Bittersweet Success

As their father lay dying, the 13 Keith siblings took his recipe for a snack no one could sell—a refrigerated protein bar—and built it into a $300 million startup.

- Chloe Sorvino

Leigh Keith is taking her time flattening a mound of peanut butter, honey, cranberries and chocolate chips with a wooden rolling pin, before cutting it into 4-inch rectangles. She used to do this at race speed, when she and her siblings worked through the night to fill orders for their peanut-butter bars 14 years ago, when they were starting Perfect Snacks. “We didn’t even have the recipe written down,” the 33-year-old says, her wavy hair—blond, like nearly all the Keiths—fastened securely by a hair net. “We started out with a whole lot of ambition. The harder we worked, the more we put into the business, the more we could try and control our destiny.”

At the beginning, the Keiths didn’t have much besides their drive. The family of 15’s bank account? Nearly empty. The family real estate? Heavily mortgaged. Dad was sick with cancer. (“We started because we were financially in despair,” says Bill, 36, who is CEO.) All they really had was their father’s recipe for a peanut-butter-based protein bar. And everyone who knew the grocery business told them it was doomed to fail.

Sure, the Keiths’ Perfect Bar tasted great, but it needed to be kept refrigerated. That meant it would take up valuable shelf space that would otherwise go to yogurt or cold cuts, far from where Clif and Power bars typically lived. It was like asking stores to start stocking cheese alongside cereal.

“Very few companies were really designed to save a family from potential starvation,” says Wayne Wu, a partner at VMG, a San Francisco private equity firm that invested in Perfect Snacks in 2015. “It turned into this American dream story. But it certainly was not an overnight success.”