When Your Fuel Becomes a Flaw, Listen to Your Team

Fast growth requires strong drive. But when my drive became problematic, it was my team who held the answer.

- Daniel Lubetzky

IT WAS AROUND 2012, when Kind Snacks made the Inc. 5000, that our business seemed to take off. We were doubling sales every year while remaining cash-flow positive and profitable.

It is exhilarating for an entrepreneur when your brand breaks through-when suddenly the person sitting next to you on an airplane is eating your product. But that newfound notoriety also brought fresh challenges. For Kind, as it is for any brand at a similar stage of growth, one of those challenges was the emergence of copycats. Some of our team members jokingly refer to this part of our journey as the Age of Imitation. It seemed like everywhere we looked, fruit-and-nut bars that weren't Kind bars were now popping up on shelves, attempting to grab market share with products that mimicked our own.

Making a Kind bar may seem simple-presumably, anyone in their home can combine a few "ingredients you can see and pronounce" (as our legal trademark holds), pop them into the oven, and create a fruitand-nut bar. But the magic of Kind has always come from preserving the integrity of what nature gave us without sacrificing taste and texture. Our actual recipe was hard for competitors to replicate.