YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Lubetzky

lines on the record: 82
first: 2026-04-20
most recent: 2026-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's both. It's very hard to separate them, but there's no question that Locke played a gigantic role. Because if I were wrong, if it was predominantly me that was a genius and all the other entrepreneurs that you interview, you'd have many more entrepreneurs that have built many multi-billion dollar companies. The fact is that you can count them with your hand. The vast majority of us get blessed if we do that once. It's very hard to replicate that. So that means that, yes, you also need to be worker-hard and be witty and greedy and everything, but without an element of fortune and luck, I don't think there's that many people that can do that more than once.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'm working on now, which is not just in the Middle East but globally in the US, is a big, big mission. So it is going to take years, but we're making headway, and I'm very confident that it will be a greater contribution than kind.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You said earlier that if I die, the story of kind would be at the top of my paragraph or whatever, I hope that what I build with builders globally will be my primary contribution.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I divide demolish and diminish? That's a destroyer. A person that wakes up in the morning says, how can I build? How can I unite? That's a builder. And the overwhelming majority of us want to be builders, want to put positive things to make this a better world for our children. We're not doing it for somebody else's sake, for our own sake.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, everything you said is to some degree correct. It's also the case that out of the greatest darkness comes light. And it's not just a poetic thing, it's a reality, right? When there's so much hate and despair, people realize that that's not going to lead us anywhere. That's when people get mobilized and activated to find a different way. And of course, I want to be clear, I'm not an optimist. I'm also not a pessimist. I worry all the time, but then I catalyze my worries into action, what I call an actionist. You may recall you and I met many years ago and I talked to you about the one voice movement and how it was moderates against extremists. And it was a very incomplete way of seeing the world because the better framework is builders versus destroyers. An extremist that wakes up in the morning think, how can I deny somebody else's humanity?”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I sold 100% of my financial stake as of December 2024, and the relationship is predominantly very informal. I think I consult with them three times a year, but I'm emotionally, I'm really, really incentivized for them to win because it's my reputation too.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And their character and their story in a brand like we did with Kind. It's very hard to give up your baby, but obviously it's not my baby anymore and you need to acknowledge that. And it's very hard.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he would take them to China and he would sell them in China. And he was selling millions of dollars of kine bars. And we had no control over it. And at the same time, every large brand was trying to recreate what Kind did in the United States and other countries. And we were afraid that if we didn't move fast enough, we were going to lose control over the brand globally and somebody else would be the first comer. We felt that we need a partner to help us globally. And our goal was to sell them the rights to sell internationally, not in the United States. And unfortunately, none of these big companies want to do that. They want to help you build internationally if you're willing to sell them the whole Anchilada eventually. And to this day, I mean, to your point, thanks to the resources, we're doing a lot of good things in the world, and I'm very grateful. But I do sometimes, it's very hard for an entrepreneur that imbues their personality.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not ready to start selling in China. And he said, Well, I already sell your product in China. I said, okay, I assume he buys a few suitcases worth of product, takes them and sells it. It's like, thank you, server. It's like, no, no, no, let me explain it to you. And he apparently, there's something called cross docking, where Costco would sell to this.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I hesitated a ton till the very last minute. What drove us to start on this journey was the fear that we were going to lose control of our brand internationally. We were at a trade show at the Natural Prox Expo in Anaheim. And a Chinese gentleman came and said, I'd like to buy your product. We told the gentleman, thank you, sir, but we're not ready to go into China.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having the humility to not launch something that doesn't exceed expectations. Like we spent two or three years designing a product where we were going to have yogurt with granola on top. And when we tried it in the marketplace, it did fine, but it didn't do great. And that's, by the way, the hardest thing. If the product sucks, it's easy to kill it. And if it does great, then of course you launch it. But what if it's a six out of ten? Do you have the discipline to say that's not good enough?”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We developed a set of guardrails to understand what a brand stands for and what a brand is not. A brand is a promise and a great brand is a promise well kept. A brand is just a shorthand for knowing what you're going to get. And if you're giving people different promises each day, then they don't know what to get and the brand is worthless. So we really need to understand what we are and what we're not. Healthful, tasty, socially impactful. And also guardrails that behind the scenes were like a product should not contain more than this ratio of sugar. And then within those guardrails, we were just playing and thinking. And if memory serves me well, our second line where the kind healthy grain squares and then with graded, the granola, kind healthy grain clusters, and then we created the kind breakfast bars. And also many times guy.