that point. I mean, we were two years in. We were basically a national brand now. What was your revenue in year two? Year two, I want to say like five to seven million dollars? Yeah, I'd say about five. Year two?

We were jumping. Crazy growth. Yeah. Was your whole life from like 2000 to launch and then in the middle of this like 2005, 2006, was you working like crazy? Or by the time you're hitting 5 to 7 million in sales, were you like kind of kicking back and you and your dad sort of clinking champagne glasses and saying, all right, we can chill out a little bit?

No, never. The bigger we got, the more I felt like we can never rest on our laurels. And I just felt like I had to work as hard as I could because I was leading our team. And if I wasn't showing that I'm working hard and showing up every day, then how could I ask people that did that for me? Yeah. You know, we're building a company. We can't say, sorry, we're not available until Friday. You answer the phone anytime somebody calls.

I mean, you know, some of these big retailers would call in the most random moments. And say, hey, we need more. We're interested. We'd like to bring you in. Can you come out and meet us at our national headquarters? Of course, you'd have to go. That's right. So as you continue to grow, you're doing five, seven, ten, I don't know, 20 million, 30 million.

How many employees did you eventually hire? We had about 26 in sales and marketing. And then manufacturing had about 75. Yeah. You, in 2008, I guess, you were approached, or starting and maybe even earlier than that, You start to get approached by big companies that were interested in talking to you. You did eventually sell to General Mills, which I want to get to in a sec, but they were not the only company that approached you. They were not.

The first phone call I got from a really large company was in early 2005, so like a year and a half in. Wow. And they said, hey, we want to talk to you. one of my investor friends who worked for us was answering the phones and she said so and so from this company's on the phone and I went what and it was a big huge company yeah it's a competitor of general mills and I was in shock I didn't I never occurred to me that I would sell my company or be approached by these big companies it just it wasn't in where my mind was. And then it became a distraction in the middle of growing the company and running it. And so, you know, my business partners and I had to decide were we really going to be serious, entertaining an offer, or were we just, you know, because it's just too much distraction. So we finally decided in 2007 that we would entertain an offer if it was the right company,

if we felt like it was the right company because we didn't have to sell. We were a very, you know, financially stable company. Yeah. But for me, I was starting to get really tired and just I was getting worn down. I bet. And I mean, you had spent most of or all of, virtually all of your 30s really just grinding this out, right? And so presumably you wanted to kind of just focus on yourself, a little bit.

Yeah, I just wanted a little relief, I think. And then we started to talk to some of these companies, and then I met with General Mills. And I just knew the day I walked in that building and how they approached me and the meeting we had, I knew I felt that there was a connection and authenticity, that if there were a company that were big that they would be a great fit. I felt like they understood my brand and respected it and all the brands they'd have had have been around forever. So they're not just churning brands out and putting them on the shelf and getting rid of them. I just felt the synergy. I mean, almost nobody we've had on the show, with some exceptions, but almost nobody who've had on the show

even thinks about money when they're starting their company. They're just committed to a product to a passion or a problem they want to solve. And then one day they find themselves with this money. They're financially secure. You start this thing at 30, 33, really. Yeah, 34, 39. You sell it. And all of a sudden, you and your dad, you have this money and this thing that you built.

Like, how did you wrap your head around it? It took a while. You know, during the sale process, I had to be, you know, they had to do all of kind of the research of our company without us telling our employees. And that was very nerve-wracking. So I had to have this very compartmentalized life for three months. And I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown. But because you don't know if it's going to come together until literally the day before. So that was very stressful period for me.

but also really unknown. And then we put a deal together and that was the day before I turned 40. And then all of a sudden I had to go from running the ship to realizing that a whole other team of people wanted needed to come in and do that and I needed to let them do that. As a result, you know, I had a little boy. I'm involved in his life. I, you know, I get to spend, time pursuing other things important to me. Yeah. And still keep my hand in the business and do the things that I love for it, but without all the stress.

Yeah. And you go into any 7-Eleven or any Whole Foods or Safeway or Trader Joe's, they're lara bars right by the cash register everywhere. Your name on this thing, on this brand, on this product. I actually have, I was in Target one day with my son. It was a couple of years ago. And, you know, he was six at the time. And we were, you know, wandering around buying whatnot.

