A hot protein bar company has added a wild new product: frozen cod fillets

Mint

24-07-2025

David Protein has begun selling frozen fillets of raw cod alongside its fudge brownie and blueberry pie bars.
The company since introducing its bars last September has won a large following of customers, but at times has heard criticism from some critics of processed food.
It is now selling four pieces of wild-caught Pacific cod sourced from a sustainable fishing company at $55 online, where it also charges $39 for a box of 12 protein bars.
Its fish also recently became available at Happier Grocery in New York City. Billboards promoting the product say 'Boiled cod. Slightly more protein per calorie than our bars."
David co-founder and Chief Executive Peter Rahal, who previously co-founded RXBAR and sold it to Kellogg for $600 million, spoke to The Wall Street Journal about the marketing message behind its push. The interview has been edited and condensed.
WSJ: What led up to launching cod on your website?
Peter Rahal: Ultimately, people want an easy way to get protein, because it turns out it's quite hard.
In our product, 75% of our calories are coming from protein. To contextualize that product performance against the broader food landscape, processed or unprocessed, we put a comparison table on our website. Our chief science officer was like, 'Well, what has a better protein-to-calorie ratio than our bar?" We started searching, and he found boiled cod. Obviously it had to be boiled. If you sauté it in butter, it doesn't work.
So we placed it there. It was kind of an Easter egg.
David's fish recently began being offered at New York's Happier Grocery.
WSJ: When did you decide to actually sell it?
Rahal: I felt we were getting stale a bit. I was like, 'We've gotta do something bold that sparks the conversation.' That was around April.
Then we mobilized. We needed to find the good, high-quality raw material. We needed to figure out the planning. We needed to figure out frozen logistics. We ended up putting them up for sale in mid-July. It's not a gimmick—it is a gimmick, but we're actually seriously selling cod. Time will tell if the market likes it or not.
WSJ: You've weighed in online responding to critics who point at David being a processed food. How does the cod fit into that?
Rahal: Most of the conversations on nutrition are often really emotional, and we think it's important to have an intellectual view. People use buzzwords and binary thinking: 'Processed is bad, natural is good," and that frame is just outdated or unhelpful. Nearly everything we eat is processed anyway, and you need it for food safety, so it's just not helpful. What actually matters is what's in the food.
When we launched the protein bar, some of our critics were from the ancestral nutrition crowd. Selling cod allowed us to address and respond to the criticism in a clever way. It's our tongue-in-cheek innovation that reinforces the same three principles that really matter in protein bars—convenience, price and taste.
WSJ: I imagine shipping cod to consumers is not a simple feat.
Rahal: We worked with Fisherman Kyle and sourced high-quality wild-caught cod, and then we branded it too. Insulation is super important to keep temperature, and then you pack it with dry ice, and you do it overnight.
WSJ: How are you marketing this push?
Rahal: What I really love about the campaign is that it's like a giant riddle. The big push was literally just making a product, and then the photo shoot. As a marketer, I think it's important to not overdo it.
Internally, some ideas are like, 'Let's get some merch and…" and it's like, no, no, no, too much.
WSJ: What are you hoping people take away from this?
Rahal: If you're sitting at home all day and have all the time to prepare fresh foods, great—that should be the way to eat. No one's arguing that. But it turns out it's really hard to do that, and it turns out it's really expensive, and it's hard to get that amount of protein.
On a fundamental level, it's ultimately a clever way to communicate to consumers the surplus that the brand creates. What would you actually pay in the market for 20 grams of protein?