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think one of the things that made us succeed the most is to initially stay focused and disciplined because what happened in my PizRocks years is I was taught that you just grow by extending your self-presence. And so I have three spreads, then six spreads and nine spreads and 15 spreads. And eventually some of our plugs really did not live up to the quality of the original products. And that hurt the brand. And I learned a hard lesson that if you disappoint a consumer once, they're not just going to not try that 15th product. They'll start buying your brand altogether. So it was very protective of our brand and I was very focused. And I remember when we have, I think, eight flavors at the beginning, everybody selling us. Look at the success. You need to launch more. You need to launch more lines. And I was like, no, we're going to stay focused with these eight flavors. So I think for several years, we just executed the hell out of what we had. Now eventually you're right. Eventually you want to innovate. And the way we did it.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I learned is that all of us are deeply insecure. And it certainly happened to me along the way in my early years where I wanted to find somebody that was like me and that was not better than me subconsciously. I don't think I consciously said that. But when you win is when you find people that are different from you and they're better than you. Somebody that was better than me at sales, somebody that was better at me at finance, somebody that was better than me at new product development and marketing, you're bringing super smart people and they're teaching you how to do better and you're growing your brain and you're creating a culture, you know, every single team member had a stake from the beginning. If you were in the company six months or longer, you got stock options. Everybody was an owner.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was the CO and president, and also, to be fair, these titles are silly. Like he was a co-CO, he was a co-president. Like, we were running the show together.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The rest is history. Like John was one of my best friends, partners very different from me. Yin, yang, like his personality and my personality complementary, but we knew we had each other's back. Like completely different temperaments and personalities, he's very operational. I was very creative and marketing, whatever. And together, we created the magic.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an amazing question. John Leahy, without any doubt, was one of the most pivotal forces to help kind become what he became. So John had a lot of experience. He had worked at playtex. He had worked at a nutritional company that sold vitamins.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because what we found out guy is that anytime somebody tried a kind bar, nine out of ten would fall in love with the brand, would tell others about it, and within a month he would pay for itself because they would start buying the product. It was a great ROI. So sampling was a biggest thing getting in checkout counters at Starbucks and other places was another really, really important one. And those things were probably the reason why we accelerated our growth”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of people discovered us. Well, they discovered us through ways, right? Word of mouth, they saw front at Starbucks or through our sampling, because our sampling went from $800 in 2008 to $800,000 in 2009. And within a couple years, we were sampling $20 million. It's like maybe 40 million bars or 30 million bars.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, the insight was this is an incredible iconic chain as back then I think 11,000 stores and they didn't at that time sell any healthy snacks. They didn't have a single healthy snack I'm like this makes so much sense for you to carry a kind bar on the go and unbeknownst to me they like those too much. They were trying to make their own versions and fortunately that did not pan out for them and they after years of years of developed relationships things aligned and they gave us a shot.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Distracted also building the one voice movement. Part of the way I explain it is that I am a very creative guy, but sometimes I can drown my team with creativity and I kind of divided myself between what I was doing with one voice and I was doing with kind where we managed to stay focused and kind and do a good job. That's the explanation I give myself. But I'm in the process of ideating additional things to do in the context of Israeli Arab and Israeli-Palestinian relationships to try to help develop a better future for the people of that region.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, kind was such an amazing journey and it brought so much happening, so many people that it never was, am I doing the wrong thing. I was always delighted about the kind journeys. I'm so grateful for it. But yes, there was a piece of me that misses the opportunity to get peace works right. Now, along the ways, I helped build something with an Israeli Arab co-founder Mohammed Darash, who called the One Voice Movement. And we recruited close to a million Israelis and Palestinians to stand up against extremism and hate and terrorism on all sides. And that gave me a lot of meaning and helped fulfill my need for purpose. Kind also has its own purpose, but obviously not as deep as PeaceWorks where one voice, but the One Voice mission kept me very busy. And between 2003 and 2007, I was spending more time on One Voice than I was unkind. And it was interesting that Kind did so well when I was this.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I didn't want to give up on the P-SROX dream. Kind was growing like crazy, but I didn't want to give up on the Peacerox mission. So my friend Joshua Schurz, who's an amazing entrepreneur, agreed to take it on. And he had his other lines that he was selling. And then he started selling Peaceworks. Peaceworks lived for 25 years. So from 93 till 2018, I think when we decided to close it.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very interesting how the industry works. Nobody wants to touch you till everybody wants to touch you. It's fascinating. Like we were like persona non grata in the investment community. We didn't even try anymore because we couldn't raise a cent, which turned out to be really good for me because then I didn't dilute myself. But then all of a sudden 2008 people are seeing the data and the company is big enough. We're reaching now. Like all these private equity companies, they're looking for the homes. It needs to have more than 10 million dollars in revenues, this, this. And they see it. And all of a sudden everybody's calling us. And now we're ignoring them because we're cash flow positive and profitable. So we don't need the money. But then we wanted to have a partner that could be a partner to help us. So in 2009, we allowed an investor to come in and they wanted to spin out the PeaceWorks business because they didn't care about the Peace Works business. So we separated Peaceworks.