And then he saw all the lara bars. And he said, did you make all these bars for the store? And I said, well, yes, indirectly, yes. And, you know, it was the first time the light bulb went off for him about what I had done and what larvae. You know, he'd seen him at our house. but to see him in the store and it was it was really exciting it was really positive moment has he ever had a snickers yes he has had a snickers and he does love them yes laura how much of what happened to you is because of luck and how much because of your skill i i mean i feel

lucky that I have opportunity in my life and that I've surrounded myself with people that care about me and that, you know, along the way when people thought I was completely out of my mind for starting an energy bar company. I remember thinking to myself, you know, you need to surround yourself with people that believe in you. It's really important. And actually, I remember thinking to myself, I have more to lose if I don't find out than I do if I try this. and it doesn't work. And I'm so glad that for whatever reason I had that in my mind because it compelled me to move forward and make LarraBar happen.

Lara American, founder of Larabar. By the way, if you've ever struggled with how to pronounce Lara Bar, maybe you thought it was Larabar, you can blame that oomlout above the A in Lara, you know, like the one used in Hagenas or Mali Crewe, which serves no real purpose or function, Lara just thought it looked pretty cool. And please do stick around because in just a moment,

we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. In 1987, dozens of federal agents surrounded a trailer park in Ozark, Missouri. Their target, white supremacist, threatening violent revolution. I have eight teams of freedom fighters prepared to start a race war nationwide. The agents fired tear gas, arrested him, and found a massive arsenal. C4 plastic explosives, hand grenades, thousands of rounds of ammunition. So years later, why did the FBI stop watching him? That story, Unembedded from NPR.

Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today, we're updating a story that first ran about a year ago. And it starts more than 20 years ago when Jerry Stellenberg was a student at Virginia Tech. And he and his friends would hang out at the student center. And there were pinball machines around the pool table. and all my friends, while we were playing pool, they'd take a break and go over and play pinball, and I thought they were just throwing money away.

But one night, one of his friends finally talked him into playing a game, just one game of pinball. Begrudgingly, I walked over, and geez, it must have been just a minute or two, but had the time of my life, and I kind of got hooked immediately. And what he loved about it was that it was kind of a physical game. You could manipulate the flippers to keep the ball in play. But Jerry was a tech guy, a competitive. engineer, and there was something about pinball that started to bug him.

While the balls rolling around this painted piece of wood, it's not doing anything other than just rolling. Which, by the way, has been perfectly acceptable for the legions of pinball players who've loved the game for decades. But Jerry couldn't shake the feeling that the game could somehow be reimagined. And so in 2009, when touchscreen tablets started to get popular, he got an idea. So I saw that technology and I wanted to figure out how to implement that in a pinball machine where we could take the physical pinball and have it interacting with graphics in the same way that

your finger does on a tablet computer. So Jerry set out to do just that. So I started with one friend who's a mechanical guy and we connected with an audio engineer, a very popular audio engineer for the computer line. And after three years working nights and weekends, Jerry and his friends built a pinball game where you could use physical buttons and flippers to launch a... an actual ball over an LCD display. So that the ball, while it's rolling towards the physical devices, could interact with

these virtual objects. And one of the games they developed is called Rocks, which is kind of a riff on the popular video game, Asteroids. Where you take the physical pinball and as it's rolling around the playfield surface, it's interacting with images of asteroids on the screen. And mind you, there's still a physical component of this. game, so the ball's still rolling towards physical targets, but we enhanced that experience with the virtual. As their prototype got better and better, Jerry and his team decided to show it off

at a pinball festival in Frisco, Texas. And so many people came to us and thought it was amazing. People stayed there and played it for hours. And what's kind of surprising here is that up to this point, Jerry wasn't really thinking about selling these machines. He and his friends had been mostly doing it for fun. But I was fortunate enough to have an aunt and uncle who's all the early prototype, and they called me, actually, after the show. And they said, hey, if you want to try this, then we're willing to give you some money to get started. And so with a very generous investment from Uncle Gary and Aunt Diane, Jerry was able to quit his day job

in tech and pay a small team of engineers to build the pinball machines. And in 2016, four years after that show in Texas, their company shipped out their first machines to a handful of fans. It doesn't need to be a billion dollar company to make me happy. I'd be happy just selling a few hundred machines a year, making it a lifestyle business, and giving people something new and different and exciting. Jerry's pinball machine is called the P3. The company is called Multimorphic, and it's based out of Austin, Texas.

And when we first ran the story, Jerry's hope was to get his machines into bars and restaurants the same types of places where he discovered pinball. Well, this year, they're doing on-site trials at Dave & Busters, and they're also about to release their first online product, a multiplayer pinball game. To hear more about multimorphic 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 so much 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 hibt at npr.org.

And if you want to send a tweet, It's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. Our show was produced this week by Rumpteen Arablewe, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Candice Lim, Julia Carney, Sanaz-Meshkent, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Sequoia Carrillo. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.