How Kind's Daniel Lubetzky built bridges to scale a food brand

Executive overview

Scaling into new customers, markets, or verticals requires building bridges — but only bridges people on both sides want to cross. Daniel Lubetzky built Kind into a major health food brand by applying hard lessons learned from his earlier venture, PeaceWorks: product quality must anchor every bridge, brand promises must be kept, and patience beats premature expansion.

A bridge no one uses is wasted effort, no matter how hard you worked to build it.

Grit without wit: lessons from PeaceWorks

• PeaceWorks connected Arab and Israeli food producers, proving economic ties can reduce cultural barriers.
• Daniel spent years dragging the product door-to-door across Manhattan, winning orders through sheer persistence.
• One deli owner relented after two hours — the jars never sold; the bridge led nowhere anyone wanted to go.
• Expanding from 3 to 15 flavors, including a gelatinous teriyaki spread, betrayed customer trust built on the original product.
• Grit alone is insufficient; entrepreneurs need wit — strategy, resourcefulness, and willingness to walk around the wall rather than through it.
• Other tensions founders must balance: intelligent risk vs. reckless risk, persistence vs. flexibility.
• PeaceWorks survived a decade largely on grit, but the learning-to-grit ratio was too low for efficient progress.

Building Kind on hard-won discipline

• After his father's death and near-burnout, Daniel put the PeaceWorks wind-down to a team vote; they chose to bet on the new bar concept.
• Applied strict focus: defined the Kind promise in writing, kept it on every desk, refused to chase trends.
• Consumer goods vs. tech: in software you can iterate freely; in food, a bad first impression is permanent and gross margins can't be "grown into".
• Shifted sampling from an $800 annual cost to an $800,000 investment; sales took off because nine out of ten people who tried a Kind bar came back.
• Letting the product build the bridge replaced trying to sell customers on a mission.

Scaling physical goods: rules that differ from tech

• Marginal cost of a digital product trends to zero; physical goods do not — wrong gross margins cannot be fixed by volume.
• "If you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you released too late" is a consumer internet rule, not a food rule.
• An underwhelming webpage gets a second chance; a goopy sauce does not.
• Overextending SKUs fragments attention from existing products; almost every CPG brand benefits from more patience, not more launches.

The Walmart lesson: meet partners halfway

• Walmart approached Kind, but Kind lacked the supply chain capability to execute at that scale.
• Product sat in the wrong warehouse, wrong shelf set, wrong category — distribution collapsed.
• Bringing in John Leahy (ex-Playtex, billion-dollar company experience) provided both the operational knowledge and the patience Daniel lacked.
• Leahy's advice: "We're not ready" — repeated until each capability gap was closed.
• Kind re-won Walmart distribution and built a durable partnership by waiting until it could meet Walmart halfway.
• Hiring someone after a tough career chapter can be an advantage: they have something to prove and a proven track record.

The FDA confrontation: building bridges through honest conflict

• The FDA cited an outdated regulation treating all fats — including almonds and olive oil — as unhealthy; ordered Kind to remove "healthy" from its labels.
• Conventional advice: comply quietly and move on; the FDA never reverses itself.
• Daniel complied immediately, then filed a citizen's petition challenging the rule.
• Consumers, scientists, and doctors rallied; the FDA ultimately reversed the definition and suspended it.
• The confrontation reinforced Kind's brand credibility and opened an ongoing collaborative relationship with the FDA.
• Kindness is not the same as being nice: being kind requires honesty and the courage to say what needs to be said.
• Creative conflict builds stronger bridges; corporate cultures that suppress disagreement leave leaders making decisions in the dark.

The Kind Foundation and Empatico

• Kind's mission scaled beyond bars into the Kind Foundation, which incubated Empatico.
• Empatico connects classrooms across racial, geographic, and national lines to build empathy through direct interaction.
• Examples: all-Black classrooms in Memphis connected with all-white classrooms in New Jersey; a Delaware classroom connected with teachers in Nigeria.
• Kindness as a "net happiness aggregator": the person doing the kind act gains as much or more than the recipient.
• In November 2020, Kind was acquired by Mars, with Daniel remaining involved.