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had three friends, two friends and a friend of a friend who had in the Peace Rocks years invested $100,000 in peaceworks. But when I started kind, it starts within Peaceworks because I wanted to find a way to thank them and my investors and my board for that. So eventually In 2008, we started getting a lot of interest.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, that's what I thought. If you're selling zero, it's really not good, but it could also mean that the proc didn't even make it to the shelves. So the system, at least back when I was starting at Walmart, was so complex that the distributor would drop off the product in the back of the store and nobody had thought to put it in the front of the store. And so it was my job to identify that, but I didn't know that. And so after we failed miserably at Walmart because we didn't know what we were doing, we licked our wounds. And a year and a half later, John Leahy, who's got the great hurt prove it and the experience, comes in as our president and as my partner. And then he taught us how to do it right and how to get to Walmart. I'm like, John, let's get back into Walmart. It's like, slow down, buddy, slow down. We need to be ready.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walmart came to us and the buyer liked our product. And you know, one of the most significant dangers is when a buyer loves you because sometimes you're not ready and you couldn't say no to Walmart and we didn't have salespeople or systems to check if our product was selling through. And one of the things that I learned in our industry is you can get reports and look at your sales per store. What do you think it means, guys, if you're selling zero per store?”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think after 10 years of barely surviving, I was very good at driving the bottom line up to the point that I was actually shooting myself in the foot by not investing in my future. Like we doubled for 10 years in a row, but the first few years, certainly 2004 to 2008, I mean, we did creative promotional things, but it was really the product that was just selling itself.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was worse than that. I had trained myself over ten years to not waste money because I didn't have money to waste. But I had made the mistake to then turn the culture of my company into a scarcity mentality rather than a resourceful mentality. So you don't want to glutinous, wasteful mentality, but if you have a scarcity mentality, then you're not investing. So the first few years we're lucky that the product had the success of our packaging, our product and those displays, but that was basically it. We didn't even have a sampling budget. Because really, we saw sampling as a cost center rather than as an opportunity for people to score products. Our budget as late as 2008 for sampling was $800. And that was $800, including samples to the retailers.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had a very, we designed a display that was not occupying too much real estate. The boxes were small, the product was compact, because retailers, what they sell really is real estate. So the more you can turn product in the less space, the more they like you. And our product was a $2 bar. You could put in a little rack, you know, $500 turned around quickly. So it was a really, really good deal for the retailer. They liked it. And then they started just growing.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they had what they called a nutritional bar set. And the nutritional bar set, I remember being at a Whole Foods and they're like, Daniel, the problem is we don't know where to put it. And I'm like, what do you mean put it in the nutritional bar? It's like, no, because nutritional bars look like this. But so, what happened is that they gave us the chance to put POP display. So what was a really big problem turned into a huge opportunity because we had racks on the checkout counters in a lot of the stores because they didn't know where else to put it.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, we wanted people to look at the product themselves and know, oh, this is real, this is not like everything else, this is clearly high quality. I'm seeing the whole nuts and fruits. That was a big insight. But the challenge is how do you then explain the brand kind and your value proposition in the real estate that you have left? So there was a lot of work that went into it. And with the Peace Rocks years, I caught so many corners to save myself some dollars and it ended up costing me more with Kind, we really worked hard on the design to get it right.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transparent wrapper was very hard to achieve because about, I don't know, 50% of the product is just you're seeing the product itself. And so it's very hard. How do you communicate everything you need to communicate in only 50% of the space or it may be 40% of the space?”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's evolved somewhat, but it really, the essence was worked out from the day one. It was the thought of the four blocks and they were kind and the lock-up and the colors. And also, very importantly, we wanted very, very clean design. Because everybody out there used a lot of photography and allegorical stuff and designs to obfuscate and for us the hero was a product. We had a transparent window which we introduced, which was very, very revolutionary”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember, we didn't have that big a sales. One of the most interesting challenges for a consumer products entrepreneur is that the more you succeed, the harder it is for your cash flow. But ironically, when you're starting, you don't have that much sales. So you don't need, like if you're selling $10,000 or $20,000 a month, you just need those $20,000 for your working capital. Once you're selling a million dollars a month, then you need a million dollars in working capital. So the problem starts getting harder as you grow. But the first year I can pull it off from what I've saved over those last 10 years.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So initially we try to find somebody to do it in the United States and nobody wants to. And so we went with relationships of Peter that were willing to do it for us in Australia”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, really hard because in our industry most bars, I think 95% of bars are what's called an emulsion or a paste. And it flows really to the manufacturing line. If you take a product, you macerate it and make a mix. It flows very well through the line. It's very easy to cut. It's very easy to load. When you're not doing that, when you're trying to preserve the wholeness of the almond, because the almonds are better preserved, they're not pulverized. If you cut them, they can oxidize, they can go rancid. They lose some of their integrity. So you want to try to preserve the whole almond. And it's very hard to do that and do that at scale and do that through a manufacturing line. So it took us a very long time to develop the technology to protect nature.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would just add a little bit more broad. I am trying to solve a problem for my needs, which is a healthy snack on the go. And so what are some of the implications of the design process? It cannot melt too easily in your hands. Right. It has to be portable. It has to be compact. It has to be nutritionally dense.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And initially the motto was all natural always because we were so freaked out by the incident that we had and we wanted to control our destiny. This is a very, very important moment. Up until that moment, I don't have control of the manufacturing ever. I work with my manufacturing partners. They have control of the manufacturing. After I get my ass kicked here, I said, all right, I have to control the manufacturing. I control the formulas, I control the recipes, and I identify manufacturing partner that can do it for us, but where we control the rights and control our destiny.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We knew we wanted to have three pillars for the product kind to your body, meaning healthful ingredients, kind to your taste buds, has to be tasty, and kind to your world that the way you do things matters. And my dad just passed away. So I think he's front of mind. And I told you earlier about how inspired of all of the darkness, he just was a very, very kind human being. So we named kind in honor of my dad.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This actually was one of the darkest periods of my life because along the way my dad passes away. And I'm doing a lot of civic work in the Middle East. And as you know, the second intifada breaks out and there's a lot of violence and stuff. And it's a very difficult time. And so I'm exhausted. I've been 10 years at this and I remember very well the meeting that happened where we had about 16 members around the table and every one of us has to vote whether we give this another shot or we just give up. And we unanimously say let's give this one last shot. A few months later, we designed it and we launched what became kind and then the company just takes off.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whole Foods at the time, and still their list is like the Magna Carta for Natural. Right. And they start adding two or three ingredients that are not approved in the Whole Foods list. And we plead to them to not do so, but they don't care because in Australia they sell predominantly to convenience stores. They don't have a highly developed natural marketplace. We explained to them that in the United States, it's going to kill our market. They said, sorry, Daniel, but we have to do this. So we lose all of our sales from one day to the other. So all of our hard work goes to nothing.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything is relative. For us, it was nirvana. At that point, we're selling half a million dollars of this product, one million dollars of this product. It's incredible. It's very quickly become something. And then something bad happens. Peter tells me that there's a company that wants to buy the product. The company decides that they still want to keep me as their distributor. But they start adding a number of ingredients that were not approved by Whole Foods.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Product was called B natural, yeah. And Peter Sudarma, who owns that company, asks me for advice. And then like six months later or a year later, he says, Daniel, my product's really good. Why don't you start distributing? And I'm like, Peter, I can't. I have a PSRX mission. Your product's not made through P-SROS. It doesn't matter, Daniel. You come up with different company distributor for us. Long story short, he convinces me to start a separate division of Pieceworks.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at the Natural Provox Expo, as I'm walking and looking at the Prox, I try these products, which is a apricot yogurt almond bar. And it is delicious. And I'm like, wow, this is really good.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five team members, everybody paid $24,000 or something like that. I call them victims because the poor guys, like none of us know what we're doing. Like most of them are kids that just graduated from college and they don't have a better option.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the way you do it, at least during my time, is distributors are not going to open markets. They're going to continue your stuff. So I opened New York City. I develop New York City. Once I have 50 accounts or 100 accounts and I find a distributor to continue supplying and distributing for them. So now I can go open Philadelphia.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was preferable every year in our journey except one where we lost a tiny like a few thousand dollars. I was preferable every year, but profitable because I wasn't paying myself a $24,000 salary.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's taking so much time to figure out these partnerships instead of focusing on one and getting that one right. So consequently, this whole PeaceWorks business, I was very proud, but the first year we sold if memory service in real 33,000, second year $226,000. Then I get to about a million, and then it's just like plateaus.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A hundred percent, but what I was getting wrong then, guy, is I was so enamored with a social mission that I was my own worst enemy because instead of focusing on one product line and winning, I was starting ventures wherever I could. So I was working like horse.”
2026-04-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KIND bars: Daniel Lubetzky. From peace in the Middle East to a $5 billion snack bar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT